Books as technology

We'll start today's lecture off with card catalogues. At some point in the past fifteen years, electronic catalogues more or less replaced card catalogues. I don't think my university library even has a card catalogue anymore. If it does, they've hidden it pretty well.

So, why did card catalogues disappear? I doubt anyone knows for sure, and since the modern study of communication is more or less designed to move us away from interesting questions, it is unlikely that some bright grad student will be giving us a definitive answer any time soon. But I would bet the given reasons went something like this: electronic catalogues were a) cheaper, in the end; b) easier to use; c) better at doing what they were made for (ie., searching for printed or other types of materials).

I can't speak to the first point, but on the other two, I would say this. If you simply have the title of a book, and want to get a call number, the electronic catalogue will be easier than the card catalogue. But if you have a kind of an idea of what the name of the author is, or the subject area for your study, the card catalogue is probably going to work better for you. For one thing, it's more forgiving. Some of the more sophisticated search engines may now make allowances for misspellings. The University of Tulsa's does not. So if I switch a single letter around when looking for Habermas's Structural transformation of the public sphere, it's going to come up empty, whereas I would certainly find that book were I to go to the card catalogue and search under "Habermas." And I'd probably find it fairly quickly (maybe 30 seconds).

The other thing that the card catalogue gives you that the electronic one doesn't is a serendipity built right into the technology. I look up "Structural transformation," but while I'm flipping through the cards I find lots of other books with similar titles or on similar subject matter or by the same author. Back in the day, I would go to the card catalogue to look for one title and walk away it with about four or five different call numbers: one of these other books often ended up being more useful than my original source. Electronic catalogues can do this too, but not in the natural way that the card catalogue does. Essentially, they're built for very specific searches. To cast the kind of wide net that I'm talking about here, with any degree of confidence, you need a specialized set of skills (a basic understanding of search strategies, for example), that you didn't need with the card catalogue.

The card catalogue is superior to the electronic catalogue for some sorts of searches, inferior for others. What this means, probably, is that electronic catalogues produce a different kind of scholarship than a card catalogue, certainly for non-specialists (like students).

Which gets us to books. I hear a great deal about the fact that ebooks are superior to paper books. For example, the claim is that ebooks allow for easy searching of terms. Also, the ebook allows you to keep multiple books on a single device. You get bored of one you can switch to another. Can't do that with a book.

Let's look at the first claim. What is the English translation of the French word "décapotable"? You're going to find the answer much more quickly in any basic French-English dictionary than you would through an electronic source (if that source even has the term: babel fish does, my electronic dictionary doesn't. And if it doesn't, you can't try figuring it out through words that are related to it, in the way that a dictionary would let you do. The thing just gives you a "?")

Okay, second experiment. You have in one hand the book Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. In the other you have a copy of the same book on Kindle (this is just a thought experiment. Kindle does not have that book. Nor, are we likely to see these kinds of scholarly works on Kindle any time soon. And it has nothing to do with the newness of the technology. Kindle will never have that book. For reasons that we will shortly see.) You remember that at some point Girard compares animal violence to human violence, suggesting that animals have an automatic barrier (or words to that effect) which keeps violence from getting out of hand. Humans have no such barrier (which is why, says Girard, we need sacrificial rituals). Where's the passage?

With the book, you look at the back, see "animals" in the index. Under "animals" there is a phrase "instinctive limits of, toward violence." Two different page numbers: the first is not what you are looking for, the second is. Took you about, again, half a minute to do this.

Now, how would you go about doing this on the Kindle? Search for "animals"? That will give you probably several hundred hits. You should get to the passage you are looking for in about half an hour. What about "barriers to violence?" or just "barriers?" Oh, I'm sorry, Girard doesn't actually use that term: his is "breaking mechanism." So "barriers" isn't going to give you the passage that you need, ever.

Like card catalogues, books are better search technologies than their electronic counterparts for some kinds of searches, and for some sorts of people. Unlike the card catalogue, the book does reward a certain level of knowledge and expertise. In the Girard example, someone unfamiliar with the book (or for that matter, with how indexes work) would probably have to read through the whole damned thing to find the passage. Moreover, lots of books that people read don't require this kind of search. Specifically, most fiction doesn't, unless you're a university English teacher. It is not a coincidence, I think, that almost all of the discussion around Kindle right now, both pro and con, uses fiction as a reference. Kindle, or something like it, may mean the end of paperback novels. (Eventually. For at least about the next 50 years, there will probably be a market for people like me, who just like to turn pages, and look at pretty covers, and don't need to take seventeen different stories with them on an airplane.) But unless the technology changes significantly, I don't see the ebook replacing scholarly books on paper. The codex is a more effective method of information storage and retrieval than Jeff Bezos realizes.