Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Robert Darnton: The Case for Books

And now it's my great pleasure to introduce Robert Darnton. Robert Darnton is currently the Carl H. Pforzheim or university professor and director of the university library here at Harvard educated at Harvard. And with a Ph.D. from Oxford University professor Darnton began his career with a brief stint in journalism. I think it was two years before returning to academia full time. He was on the Princeton faculty as a European history professor for almost 40 years and he took up his current post at Harvard in 2007. Fessor Darden's many scholarly works have focused on French cultural history and the history of the book. In 2005 he received an award for distinguished achievement from the American printing history Association for his pioneering work in that field. He currently has several new books out demonstrating both arms of his scholarly interest in the devil in the holy water. He explores the role of slander and the fomenting of the French Revolution a topic which is also the center of the Bohemians a revolutionary era French novel which with a new translation out edited by Professor Darton and

then the case for books he looks at the history of the printed word and its future in an increasingly digital age. And now please join me in welcoming Robert Darnton. Bill thank you. Thank everyone for coming here. I'm grateful to have a chance to talk about books you are book lovers. I think is a nice setting to discuss them and somehow it turns out that I've published three books in the last week or so and there are books about books. So this is a book occasion but I think books are a lot of fun so I hope you won't feel it's too heavy going in academic. I especially want to thank Jeff Mason and to wish him well. This is an independent book shop. It's a center of sociability intellectual life bookshops and matter especially independent ones.

So Jeff you are the salt of the earth. And good luck to you. Right. So three books about books. What we are not doing is having a funeral for the book. I think this is a time to celebrate books. But I've been invited to so many conferences on the death of the book. I think it must be very much alive. It reminds me of one of my favorite graffiti which is in the Princeton University library in the men's room on the second floor. You may have seen one like this. It says God is dead side nature. You know it right. And then underneath someone writes nature is dead. Signed God. Well the book is not dead. It doesn't follow that it's having an easy life but

it really is thriving. I've got some statistics which I will not share with you. But what's interesting is that the number of books published each year increases and the graph goes up and up and up. When last measured it was almost 1 million new titles worldwide per year. A million new titles. I mean the book is doing very well thank you. And the notion that you know everything is digitized and the codexes being replaced by new media is I believe simply crazy. Not that I'm against digitisation. On the contrary we're doing all we can to forward it at the Harvard University Library. But my point is well it's a lesson I think we can learn from the history of books or the history of communication in general. Namely one medium does not displace another. We found this out in the case of well radio did not displace

books and television did not displace radio and so on and so on. In fact we now have pretty good hard scholarly evidence that Gutenberg's great invention did not at all displace manuscript publishing as you probably know manuscript publishing in the 15th century was a big business and there were almost assembly line scribes who are copying at a furious rate in scriptorium. They were doing very well and I think the invention of moveable type or the reinvention of movable type by Gutenberg stimulated manuscript production it didn't wipe it out. A recent study by Harold love a very fine English scholar has demonstrated that manuscript publishing thrived throughout the late 15th the 16th the 17th century and well into the 18th century and a a former friend of mine now dead

Don McKenzie argued that it was cheaper in the early modern period right up into the 19th century to hire scribes to copy out books. If you were producing an edition of less than 100 copies so scriber publication continued very well and not that I can extrapolate easily from the past but I really think that digital publishing the books that you will be reading online are going to reinforce publishing through print and that there's a great future actually facing publishers if they can get to people like you through the digital means whet your appetite for a book and then persuade you to come to a place like the Harvard bookstore and buy it or who knows you might use the famous machine down in that corner. I don't know if you've seen it yet. The espresso book machine which is an example of how

the new technology can reinforce the old printed Codex. What do you do. Well you want to order a book. Let's say it's a book in the public domain it'll be virtually free or a book that's in print but whose publisher has agreed to play ball with this new machine. So you order it you contact a digital database. The book is downloaded on the computer here instantly and within four minutes it is printed out. Trimmed a paper bag cover is attached to it and you walk off. Within four minutes with a brand new paperback under your arm and the cost is quite reasonable It varies of course but it's an example of how this kind of electronic technology can reinforce the traditional book. So I think we are living in a very interesting transitional period in which the new technology and the old technology Gutenberg and all that

