A Luddite-style rant against e-books–in AAUP’s ‘Academe’
I’m all in favor of “academic freedom”–part of which is the right to come across as an imbecilic Luddite pandering to the like-minded. But should the American Association of University Professors have published an article as sloppy and dishonest as the one by S. David Mash, a “Ph.D. student in higher education administration at the University of South Carolina”?
The title of Mash’s article is Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom: Can Academic Freedom Survive the Death of the Book? A better question, however, is whether the AAUP’s full credibility of the moment can survive Mash. If this example is representative work from him–let’s hope not–then he strikes me as a Jayson Blair of academics.
In his ramblings for the May-June issue of Academe, Marsh apparently refuses to classify electronic books as real books. Here I carry around Dickens and Trollope, Wharton and Cather, in a PDA smaller than a typical paperback; and yet poor Mash in effect is telling me I am not reading real literature. Since when are e-books less rich in eloquence, facts and insights than the equivalent p-books? Does ink confer wisdom? Does paper assure that the ideas will be more fleshed out than on television? Does a cardboard spine with golden letters guarantee accuracy and integrity? Does a paper Mein Kampf end up as more uplifting than an electronic Bible? No, books are words, not cardboard, ink and paper, and it is downright Orwellian to say or even imply otherwise, or suggest that e-books are less valuable. An online dictionary, based in part on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, would appear to back me up with a definition alluding to “A printed or written literary work.” Books can be written in bits and bytes, not just ink. “Write” can mean to “compose and set down,” and the U.S. Copyright Office qualifies electronic books as a fixed form of expression eligible for copyright. End of story. Luddites and friends, however stubborn they often are on definitions, should just give up on this one.
To move on to the implications of the article’s title, just what’s this malarkey about e-books being at odds with academic freedom and presumably other forms of free expression? If anything, by lowering the costs of publication, the medium will add to, not lessen, freedom. Last week at little or no extra cost for Web hosting, TeleRead put online the full text of The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair’s expose of corporate journalism. I’d never seen The Brass Check at my local public library, and many decades earlier, in fact, when Sinclair had self-published his work, sellers of paper had withheld some of the supplies he needed for reprints.
Now, however, thanks to TeleRead and some helpful volunteers in Indiana and Maine, every English-language reader on planet Earth can read Sinclair’s message if a Net connection is at hand. And that is even before the Project Gutenberg spreads our edition of The Brass Check to hundreds of servers throughout the world. I am delighted that the University of Illinois recently came out with its own version of The Brass Check, but it is the free electronic editions that will provide the ultimate rebuke to the would-be censors. Yes, oppressive Digital Rights Management and the shrinking of the public domain might somewhat crimp access to e-books in the long run, but even with the most nightmarish of scenario, I doubt that The Brass Check and other uppity works will vanish from Gutenberg’s global network of servers.
A few of Mash’s other gems appear below:
Mash: E-books are to be discussed in the same paragraphs as the old hype for educational TV. He cites The Problem with Pulcifer, a book about a future in which librarians steer children from books to television. In fact, Mash tells of a real-life institution of higher learning–Eastern Michigan University–that replaced some bookshelves with computers, TV and the rest.
TeleRead: Yes, if it is electronic it must be evil (sarcasm alert). Actually, months ago, in a rant against the displacement of p-books by media centers, TeleRead was already on the case. We oppose bookless libraries—unless students can read the same material by way of e-books. That’s what TeleRead is all about: making it happen, not immediately but slowly over time, without instantly killing off every paper book. But some academic hacks are more interested in formulaically defending p-books than in looking ahead to a TeleReaderish era when people in the most remote areas of the world could read everything from Kant to Clancy. Even then p-books would survive. The charm is and will be there. May p-books live on like horse-and-buggy rides in Central Park. Just don’t cheat the world–especially the world beyond the privileged inhabitants of academia–of e-books.
Over the years, in books, in p-articles and on this Web site, I’ve told how children could grow up reading a rich collection of the classics and other books in electronic form. This vision won’t be reality to the fullest if we kill off or crimp public libraries and those in schools; we must not limit books–paper and electronic–to the elite. But if the worst happens, the villains will be the humans, not the machines.
Mash: E-books must be a failure because they haven’t caught on by now. “In early 2002,” Mash writes, “less than three years after it founded the ambitious Frankfurt eBook Awards, Microsoft withdrew financing and discontinued the related annual event.”
TeleRead: Wow. Imagine this man’s historical perspective. Was television doomed just because the masses didn’t buy sets from Day One? Point is, some people have cared enough about e-books to read them even without optimal technology. Not everyone feels this way, of course; we have not yet reached the era of electronic ink, where e-books will be similar to p-books, complete with flappable pages. But we are getting there. Meanwhile I find myself actually preferring to read books on my Dell Axim, which has a sharp screen and type that I can blow up to any size I want, using the Tiny eBook Reader program.
