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CHAPTER II
The Transition from Print to Digital: The Cumulative Aspect of Media Means that Transitions Involve
Co-Existence of the Old with the New
ONE generalization that I have drawn from my research is that old media tend to co-exist with the old rather than replace the old, over extended periods of time. This was not as evident to me in
2005 as it is nearly twenty years later. Though it was more than obvious that the world of books was in the midst of great change, when I wrote the in- troduction to From Gutenberg to the Internet in 2004 and 2005 I did not foresee the enormous speed at which the transition from print to digital would oc- cur. At that time the massive projects of scanning and indexing the world’s printed books were just beginning, and the eBook was only a fringe product. But even before the wide availability of digital books and acceptable eBook readers, the rapid development of online editions of newspapers, encyclope- dias, and other large online research sources during the 1990s confirmed that the graphic qualities and searchability of web resources provided a growing substitute for the creation and distribution of information that had pre- viously been distributed primarily through print, as well as an alternative distribution method for other electronic media such as television and radio.
In October 2004 Google announced its Google Print project, renaming it Google Books in December 2005. Prior to announcing the project Google had the open-source firmware for the Elphel 323 digital camera adapted to allow the camera to scan books at the rate of 1000 pages per hour. In only about five years, by October 2010, the Google project, working at a mul- tiplicity of sites, had scanned over 15 million books from 100 countries in
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