Michael Gorman

Michael Gorman's Revenge of the Blog People! article caused a bit of a stir among librarian bloggers. It seems that he is angry with bloggers in general because a few took issue with what he wrote in a LA Times piece complaining about the Google Print initiative. It is interesting that the president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA) is stirring up so much controversy.

Mr. Gorman defines a blog as an "electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web". I wonder if he views web sites to be in the same category. Just as there are a wide spectrum of different kinds of web pages, there is a large variety of blogs. To brand all blogs as being the work of the unpublishable is wrong.

In the LA Times piece suggests that there is little value to digitizing large amounts of works because people will never take the time to read an entire book at a computer. There is some validity to this argument. But I believe in the next ten to twenty years there will be very large breakthroughs in the field of computer displays. Eventually it will be possible to read things on a computer as conveniently as reading them on paper. Starting the process of digitizing books is an experiment that will pay off eventually. E-Books have their drawbacks now but they will only improve with time. The experiments of today pave the way for the future.