While the Google Book Settlement seems to trundle forward no matter what, and even as other countries such as Germany, France and China mount increasing opposition, Lewis Lapham suggests that all the discussion over copyrights and the privatization of literature are being conducted at the expense of an even more fundamental aspect of what Google’s doing:

Invoking the great fires that destroyed the library at ancient Alexandria and the U.S. Library of Congress, Google co-founder Sergey Brin says electronic texts will preserve the world’s cultural heritage.

Google Books aims to create a digital mega-library with millions of books and periodicals available online.

Well, remember microfilm? Worried about the decay of paper, librarians rushed to put their collections on film, discarding many of the originals in the process. Instead of lasting forever, frames tore, shrank, melted together, sprouted bubbles, blemishes and sometimes even fungi.

Since bits become degraded over time, digitization may not prove any more reliable in the long term. Documents could easily disappear into cyberspace as their coding becomes obsolete. The accelerating speed of technological change may overcome even mighty Google, ultimately rendering its database as useless as floppy discs and CD-ROMs.

In other words, could it be that the best way to print, store, and pass along texts is via what’s known as — holy cannolis! — paper? That’s what historian Robert Darnton says in his new book The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future from Public Affairs. He talks to Lapham on his Bloomberg News radio show, The World in Time, in a wide-ranging discussion that’s extremely interesting, even if it does overlook the fact that they don’t discuss the fact that Darnton’s book is available as an ebook.