robertdarnton Robert C. Darnton, the new director of the Harvard University Library, isn’t just talking about the importance of digitization for the library world. He’s actually writing an e-book and will welcome customization of it by others.

As reported by the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, Darnton "studies the history of books and taught at Princeton before coming to Harvard this year." He sees libraries not as “warehouses of printed paper,” but as “dynamic cultural centers.”

Book-smuggling: Darnton’s e-book topic

So what’s the e-book Darnton intends to write? From the Crimson:

"Inspired by an archive in an old Swiss town in which he found—and spent 14 summers reading—50,000 unpublished letters, Darnton said he plans to write about book smuggling across the French border during the 18th century.

"The book will be published in electronic form along with monographs and digitized manuscripts so that the reader can create a personal version of the text.

“’You can log on and follow things in very great detail depending on how seriously you’re interested,’ Darnton said.

"Darnton said the book could have several ‘levels’ in which readers could click on additional items according to their degree of interest and have the opportunity to translate excerpts of correspondence and read source material in the original French."

At the same time, in a speech titled “Old Books and E-Books,” Darnton pledged to "continue to strengthen Harvard’s fabulous collections in old printed material…."

Related: Library Journal article on Darnton.

And speaking of E and academia: Yale Library and Microsoft partner on ambitious digital project (press release, via LISNews).

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9 COMMENTS

  4. I agree that “writing an e-book” does sound a bit strange and that an ebook is still a book. But, as David points out, there are some additional things you can do with an ebook. With an ebook, you have some amount of interactivity and flexibility of presentation that you don’t have with a book. Not better, just different.

  5. Well put, Joseph. For fiction and even some nonfiction, I love old-fashioned, linear books that could be E or P. Books to lose myself in! But I’m also exited about the promise of interactivity and the rest, especially for textbooks or trade how-tos or certain kinds of histories. All are books. I totally agree with Bill Janssen that Wikipedia is a book. It is simply–as you undoubtedly would describe it–different from a paper encyclopedia. Thanks. David

  6. Ah, yes, thanks for educating me. I recall when CD-ROMs were new, a company came out with enhanced CD-ROM versions of several books for the Mac (because it had QuickTime). One was Jurassic Park and I was very impressed with the added features — like charts showing the relative sizes of the creatures compared to human beings!

    But that’s why I did cringe over “e-book” vs book — will his e-/book have the enhanced features that an e(hanced)-book can have?

  7. For most non-fiction books this format sounds like a wonderful idea – you could read the main part of the text if you want a quck overview of the topic, or delve deeper into the areas that are of real interest. I wrote a piece some time ago about the horrors of footnotes in academic books – let’s get rid of the wretched things and have additional material available in a link or pop-up screen instead of those ghastly 2 micron high bits of gibberish printed at the bottom of pages.
    Perhaps this could also create a revival of illustrations for novels (having just re-visited George & Weedon Grosssmith’s “Diary of a Nobody).

  8. Carol,

    I couldn’t agree with you more. Footnotes are just one of the many things that could be presented better in an ebook than on paper. Footnotes and endnotes just don’t fit well into the linear structure imposed by printed books. We’ve been suffering with this for centuries.

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