Kelly’s comments parallel the static print libary of Borges and the flowing, connected library of Rushdie:

(Kelly) The common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Metadata as the real magic (cross-linked … extracted … indexed … analyzed …) — Mike Cane should like this! :

(Kelly) Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Clive Thompson says the community of digital book readers will transform books by building a web of linked commentaries. Kelly says much the same:

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. … Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Peter Brantley imagines a world in which digital books become connected as long winding rivers that flow together. Here’s Kelly sounding similar:  …

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. … This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together.

Rushdie describes the countless currents in the Stream of Stories “weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry” — Likewise Kelly:

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. … In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book. … So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? …

What Happens When Books Connect? – This is the title for one of the sections of Kelly’s article from which most of the quotes above are taken, and it is really an overriding theme for all of the them — The digitized books of the future will talk easily to each other, which will transform books in the same way the Web has already transformed other aspects of culture.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

All of this hidden information — exploded out, made explicit — turns an ebook from a dumb object into a smart object. … With such exploded data, an eBook becomes a ticket for admission to a vast collection of databased information.

An eBook becomes a local terminal connected to a growing and living cloud of associated information, with meanings and implications no publisher or writer can currently imagine. It lets the reader make those connections. It’s an eBook that can do something. … And this is precisely why Google wants the Book Search settlement to go through: it sees that as the future. Google is staffed by geeks who juggle information with an expertise that print publishers lack. … Google makes information do things.

Print publishing freezes information into a static object — An object that stands alone, disconnected, unable to do anything. … There needs to be another layer slathered over [the Publisher]. The information geeks. The ones who will take the static objects, extract the hidden information, and database it. … They are new publishers for a new age.

This metadata has value. And that value will increase as it ages. As new connections are formed, and new data is added, its value increases exponentially. The metadata value of a publisher could equal, if not surpass, that of the works on which it’s based.

Metadata will become a multi-billion dollar business. … The entire global economy is built on metadata. And it’s accessing that metadata that would justify more than a five-dollar price for an eBook. Consumers would see [that] an investment has been made to turn a text data dump into something active and intelligent. … no longer a flat, linear collection of words. Dimensions have been added that breathe and grow. The eBook price becomes a ticket. People are … buying into an ongoing experience.

Metadata Librarians will Rule the World …

Metadata, of course, is a concept that’s near-and-dear to the hearts of librarians … Which led to a bit of serendipity in thinking about the title of this article. I found in Google that no one else has used the phrase “Metadata will Rule the World.” But in playing around with various combinations I did discover the phrase “Librarians will one day rule the world” — in a 2004 blog post by Robert Wolfe (@metametadata), who works in Metadata services at the MIT library.

Of course, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use the picture here of Wolfe’s Librarian Trading Card — “That’s right, I’ve got special metadata related powers.” (How do you like that, Mike Cane!)

The last posting on the Metametametadata blog is August, 2006 — Too bad — Robert Wolfe has interesting ideas.

Cane: Metadata turns an eBook into an active, growing, living cloud …

Cane’s contrasting of living eBooks with print publishing’s static books is reminiscent of the language used in the articles I wrote in May on the Stream as the new metaphor of the Web, particularly the article on Salman Rushdie’s Stream library & JL Borges’ Print library — Rushdie’s vision of books twisting and stretching and weaving in and out of each other sounds much like Cane’s vision in the quote above.

Eric Rumsey is @ericrumsey

In Borges’ library, as in the traditional print library, the books sit on the shelf, with no suggestion of their being connected to each other, no sense of movement. Rushdie, on the other hand, imagines a library in which the books flow in a stream — twisting and stretching and weaving in and out of each other. As I’ve discussed in the previous article, Rushdie’s vision resonates with recent discussions of the growing sense of the Web’s Stream-like, flowing nature and also with the coming revolution in libraries, as books are digitized, remaking them into Rushdie’s “fluid form.” The excerpts below give a sense of the different visions of the Library of Rushdie and Borges.

From Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of stories:

[The Ocean of the Stream of Stories is] “made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” Rushdie imagines this Ocean as “the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.” [See previous article for complete passage and for picture credit.]

From Borges’ The Library of Babel:

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. … There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.” [The picture accompanies the Web version of story, and is not credited; it appears on numerous other sites.]

