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Little did we know that we would participate in violence when we came to class last Thursday. With a tote bag of victims in hand, Professor Croxall marched us out of the basement of the JFSB towards the library. I walked fast but was slow to realize that what we were doing had been spelled out for us in our midterm. Thus informed my more astute classmates, upon reaching the conservation lab I expected to find a state-of-the-art scanning machine. Instead, we rounded a corner and were faced with a guillotine. A slightly manic professor. An innocent pile of books.
I had not had the time to come to know Vonnegut yet, considering the point of this project was to avoid coming to know him, or at least his work. I enjoyed some of his short stories but have no idea what his novels are like. So why did I feel like I was putting a stranger to death? What is it about a glued stack of paper that makes me resort to such excessively dramatic monologuing in this, my final blog post?
I have been thinking about the friction of formats, and I wonder if people that share my inexplicable reverence for physical books—books that may be written by people we are altogether indifferent about—will pose as a hindrance to the digitization of literary canon. Most classics exist as eBooks now, and many books getting published are usually released in eBook form alongside the print form. But what about all the books that fall outside those two categories? What about the books that are out of print, clutched to the breasts of those that worship the printed word?
How can we “not-read” a million books if they aren’t first translated into a language that our computers can understand?
