Digital Libraries Quotes

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Ebooks had to happen.

Digital reading will completely take over. It's lightweight and it's fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

The age of the book is almost gone.

The world's information is digital. The web, the news, all of that is digital. And now... we have ten million books scanned. That was the last bastion of what was offline; it's now online and accessible.

Electronic books are junk.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything.

With enough libraries, all content is free.

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

I'd be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.

Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

One potential long-term problem with many current digital libraries is that they grew out of and aresupported by bricks-and-mortar libraries. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, inreality it creates a potentially dangerous situation that I call "the other digital divide."

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.

The Deep Web contains shockingly valuable information. Can you imagine how cancer research would blossom if every researcher had instant access to every research paper done by every single university and research lab in the world?

I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders...Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information. The result won't be a library without books--it'll be a library without value.

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.