Is downloading digital academic material on my computer a sort of ownership, I wondered? If so, then I have something to say in my blog. As I began to consider the implications further, I realized with dismay that I'm really only 'borrowing' book chapters and articles, which doesn't count as ownership at all, since I acquire these materials through the university library. There is no outlay of money. I bring no weighty tome home in a crinkly plastic bag. Unwrapping the plastic shrink-wrap is not part of the experience of reading these school texts and I never have to make room on my book shelf for class readings; I just save them to my USB. Sunk again. I really have nothing to say in my blog entry. How annoying!
Sitting silently at my computer for a while, my hands not touching the keys, I began to think about terminology. Is 'borrowing' the correct term for my class-related reading? When I download the text from the catalogue, no receipt is generated on which is stamped a due-date by which I must return the borrowed materials. While I sometimes dump the said readings in my computer trash, I certainly never give them back to the library. PDF copies of born-digital texts are like photocopies of printed books or journal articles: no library would accept stacks of photocopies if a patron tried to return them at the end of semester. Can you imagine? "Here, this stack came from Robarts and that stack came from the Inforum. Oh, and can I have a refund for the photocopying fees, please?" -- As if!
Mind, I generally like keeping the scholarly readings from the various classes I've taken. In fact, if I really like an e-book chapter assigned as required reading for some class, I will download more of the book if the publisher's website will permit. Some of the major academic publishing houses, especially the British ones, actually allow download of complete books. Believing that functionality coincides with legality, it became a habit of mine over the course of the last year to download complete books whenever possible. At the time, I didn't know that this was actually illegal. Just checking the small-print copyright policy on the said academic publishers' websites I now realize that they actually prohibit downloading more than a chapter of any book:
"Unless otherwise stated, users may make copies, printed or
otherwise, of one chapter or up to 5% of the pages from each title,
whichever is the greater."
For a minute I tried to argue in my favour: I do nothing more than 'use' these copyrighted materials! The library purchases digital texts from publishers by means of subscriptions or flat out purchase. When I go into the library to sit and read a book, I am only using that book. How is that different from downloading a digital book to read? What about Paul Duguid's argument, which we read way back at the beginning of the semester? Technology is liberation: information just wants to be free! Back in the 1970's, Barthes distinguished "between the 'work', servant of one master, and the 'text', an item of pleasure for many." [Duguid, "Material matters: the past and futurology of the book," 75] Isn't a PDF visualized momentarily on a computer screen the very epitome of evanescent text? But then there is physical proof on my computer that they are not. And then it hit me: electronic texts are material! This is exactly what Galey had argued in his study of e-books of Joanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists (2010): e-texts are material artifacts. [Galey, The Enkindling Reciter, passim]
I couldn't sit still then. I got up and paced around. Sat back down again. Materiality had come up in this week's reading as well, I thought. It was discussed in Yochai Benkler's introduction. Having only skimmed the piece previously, I read it through and realized that he was making much the same article as Duguid. Benkler's introduction was like a manifesto, in which he urged individuals to realize that the minority no longer controlled the material means of production, but that the material means of production of our current information age is found in networked computers, now more inexpensive than ever before and widely available around the globe. In his view, the internet revolution has endowed individuals with the power to shape our own lives, both singly and collectively. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, passim] Nowhere does Benkler mention the dark 'material' side of the internet revolution, e-waste. The controlled obsolescence of technology -- computers, phones, tablets and e-readers -- that creates mounds of technological garbage, which we don't see, because the crap is shipped overseas to countries willing to pollute their own soil, water and air to recycle such material in exchange for dumping fees.
We are still mired in materiality. Large conglomerates continue to control the means of production. Electronic texts are still physical and legal entities. And the only free books I see are Benkler's pseudo-economic treatise and those forlorn titles sitting in the box on the corner of Bloor & Brunswick leftover when the street bookseller packs up and goes home.
Best, Laura
No comments:
Post a Comment