Building a public library network requires commitment — it took a fortune and the involvement of hundreds of women’s groups to set up the 2,500-odd Carnegie libraries that became the bedrock of the US library system. It also requires ruthlessness, as the founders of the Library of Alexandria knew — the Library’s collection, unparalleled in the ancient world, is said to have been built in part by stripping all ships that came in to port of their books.
India has needed a good public library network since Independence but never managed to build one on the same scale as countries like the US or the UK. This is not for want of resources — we have the land, the money, and what is known in the trade as the “book hunger” — but for the lack of a vision. Until recently, it was accepted practice for scholars to go abroad to the libraries of the UK or the US in search of key manuscripts and source documents. The general public libraries that do exist are often unwelcoming, and frequently have only modest collections of books.
If a library revolution is overdue in this country, it might happen faster on the digital rather than the physical front. This is in part because of the general trend worldwide towards the digitisation of books — and other forms of human knowledge — on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The venerable Project Gutenberg has been offering classics of Raj and early Indian literature in simple text form, including the first work of Indian writing in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet. Over the last few years, universities across the world have begun to create large, publicly searchable databases at places like the Hathi Trust, quite apart from Google's ambitious if beleaguered attempt to build the world’s largest public library at Google Books.
Many of these libraries have substantial “Indian collections”, and the idea that these might soon be available to readers here in a kind of new, digital Commons is an exciting one. In India itself, the Million Books Project has collaborated to set up a Digital Library of India, while some universities are experimenting with digitising their collections.
At this stage, the interface and the ease of reading is still clunky and not as user-friendly as it should be. As with all digital library initiatives, there are unsettled issues and fierce battles to be fought. Many objected to the Google Books project, unhappy at the idea that one company might own so much of the world's knowledge, and digital university libraries, as well as organisations like the Hathi Trust, have to address concerns about authors’ rights.
But the movement towards digitising books and information is spreading globally, despite the many very valid concerns. Despite the relatively low number of physical bookstores, the online bookstore Flipkart and its global rival Amazon have changed and promise to keep changing the ways in which Indians buy books.
Not having created physical, brick-and-mortar libraries, we might leapfrog to the next stage anyway. Given the country's relative ease with new technologies, the high levels of mobile penetration and the market for devices like the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, that also work as e-readers, expect digital libraries to start changing the way Indians read and think about books.
