From The Independent
Inky ghosts at the United Nation's hi-tech book feast
Sometimes actions really can speak louder than words. If you simply listened to the addresses, the debates and the workshops in the Villa Reale at Monza, outside Milan, during Unesco's global congress on "the book tomorrow" last week, the future of reading would have sounded too close to call. Optimists and pessimists, utopians and doomsayers, champions of the latest digital devices and devotees of old-fashioned print-on-paper: leadership of the argument swung back and forth like a closely contested Italian Grand Prix at the F1 circuit just across the vast park that flanks this 18th-century Habsburg summer palace....
This grasp of the breakneck pace of change softened the rhetorical tone. Frankly, I expected more Google- and Amazon-bashing, above all from the European public-sector notables. In spite of a few routine digs, we heard relatively little. Those almighty corporations look less than invincible to well-informed insiders these days, with Google's mass digitisation project now stalled in the US courts.
Geoffrey Nunberg, professor in the School of Information at Berkeley, California, and previously a leading Silicon Valley research scientist, even had sympathy to spare for Google and the flaws of its digital library. For Nunberg, Google has fallen into all the early blunderer's mistakes. More circumspect virtual librarians will learn from them: "You don't have any clear idea about how to do something right until you see it done wrong." The gaffe-prone metadata which Google uses to classify material counts as a total "trainwreck", with (according to the company's own scientists) a 28 per cent rate of error. "You see a manual for internet browsers attributed to Sigmund Freud," noted Nunberg; or, perhaps, 265 works ascribed to Umberto Eco prior to 1944 - when the Milan-domiciled polymath turned 12....