are thriving together. But no one quite knows how it's going to work out. When I was an undergraduate I remember the first time I walked up the steps of Weidner library and I looked up at those columns and I thought here is all of the world's knowledge packed into one building a splendid building rightly situated at the very center the heart of the campus. But that of course was a grand illusion even then it Weidner didn't. It did not contain everything. We now have sixteen point three million books in the whole Harvard University system and if a million new books are being published every year you can see how far we are from having everything. We're not a deposit library. We're not the Library of Congress but we are the largest university or library in the world by far. So it's a great monument to the printed word and to other

forms of communication. However as I say that freshmen sentiment walking up the steps into a kind of temple of learning was if you like a grand illusion and it's not shared I think by freshmen today we have some here. Well I should ask later on. I think most freshmen today feel that all information is on line and that too is a grand illusion because of course it isn't. So we've got to work our way through these if you like colossal cases of collective false consciousness to a greater understanding of things. And that's what I've been trying to do in the first of these three books that have come out this is called The Case for books and it deals with a series of interconnected issues. I'm simplifying slightly but I despite I'm sounding optimistic about the

the case for books and I'm convinced that the Codex is one of the greatest inventions of all time and that it will continue indefinitely despite that I think it really would be naive to say that booksellers publishers authors even readers have it easy. These are hard times in fact. Why. Well because of a series of interlocking problems that just looked at from the perspective of the world of learning university presses graduate students students of all kinds. You could begin with the spiralling cost of scholarly periodicals especially but not exclusively in the hard sciences. Some annual subscriptions to periodicals cost more than thirty thousand dollars. Several cost more than $10000. And we at Harvard have to by all serious scholarly

journals because we have to keep up with everything. And if we started canceling subscriptions our faculty and students would revolt and I would be strung up by the nearest lantern. So we're trapped. And in fact some of these publishers use what we call cocaine pricing. You price a journal at a reasonable level. The readers get hooked on it. The libraries buy it and then you start jacking up the price. And we can't unsubscribe because everyone wants that journal or once a bundle of journals and so on. The result is not here at Harvard where we're continuing with difficulty to buy books in large numbers but elsewhere many university libraries are canceling monographs. The journal proportion of their acquisitions is simply squeezing out the book sector in some places. I won't name them but

they're well-known to librarians. Instead of a 50/50 relation in acquisitions between journals periodicals and monographs it's 80 or 90 to 10 percent. So libraries are no longer buying books in large quantities and that means that serious publishers especially university presses are selling fewer and fewer and they have given up publishing monographs in many fields colonial Latin America for example. If you're a graduate student in Colonial Latin America you can't get your dissertation published and no publishing you perish as the slogan goes. So there is a kind of ripple effect that is moving throughout the world of learning in which everything is connected with everything else. But it seems to me the new technology is a ground for hope.

My own ideal if I am speaking as a specialist in 18th century studies is what the 18th century called the republic of letters. It's a republic with no police force no boundaries. Complete egalitarianism. Anyone can participate. It's where talent counts. In the 18th century as I've tried to show in earlier studies this was an ideal that was very far from reality. In fact authors and publishers and so on were always fighting. And life was pretty nasty actually. If you were trying to make it in the republic of letters in the 18th century but today it seems to me that we've got new possibilities of really reviving this republic of letters thanks to the new technology. So we have this Espresso Book Machine but we've got many other things as well. It seems to me that there will be a reorganization of the modes of production

within publishing where housing will be cheaper transport will be cheaper you will be downloading and digitizing and transforming into printed works all kinds of books. I think in a way that will be simply wonderful and it will open up and democratize learning. That's what we're trying to do. Also in the Harvard University library I mean if I had one word to describe the sort of policies that I'm trying to promote it would be openness. We have an open access program that was voted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences two years ago now and that means that all new scholarship in the form of articles scholarly articles will be put on an open access repository made available free of charge everywhere in the world. I've created an office for scholarly communications which is disseminating this work through the repository and is also

