How Books Will Become Machines / quote 14 of 21
The encyclopedia's victory over the book
The first way to continue the book mechanization process consists in taking an encyclopedic perspective on book contents, introducing descriptive formalisms in order to turn structured text into well standardized resources. [...] This de- coupling between form and content has many advantages. In princi- ple at least, it allows to envision texts that can change layout on demand [...] Explicitly standardizing the implicit structure of books makes them searchable and browsable in new ways. And this is just the beginning. In on-going standardization steps, the encyclopedia would like to tag the semantic content of each of these resources.. [...] The goal is now to create open standards to describe bookmarks, dog-ears, notes, commentary, book loans. Each book-reader encounter should be documented. The whole life of a book will be made explicit. Tra- jectories of books and readers will form a new information mesh from which numerous correlations could be extracted. [...] Digitalization is actual- ly not a very good term to describe this content extraction and standardization process. Books are containers, and the so-called digitalization process consists precisely in extracting their contents. In this new world of data, book contents extracted from their origi- nal physical shells become digital resources among others, databases linked with other databases. [...] We cannot help feeling the power of this global bibliographic machine as it directly corresponds to one of the oldest dream of hu- manity: creating a library with all the books or, expressed different- ly, an infinitely dense book of books.19 But we should also be aware that the dream of the Alexandria library is precisely an encyclopedic dream. The industrial extraction of book contents from books means nothing but the end of the primary function of the book: the isola- tion, organization and layout of contents in a confined volume. It means the total victory of the encyclopedia over the Book. This is not without consequences.