Thought experiment: a "bookless library"

This morning, I read that "'the library, as a place, is dead.'"  Enter the "bookless library," which is all pixels, all the time. 

What kind of "bookless library" would satisfactorily replace a bound collection? What sort of obstacles would it face?

1.  We'd need a full subscription to the final form of GoogleBooks, as well as to any other substantial collection of digitized books.  If we can't check books out of the library, then we have to be able to read them on our own computers.  That means that a single, on-site license wouldn't work--the library would have to splurge for unlimited offsite use.

2.  That's a full subscription to everything.  Yes, scientists now do much of their publishing online.  Alas, books in the humanities primarily exist in the material world.  This may come as a shock, but we can't expect students doing a research paper to cough up $ to Google (or Amazon, or whomever) every time they want to cite a source.  In fact, we can't expect faculty to do that, either (because most of us don't make that kind of $).  I imagine that this will cause all sorts of copyright havoc. 

3.  Google needs to fix its preview and snippet functions.  According to the article linked above, we aren't going to "shelfwalk" anymore.  And yet, given that Google's snippet view CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF THE MOST MIND-BOGGLINGLY, INFURIATINGLY, AND SUBLIMELY USELESS SEARCH FUNCTIONS IN THE KNOWN GALAXY, AND QUITE POSSIBLY THE UNKNOWN GALAXY AS WELL (INCLUDING REGIONS REACHABLE ONLY BY STABLE WORMHOLES), we still need to shelfwalk.  Because we cannot tell what's in the book by using Google's search results.  I'm still getting "snippets" that turn out to be blank margins. (Which, again, means that the library would have to splurge on a license that gives us full access to everything Google scans.) 

4.  Google needs to actually develop something that bears a vague passing resemblance to quality control.  Recent weeks have turned up creased pages, blurring, pages scanned in the wrong order, missing pages, and, of course, the ever-present thumbs.  If we're going to have bookless libraries, then perhaps we first need the substitutes to be, well, useful?

4.  Are we assuming that all publishers will cheerfully release their books for electronic distribution? Er...are we? Where do we put the books that aren't digitized? 

5.  Got rare books? Never mind Google.  Will libraries with substantial rare book collections agree to digitize them and make them readily available to its own users, let alone to the World At Large? Many older books cannot be digitized by sticking 'em flat on a scanner bed--the bindings are either too tight or too fragile to survive the process.  What about manuscripts? I would expect that many special collections either won't be digitized or can't be digitized without considerable expense.  Which means that libraries will still have books in them.

6.  Where will all the books go? Are we assuming that everybody will just stow their collections offsite (because all universities can afford to shell out the cash to store a few hundred thousand...or a few million...books somewhere else, in the right physical and climate conditions), or that libraries will have fire sales to raise money to buy databases? (Hey, I'm always willing to acquire a few texts...)

7.  How are bibliographers to do their work? For any serious bibliographer, scanned copies will be useless: it's difficult (or impossible) to see watermarks, illustrations often reproduce poorly, the book's material aspects (bindings, etc.) will be obscured, and so forth.  (ETA: Forgot to mention Thomas Freeman's "Texts, Lies and Microfilm," Sixteenth Century Journal 30 [1999]: 23-46; obviously, Freeman is talking about the problems of working with microfilm, but several of his observations carry over to digital texts.)  

I'm sure my readers can think of many other issues. 

ETA: Pace Steve Bell, putting my mildly sardonic reaction to the "bookless library" proposition aside, this post has absolutely nothing to do with Suzanne Thorin, and everything to do with baseline practical issues when it comes to electronic texts--especially those issues facing smaller libraries like mine, which do not have the money to buy all the good electronic stuff.    

Comments

[Brian Ogilvie]

I think that the library as a place will be around for a while, but I fear that physical printed material will occupy less and less of it, until it becomes a kind of museum--the entire library as a special collections department.

I'm one of the "vocal minority" of faculty on my campus who points out that there are disciplines whose current literature and classic works are still mostly print only, but also that printed primary sources will continue to be valuable. Some forms of research can't easily be done if material is in remote storage, such as going through decades' worth of runs of a journal.

And much of the discussion of library space seems to be driven by the perceived needs of undergraduates, not the graduate students and faculty. I use the analogy of lab space in the sciences: it's expensive, and few people use it, but it's still central to the research and teaching mission of the university. Alas, I don't seem to get as much traction with that analogy as I would like.

With sources, it's also important to develop a feel for how one's research subjects approached material. Just as there's no substitute for handling medieval manuscripts, there's no substitute for working with an early modern printed book, or a cheap 19th-century edition. I enjoy the utility of paid databases like EEBO and free ones like Gallica, and even Google Books (which just supplied me with a decent PDF of a 1617 theological treatise), but I hate to think of a generation of budding scholars who have never handled the real thing.

[undine]

Amen to all you've said, especially #3.

[JaneC]

There's nothing like holding a book in your hands. My students respond a lot better to a facsimile of a medieval codex that they can handle and turn pages in than to powerpoint slides with pictures from the original.

And, as you say, scanning books and articles hasn't been perfected yet. I came across an article in a well-respected database recently that was missing its first page! Fortunately another database had the same article, sans missing page. Of course, the first database also had the ads printed in the original journal, and the second didn't. This, I imagine, will be significant to some future scholar of advertising history.

[Jane Le Galloudec]

Earlier this year after the death of my aged aunt we offered a substantial collection of scientific books to Oxford University (where her late husband had been a professor of chemistry) only to be told that the science department no longer had a library - as all information was kept online. I am not sure this is progress!

[Michael Steeleworthy]

I would argue that even in the humanities - at least at the undergraduate level - that the traditional monograph is on its way out. At the same time, I think every claim that "the book is dead" or every question we make that questions if Print is a thing of the past is still premature.

Until e-readers can be produced and sold en masse at affordable prices, and until e-book vendors can toward a consensus on the look-and-feel of e-book interfaces, print will still dominate. There is no where near a critical mass of e-book readership in academe yet, and the interfaces from one vendor to another are hardly seamless. One day, perhaps, there will be, and given the fact that libraries can acquire between 4-6 times the amount of e-material than print material, I think we need to be ready for that future. But that future is not knocking down the door this term, and certainly not for another couple terms at least.

As for scholarship that requires the printed word - not just the content but its form - I don't think this will go away in the wake of electronic formats. This is a legitimate and strong part of many disciplines, that, frankly, will become even more more important as more and more of our culture is consumed in digital formats only.

-my two cents.