The Kindle and the End of the End of History

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.

"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.

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)

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.