[quote]The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar [a Chinese company] sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from.
A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it’s a cheap way for a library to increase its collection.
Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe’s e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books."
It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.[end quote]
Scan This Book! – New York Times. (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.) The rest of the article addresses other fascinating topics about the future of the book; it’s definitely worth a read.
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