A Thought on reading Battles' Library.

In his book, Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles tells us that monastery libraries (the only ones that existed in Christian Europe at the time) would have at most a few hundred books, and those would have included multiple copies of the bible and books by St. Augustine. Monks would be put to copying such books in part to allow copies to be loaned to others for study and copying, but also that the copyist would study the book he was copying.

By the early 18th century, libraries could be found in universities and available to secular scholars, and those libraries included many more books, including modern works as well as those of church elders and ancient Roman and Greek authors. Still, the number of books was tiny.

Today, Harvard University boasts the largest university book collection in the world with more than 14 million volumes, while the Library of Congress holds the largest general collection with more than 100 million volumes.

Google estimates that some 130 million books have been written and still exist, and that it has scanned some 13 million making them available to be scanned or read via the Internet.

In 1700 there was actually a debate as to whether then "modern" writers were comparable in worth to the classics. (We tend to think rather positively today about Shakespeare!) Today there is little doubt that among the more than a quarter of a million books published each year in the United States, there are some gems. Of course, one has to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, and one has to go through a lot of newly published books to find a really good one.

In the middle ages, a learned man might have read a few books, but would perhaps have studied a handful in great detail. I figure I have read a perhaps two or three thousand books in my life, but don't recall very much about any of them. On the other hand, I have looked up several things on the Internet even in the few minutes I have been drafting this post. I don't need to directly recall the detail of things I have read if I have technology to sufficiently augment my memory.

It is perhaps no wonder that the generation that has grown up linked to the World Wide Web through the Internet, connected by desk top, lap top, and hand held devices, multitasks. Kids scan a lot more information than we did, knowing that they can retrieve more detail rapidly if they should feel that need.

I recall how strange I found it when years ago I lived in developing nations, that people spent so much time talking about where to find shops and facilities, where to buy things. Of course, I was used to living in a society with telephone directories and want adds in which I could look up that kind of information, while those aids were not available in Latin America at the time. If you have to devote time to discovering information you might need in the future and committing that information to memory, you don't have time and mental energy to devote to other mental tasks.

On the other hand, kids trying to sample the huge flow of information from the Internet may also have to give up other ways of thinking, such as analysis and savoring of tidbits of information. One wonders what would be the ideal balance!

I would point out that the post deals so far with countries already deeply involved in the information society. It has been suggested that very few books are published per year in Arabic and that the portion of those books on religion is greater than the portion of English language books on religion. I recall being shocked years ago in Egypt by how little reading of books was required of university students in that country. There has been a lot of writing on the digital divide, but there is also a print divide between people who read different languages. Of course, there are thousands of languages, and many many languages have fewer books available than does Arabic. Unfortunately, the people speaking only these languages tend also to have less access to ICT; they do not easily find materials on the World Wide Web that they can read, nor do they have easy access to translation software that can make materials written in global languages available their minority language.