planning to expand things so that we will have dissertations digitized and available free everywhere. We will have what's called grey literature also available. That's what casual talks like tonight tonight's Why shouldn't something like this be made available if anyone wants to see it or work in progress reports or for scientists. All kinds of labs that do lab work for which they keep logs. The possibilities are simply fabulous. So I think Harvard should open itself up share its intellectual wealth and be part of this digital future. That brings me to the subject of Google. Now I will try not to go on and on about Google. It's true that Google apparently thinks I'm its enemy. It's wrong. I'm an admirer of Google. I think Google is wonderful. I admire it so

much and think it's so good that it's dangerous because of course with this power the attempt to monopolize access to books and a whole world of information Google will have the ability to indulge in cocaine pricing and I feel that we have to have guarantees against that. We need the public authorities to prevent this magnificent thing called Google Book Search from exploiting the public by demanding too high prices through its subscription service which it will launch. I even think that it could be in the interest of Google to moderate its pricing and to turn itself into a national digital library. That's what this country needs in the world of books. It can be done. President Sarkozy in France announced recently that seven hundred and fifty

million euros would be made available to digitize the patrimony of France. Why can't we do what France is in the course of doing and what the Dutch are doing and what some of the Scandinavians are doing. It's not easy. It's going to require a lot of effort. It will even require the changing of our copyright laws. Copyright is another vast subject. I won't go on and on about it but I'm trying to show how all of these subjects that I tried to discuss in this book are linked. So as some of you may know the history of copyright goes back really to the statute of Anne and 17:10 in England. But the key turning point was a case in the House of Lords in 1774 where it was determined that copyright would not be eternal. It would be limited and the limit would be 14 years renewable. Well the

founders of our republic copied the notion of copyright from the British and our first copyright law which is entitled four hours ago for the stimulus of knowledge. I haven't got the quotation exactly right but for the forwarding of knowledge in for the encouragement of knowledge that's it. The copyright law of 1790 was 14 years and another 14 years renewable a limit of 28 years which I think is great. But the 1998 copyright law the Sonny Bono copyright extension Act known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act gives makes copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. That's more than a century. In most cases. And why. Well in part because Mickey Mouse was about to fall into the

public domain. So Hollywood mobilized and now we've got a very poor copyright law which is not encouraging the spread of knowledge at all. So we need changes in the copyright law. We need changes I believe notably in the regulation concerning so-called orphan books which I could discuss later if you like. I don't want to go on and on and I would like to mention the other book which I'm publishing recently. It's got a maybe. I like titles that are sort of amusing and I would like the text actually to be if possible amusing. I mean one of my ambitions is to make my reader laugh out. I don't know if I've ever succeeded but I would be happy if I could sit in the let's say the reading room of Weidner and watch a student read a book and laugh. The power and enjoyment of laughter I think is it's just a wonderful thing.

So. Well maybe it's not going to make you laugh but the title is The Devil in the holy water. Then I have a subtitle that explains or the art of slander from Louis 14 to Napoleon. It is a book about what the French called in the 18th century bad books movie leave or another expression for them was philosophical books. So the police called them bad books and the readers call them philosophical books. They combined wonderful ingredients. They were anti-religious. They were seditious. And they were what we would call pornographic. So they made terrific reading. They were in fact best sellers. And I brought two of them along to show you. Maybe this is you can't see it perhaps too well but notice the size of this book. It's a book that could be sold

soon molto under the cloak. So imagine a peddler coming up to you and saying. And you open it up of course it wouldn't be bound. Probably it would be in distich perhaps and it's got a very provocative Frontispiece. You know you can't see it maybe from back there but it shows a journalist a gazetteer who is firing off cannon shots everyone and especially the powers the evil powers of Versailles the old regime up above. It is a wonderfully wicked book and very funny. I won't go into the details but you get the idea. It was what the French called a libel a Lee Bell. Well I had done a previous study of forbidden books in which I tried to come up with statistics and I was able to trace the demand for seven hundred and

