Wednesday, January 3, 2001

 

2:54 a.m. Today I began a massive scanning project. On the surface, it looks like the height of high tech, but what's really going on here in the electronic office is an almost complete reversal of my typical working day. Except for a few keystrokes, I might as well be back in the stone ages before I ever even had a computer.

It's very odd. Because the scanning software completely ties up the machine, I'm reduced to spreading the book pages down on the glass, straightening them out, hitting a couple of keystrokes ... .... ... ... buzz buzz ... ... ... ... more buzzing until it's time to hit a couple of keystrokes and, eventually, turn a page and do the whole thing over again.

I can't check email or go out on the web. I can't work on other manuscripts or art projects. All I can do, really, is listen to the radio and wait.

It's going to be like this for the next month or so as I scan in some of our old books. They're going to get a new life as ebooks. Some of the old books are actually digitized, but the material is on five-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. Some of them are in .dos formats and some of them are locked in old PageMaker files or trapped on fussy floppies that no longer open.

It's extremely ironic that of all these formerly advanced technologies, the most dependable -- by far -- is the paper book. I think about that a lot as I send my daily journal pages off into the ethernet each evening. Although there is a broad and instant distribution and duplication, there is also the chance that the host server could disappear, or I could stop paying my bill, or there could be a snag in the electrical service between writer and reader.

Because of all of that, I've been printing out the pages of my journal and binding them in a loose-leaf book. Years from now, it might be the only record remaining, just as the book I'm laying face-down on the scanner's glass might end up being the only version that survives.

I never did trust that idea of paperlessness.

Meanwhile, I've got to find some way to amuse myself as the scanner runs. There must be something I can do ... maybe I can fill up my Pelican gold-nib and perhaps scratch a few symbols in the dusty ledger on the shelf opposite the machines. It's marked as Journal #29, begun February 2, 1996. There are only three entries for the year 2000, and I'm only up to page 34 in the book.

Electronics have claimed all the rest of my time and my brain and my words.

And I can remember it as if it were yesterday -- the evening in 1981 when we set up the Commodore PET and turned on that strange dark monitor with the blinking curser and the trailing luminous pale green letters. The delete key that ate all manner of embarrassing mistakes. The miracle of copy and paste and insert.

Just before the computer, I had actually worn out my blessed Smith-Corona -- sheared off some gears somewhere deep in the turquoise machine with the constant writes and rewrites and that merry dinging of the carriage-return bell as the platen flew back and forth. Impressing paper and copy-catting carbon.

The machines of the moment. Today, it's been the miracle machine of OCR: optical character recognition. It's what you're doing right now, in fact. Another miracle machine. Keep your gears warm.