digitizers in Ludovico 2013
rtant not to forget that traditional libraries (public and private)
still guarantee the preservation of and access to a huge number of digitally-
unavailable texts, and that a book's material condition sometimes tells part
of the story, not to mention the experience of reading it in a library. Still,
it is evident that we are facing the biggest digitization ever attempted, in a
process comparable to what Napster meant for music in the early 2000s. But
this time there are many more "institutional" efforts running simultaneously,
so that we are constantly hearing announcements that new historical material
has been made accessible online by libraries and institutions of all sizes.
The biggest digitizers are Google Books (private) and Internet Archive (non-
profit). The former is officially aiming to create a privately owned,
"universal library", which in April 2013 claimed to contain 30 millions
digitized books.1 The latter is an effort to make a comparably huge public
library by using Creative Commons licenses and getting rid of Digital Rights
Management chains, and currently claims to hold almost 5 millions digitized
books.
These monumental efforts are struggling with one specific element: the time it
takes to create digital content by converting it from another medium. This
process, of course, creates accidents. Krissy Wilson's blog/artwork _The Art
of Google Books_2 explores daily the
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