Knowledge and its price |
Publishing Research Quarterly. Winter 2007. Vol 22. Nr 4, page 26 - 30. |
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The recent push to render books and libraries accessible on the online digital knowledge landscape arrived only one year later, in 2004. It came from the outside, to begin with through an online book dealer, Amazon, and later through a search engine, so to a certain extent a bibliographical enterprise, Google, which thrust itself into the field with all the recklessness of the late newcomer. A clash with representatives of the established publishing and knowledge markets was preordained. But this is not solely a conflict over copyright infringements, with the publishers vehemently asserting their exclusive right of access to books and their contents. Google's claim "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (according to Google's mission statement) is a call to arms for the power to define knowledge and cultural content. |
The value of a book is based essentially on its exclusivity, on its contents being available only between its two covers. Its author has chosen from among a multiplicity of stories or ideas to compose this self-contained text. For this achievement, he or she expects to become known, criticized, disseminated, cited, and of course, compensated financially. The same holds true for much information contained on the Web (such as scholarly archives or CNN's news database), where individual documents are clearly identified, are unalterable and available only for a fee. But when books are published on the Web without hesitation and in grand style, then for the first time the rigorously formatted knowledge contained in books will be situated on the same level with all of the other variegated pages on the World Wide Web.The complete essay here |