In his recent The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future , Robert Darnton suggests that the development of information technologies brings the Enlightenment aspiration to democratize learning closer to realization.  In his TNR review of Darnton’s book, Anthony Grafton quotes Darnton’s description of the philosophes ’ “Republic of Letters”: It was to be “a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent.”  In fact, the Enlightenment philosophers, Grafton says, “rarely, if ever treated the impoverished hacks of Europe’s Grub Streets as their equals,” but with the spread of electronic books we come closer: “For the last generation and more, the traditional realms of information have experienced new and frightening pressures.  Great libraries - those of American research universities, for example - have amassed mountains of printed material.  But these collections have been accessible only to the small group lucky enough to have the keys of the kingdom: students, faculty, and others who can afford to pay for the privileges.”

That’s all changing.

Scientific journal subscriptions have gone through the roof as they have been taken over by for-profit publishers (Grafton says that some journals cost $20,000 and more per year).  Books are published, but library budgets are in trouble and so libraries can’t afford the new books.  Now, besides these and other internal problems, libraries and research institutions face the threat from technology: “Scholarly journals and trade magazines still exist, for the most part, on paper.  More and more though readers read new articles when they first come out on screen, and find older articles not by leafing through volumes in the stacks but by searching on Google.  Vast collections of older books, magazines, and documents have been digitized, and publishers are making it possible to have out-of-print titles from their backlists printed on demand in a few minutes on the Espresso Book Machine, which can print, bind, and trim a three-hundred-page book in less than five minutes, while the buyer waits.”  Google intends to digitize all the world’s books, and already has access to millions.

Meanwhile, reading rooms are empty.  University presses “often find it hard to sell even a few copies of a monograph that wins multiple prizes, and impossible to publish many valuable works of scholarship.”  As a result, “some of them have resorted to concentrating on mid-list trade books and works of local interest.  Such offerings may keep the presses alive, but they hardly deserve the help afforded by a tax exemption.”

Darnton knows there are problems ahead, but on the whole he sees these developments as a good, a fulfillment of an unrealized Enlightenment dream.