Let's hear it for for Carnegie Mellon University whose Million Book Project, an effort to digitize every book in print, hit 1.5 million titles yesterday.
The so-called Universal Digital Library project, launched in 2002, set out to digitize nothing less than all of humanity's published works. In 1000 years, the plan is, there will be a complete record of all books from the Gutenberg Bible to today's latest romance novel by Danielle Steel.
I'm inexplicably moved by this project, particularly at a moment in time when the future of book reading is under intense scrutiny. I recently commented on the disappearance of reading among teenagers on my group blog, Mid-Century Modern Moms. As new media options roar forward, is reading for pleasure truly at risk?
Two important stories last week:
- New York Times story on NEA's report on the plunge in test scores attributed to less reading for pleasure
- Launch of Amazon's Kindle, a handheld device that will allow downloads of up to 90,000 book titles, blogs, newspapers and periodicals.
Will Kindle encourage serious reading . . . or just be another portable device for enabling us to read more short, redacted, trivial and ultimately disposable writing. Will it be an entertainment device? An information device? Does Kindle have the potential to save the novel?
It all has me thinking about Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Farenheit 451? Did you at least see the film? It depicts a time in the future when civil society is ruled by a totalitarian regime and all printed materials are banned. (Farenheit 451 is the temperature at which a book catches fire.) In an effort to save the written word, an underground of book lovers memorize important literary and non-fiction books to keep learning alive. Importantly, Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of facts.
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