
The Kindle and the End of the End of History - pclark
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/the-kindle-and-the-end-of-the.html
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TetOn
But Google is specifically digitizing the entire holdings of well stocked
libraries, such as Harvard's. This activity directly argues against the thesis
of the article: if we assume for the moment that any and all rights issues are
resolved, then Bezos is quite right that every book currently available
_anywhere_ in _any_ form could indeed be downloadable in 60 seconds. Even
books represented by a single extant copy could become widely available,
potentially for the first time in centuries, in their "new" digital form. This
is the exact opposite of any "recency" bias.

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tokenadult
"To cut to the chase, if you read old books you get a sense for how thin the
searchable veneer of the web is on our world. The web's view of our world is
temporally compressed, biased toward the recent, and even when it does look
back through time to events memorable enough to have been digitally
remembered, it sees them through our digital-age lens. They are being
digitally remembered with our world view overlaid on top."

Good point. Another example of recency bias.

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ajju
Quite to the contrary, after recently becoming interested in history, I have
found scans of rare first edition works on Archaeology on the web that no
library within 500 miles of me had.

The web cannot provide equal weight to old and new stuff alike. All media in
any age will have a recency bias. The web makes it much much easier for one to
access old books. The Kindle (and similar products) will make it easier (by
building central repositories and making it possible to monetize the resale of
very old books in one more way)

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Herring
Reminds me of that story about perl & love. The things that will last - things
that are really important - are those that have people working on them. It's
unavoidable so long as we're a civilization of humans.

