In Search of “That Purple Book”

Technology is funny stuff. Take hearing aids, for example. Back in the last century, hearing aids were so horrendously expensive that the only way anyone could ever afford one is to have the cost of the device subsidized by the government and donations—usually the organization selling the hearing aid was a tax-exempt nonprofit. Technology changed all that by bringing down the price of the devices so much that hearing aids are now quite affordable. And you know what, those free and nearly free services have gone away. Does that mean that technology made hearing aids obsolete? Not at all. But it did change the nature of the hearing aid industry forever.

Today, technology has done nothing to the demand for books. If anything, it has increased that demand. Technology has made it possible to disconnect a book from the paper it was written on, and made it possible to store a nearly infinite number of titles in databases. The retrieval of those titles could mean uploading the title into an ereader or printing the book via Print-On-Demand technology. Has that storage-and-retrieval technology put authors or publishers or book designers or cover artists or editors or marketers out of business? No, they’re still there and still needed. It hasn’t even made a dent in the need for warehouses and shipping departments. But publicly available databases filled with searchable content has done one thing. It has changed the research industry, and I’m guessing that very soon, one of our most valuable national free resources will be gone the way subsidized hearing aid companies have gone. I’m talking about librarians.

I have spent much of my life around librarians. Not libraries, mind you, but librarians themselves—both my mother and my wife are librarians (I didn’t do that on purpose, I swear!). And when you get to know librarians as well as I do, you gain a deep respect for what they do—and no, telling you to shush isn’t one of the things that I’m talking about. Perhaps you didn’t know this, but librarians are actually hard-core researchers and information specialists. A librarian is someone who actually has a snowball’s chance in hell of finding “you know, that book… it’s purple, and I think it has the author’s name printed on the cover. Or was it the title?” Try typing that into Amazon.

There are organizations out there trying to replace librarians. Take Wolfram Alpha, for example (Wolfram Alpha is a natural-language search engine—or as they refer to themselves, a “computational knowledge engine”). I actually tried typing the following phrase into Wolfram Alpha: I’m looking for that book with the purple cover. Do you know the one I mean? And here is the result that I got. The Color of Purple by Alice Walker. I suppose that’s a valid answer, but it really wasn’t the book I wanted. In fact, the one I had in mind was the novella Sex, Death & Honey by Brian Knight as published by Cargo Cult Press (before he turned it into the novel Genius Book Publishing released).

Search engines have made amateur librarians of all of us, and online bookstores have diminished the need for physical libraries. But one of these days, someone is going to find a way to create a search engine just smart enough to put librarians out of business. In the short run, somewhere between when libraries go out of business and when IBM Watson is commercially available to the masses, I’m guessing some clever entrepreneur is going to create an online service where someone can submit a query as vague as “I’m looking for that book with the purple cover. Do you know the one I mean?” and get it answered by real librarians, and not by crowdsourcing like answers.yahoo.com uses (crowdsourcing is when you get a bunch of people together and hope that one of them has an answer that is close—Wikipedia.com uses the same logic).

Or maybe they won’t. You see, the kind of research librarians do is very labor intensive, and if there is one thing that technology does, it reduces the need for labor intensive activities. Labor is expensive. Technology is expensive. But the technology folks have figured out that they can keep all the money for themselves if they cut out the middleman laborers. So I’m still betting on IBM Watson to take the place of librarians well before anyone ever starts up a 24/7 librarian service.

So if you are looking for that purple book, pretty soon we—as a culture—will lose the ability to find this kind of information. Is that a big loss?

I think so, but then again, I’m biased.