What if I want to write in the margins?

The NYT today draws attention to library collections' transition from paper to digital. The article mostly focuses on internet scholarship's potential to free up floor space, especially since many undergraduate libraries are duplicate collections of superior graduate facilities, unlike here at NYU where the behemoth Bobst serves all.

While the piece doesn't seem to be intended as a full feature on the topic, it should have at least raised some of the potential pitfalls that internet scholarship, in its present state, poses to scholarship in general. (There is a very interesting piece on this by David Bell in the May 2 New Republic.)

Of course, internet scholarship has tremendous potential to democratize learning, eliminating the cost of printing, shipping, and storing books and making the finest collections on the planet available to anyone with an internet connection. However, at the present, this seems to be confined to the university realm. Publishers, uncomfortable with a new medium as entrenched interests often are, are wary of publishing e-books, and the result is a very low selection of titles available online outside of the Academy.

Also, there is the actual physical process of reading from a computer. This isn't a concern based in the romantic notion of cracking open a dusty calf-bound volume, but from a simple fear that internet scholarship will make us all bad readers.

Most obviously, there is the potential for eyestrain, which would serve as a physical deterrent to prolonged reading. Some companies are experimenting with "electronic ink," screens that display text with microcapsules manipulated by an electronic field, rather than with the projection of an internal light source. Still, electronic reading devices released to date have been clumsy, expensive, and just not realistic enough.

Finally and most importantly, internet scholarship has the potential to reduce the overall quality of study, because it's just too easy to cheat. Instead of reading an entire book or chapter to get a feel for the author's style and the context of the book, eager researchers can simply search the text for the information they need based on certain words or phrases.

I'm not against the expansion of internet scholarship, but we shouldn't put the cart in front of the horse. Until hardware technology has caught up with internet technology and until we can be assured that e-books will be treated like any other, we should proceed with caution, with an ethos of quality over quantity.