TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Book nerds vs. Hitler, old age and acid

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Digitized libraries are one of the best revenges against practitioners of genocide. They might even help discourage future Hitlers.

If books and other forms of art can be preserved in digital form throughout the world, mass-murderers will not be able to wipe out the culture of a people. Books, paintings, statues, and other art can live on forever in redundant digital archives across the planet, from Melbourne to New York. Not that haters are rational; but perhaps a few would-be Hitlers will understand the limits of even the most complete Final Solution.

So, in reading Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, I was pleased to learn that author Aaron Lansky has looked beyond the brick-and-mortar incarnation of the National Yiddish Book Center and entered the digital era. He and his colleagues have not just founded a home for slowly disintegrating paper books given away by aging immigrants whose sons and daughters are ignorant of Yiddish. They have also established a Virtual Digital Library Project, and let’s hope that many, many other ethnic groups follow.

Much-needed start

Led by a Lansky associate named Gabe Hamilton, the Project has already digitized 3.5 million pages of Yiddish books, making available print-on-demand versions of the works of such greats as Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer, older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer. That’s most Yiddish books–masterfully saved from oblivion. “Modern Yiddish literature,” Lansky writes in his readable memoirs from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, “holds the dubious distinction of being 100 percent acidic: printed on inexpensive, wood-pulp paper, which, because of its high acidity, gradually breaks down, turning yellow and brittle and, eventually, crumbling into fragments and dust.”

As valuable as the scans and print-on-demand books are–you can even buy the PODs online, directly from the center–much else might be done with the proper resources. For example:

1. With e-books in mind, the center’s books could be OCRed and converted by enthusiastic volunteers into a high-quality digital text format and made more searchable than they would be with the emphasis on mere images of the books.

Compared to images, the resultant text would also be more readable on the screens of computers, especially handhelds and tablets. One must remember that millions of children are now growing up accustomed more to reading off computer screen than off printed material. For Yiddish books and others to live on in young people’s minds, not just in databases, it might be helpful to go the next step with a gracefully evolving universal consumer format like OpenReader with all the typographical niceties.

OpenReader also would allow conversions into many other formats optimized for readers’ PDAs and other devices. But OpenReader is intended to be easily updatable to allow for improved machines in the future.

2. Regardless of the final format, an OCR approach producing computer text would if nothing else make machine translation possible.

Current translation software isn’t as good as human translators and surely will never be the equal of one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first English-language translators, Saul Bellow. But in the future, it might be hard to distinguish between human and machine translation.

3. With a format allowing links, even sentences within individual e-books could be linked to those within other books. OpenReader will allow this. What a boon to scholars.

4. If a text approach were used, especially OpenReader with powerful linking capabilities, it would be easier to build online communities around individual books. Participants could precisely annotate books. Needless to say, they also could voice-chat and blog in Yiddish and English.

Whatever the form, digital preservation is essential for other cultures, too, not Yiddish alone. Think, for example, of the Taliban’s jihad against the folk music of Afghanistan and the role that audio has already played in helping to keep it and oral histories alive. Archivists should go the next step and electronically preserve great Afghani works in a permanent and consumer-usable text format, as opposed to the ephemeral formats that so often show up in the world of e-books. Luckily some good efforts are already underway to preserve Afghanistan’s culture despite the limitations of current technology.

Luck of the Yiddish

But let’s not forget Yiddish; Lansky’s book makes a cogent and poignant case for keeping the language alive through technology and otherwise. His title comes from a quote from Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar who was lucky enough to be lecturing in Finland when the Nazis invaded Poland. Skeptics wondered why Yiddish should be preserved since Hitler had already killed half the speakers of the language. “Because,” Weinreich said, “Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.” Certainly technology can and should be part of the outwitting process, and it is good to know that Steven Spielberg and the MacArthur Foundation have been so supportive of Lansky’s work in various media. If you yourself want to contribute–much else needs to be done–you can visit a donations page.

Details: I’m among the ringleaders in the OpenReader project and have the usual prejudices, but, objectively, society needs a universal format if e-books are to be regarded as a permanent medium at the consumer level, as opposed to an electric equivalent of acidic paper. Adobe and the other owners of proprietary formats can change them whenever they want. As for a third-party effort to produce an archival form of Adobe PDF, the format lacks the compactness and versatility of the XML-based OpenReader. It also is missing OR’s multimedia capabilities.

The format mess, the Tower of eBabel, is not the happiest situation for archivists trying to preserve Yiddish or another language/culture. Furthermore, “consumer” counts. E-books should reach the machines and minds of millions of users, not just be preserved in big archives for scholarly use.

Not directly e-book-related but still mentionable: Please note that the digital library is just one detail in a book that is undeniably a bibliophile’s delight despite the horrors recounted in such chapters as “The Great Newark Book Heist.” “The library,” writes Lansky, “had been in disarray since 1969, when, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, a newly elected administration targeted it as an elitist white institution and tried to shut it down.” The horror continued into the ’80s when a young library worker tipped off Lansky that several thousand Yiddish books were about to be tossed out. Almost one third of the collection was already gone.

Come to think of it, this detail is e-book related after all, for it shows the need not to tie all library matters to geography alone. “There are few Jews left in Newark,” a library administrator told Lansky or a colleague, “and the Yiddish books are rarely read. That’s why we phoned you. We have to work quickly and quietly. We have a very big job ahead.” Under a TeleRead approach, old books would not be destroyed, but rather lovingly preserved in appreciative research institutions, and meanwhile, no matter where library patrons lived, they could access the material electronically in the highly readable OpenReader format.

Update, Nov. 3: Gabe Hamilton tells me that “one million” referred to the number of physical books, not the number of titles. In having digitized 10,000 or 15,000 books–the exact number escapes me–the center has actually preserved most of Yiddish literature. A great example for the English language! I’ve tweaked the original post to reflect the new information.