Looks like an interesting conference was held earlier this month at Emory: Free Culture & the Digital Library. One of the disadvantages of not living in the United States is that I cannot make it to these events, which I surely would attend if there.

There are not yet any papers online from this conference. Let’s hope that the organizers will get the papers online soon.

Interesting…with all my talk on this site about digital scholarship, multimedia, visual literacy, etc. I find myself still paying more attention to text on the Web than any other format. In the past hour of browsing through entries on bloglines I’ve come across a dozen or more postings where the content is either a podcast or a video. I mark those for later listening/viewing, though I know it’s likely to be weeks if ever before I get back to those non-text sources.

Text does have some very important characteristics that are not replicated in other media. Text can be easily skimmed. We know have “to eyeball” a page of text in order to extract some meaning or, at least, to determine if it’s worth reading in-depth. How do we do the same with a podcast or a 10 minute video file?

Even though I love my shiny blue iPod mini, I never download podcasts of lectures, speeches, etc. Of course, I’ve never been into talk radio either, so maybe it’s just me. But if I still had that hour+ commute like I did in Miami, then maybe I would be loading my iPod up every morning.

Rather than watching a 10 minute interview with someone in QuickTime, I prefer just to read a transcript or, even better, an edited summary of the interview. Now, maybe if I had one of those fancy new video iPods….

It may just be personal preference or prejudice (though I’ve never been accused of having a prejudice against multimedia). It may just depend upon lifestyles and the gadgets you own.

Regardless of why some people adapt well to podcasting and video blogs and others don’t, the ability to grasp the content of a work without listening/viewing to the complete work is something that will be needed. I how no idea how that will be accomplished.

Peter Brantley, who is Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, highlights a significant educational scenario of Google Print and having a large collection of digitized books:

Re-mix and Re-use. What might that mean in the context of a large online library of digital books? We need look no further than O’Reilly’s SafariU, a wonderful effort which permits faculty instructors to create their own textbooks by re-assembling content from a deep collection of technical works.

That specific capability isn’t a feature of Google Print but it certainly is one area where this all should be heading. Peter’s personal blog shimenawa has a lot of interesting ideas on this and related topics.

While the lawsuit from the publishing community is based on the issue of copyright, I continue to suspect that the underlying motivation is that the publishing community is beginning to awake to the long-term financial gains of making their digital content accessible in segmented quantities as Peter describes and they don’t want Google to be an eventual competitor in this market. If the publishers do win their lawsuit, then I hope that they will move towards innovative strategies with their digital content in ways similar to SafariU (though I’m not holding my breath).