Afterlives

A time will come when this book falls apart. Too many pet book projects, too many students picking through, it doesn’t matter how carefully. But like many books, Celtic Myth & Legend, Poetry & Romance was turned into an audiobook, and later, into an e-book. One day the digital copies will vanish as well, but before then, the book will exist only in its un-native form.

A simple search on WorldCat revealed that audiobook is from 2003, published in Southfield, Michigan by Readings for the Blind. However, WorldCat also admits that none of the libraries in its database own a copy.

That leaves us with only the digital copy, which is held in the care of the HathiTrust Digital Library. No other digital copies exist in WorldCat’s database, not that I can find, anyway.

My Virtual Pet Book

I had a rather unique relationship with this particular digital copy. Partway through this pet book project, it became necessary for me to leave my pet book behind, and to work with the digital copy from home. In doing so, the differences between the physical copy and the digital copy became clear to me in a way that I believe they could not have otherwise.

Making the shift from physical copy to digital copy had a huge impact on my relationship with the book and with the text, which makes sense, given that almost all the changes I noticed connected in some way to the user interface.

The physical book is full of paratext. It has an index, footnotes, a glossary, and even a pronunciation guide. That tells me that the publishers wanted to make sure that the book was not only pleasant to read, but also easy to read.

The folks who digitized this manuscript seemed only concerned with recording the book. As a result, they don’t seem to have considered the user experience as a priority during the digitization process. The website supplies a general user interface, but there doesn’t seem to be any consideration for the needs of individual texts.

First Impressions

The website gives information on the size of the book, but the information is incomplete, which, I would argue, it should be. Knowing that a book is 90cm in height is basically meaningless. That information will never be able to replace the impression a book of that size would make. In one sense, the incomplete physical description is a barrier to researchers, but in other sense, the incomplete information is a clue to the casual viewer that, beyond telling you the general size of the book, the information is useless. Every first impression will have to do with the particularities of the digital medium.

Crippling Paratext

All that usability, all that paratext we see in the physical copy. No one recreated that for the digital version. The book isn’t a searchable pdf. It does have a slider to help you quickly slide to new pages, but the pages take so long to load that it’s basically useless. Even turning one page takes a few moments, which makes the book unpleasant to read in in its digital form. When I found a sentence split between two pages, I had to turn back and read the sentence over because it took so long to load that I forgot what I’d been reading.

If I found the physical book, lying around in a library, I might sit down and read for awhile, just because of how lovely it is. In fact, when I had the physical book, in special collections at Colby, I did just that. In its digital form, however, just reading the book is so frustrating, I don’t know if I would ever read a book in this kind of online format. I might pause a moment to admire the cover, and I might skip to the back, but I would’t read it. It becomes, in some ways, like an exhibit at a museum. I look through the digital library, and I pause to admire the exhibits, maybe flip through some pages, and then I set it back. When the books are stored in a digital format that is hard to navigate, frustrating to work with, and slow to load, the reader cannot help but conclude that the book isn’t meant to be read. It’s meant to be admired, only, and remembered. Why else would they make it so unpleasant to read.

The Librarians

I want to make myself very clear, here. I don’t want to throw the librarians under the bus. A lot of people work very hard to ensure that books are available digitally. If they didn’t, I would not have been able to complete this blog. In fact, the work they do is vital. Many of the books they digitize are in real danger of vanishing entirely. The act of preservation is an important one, and one often tackled, I think, with limited resources and limited technology. Certainly, with limited time.

As we move forward, however, as more an more e-books are published without physical counterparts, I think we need to be careful that digitized books do not become too dusty. On the one hand, we have a well organized searchable pdf, with internal links and methods for glossing a word without ever changing windows. On the other hand, we have a digitized book whose navigational aids are crippled by the difficult to navigate digital format. What use is the table of contents if you can’t easily flip to it? Likewise, the glossary, the index, and the pronunciation guide. I recognize that some technological limits are standing in the way of more useful, user-friendly digitization, but those technologies would be easy to create. We are at a moment in time where it would be easy to preserve our manuscripts in highly effective and user-friendly ways, if the librarians and workers had more access to resources.

Extraordinary Access

Obviously, the digital version of my pet book was frustrating at times, and left me in want of better software, and better design, but at the same time, isn’t it neat that I can access my pet book, remotely, from my house, and write almost an entire blog about without touching the book in person more than once or twice? That kind of access is a recent development. Obviously, we have a long way to go, but I can’t forget that we have already come a long, long way.

I will miss you, pet book.

Sam McGrath Holmquist