It is just as important to preserve digital books as paper books, especially given the rising popularity of digital books and the fact that many local and diverse voices are not published in print at all.
Today, most digital books can only be licensed, meaning there is effectively only one copy of a digital book and it can be edited or deleted at any time with zero transparency. In this scenario, profit-motivated big publishing shareholders for companies like Newscorp, Amazon, and Disney are in control of whether a book is censored or not.
But big publishers wouldn’t walk into a library and steal books off the shelves, and they also wouldn’t hack into a library’s computers and delete books. This is why it’s important that libraries actually own digital books, so that thousands of librarians all over are independently preserving the files of important books. This kind of decentralized curation makes books more resilient to censorship, keeping them available to the public and unaltered.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/Ns9KbAh
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.