We’ve all heard a lot in the news recently about digitizing books for everyone to read. Microsoft is doing a 20 million dollar project in Britain and Google is doing several libraries in the United States. There has been some controversy on this issue from royalty-free authors and booksellers. It is for this reason that our Think Tank brought up the subject.
A prominent member of our Think Tank “Swift” said; “I was researching his idea for the digital library and Goggle’s attempt to put all existing books on the internet. I really like this idea as only a small percentage of books are still in print. I have been looking for an out of print book publication for decades called The Rose and the Labyrinth and there have been searches for books all over the world. I found there were 5 books with this title. The one I am looking for is about Carl Jung’s time spent with minors and his reactions to them. wrote it, but I don’t have the book information anymore so I can’t remember who the writer is. There are some really wonderful books out of print and no way to access them. publishers who are concerned about copyright infringement issues and the “fair use” interpretation.
I don’t think they would start with the newer books; but the books that were no longer protected. What the hell are they being protected from? No one is going to pretend they wrote them by crying out loud. After this period of time, I will read any book by the name of the Rose and the Labyrinth and pretend that it was the book that Jung’s last student sent me before he died. I really like the idea of a mine being a maze, and so does my father.
Well, I certainly see Swift’s point on this issue and we know that we are currently very busy digitizing humanity’s written knowledge from books to digital so that it can be made available to the world. This is a very wise decision, as books can deteriorate over the years and out-of-print books are not available to everyone. By digitizing human written knowledge known to the world, we can conquer the barriers of opportunity for those hard shippers who may not have the resources to achieve the upward mobility they seek. As we conquer the digital divide, we will be on our way to bringing the world’s knowledge of the entire Library of Commerce back to the human race in an easy-to-read, search, and retrieve format available to all. That will be an excellent day for the human race. Imagine a Commerce Library digital library capable of using Super Computer speeds to retrieve all the world’s written books online at the speed of Google or MSN.com. I mean, any book written in any language, anywhere in the world, at any time, think about that for a second.
By using knowledge and experience in this way, we can take advantage of this to avoid failure through understanding the results. Those who don’t learn from their mistakes tend to avoid making them. Those who remember the lessons learned from their mistakes and successes tend to reason better by analyzing their mistakes and trying to find a way to fix their problems.
Now let me tell you why I think a society needs digital libraries connected to all civilizations for faster advancement of the human species as a whole or as one. If you had a problem that you had to solve for the betterment of your civilization and you had all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; that is, a computer connected to a system like a World Digital Library, then it would have improved your personal knowledge and memory by a million times. This could help your intelligent quotient at computer speed and that, along with speed of thought, is an important component necessary to lead humanity to the uniqueness of an omniscient and endless being in this dimension. Think about this.
