Where Are the Books Going?

An interesting trend in colleges these days is to digitize books. Online scans of books allow “students [to] browse periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.” The article seems to believe that having books online, as opposed to in physical form, makes research easier.

For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine (librarian at Stanford) says that “with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily.”

It should be noted that most of this feedback is coming from engineering students. For those of us in the social sciences and humanities I cannot imagine that digitizing books makes research any easier: typing in keywords and hoping to get something qualitative is probably more difficult than having mountains of books on a topic in one area for you to delve and parse.

I am not saying that digitizing books doesn’t have huge benefits. I’ve been able to find rare (and very expensive) books on Cornell Library’s website for class, but I can’t believe that actual research is any easier. Digitization wouldn’t be a problem if some students weren’t so giddy about the elimination of physical books altogether:

The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn’t been taken off the shelf in five years.

Keller expects that, eventually, there won’t be any books on the shelves at all.

Unless one works in the physical sciences, the absence of physical books is a detriment. I know many of the best books I’ve encountered were asides that I noticed in the library doing History research; these books include classics like Orthodoxy by Chesterton, Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk, and Cicero’s De Re Publica.

Having books accessible online is a great benefit, but the loss of real books is where we must draw the line, or else we’ll all be huddled in the couches in Uris reading Freakonomics-quality drivel on our iMaxies…err, rather iPads.