TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Dump Gorman–as a threat to literature and librarianship

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Michael Gorman has come up with the excuse that his anti-blogger piece in Library Journal was good fun. Huh? The damn thing in places reads like a legal brief. Simply put, the president-elect of ALA is a liar and an idiot who can’t grasp the power of blogs to put books and other formal content in context. Moreover, he has yet to repudiate his ignorant op-ed in the Los Angeles Times against e-books for most uses.

Worse, by discouraging the mass digitizing of books, he is a threat to literature. As often noted, many venerable classics were printed on acidic paper. What happens when the originals crumble? Suppose that they grow even more out of fashion and society does not bother to preserve them. And wouldn’t computerized scans be more efficient than old-fashioned microfilming, especially in spreading the books around? The more literature is on people’s minds, the more society will care about old works.

Myopia as a threat to culture

Of course, it would help to have redundant and systematic storage, as well as gracefully evolving e-book standards. Those are the very kinds of things that will not happen as quickly if the Michael Gormans prevail and e-books and preservation methods fail to receive the funding and other support they deserve now. An ALA leader this myopic is a threat to culture. Even Google cannot do the job right without sufficient help from the library community in the company’s ambitious but worthwhile efforts. And here’s Gorman opposing the essential. As troubling as the professional issues are–Gorman apparently has a real knack for violating Reference Desk Rule One and spouting off in prominent places without solid citations–the biggest problem is this. He has a severe vision deficit.

Gorman as a threat to formal librarianship

Now put yourself in the place of a bright young student pondering a library career. You know that e-book displays are rapidly improving and only will get better and better, and that with good software, you can find your way through digital books more easily than through the paper variety. You’re aware that Google’s efforts are just a start, that scanned works can be OCRed and made into extraordinarily readable text fit for the disabled and the rest of us. You also understand that researchers are even working toward e-books with flippable pages, so that distinctions between digital books and the paper variety will blur anyway, With all this knowledge, just how eager would you be to become an LIS student–if Luddites such as Gormans set the tone for the profession?

I myself came to the e-library issue as a lover of books, not an MLIS, and people like Gorman make me rejoice that I avoided formal librarianship. Oh, the malarkey that such fools would have filled my head with–at the very time I was most vulnerable! Please, ALA. Dump this guy now if you care about old books and new librarians. Even though Gorman is approaching retirement age, he can still do the library profession his share of unwitting damage through his lack of vision and integrity. The only positive aspect of this whole fiasco is that some more visionary librarians are speaking up.