twenty titles of the top 12. Five were liberal libels and I never heard of any of them. They're all anonymous. None of them exist in histories of French literature. They've simply disappeared from what people think of as the literary history of France. But in the 18th century people loved them. They sold like dig deep you know wonderful delicious little biscuits if you like. And it's clear from the correspondence of booksellers I've read fifty thousand letters of 18th century booksellers that these books sold like crazy the public wanted to read about. Here's another nice title. The Private Life of Louis 15 four volumes. And it's full of sex but it's also full of politics and even philosophy. It's a fascinating work very well written.

We have a copy of the translation of the private life of Louis 15 into English here in Holten library and on the top it says Gee Washington we have Washington's copy of the private life of Louis 15 and it's not altogether surprising because Washington wanted to read about all the sex going on in Versailles in the Parko center as did everyone else. It's a terrific tale. So my argument in this book is that this literature which is enormous deserves to be taken seriously even though librarians didn't necessarily stock libraries with it because they thought it was well trash. Trash is interesting. We need a history of trash. We should take it seriously why. Well because in part the

police of the old regime took it seriously and not just the police but Louis 15 himself and Madame Dubery Madame de Pompadour all the ministers and mistresses and so on who are dragged through the mud and in books like like this one. All of these people saw it. First of all as horrible and wanted to protect their name but more than protecting your name and your reputation you were protecting your position in a power system. These books the libels. Here's the second. I wanted to show you and it has the same title. It's called The Devil in the holy water. The diablerie door was Doane's and beneath you. So I've drib the title from this actual book which was a very important libel in the 18th century. These books that revealed all about the private lives of people in power were seen as powerful

themselves. And what I try to do aside from analyzing their character in general is to show how the regime reacted to this literature of libel partly because it demonstrates the importance of it at least as seen from the perspective of people in power but also because it's so much fun. I believe that as a writer I want to write for the general educated reader not just for other college professors. So I hope that the reader will enjoy the tales of how the public authorities in the 18th century tried to suppress libels because it's full of hugger mugger. It's there are simply amazing stories of kidnapping and assassination attempts of secret agents of the agents of the Parisian police disguising themselves. They like to call themselves Baron as false barons and with a big

expense account. They go to England and they try to capture libelous to hit them over their head put them in a boat take them to the bus and get them to squeal about their sources of information and the whole production system that produced these best selling libels. I won't go on and on about the about the adventures of these people but it's a lot of fun. And this book in particular the French version of the original devil in the holy water tells the story of the attempt of the French police to capture libelous the book was written they're all anonymous by the way and they're written by people that I'm sure you've never heard of in this case. The author is one of my favorite characters from the obscure areas of French literary history. In fact virtually no one has heard of him or of his. The book I'm about to mention which is the third and last translated

into English of the Bohemians. His name was on the left feet Marquis de belled boor the Marquis de pilpul. He wrote this book The Devil in the holy water. He wrote at least a half dozen other libels. He was the most terrible libel asked that the French police ever ran across. He was hiding in London and he had the English Channel between him and the Basti. He also had the benefit of really virtual freedom of the press as it existed in London and frankly the British couldn't care less if libels were being produced in London and smuggled into France about the secret life of Louis 15 and Louis 16 and Marie Antoinette and all the rest. In fact they were at war with France. That was our ward that gave us independence and that was a terrific time for the life of a libeler. So this fellow the Marquis de Boer

was churning out libels throughout the 17 7 late 1780s and he was only one of a whole colony of French expatriates who made this their specialty. The book sold very well as I said but they also were excellent for blackmailing the French. And so Bellport wrote a letter. I'm a loyal subject of the king and I've discovered to my horror that a terrible subject is about to publish a book about the well about well about the Queen and the king and their relations or their lack of relations. And it's really distressing for a certain sum every last copy of this edition could be destroyed. So there's there's a wonderful blackmail operation that kicks into full gear and without going to the detail the police

