Interesting piece in The New Yorker

["Greg Tananbaum" <gtananbaum@gmail.com>]

The current issue of The New Yorker contains an interesting piece 
on libraries, the history of publishing, digitization projects, 
and perceived utopias:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton?printable=true

Here is an excerpt:

"[T]he Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less 
an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now 
engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create 
anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp 
what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are 
actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the 
history of text production. On many fronts, traditional 
periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other 
electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of 
copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a 
number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to 
accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will 
result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in 
one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them 
challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text 
have learned to survive."

Best, Greg
  Greg Tananbaum
gtananbaum@gmail.com
(510) 295-7504