The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning.
I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column format with the original Greek in the left column and with a complete Latin translation in the second. For a language lover like me, the web has nothing even remotely close to this. There is an inimitable sense of discovery you get as you thumb through pages and compare column to column in a work such as this - a sense of discovery that the web can't begin to match.
I think this has to do with both history and aesthetics. Why was such a work ever printed? What does it say about those who did it? Why all the care to put it in handsome bound volumes? Such factors combine with the unusual nature of the subject matter to enhance the sense of discovery one gets when reading such a work. The web can’t do this because it can’t provide either the historical sense or the aesthetics.
Now imagine a room full of such works from different times and places spanning the centuries. They do indeed provide an amazing sense of discovery that cannot be matched on the web today.
There is no magic to antiquarian books and there is no need to romanticize them. They are just books. But they can be really fascinating. Serendipity with such books is different from serendipity on the web - it goes beyond content to a sense of discovering how people in different times and places lived and about what fascinated them in their day. Perhaps the web can some day capture this same sense if technologists can devise a way to capture a comparable sense of the intangible elements of time and aesthetics. It does not do so today.
Of course, if one's sense of serendipity turns on the content of the information alone, then these intangible factors are irrelevant, but I think it is artificial to try to separate those intangibles from the content itself when it comes to the pure excitement of discovery..
"The web is great for serendipity and will eventually leave books lagging far behind in that area (it certainly has done this with respect to library stacks). But nothing will ever replace the sense of excitement one can get from antiquarian books if one is a lover of history and traditional learning."
I find the serendipity bandwidth of wandering around a bookstore much higher than the Web. The Web, however, is more more available to me. But wandering around the real world has a lot going for it.
I have an 1850s 5-volume set of the complete works of Aristotle in 2-column format with the original Greek in the left column and with a complete Latin translation in the second. For a language lover like me, the web has nothing even remotely close to this. There is an inimitable sense of discovery you get as you thumb through pages and compare column to column in a work such as this - a sense of discovery that the web can't begin to match.
I think this has to do with both history and aesthetics. Why was such a work ever printed? What does it say about those who did it? Why all the care to put it in handsome bound volumes? Such factors combine with the unusual nature of the subject matter to enhance the sense of discovery one gets when reading such a work. The web can’t do this because it can’t provide either the historical sense or the aesthetics.
Now imagine a room full of such works from different times and places spanning the centuries. They do indeed provide an amazing sense of discovery that cannot be matched on the web today.
There is no magic to antiquarian books and there is no need to romanticize them. They are just books. But they can be really fascinating. Serendipity with such books is different from serendipity on the web - it goes beyond content to a sense of discovering how people in different times and places lived and about what fascinated them in their day. Perhaps the web can some day capture this same sense if technologists can devise a way to capture a comparable sense of the intangible elements of time and aesthetics. It does not do so today.
Of course, if one's sense of serendipity turns on the content of the information alone, then these intangible factors are irrelevant, but I think it is artificial to try to separate those intangibles from the content itself when it comes to the pure excitement of discovery..