Related articles:

• Did Salman Rushdie envision the Web in 1990? – Rushdie’s word-picture of the Ocean of the Stream of Stories.
• Digital books: Narratives in long winding streams, Peter Brantley, 2009
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• The Stream of Streams has arrived, Nova Spivack

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Salman Rushdie, describing the Ocean of the Stream of Stories:

It was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity … it was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Nova Spivack suggests that the new metaphor for the Web will be the Stream:

Something new is emerging … I call it the Stream … The Web has always been a stream of streams. … with the advent of blogs, feeds, and microblogs, the streamlike nature of the Web is becoming more readily visible.

Peter Brantley, writing on Google Book Search, says:

We stride into a world where books are narratives in long winding rivers; drops of thought misting from the sundering thrust of great waterfalls; and seas from which all rivers and rain coalesce, and which carry our sails to continents not yet imagined.

What an interesting story the Web itself is! — The Stream imagined by Rushdie 19 years ago looks like it might finally be flowing together with Spivack’s Stream and Brantley’s long winding river.

Related article:

• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. … The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness. … Perhaps the best example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter and other microblogging systems including the new Facebook. These services are visibly streamlike — they are literally streams of thinking and conversation.

The Web has always been a stream. In fact it has been a stream of streams. … with the advent of blogs, feeds, and microblogs, the streamlike nature of the Web is becoming more readily visible.

The Web is changing faster than ever, and as this happens, it’s becoming more fluid. Sites no longer change in weeks or days, but hours, minutes or even seconds. if we are offline even for a few minutes we may risk falling behind, or even missing something absolutely critical. The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our “now” is getting shorter.

The era of the Web was mostly about the past — pages that were published months, weeks, days or at least hours before we looked for them. … But in the era of the Stream, everything is shifting to the present — we can see new posts as they appear and conversations emerge around them, live, while we watch. … The unit of change is getting more granular. … Our attention is mainly focused on right now: the last few minutes or hours. Anything that was posted before this period of time is “out of sight, out of mind.”

The Web has always been a stream — it has been happening in real-time since it started, but it was slower … Things have also changed qualitatively in recent months. The streamlike aspects of the Web have really moved into the foreground of our mainstream cultural conversation. … And suddenly we’re all finding ourselves glued to various activity streams, microblogging manically … to catch fleeting references to things … as they rapidly flow by and out of view. The Stream has arrived.

Spivack’s vision of the future Web as a Stream resonates with other commentaries, as I’ve discussed in related articles:

• Did Salman Rushdie envision the Web in 1990? – Rushdie’s word-picture of the Ocean of the Stream of Stories.
• Digital books: Narratives in long winding streams, Peter Brantley, 2009
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Haroun looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Pow! Isn’t this a strikingly clear metaphorical description of the Web Stream that we all swim in every day? My first idea of a title for this article was “Did Salman Rushdie predict the Web?” I decided that was a bit too presumptuous  — But not by much — The passage does indeed verge on prediction. It was written in 1990 — Interestingly, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee “invented” the Web. It’s tempting to imagine the left-brained engineer (Berners-Lee) and the right-brained artist-seer (Rushdie) both envisioning the future Web in their own ways — Berners-Lee in outlining his Web ideas at CERN, and Rushdie in writing Haroun.

How has this passage and its Webishness gone unnoticed for so many years? Haroun is a story on many levels — Rushdie wrote it for his young son, and it’s often put in the category of “childrens’ literature.” I suspect this is the main reason it hasn’t been read often enough by grown-up Web users for someone to have seen Rushdie’s Stream of the Web metaphor. (Note that Haroun is on a prominent list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time)

How about the library connections in the passage? As a librarian, it certainly occurs to me that it could be viewed as being especially about libraries, maybe even seen as a threat to the traditional print library (”storeroom of yarns”). But I think, to the contrary, that Rushdie’s passage does the library world a great service, ushering us into the “liquid tapestry” of the digital Ocean, in which the Stream of “the library” will be able to “weave in and out” with the “thousand thousand and one different currents” outside of the traditional library world. Recent discussions of Google Book Search and orphan books show that the world is eagerly anticipating the stories in libraries being put into “fluid form.” And, in fact, library leader Peter Brantley, in commentary on GBS written in January 2009, talking about the coming age of digital books, uses language reminiscent of Rushdie: “We stride into a world where books are narratives in long winding rivers … and seas from which all rivers and rain coalesce.”

