‘Insta-Book Freedom’: Digitization and the Persistence of the Page

Abstract

Large-scale digitization projects seem to free information from the prison of paper, from the tragic and old-fashioned constraints of the material. But that is a fantasy—how digital utopians wish the world was, not a description of the world as it actually is. Using the Internet Archive as a case study, this paper argues that the physical page and material book persist, with crucial effects, in digital repositories. As this paper shows, this persistence takes two forms, the first generalizable to many digitization projects and the second more peculiar to the ideological and practical underpinnings of the Archive.

First, a digitized book does not offer mere or immaterial ideas. Instead, the act of digitization makes visible and widely accessible the particular history of a particular copy of a book. Opening a book digitized in a repository like the Internet Archive, a viewer sees not disembodied thought but high resolution images of pulped wood and imprinted ink. (Or, in other modes, text pulled from those images, bearing artifacts of their form and layout.) And these images are created by physical machines and human labor. This is obvious, in some ways, but too often ignored even though it is absolutely vital to the whole project of digitization. As a close reading of a digitized book demonstrates in this paper, that project is a process which does not move in a straight line from material to digital but, rather, mediates a complex, recursive relationship between them.

Second, books that are digitized don’t always stay digital. Indeed, the Internet Archive’s program began with the express purpose of taking paper books, digitizing them, and then taking that digital information and, in Archive founder Brewster Kahle’s words, “turn[ing] it back into paper.” Perhaps surprisingly, the main tool used by Kahle and his collaborators to achieve this goal was an icon of old media infrastructures: a bookmobile. In the early 2000s, the Internet Archive Bookmobile traveled across the country (and, in a later iteration, to Uganda), teaching people how to print books from the Archive’s digitized collection on demand. This was somewhat peculiar to the Internet Archive’s founders and staff. But it illustrates the larger fact that, even into the twenty-first century, some of the most feverishly utopian Silicon Valleyites imagined unions of paper and flesh, as much as bits and bytes, when they dreamed of encounters between books and readers.

By focusing on digitization and digital repositories, this paper offers a materialist perspective on key tools and methods in the digital humanities. And, more broadly, by offering examinations of both the processes and ideologies of digitization, it illuminates an important imbrication of the digital and the material in the twenty-first century.