Monday, July 30, 2001		Article

RADIO, television, radar, computers... now Britain can announce another innovation, this time in the world of e-science, with plans for the world’s first ‘cybrary’, or cyber-library.

In a move that has won grudging praise from the US Internet community — hitherto seen as the powerhouse for new e-thinking — a London dotcom entrepreneur has come up with the first ‘big idea’ for more than three years: a plan to store, on paper, all books available on the Net.

Research has shown that many persons are put off reading literature on the Net because of the bother of scrolling electronically through thousands of different screens. ‘What I want to do instead,’ says 21-year-old Lee Peters — who prefers to be known as CAX100 (Cax-‘ton’, after the father of modern printing) — ‘is to introduce what I call the tactile dynamic.

‘Thousands of persons — millions, even — will, if this works out, be able to go to a public building and handle the texts, creating for the first time a real physical interface. We’re going to download, at the start, the first 1,000 most "classic" texts - Shakespeare, I suppose, Kafka, Bridget Jones, Douglas Copeland, that kind of thing - and print them all out, making sure there’s a break after every, say, 800 words or so, so they come out in "pages".

‘We’re trying to copyright a program that will even number them as we go! Then we’ll stick them inside some kind of binding, or at least some kind of handy plastic envelope, and leave them out on shelves for persons to come along and borrow as and when they like.

‘The beauty is that, now, people will be able to read this stuff anywhere — in the bath, in the bed, on the tube. Gone are the days when if you wanted to read something you had to go through the laborious business of logging on and searching and clicking and swapping screens and changing fonts and hoping your server doesn’t go down. If this takes off, all that stuff will seem frankly pre-historic. Instead, you’ll have persons wandering around cities with the actual downloaded texts in their hands! ‘Already we’ve had huge interest and big offers of backing. But it’s not about the money, it’s about literature. Although, eventually, the plan is to actually sell the bound downloads; we could have a chain of bound-download shops across the country!’

The main problem he faces is storage space. ‘If we get enough stuff downloaded, that’s going to be one mother of a lot of paper. We need big rooms, big halls.’ He has been in discussion with councils in London, and there have been encouraging signs from Barnetstone and Flatford, both of which have, along with most other councils, carried out extensive public-library closure programs.

‘I can’t comment officially,’ said a spokesman for Flatford, ‘but a few members are rather taken by the idea. We have two smallish libraries already closed which we could turn over - or we could even bring forward closure of the main borough library to make way for what promises to be a truly exciting new development.’

CAX-100 admits he has not fine-tuned all details, but expects to do so within a year. ‘Decoding the ASCII bin-hex was no problem, we’ve cracked that. No, the real worry is the "mistakes," I mean the writers’ mistakes. Before we print out we want the stuff to be perfect. Stuff like the punctuation in Finnegan’s Wake - my God! - and the misspellings in ‘Jabberwocky’. But we won’t mess around too much. I mean, we don’t want to make it so Hamlet doesn’t... you know, get the girl, whatever.’ ‘Like all the great ideas, I suppose, its beauty is in the simplicity.

Frankly, it’s a bit of surprise no one’s ever thought of it before.’ Britain’s first cybrary is expected to open on April 1, 2002.