I guess you could file this one under "technology isn't everything."
Some lowlife torched the four-year-old Williamsport Library in northwestern Indiana. I don't know how many books a library in a 2,000-population town would hold -- probably not many by Fort Wayne standards. Almost any of our branches would likely have more.
The complete works of Shakespeare can be stored in about five megabytes of space. I carry around a 1GB flash drive smaller than a stick of gum; that could hold a pickup truck full of books. I also have 40 GB and 60 GB portable hard drives, each small enough to slip into my front pocket. I could get a 100 GB drive, of the same size, for less than $200, and it would hold a library floor full of academic journals. If I had that material on my hard drive, and the drive were lost or stolen, I would be annoyed but not devastated. Get another hard drive, fill it up again.
Yet the mindless destruction of this small library saddened me and angered me as much as any heinous crime I've read about lately. It's the perfect representation of all crime, the need of some people not happy with their own circumstances to steal or destroy the efforts of others. A library is not just an accumulation of knowledge. It is the symbol of humankind's yearning for knowledge, the repository of what we have learned and how we have argued with each other in the learning. A library represents the very best we have to offer each other -- what we can understand from the pain of the past, the turmoil of the present and the uncertainty of the future, all collected in one place so that we might advance, one small step at a time, in our shared journey.
Comments
I definitely agree with you on the subject of the book burning. It makes me angrier than most other crimes I read about -- perhaps because of its novelty (no pun intended), but also for the reasons you describe so well.
As for the flash drive or other electronic solutions, there are, among other things, copyright problems. If you have a touch of the insomnia some time, you might be interested in a law review article I wrote about a decade ago entitled, "Fixation on Fixation: Why Imposing Old Copyright Law on New Technology Will Not Work."
http://www.law.indiana.edu/ilj/volumes/v71/no4/masson.html
And remember the copyright problems faced by Napster. Do you think the debate might be a little different this time, with Google buying YouTube in a $1 billion deal? As you point out in your article, one main problem is that protecting intellectual property rights will be increasingly difficult as the physical component of the created works becomes less important. I wonder if the artists themselves will provide part of the solution as they figure out all the ways THEY can use this new technology. Musicians seem to be on the leading edge here. Garage bands that at one time sweated out a record deal for a few years before giving up are now putting their music, even live performances, online and building a fan base in ways they never could before.