finally not having succeeded in kidnapping pilpul or they didn't manage to buy him off for a whole series of reasons lured him to Boulogne you see him heir to the France the French coast and captured him. They threw him in the Basti where he sat for four years now four years is a long time for a prisoner in the busty the normal period was about four months. It's not a modern prison. You know the modern concept of prison doesn't exist. So he was one of very very few prisoners who stayed more than a half a year. He actually stayed for four years and three months. He arrived in 1784 he was released in October 1788 as you may have heard the busty was nearly empty on July 14th 1789 when the French crowd liberated it. There were seven prisoners in the bus. At that time the busty in the late

1780s was not full of people just a handful really. But one of them was my man palp war and the other who is there for exactly the same amount of time who also was a marquis who also came from the ancient nobility the old feudal nobility and who also was writing novels was of course the Marquis de sod. So the Marquis de sod everyone knows and so on. He's writing these wicked books in one cell and Bellport is writing a wicked book and the other cell. And this is the book The Bohemians late Bohemia in French. It is a truly lever. It's a bad book in that sense of the word. And I found out to my astonishment while tracing the lives of these libelers that no copies of this book were available I could only locate six in the world

not a single copy in Paris only one in France actually and moved a little over the municipal library of hell. It's a book that completely disappeared from French literary history just as the author Peled poor disappeared. But when I finally got my microfilm copy from the municipal library of law and started reading it I've I thought this is a masterpiece. This is a terrific libertine novel. Now masterpieces too strong. I really wanted to believe it was a masterpiece once I got into it but it's a incredibly interesting book. So I managed to persuade Geldmarkt in France to republish it. It's appearing it's just appeared I think yesterday or the day before in Paris it's been published in Dutch and it's now available in English. I recommend it strongly. It's a little shocking in places because it

outdoes sod and the description of sex. Not it's not violent. There's no delight in the suffering of others but it is very sexy it's very wicked it's very anti-clerical and it's full of information about the life of hack writers because Bellport was one of them. And it turns out it's a hormone actually that is to say a novel it's a picaresque novel that's full of information about these hack writers that teleport poor himself knew including the whole colony in London some of whom went on to be leaders of the French Revolution. The most important one is Jacques presold but another is my rock. So there's a lot to be learned as well as a lot of fun to be had from this whole world of books from 18th century France which thanks to the richness of the archives is available for research and now available for reading. That sounds like a commercial I'm not really trying to persuade you to to to buy them but I am trying to

make a plug for the history of books. I think it is the most exciting field in the humanities. It's a field that is just bursting with energy new ideas. It's very active here in Harvard but it's everywhere in the world actually. China for example. So the history of books is I think an example of how new life is being infused into the humanities with new techniques and new ideas. We're going places and I hope that the Harvard University Library will be at the heart of this revival of interest in books. The old fashioned book as well as the new digital book. Thank you very much. Can you be sure of the authenticity authenticity of the text. Again I'm speaking as an admirer of Google but Google is like a bulldozer. You know just from digitizers everything it does. Digitizers

by the shelf. I've seen them do it actually I was allowed to watch the process of digitisation. It's terrific. That's the only way you can digitize millions and millions of books. But your objection I think is valid because Google doesn't ask what is the best edition. Is this edition valid. Does this edition have all of the volumes announced in it. Middlemarch is lacking one of its volumes in the version that appears in Google Book Search et cetera et cetera. Now another great thing about Google is they say right. You know we are. We move fast. We just plunge in. And then if we make mistakes we will correct them. So I admire their willingness to take the plunge and then to correct things. There's hope that we will get better editions. However as far as I know have no bibliographies no concept of the integrity of the text. Instead it's information and mess passing