Speaking of the library world — As mentioned, there has been a notable lack of anyone else seeing a connection between the Rushdie passage and the Web. But the closest I’ve seen is in a paper co-authored by an engineer (JH Lienhard) and two librarians (JE Myers, TC Wilson), that was written in 1992, Surfing the Sea of Stories: Riding the Information Revolution (Mechanical Engineering 1992 Oct; 114(10): 60-65). This does an excellent job of connecting the Rushdie passage to the coming digital revolution, as it was seen in 1992, and contains the perceptively-done graphic in this article (above). But of course the full-blown Web was not born until 1995, so this view is limited. (The paper is summarized in the transcript of a radio program about it.)

Nudges for writing about this in the last week: First, In his blog article, Is The Stream What Comes After the Web?, Nova Spivack suggests that the metaphor of The Stream may soon replace The Web. The article doesn’t mention Rushdie, but it has elicited much discussion on Twitter, and someone would surely make the connection soon. Spivack does mention Twitter, saying that it and other microblogging systems are “the best example of the Stream,” which is related to the other nudge I’ve gotten, a blog article by Joff Redfern, Twitter is becoming the Ocean of the Stream of Stories. This is short , consisting mainly of the Rushdie quote above, but with its title it would likely be connected to Spivack’s Stream and Rushdie’s Streams of Stories sooner or later. Taken together, I think the articles by Spivack and Redfern indicate that Twitter is bringing to peoples’ minds the “stream-like” nature of the Web — The way big streams (e.g. swine flu 2 weeks ago) weave in and out with the day-to-day small streams of peoples’ lives on the Twitter ocean, with the stories constantly rewriting themselves.

Related articles:

• The Stream of Streams has arrived, 2009 – Nova Spivack says that the new metaphor of the Web is the Stream
• Digital books: Narratives in long winding streams, Peter Brantley, 2009
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

With recent back and forth over the proposed Google Book Search settlement (e.g., Robert Darnton’s essay in The New York Review of Books; Tim O’Reilly’s response; and James Grimmelman’s litany of proposed corrections predating both at The Labortorium), I’ve been cast again into thinking about aspects of the agreement.

It is difficult to credit that frustrating access is ever able to delay or stem fundamental social trends – for example, the increasing importance of visual and interactive media. … Or the possibility that searching and reading networked books for anyone under the age of 40 might be an inherently social activity that generally increases enthusiasm for all forms of reading.

Let us consider a far more basic, more fundamental concern: the proposed Google Book Search settlement is embedded in a set of conceptions about books, reading, and information access which is as profoundly obsolescent as the printed Encyclopedia.

This is a world where young children carry around in the palm of their hands gaming consoles that have more networked computing capacity than a moderately powerful Sun workstation of five years back. Where increasingly I think about printed books with as much fondness as large cinder blocks, …  And yet authors and publishers worry that a fair level of access to digitized books … might reduce their profits. Truly, this should not be their worry. Their eyes remain cast on a horizon which has fallen from the earth, while a new sun is rising.

The settlement describes a world of time past, not a world of possibilities. Can we not imagine a redrafting of the settlement’s terms with libraries? … let us envision an alternative world where children routinely carry Alexandria in their hands. Where they experience works of literature as games, pushing at the borders of their knowledge and experience by engaging the library with others as a festschrift.

The people served by our libraries – let them show us how to re-make literature in a world where it fits in the circle of many hands, caressed by fingers, shared between minds. Libraries are laboratories for the future of reading, and with this, we have the key to it. … We stride into a world where books are narratives in long winding rivers; drops of thought misting from the sundering thrust of great waterfalls; and seas from which all rivers and rain coalesce, and which carry our sails to continents not yet imagined.

[concluding paragraph] Digital books are sparkles of magic untapped. The settlement proposes a bold path from darkness. But it is a trail that circles back to an old forest, abandoned. Our people have left, ventured onto a flat savannah, strewn with rocks, thorny shrubs, windblown trees, beasts. We can see it all now. And we are starting fires, with wood from fallen trees. Burning down the forest.

Related articles:

• Did Salman Rushdie envision the Web in 1990? – Rushdie’s word-picture of the Ocean of the Stream of Stories.
• The Stream of Streams has arrived, – Nova Spivack says that the new metaphor of the Web is the Stream
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey