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1979 (revised 1983 July)
.cb TOWARDS A NATIONALLY AVAILABLE COMPLETE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY


	For some time it has been cost-effective to put the entire Library
of Congress into a computer file and make all its resources available
to anyone in the country with a computer terminal.
There is no need to argue that all printed paper will be abolished, but
I would certainly get rid of ninety percent of my books and magazines
if I could access it from my terminal at home.

	A recent proposal to a Stanford University research group offered
a 1.2 gigabyte storage module for α$24,000.  If we count a book as 500,000
bytes, then this module can store 2400 books.  The space occupied by
the module would store about 300 books on shelves.  The cost comes
to α$10 per book.  Recent work information compression would give
another factor of four in storage density, reducing the cost to α$2.50
per book and reducing the storage volume to one twenty-fourth of
that required to store books on shelves.

	Books cost much more these days and so does the space required
to store them, although the cost of cataloging the books is apparently
larger than either.

	Still more recently IBM (3380) announced disk files storing 2.52 gigabytes
per unit which would store 20,000 compressed books in the space taken
by 300 on shelves.  The Library of Congress would then require between
1000 and 2000 such disk units.

	Digital videodisks storing much more are predicted for the
reasonably near future, but the project is practical with technology
now in hand.  I think it is time to begin.

	Consider the following system.  In addition to existing
paper libraries, there would exist one or more computerized libraries
containing everything that has ever been published, i.e. a computerized
version of the Library of Congress.  This library would be accessible
over the telephone network from any computer terminal in the country.
A reader could browse through the library catalog and various
bibliographies just as though he were physically present.  He could
read any book by calling it page by page onto his terminal's screen
or he could have it transmitted to a local printer.  At present,
the Canon company is beginning to market a printer that can print
arbitrary fonts for less than α$10,000, but we can envisage cheaper
printers in the future.

	Most office workers would have terminals on their desks,
and many people would have them at home.  At present a good enough
terminal costs about α$800, and high quality terminals should cost
about α$2,000 if manufactured in moderate quantity.  Any office
would have a high quality printer.

	Of course, yet better terminals may eventually be available.
We can imagine a pocket terminal consisting of a rolled up plastic
screen with a 1024 by 1024 array of liquid crystal dots accompanied
by another rolled up pressure sensitive keyboard and a pocket computer
with enough memory to store a book.  Suppose that it has a modular jack
that can plug into any telephone so that the user can call the
library, scan it for a while and then reload his book memory.
This would be nicer than the technology now available, but the
available technology is good enough to justify a start.

	From the user's point of view, the advantages of the
computerized library are the following:

	1. All books, magazines and newspapers are available.

	2. Anything can be obtained in a few seconds.

	3. Nothing is ever out.

	4. The library is open 24 hours a day 365.2425 days a year.

	Many paper libraries would be found unnecessary.  In particular,
university libraries could carry out their functions with much less
money and manpower, since their users would switch to the electronic
library for much of their work.

	The establishment of such a system involves many problems
and will take some years, but we will mention some facilities
that can and should be started right away.  Moreover, people who
don't have terminals at home now or on their desks or don't use
them at all may be difficult to convince of the advantages of
such a library.

	Here are some of the problems:

	#. It is expensive to convert the books to computer readable
form.  Equipment for reading special type fonts is available and
reliable.  The recent Kurzweil equipment reads arbitrary fonts with
training but is reported to rely to a substantial degree on a
blind person's ability to know when something was garbled and try
again and on his ability to understand imperfectly read material.
The lowest error rates are apparently those obtained by the
Information International Grafix I system.  This machine is very
expensive, mainly because it uses obsolete computer hardware, but
the company would update it if the market existed.  Even if much
of the material had to be retyped by hand, the project would be
worth what it would cost.

	Of course, much new material is generated in computer-readable
form, but many forms are used, and as yet no-one has developed a
system for putting all this material into a common form.

	#. The copyright law requires permission to put copyrighted
material into computer form.  In my opinion, copyrights should be
respected and suitable financial arrangements based on readership
should be negotiated.  Once a computerized library exists, it will
be so much more accessible than other libraries that authors and
publishers will find it to their advantage to negotiate suitable
deals.

	#. The best arrangement might be that the copyright owner
could set whatever price he pleased for reading his material.  The
reader could decide whether or not to pay it.

	#. There is a problem of unauthorized copying.  The problem
exists whether a national library exists or not, and the temptations
will increase as copying machines get more convenient and cheaper
and when a general purpose machine for reading documents from paper
to computer files becomes available.

	#. At present an author gets ten to twenty percent of the
retail price of his books, except that he gets nothing for unsold
books and less for mass market paperbacks.  An electronic
publishing system could afford to give the author eighty
percent of the price paid by the readers, because there would be
no physical production or distribution costs.  This would permit
increased income for authors and reduced prices for the readers.
Presumably there is some price elasticity for reading that would
produce more reading with reduced prices and greater convenience.
This would greatly reduce the temptation to copy illegally, since
the reader would find it less burdensome to pay the writer his due.

	#. I think it likely that the amount of illegal copying
would be low enough so that the system would survive.  If not we
will eventually have to go to a system where reading is essentially
free and writers are paid according to a formula by the Government.
This would have many disadvantages, since no formula could take
fully into account the fact that different writers have different
abilities and put different
amounts of work into books of different kinds.  Of course, the
present system doesn't take this into account very well either,
but there are some works now that charge very high prices, i.e.
newsletters.  I suppose these could still operate outside the
standard system.


Getting Started

	Already there exist numerous databases available by telephone
from anywhere in the country.  Some of them contain bibliographic
information, i.e. abstracts and references, but others contain the
texts of the material.  Some of them are subsidized by government
grants, e.g. many of the medical databases, and others, e.g. the
legal databases and the %2New York Times%1 Databank,
are profit making businesses.  The charges for using them range
from α$25 to α$200 per hour except for subsidized customers.

	One important step could be taken by the Federal Government.
It is required by the Freedom of Information Act and other laws to
make very large amounts of information available to the public.
This information would be much more conveniently available if it
were in a database accessible from anywhere in the country.  This
especially includes the Federal Register where all new laws,
regulations, announcements of hearings and requests for comments
are published.

Technical problems

	While it is easy to compute the costs of the storage media,
which are already cheaper than paper, it is harder to calculate the
costs of the computers.  This is because present systems have not
really been optimized for handling very large numbers of users.
It will also be necessary to optimize telephone access.  For this
there are many possibilities.

	A daytime cross-country call costs 54 cents for one minute.
In a minute 36,000 bytes can be transmitted at 4800 bits/second.
This means from α$7.50 to α$15.00 to transmit a book uncompressed
or from α$1.87 to α$3.75 with a compression of 4.  We can imagine
a terminal that could store a minute's worth of text and could
decompress it for reading.  These costs are unpleasantly high, but
they can be reduced in various ways.  First, technology permits
substantially lower long distance transmission costs.  Indeed the
one minute transcontinental charge late at night is 16 cents
making our compressed book cost from α$.56 to α$1.12 if transmitted
all at once.  This probably less than the cost of a trip to a
library if one's time is worth much.
The independent long distance telephone companies are often 40 percent
below ATα&T, which brings our optimistic number down to 33 cents,
which is reminiscent of the days when pocket books were a quarter.

	We can suppose that the terminal could remember the telephone
number and catalog number and automatically phone for another minute's
transmission when the reader is close to the end of what it has in
storage.  These costs are even less attractive when browsing is wanted.
A solution for that is to use the European telephone charging system
which allows calls as short as a 4 seconds.
Current networks keep the cost for maintaining a connection down by
time-sharing lines, but this doesn't reduce the cost of straight
data transmission.

	An obvious possible saving is to have local libraries with frequently
consulted books and magazines.  My guess is that with optical fibers
and other new means of transmission, the transmission costs can be
brought down to the point that local libraries will be unnecessary.