Maybe I am the last person to learn about this (update: maybe I’m the first?  Seriously, no one has blogged about this yet?), but I flipped open a Gaylord catalog this morning to find “Digitization by Kirtas Technologies: now being offer by Gaylord.”  This is pretty amazing for several reasons, chief among those being that a company has put a simply cost on the digitization of a “normal” (read: less than 300 pages, min size 4.5″x7″ / max size 11″x14″) book: $79.10.

Using their “state of the art robot technology” which employs an “automatic page turning and book handling system that’s gentler than the human hand,” they’ll also gladly digitize oversize books (monsters with more than 300 pages but less than 600 for $722), newpaper ($1.30/page), documents (depending on size, $.60-$6.00).  And if the whole we’re-selecting-books-in-good-condition-for-these-mass-digitization-projects issue and its implications pops up on your radar like it did on mine, Kirtas will need a bit more dough for those brittle items: “If your book requires special handling, there may be an additional fee.”

As overall pleased with this democratization of the capitalist cultural heritage digitization venture though I might be, I got a severe case of the giggles as I read through a set of bullets seeking to answer the vision quest that is the $64,000 question: “Why Digitize?

Why Digitize?

  • Provide a worldwide audience of researchers access to your collections
  • Protect your original collections from repeated handling
  • Increase the prestige and visibility of your institutional holdings
  • Turn your collections into cash by making the available for printing on demand through major online retailers

    • Yes!  Digitization is the first and only step towards reaching a worldwide audience!  The mere act of digitization will solve all your problems, none of which shall come from hosting and managing that digitized content!  And yes!  Libraries are reaping in zillions of dollars by working with megacorps in the bustling print-on-demand market!  Indeed!  :)

    I do believe digitized institutional holdings should be hosted and shared as widely and freely as legally possible, and I also do not contest that digitization can protect collections from repeated handling, but I’m still waiting on someone with a better ILS system than I’ve ever been a user of to prove my strong and long held belief that digitization and its many marvels / advantages drives up circulation of the original.  Yes, the book. Yes, those things that are disappearing from libraries.

    Altogether, a very interesting development, and I wonder what it might mean for conservation services, deacidification services, etc.  Good luck, Gaylord and Kirtas.