Digital Books

Harry Lewis was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.

Harry Lewis is the author of several influential computer science texts, including “Elements of the Theory of Computation,” with Christos Papadimitriou. His 2007 book about higher education, “Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?,” is a provocative challenge to institutions of higher learning to help students develop a philosophy of life and to value enduring wisdom. It has been translated into Chinese (in both Taiwanese and mainland editions) and Korean. Lewis is coauthor with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen of “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (2008), a guide for the general reader to the origins and public consequences of the explosion of digital information worldwide.

Harry Lewis’ paper  Digital Books has been published as part of The International Journal of the Humanities.

Abstract: Digital books are potentially the realization of a grand dream–that all the world’s learning might be accessible to anyone on earth at virtually no cost. The Internet and mass magnetic storage devices have in a very short time period made the dream both technologically and economically feasible. Of course, its feasibility as a world-wide social reality remains very much in doubt. Political censorship in repressive societies has become, if anything, more aggressive with the rise of electronic communication, and even democratic societies are fighting the electronic spread of sexual material in ways that threaten open communication of other unpopular ideas. But there is another threat to knowledge ubiquity, unexpected and little-noticed: the potential creation of a de facto corporate monopoly on digital books. That would be the practical effect of the settlement, now pending judicial approval, of a copyright infringement suit against Google precipitated by its program of book scanning. The reading public of the entire world has a very large and long-term stake in the terms of this deal, which has been worked out between private parties and needs only the signature of a single federal judge to take effect.