What’s more, I am laughing at Mash’s silly belief that e-books are a failure because Microsoft is not pushing them as ardently as in the past. Far from throwing in the towel, Microsoft simply decided that the quick money was not there. It’s not as if Microsoft has given up on the medium. If anything, as the Open eBook Forum and the Association of American Publishes have documented, use of e-books is growing far, far more rapidly than that of p-books–the sales of which in recent years have been rather disappointing on the whole.
Mash: “…in September 2002 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the results of an e-book study conducted with students at Ball State University. The study, supported by a $20 million grant from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, found that college students are not yet willing to replace textbooks with e-books. In fact, ’several students said that they thought e-books adversely affected the amount of information that they absorbed.’”
TeleRead: Look, this TeleBlog is just the Web log of a small Net-based group, not the august and presumably peer-reviewed Academe. Just the same, thanks to the nefarious electronic medium known as the Web, I have actually been able to read certain source material from Ball State—the 2002 study, The Usability of eBook Technology: Practical Issues of an Application of Electronic Textbooks In a Learning Environment. The researchers were Richard F. Bellaver, Associate Director Center for Information & Communication Studies, and Dr. Jay Gillette, Director Human Factors Institute, Ball State University. And even though most of the students were uncomfortable with e-books, I saw conclusions in the Bellaver-Gillette document that raise pesky questions about Mash’s summary.
The two researchers, while acknowledging the unpopularity of the technology actually used by the students, even wrapped up their paper with the following paragraph: “It appears that the current dumb eBook output device could be viable as a full screen storage medium for students. As an easy to carry, relatively inexpensive and completely reusable storage device, the eBook could fit into the hardware/software spectrum between the full personal computer and the PDA.” Why didn’t Mash at least acknowledge this sentence? And how come he left out the fact that the researchers were working with already-obsolete technology? Jayson Blair territory. Bear in mind, too, that the students were reading textbooks, and that linear reading, such as novels, would not require cross-references as often. At any rate, devices with larger and sharper screens at affordable prices should help immeasurably. Such tablet-style computers will be on the way.
Alas, in summing up the Ball State study, even the Chronicle hardly distinguished itself. The headline said: “Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds.” But far down in the story, the Chronicle at least had the decency to report that “whatever the complaints about the performance of the devices, there seemed to be little difference between the performance of e-book users and textbook users. Several quizzes were administered during the study, each with a maximum score of 50. The textbook users earned an average of 29 points per quiz, while the black-and-white and color e-book users earned average scores of 28.9 and 28.5, respectively.”
On top of that, studies from two Midwestern schools and the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University suggest that students can be rather enthusiastic about e-books. Only 20 students took part in the later study, but 100 percent said they would recommended e-books to a friend for use in college courses. An amazing 84 percent answered “Yes” to the question: “If you knew that every one of 4 courses that you were taking next semester had the option of an e-book, would you be willing to spend $200, in addition to any textbook costs, to purchase one?”
Mash: The Web is inadequate as a research medium, and students rely heavily on traditional libraries.
TeleRead: Of course, the Web could be better, much better. Mightn’t part of the reason be that people like S. David Mash are too busy repeating the old Luddite platitudes (sucking up to a dissertation advisor, perhaps?) to come up with solutions to the problem? Such as well-stocked national digital library systems in the States and elsewhere? Meanwhile, like it or not, research commissioned by the Pew Foundation shows that young people are relying on the Net in a massive way. Let’s start addressing their needs by improving the quality and range of online information, especially from academia–and by improving linking and archiving and otherwise adding to stability. Or would universities rather take pride in withholding the goodies and not caring about a good online enviroment for serious research?
I could move on to Mash’s other lapses of fact, logic and honesty, but I think it’s already clear how Blairish the AAUP-published essay is. I am tempted to send the editors of Academe the Web address of this TeleBlog posting—which is not a formal response, just my immediate thoughts—and demand that the magazine let me publish a full-length rebuttal of the Blair article if the organization really does care about “freedom” and open-mindedness. If nothing else, the AAUP should correct Blair’s, er, Mash’s, egregious misrepresentation of the researchers’ conclusions at Ball State.
Despite my unhappiness with the essay as a whole, I’ll acknowledge that Mash did serve up some quotes with which I’d agree:
With uncanny prescience, Henry David Thoreau opined in Walden that “men have become the tools of their tools.” But we do have a choice and we must exercise it. As Eric Ormsby, professor of Islamic intellectual history, wrote in the October 2001 issue of The New Criterion: “If the past twenty-five years have proved anything, it is that, for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen.”
But of course! If only Mash could apply those words sensibly to e-books! Indeed, elsewhere, in The Death of the Book, an article for a religious publication called The Mars Hill Review, he does impress me as far more balanced about the usefulness and survival of both p- and e-books. And now–here’s the kicker. Turns out that this second article identifies Mash as “Administrative Dean of Information” for Columbia International University in Columbia, South Carolina. Dean of Information? If Mash is a “Dean of Information,” then what are the other deans thinking about e-books and “academic freedom”?
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