information. So that has its advantages. It has its disadvantages. And what I hope is that we will have a national digital library that will do the job right. I hope that will happen with the help of Google. So Sergey Brin if you are listening. Help and I think that Google with with the collaboration of university libraries bibliography is a book people who really understand books could use its database not for books that are now in print commercially available books as Google calls them but rather for books that are in the public domain as they are already doing and then books that are out of print but in copyright if we could take all of these books that would be the totality of books in the English language up to 1923 which is when the copyright laws get tricky it would be fabulous. So Google I think will not lose anything by

contributing to this cause and we would all gain. So the question in case you didn't hear it is is it the case that there are more books but fewer readers and could there even be students who go through Harvard without reading a book that I doubt frankly. But it is true that students specialize early and some of them you know read online they read snippets frequently or they read extracts or they read articles sometimes. But the notion of cover to cover reading continuous reading and reflective reading what I call slow reading maybe that's a losing not a losing cause. But anyhow it's retreating when I was a student here there was a wonderful professor Ben Brower who was a champion of the New Criticism and this is when speed reading just was being offered as a technique and Brouwer said no we need to slow down. I mean I think in general in

America we need to slow down. You know why read fast read slowly enjoy it have let your fantasy roll. Well I doubt that we have so much of that kind of reading today. It's a loss I think however the history of reading itself is an aspect of the history of books or vice versa if you rather. And we've discovered lots of things about how people used to read books they actually read snippets frequently in the 16th 17th 18th century. We have a fabulous collection of so-called commonplace books in hope so sir Thomas Jefferson reads a book he copies out a passage then he uses that passage later when he's writing something else in his law practice when he was a young man. Books were often not read from cover to cover in the 17th century. They were read for ammunition to be used in political battles and ideological warfare. So the history of reading

isn't this wonderful sort of paradise we have lost but rather a very uneven terrain in which there were lots of ups and downs. So who knows maybe the our ability to do word searches now will open up a new kind of reading. But I share your worry. I wish I could offer some higher wisdom on the topic. Speaking as a grandfather myself I also worry about the amount of time twittering and that sort of thing. Especially if they're texting and driving I mean my my grandchildren are not nearly that old. But. What how will it work out. I honestly don't know. I think that it's difficult to predict either. Whenever I try to see into the future I look into the past and use it as a kind of rear

view mirror that's projecting things onward. So as I mentioned earlier I think that we can demonstrate a lot of reading in the past was so to speak in snippets that people didn't start at the first page and read their way through frequently. But they read for specific passages which they could use for specific purposes. That's one kind of reading. There were many kinds of reading. In fact there's a debate among the historians reading about a so-called reading revolution that took place in the late 18th early 19th century. The argument is that before then there was so-called intensive reading in which people would have one or two books the Bible and say Pilgrim's Progress and they would read them over and over and over again. And then as books became less expensive people became more educated and wealthier with the kind of consumerism that began in the

18th century instead of reading books more than once they would read a book and then race on to something else so-called extensive reading. That was some would argue more superficial. I think that thesis is wrong but a lot of other historians are reading think I'm wrong. So we've got a debate around that kind of thing. Now that's not an answer to your question. I honestly don't know what will become of our grandchildren as they Twitter and text and all the rest of it. But I do feel that there's something so powerful and persuasive about the Codex that is a book made out of pages that they'll get it they'll get it. And the sheer the sheer force of this invention will make itself felt. So I see complementarity rather than contradiction. I think it's conceivable that in the very long run that we will have a new sort of technology that

could replace the Codex. I find it hard to believe but I think it is indeed possible. So it could be that 20 50 100 years from now we will live in an entirely digitized world. The technology changes so fast that it's difficult to predict. But one thing we can do is to follow the changes in the technology. I mean this is maybe a little simple but I love the site turning points. So 4000 B.C. you get the invention of writing about 1000 B.C. you get the invention of writing with an alphabet around the time of Christ you get the invention of the codex with Gutenberg you've got printing with movable type so you know we're collapsing time and then the Internet dates from 1991 the beginnings of the Arpanet as it was called. I think from

