George Needham, one of the contributors to the blog It’s All Good, offers a parody of Michael Gorman’s Revenge of the Blog people story. It’s in the form of an interview with Abbbot Michael upon his return from a visit with that upstart, Johannes Gutenberg.
This upstart Gutenberg claims he has created a device to allow ink to be directly applied to paper, without the intervention of a scribe! He has adopted a wine press, of all things, and places tiny pieces of wood on the face of the press, slathers ink all over the wood, and then presses the letters to the paper. He claims he can turn out dozens of pages a day this way.
Shocked
I am shocked. That blogger was able to put a row of words together in a coherent sentence.
Excellent, excellent parody!
links
In case you’re late joining us, here’s some links
http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=art iclePrint&articleID=CA502009
http://www.lisnews.com/articles/05/02/27/1325209.s html1 52284 72565 02055 3237
http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/27/08
http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/26/11
http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/25/09
http://www.lisnews.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/24/20
And interestingly enough, I’d side (partially) with Mr. Gorman. His slams against bloggers aside, his piece wasn’t that far off. People should be free to speak their mind, and I do have some issues with attempting to rely on Google as the best method of organizing data/information. Unknown, proprietary algorithms, and no knowledge of what things don’t show up in a search, or even are just subtly ranked below the top ten hits, are very scary thoughts, when you start thinking in terms of social control.
I’m not sure he’s particularly against digitization (although the claim that money spent digitizing would be better spent on the poor, or on ‘real’ libraries, might be a counter-argument to that).
He believes that books should be read, and if he’s willing to concede that people can read from the screen, then he should be quite happy that books shall be digitized, even if some people won’t read them (and instead google them for tidbits). Those people probably weren’t reading them before, but now those books are available to all who can get online and download them – even if they live in a place without a library (say, the middle of Montana).
I’d still like to read the original LA Times article….
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
Parody?
<satire>
I don’t see where the blogger says it’s a parody. We ought to be asking him to scan in the original transcript of this interview. I’m going to have a real problem if he turns around now and says he was being satirical. I expect better from someone who works at OCLC.
We need clear labels on all parody, satire, sarcasm, burlesque, etc. And next thing you know, Dan Brown will be claiming that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction!
</satire>
print.google.com
And if google’s solution is anything like print.google.com is showing right now, where you can’t navigate a book: You can’t select a chapter, you can’t move page-by-page, you can only search for text which may or may not be within the book, then that’s a *major* problem, and I concur whole-heartedly with Gorman, that it’s no longer reading, it’s just hunting for tidbits. Which is no way to put information into context.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL