Digital Revolution

Digital library is a promising and yet somewhat neglected initiative. Most approaches today copy what physical libraries do for free or for some subscription fee. The process is borrowing and returning books from a pool of publications. But many people still don't buy it. Perhaps the subscription model is problematic, in that it doesn't allow a subscription for unlimited downloads. Apple Music, News+, TV+, etc. all offer unlimited access rather than borrowing and returning. If the pool of publications is large and attractive enough, digital library might succeed following the lead of these apps. There are actually some clues for the success of a well-designed digital library. It's the electronic access offered by university libraries. Faculty and students regularly download electronic resources from university libraries in unlimited fashion. It's appealing and users love it. Although the selection of publications might differ for academic and mass audiences, the subscr...

Ebooks failed. Critics of ebook cite various reasons, including prices and the love for paper books, to explain why ebooks failed. While there is truth in these critiques, one can not but ask why ebooks failed to take off while research papers in electronic form became dominant. Although there is more to research publications that the digital revolution should promise, the raw digitization of papers already shows great advantage against printed papers. Digital copies are vastly easier to distribute, organize, and index. Web sites like arXiv are extremely popular for people to find papers. One reason is that ebooks are often technologically backward compared with the layout of printed content. Although Apple managed to revolutionize the ergonomics of reading through the iPad, the aesthetics didn't extend to Apple Books. It's worth noting that many beautiful interactive ebooks are published as apps, rather than ebooks, which demonstrates the versatility of the tablet platform...

Research publications are dominated by the paper model with deep roots in print. Although most publications are available online, the format is still raw digitization of print material. It's almost as if even the most innovative academics reject the idea that digital revolution could bring positive changes to research quality. Take science publications for example. During active research, researchers often employ large data sets for study. At the end of the process, only tiny bits of selected statistics appear in published paper. Since data generally can not be reduced to statistics due to Shannon entropy, the conclusion based on statistics may be dubious. One hears lies, damn lies, and statistics not for trivial reasons. Often, there is no way for a reader to verify a published paper without original data. Yet, academics cling to the traditional paper model. Digital technology should be employed to improve verifiability of research publications! Programs and data may be bundled to...

Digital revolution has transformed many fields. Publishing, TV, even finance all experienced the power and benefits of widespread and deep integration of digital technology. However, there is a area most suitable for digitization and yet successfully resisted it for decades. That's our library. Many technologies tried to transform libraries. The web was designed to freely exchange knowledge, and web sites like arXiv successfully delivered, for papers. But, the main form of preservation of our knowledge is still books. For a number of reasons, the web only succeeded in mass selling print books. The claim made by Turing Award winner Tim Berners-Lee that the web succeeds as a public library remains void. Tablets made another step forward regarding the ergonomics of reading, and yet print still lives very well. A useful example is the presentation of technical documents. Knuth was appalled that distributors sold The Art of Computer Programming in ePub with poor typesetting. The soluti...