From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes this interesting piece on books and reading:

At a focus group in Oxford University Press’s offices in New York last month, we heard that in a recent essay assignment for a Columbia University classics class, 70 percent of the undergraduates had cited a book published in 1900, even though it had not been on any reading list and had long been overlooked in the world of classics scholarship. Why so many of the students had suddenly discovered a 109-year-old work and dragged it out of obscurity in preference to the excellent modern works on their reading lists is simple: The full text of the 1900 work is online, available on Google Book Search; the modern works are not.

That was the opening paragraph and it made me want to read more. Among other things, I liked their quotation of Scottish-American classicist Gilbert Arthur Highet who said that books “are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”

But I already knew the conclusion. We need to digitise books and put them online. Why? To preserve them for one thing, but more importantly to make them visible to learners who would otherwise not read them.

So I share the call at the end of the article:

Let us work together to give students, scholars, and readers access to the written wisdom of previous generations. Let us keep those minds alive.