There is no standardized way to link to a page of a digital book. Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritizes pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardized way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Accessing the e-book revolution
A couple of amusing incongruities in the quote above:
1) if you click on the link to the article that advocates for freely linkable information, you will most likely not be able to access it unless you perform one of two pirouettes: you either register (giving them your personal data) or copy paste the headline into Google News and click on the resulting link.
2) the article, posted in the Financial Times (not exactly a communist, free for all outlet) doesn’t mention copyright at all and the resulting economic/ compensation issues regarding the access of books online. So, how exactly do we make all books linkable while, at the same time, maintain the current copyright model that requires authors/publishing houses derive monetary benefit from their product? I am a big advocate of Creative Commons and online access of information/ books/ texts, but as it stands today, as much as I agree with everything in the quote above, it is not workable.
So yeah, Financial Times, thanks for pointing the obvious while you remain part of the problem, I guess.
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