Color me skeptical

From a Times article proclaiming the dawn of the digital library:

What is the technology telling us? That copies don't count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library. Soon a book outside the library will be like a Web page outside the Web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

Now, I certainly welcome the trend toward digitized versions of hard copies. It's a big step for preservation at the very least and, as this article notes, it will certainly make information more accessible, also good.

But I think it's preposterous, not to mention shortsighted, to assume that this will signal the virtual end of the printed book. At the very least, in the academic community, lots of scholars and students and the like will still want hard copies to make notes, have a handy reference, etc. And while it might be true that some day we'll all own iPods loaded with most of the world's books, I still think there will always be people who just prefer hard copies. Then there's the matter of 500-year-old technologies dying hard.

And that's where I think the real problem is with this article. It's predicated on a blind, total faith in technological progress, which strikes me as entirely misplaced. For one thing, I don't know that people realize how unwieldy this universal library could be to search, especially if the full text of books is made searchable, which could be more of a hindrance than a benefit.