Leaves · 11 April 2001
My position on those early web page prototypes called books is clear: I love books, books are good, books decorate a room nicely. The codex is a robust plug-and-play interface. Hell, I’ve been designing the fucking things for years. Girls who wonder ou est la bibliotheque make me go all googly.
But these rumblings from Nicholson Baker, chronicler of eye-crossing minutiae, phone sex and the spindly legs of men in brown UPS uniforms, however, about the unquestionable value of paper, and about the destruction brought about by microfilm and OCR, strike me as hooey. Dumb nostalgia. The library is changing, surely, but should every teacher know every novel, should every restaurant serve every dish, should every television play every episode of What’s Happening!! at once? Or should libraries focus on what they do well: cataloguing the whole huge morass of recorded thought. Isn’t the format and location of the morass irrelevant?
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