1974 and reading with you know search engines and relevance ratings and that sort of thing that's yesterday Google exists since 1998. So we are I think living through a time of increasing technological change and I believe that it is. It is change now that is so rapid and pervasive that it is comparable to the change produced by Gutenberg and company. And so yes maybe you're right perhaps 20 50 years from now the printed Codex will cease to be a force. I hope not but it could be. So the first question had to do with research methods and the second with censorship. It's very clear that digitisation is opening up new possibilities for research. So let's say you're not used to computers but you are

interested in words. You can do word searches and look at semantic fields and discover at what point in time certain words began to be used. Since I've been talking about bad books I'll give you the example of the word pornography. You know it's not used in the 18th century. It begins in the 19th century or the word Bohemians. I always and I think Bohemianism as such you know Puccini and all that is a 19th century phenomenon. But what I'm trying to show here and also in the novel is that there were the word was used. It's you can find the expression Bohemia in several places and in the second half of the 18th century and the title of helper's book is the boy. Yeah. Well with a proper word search maybe we could get a really very interesting account of how that word when it came first was used and how it developed that kind of research you can

do without a lot of fancy technological knowledge. I think you would find it useful as to censorship. Well I you know the the the settlement that involved Google's case and the authors that is the authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers who sued Google for breach of copyright. This thing we call the settlement gives Google the right in the corpus of digitized books that it is creating to eliminate any books it wants. So Google I call the censorship that is to say Google can decide not to make books available on its database. Now the settlement does say if it makes such a decision it will announce it and make the digitized version of this book that it's eliminating available to something called The Book Rights Registry. OK that's a little better. But the book Rights Registry isn't going to have a database so it could be

that Google as a business will not want to publish anything critical of say China. Well you've probably followed Google's relations with China recently and Google was permitting China to censor its general searching facilities and finally said enough is enough and that it will no longer do this. I applaud Google. I think that's wonderful. I mean really I do admire Google but they were censoring for quite a while in the hope of penetrating into the Chinese market. But if you've got a monopoly position and you have the right of censorship that's dangerous. So I I'm you know monopolies could be good in the sense of providing good services but monopolies tend to charge monopoly prices and to abuse their power. So we need I think a public authority that will prevent those abuses. First

of all it's clear that there poor and sorry wrote their books while they were prisoners in the Basti. But I've done a lot of research in the papers of the busty that not all the papers have survived so it's a little tricky. But in the case of Bellport I found a specific reference to one of the not the guards but one of the officers of the busty saying we will make paper and pen and ink available to the Marquis de. The bust he had a library and they can read books there. It even had in 1788 a billiard table. And so I imagine the Marquis de sod in the Marquis de Boer playing Sylvia. Now I can't prove it. And in fact I can't prove that they ever met but they were there for four years and we know that some of the prisoners were allowed to take walks in the garden of the Basti et cetera. We know that they exchange notes in the chapel for example. I think it's inconceivable that they did not know each other. It's just that

I think my mantelpiece was a much better writer but that's it that's up to you to decide if you want to compare their novels now as to the buying of books in Houlton library. And our special collections in general because we have at Harvard many special collections and many different libraries. In fact I'm often asked how many libraries do you have. I asked the question myself when I first arrived here and the answer was Well some say 40 and some say 104. That was embarrassing. If you had to you know explain what the library system was all about we have now decided we have 73 libraries. It depends on how you define a library but certainly many of the 73 libraries have their own special collections and Holten is the flagship of special collections. We are not going to cut back on buying rare books and buying important books. Our donors are very generous actually and we have many graduates who are willing

to give money so that we can continue doing this and we buy manuscripts. So John Updike's manuscripts are here wasn't easy but the graduates of Harvard rallied round. And now we have a magnificent John Updike collection both his books and his manuscripts. And I could go on and on. Yes it's very complex but some donors create endowments and the income from those endowments keeps it going. So we depend on gifts of course but we also have regular endowments and we have a magnificent staff in Houlton which is cataloging works and keeping taking good care of them and even teaching. I mean I teach a course and some of the students are here. They know that these Hopetoun librarians can teach you a lot. So we are trying to make the most of this talent that we have in the library in all respects. Well the short answer to that is yes but it's a

