With the holiday season gearing up, it it always nostalgic fun to look back upon Christmas' past. For this blogging assignment, I have been asked to pick six books from the 1913-1914 Eaton's Christmas Catalog and attempt to located them in their entirety on the Internet. I have selected relatively well known books in order to display just how accessible valuable cultural knowledge (in this case classic literature) is in today's world. The first thing that struck me when beginning this assignment was the attempts made by the Internet Archive to make their digital online version of that catalog as lifelike as possible. This includes the outline of a book cover behind the pages and also the pages physically turn resembling real life interaction between the reader and the book. While I have read many online articles and even some major portions of books, I have never come across such a real life digitization effort. Another excellent quality to this digitized catalog is that the text has been marked up to allow it to be searchable. This is extremely efficient as it removes the need for a physical index to be consulted for a desired search. For the future of e-books, this is certainly a promising development as many people have a difficulty reading text from an non-interactive screen. By adding real life physical movement and employing marked up text, the reader now can interact directly with the book rather than having to passively navigate the screen. The Internet Archive's attempt to bridge this disconnect is a positive movement in the integration of e-books into a generally acceptable form of print media. However, as I begin to search for my books, I notice the trend backwards into static text displayed in a screen in a lifeless manner. Despite this format constraint the real object of this exercise is to hunt for content, of which there is an abundant supply on the Internet.
The first book I have chosen is the bible, perhaps the most widespread book in all of human history. This is also the first page of book listings and I felt should not be neglected from my search. The edition that I was trying to find was simply entitled The New Testament. I was able to locate this version fairly easily by using a simple google search. The website I found can be located here and is a fairly good website. It has the text organized by book and chapter for easy navigation however the text is not searchable. The second book I wanted to search for was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, an extremely important book in the emancipation movement in the mid 19th Century United States. The third book I wanted to find was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, a literary classic. Again, I was able to find the full text for both of these books by simply entering the title in a regular google search. However, the site which I found the texts for both books can be accessed here(Uncle Tom's Cabin and Robinson Crusoe) has marked up text allowing the text to be searched. This has some excellent potential values as one need not flip endlessly flipping through pages to find character references or major plot themes resulting in more efficient searching and opening up new modes of analysis. This is an instance of an historic book being given added value through the digitization process. The fourth book I wanted to search was another classic, Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. Again, using a simple google search I was able to find the entire text online. The site that I found can be accessed here and also contains marked up text, however in an entirely different format than Uncle Tom's Cabin and Robinson Crusoe. To my surprise the markup on this site did not allow the text to be searched but instead linked words to advertisements. The words could be completely taken out of context such as " 'the blank' of my infancy", with 'the blank' linking to a site describing how to fix computer blanking errors (something that Dickens would have thought endlessly about while writing the novel). To add to this confusion, once a 'link' was clicked, it would disappear as a link and then most of the words around the original link would then become their own links. This allows the text to serve as a constantly updating advertisement stream. David Copperfield illuminates the difficulty in offering an open source novel while simultaneously generating profits for the sight. In this extreme example of the uses of markup, it is clear that digitizing text can be distracting not only in format but also in content as well (if manipulated properly).
The fifth book I decided to search for was Aesop's Fables. Due to the children oriented stories of Aesop I expected to find a site with much more interaction than just text as children often need more to hold their attention that mere text. However, I soon realized that using multimedia to enhance each and every fable would be extremely time consuming and difficult and thus tempered my expectations on finding such a vibrant source. Using a simple google search I was able to find a site which contain over 650's fables and also had lots of multimedia attachments. The website, which can be located here has a good amount of imagery as well as audio recordings of many of the stories. A nice addition on this site is the use of a translator which allows each fable to be translated into a plethora of languages. By having digitized text, this website is making the fable's accessible to many people beyond English speakers and have created a universal site. The sixth and final book I wanted to search was the classic Christmas story The Night Before Christmas ('tis the season!). Again, begin heavily geared towards children I was expecting a much more decorative and interactive online source for the full text. Also, since the Eaton's listing of the book was merely an illustrative addition to the original poem I would expect there to be some more interactive reproductions of the poem online. Unfortunately, I could not find a the site I had envisioned. Again, using a google search was more than sufficient to find the full text, which can be viewed here. I was disappointed to not find a really vibrant page that could bring the poem and the text to life. A big drawback for reading digital text is the lack of interaction between the reader and the screen (unlike the physical interaction one experiences when reading a book). I was very surprised to see such a famous poem lack any extra panache on the web where integrating multimedia aspects is becoming easier everyday.
Overall I have learned a few valuable lessons about finding complete texts online. The first being that you can find pretty much anything you want by using a simple google search. All I had to do to locate the books was to type in their title and voila, I had a link within the first ten options to the full text. Secondly, I learned that many classic works of literature have been compiled and marked up to allow more effective researching techniques than merely possessing the book. In particular the website http://www.online-literature.com/ has a tremendous database of marked up classic novels. Thirdly I learned that our expectations of what the Internet can provide us with sometimes needs to be moderated. I was expecting to find some very elaborate and exciting websites for the popular children's stories and poems I wanted to search, but could not locate them. With the vast potential of the Internet at our disposal, sometimes we can forget that it takes hundred of hours of manpower to create those wonderful sites and there just hasn't been enough time or motivation to make some of these potentials into realities. The case of e-books and digitization of text clearly illustrates this dilemma. There has been so much already accomplished by ambitious projects such as googlebooks and the Gutenberg Project, yet theses project have only scratched the surface of what can be accomplished. We must also remember that as well as being an educational tool, digitized text can be distorted and used in other ways not conducive to the learning or entertainment experience, as evidence by Dickens words being used as advertisement for shoddy online products and services. It is amazing what you can discover simply by going on a treasure hunt for old literature!
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