j’s scratchpad

My favorite librarian sent me a translation of an interview of Umberto Eco in the Frankfurter Rundschau about technology and libraries. He thinks of the Internet and computers as ways of complementing our memories and uses a large portable drive onto which he downloaded many digitized books as an example. He discusses the challenges of information overload and the future of the book:

"I am very well acquainted with these questions. ‘Will the new media edge out the book? Will the Web make literature obsolete?’ Journalists often ask me these questions, usually in very worried undertones. And they should actually relax when I answer them. ‘Calm down, it’s not that bad.’ But when I say that, the majority of your colleagues seem disappointed, because that answer isn’t a scoop. When you can write that a Nobel-Prize winner is dead&emdash;that’s news. But to say that he’s living and doing well, that doesn’t interest anybody besides himself."

* * *

"The debate about the end of the book is artificial. If I look around in a bookshop, I am confronted with an obviously growing mass of books. The fact is that each year, there are more books, too many books. If the computer really contributes to the decline in the total number of published books, that will be an improvement.&quot

Thanks for the pointer & translation, RKO!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Internet, Computers, Tools, Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.