very very good question and it keeps me up at night because it's true that most works today are born digital. I mean virtually every writer writes on a computer and the text is in a and electronic memory. Now it can be printed out and so on. But publishers are working from these electronic texts. And so even in the case of ambitious full scale books there is a problem of preservation in the case of ephemera. The problem is enormous. So we have for example what e-mail most e-mail is disappearing has disappeared. The e-mail from the White House between 2001 and 2005 apparently has disappeared. But there was also the case of the census of 1960. I don't know if you've heard of this.

This is the census of the United States which was kept on magnetic tapes I believe anyhow some kind of electronic storage and it was thought that the entire census had just was no longer available because the of the extinction of these archaic kinds of tapes and hardware and software. Well I mean if we lost a whole census that would be serious. In fact in 1976 a whole corps of engineers was able to reconstruct the census but it was not easy. So we've had spectacular examples of lost electronic data. And then if you think of all the eyesight's just in Harvard at Harvard University I don't know how many there are but practically every professor has his or her Web site. Many have several Web sites that Web sites are often incompatible not interoperable. Some with the others and they come and they go

so at the library we feel that this is valuable material that's of high scholarly value in many many cases. So we are now developing programs to capture the e-mail of Harvard just of Harvard but that's we're talking about millions of e-mail messages and to capture Web sites. It's an elaborate program. It's a costly program but we feel this is part of our responsibility. And a lot of this will go into this office for scholarly communications that I mentioned and the the electronic repository that keeps. But you're absolutely right. No one in this country or in the world has solved the problem of digital preservation and it's not just that the hardware becomes obsolete and that the software becomes obsolete but it gets lost in some cyberspace even if it hasn't eroded it. You know the zeros in the

ones can unravel so to speak but we can't locate it if we don't have proper metadata. That is a proper description of how to find it out there. So there are enormous problems in digital preservation and I feel it's our responsibility to future generations to solve those problems. So we have something called the library digital initiative. We have an office of information services within the library with very talented computer engineers and so on and they're working on it. Whether they'll solve it I don't know but I think that we need to have an R and D ingredient in the library system to expand and improve our digital infrastructure to really make us the most avant garde digital library in the country while at the same time buying all these printed codecs is not easy but by guests of the government you meant the

busty and the prison. OK. Of course one of the definitions of a legal government is it has a monopoly on power. So what I'm when I refer to monopolies it applies to that of course. Governments tend to abuse their power. We have laws we have a balance of power system which is abuse sometimes but it's worked reasonably well. We have militant organizations civil liberties unions we have courts and we have other possibilities. I mean I'm in particular thinking of the Library of Congress which is a fabulous library by far the largest library in the world. Why shouldn't the deposit library so every book that is produced is supposed to be deposited free of charge in the Library of Congress. Why can't it digitize its holdings which is something something around 30 million volume's I mean it's

staggering. Why can't it do that and make you know make sure that these holdings are preserved and made available for the country. Well the answer is two problems. One copyright so you can't violate copyright in digitizing them if the book is still under copyright and to money. Because a lot of money however. And my formula is let us have if not a new copyright law. We've had 11 copyright laws in the last 50 years. One more complicated than the other. So let's at least have a law that covers orphan books. If we had such a law then competitors to google would be able to digitize books but they can't. According to the settlement only Google can digitize these books and be protected from lawsuits. So orphan book legislation would make it possible for someone else to do the digitizing and then a coalition of foundations if not Congress could finance it

and it could be. You know we wouldn't do it overnight but we would do it right and we would do a million a million books a year. Ten years we've got 10 million books in the public domain and in out of print but in copyright books it would be fabulous for the American people. And that's a small cost compared with one day in Iraq. So I think I think that it is doable but we lack the will. And so I hope that we have served. Sergey Brin isn't listening that the Congress is and that we should write to our Congress congressmen and women and get them going on this because it's is doable and it does matter.