There's a new the question on the minds of those who deal in the literary artifacts of public figures as they struggle to work out how to do business in the electronic world, where information can be copied and distributed more easily than ever before. A recent article on ABCnews.go.com by Tim Simonite explores this question.
So far, according to Simonite's article, digital archives have been traded as just a small fraction of a larger, mainly paper-based, archive, and to date the paper component has largely driven the highest prices. Indeed, no-one is quite sure how much the digital ephemera of a historical figure are worth. "I don't feel the same way about the printout of an e-mail as I do a letter," said Gabriel Heaton, a literary manuscript specialist at auctioneers Sotheby's, adding that more tangible digital objects were easier for auctioneers to price and sell.
Simonite's article goes on to say: Although a panel of auctioneers and booksellers suggested that digital archives would end up being valued at levels close to their paper equivalents, conference delegate Gordon Bell, from Microsoft Research, suggested that prices should actually fall to almost nothing. "Isn't it about scarcity? Once it's been copied and distributed the value is gone, it's just a piece of Booksellers, collectors, and libraries are already trading in digital objects, Joan Winterkorn, of antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch, told attendees at the Digital Lives conference at the British Library earlier this week. When Emory University Library bought author Salman Rushdie's archive in 2006, it received a desktop computer, three laptops, an external hard drive and a Treo smart phone along with his paper files. "The nature of digital information is that it's near-infinitely copyable," said Peter Hirtle, who works on technology strategy at Cornell University Library. To turn it into something of value, "you're having to deny the nature of the medium," he said.
How would you value digital documents? Leave a comment with your thoughts.
Search Abebooks for the books written by Rushdie.
Photograph by g[wiz].
