Radical Tactics of the Offline Library

<p>The Personal Portable Library in its most simple form is a hard drive or USB stick containing a large collection of e-books, curated, archived and indexed by an individual user. The flourishing of the offline digital library is a response to the fact that truly private sharing of knowledge in the online realm is increasingly made impossible. While P2P sharing sites and online libraries with downloadable e-books are precarious, people are led to an atavistic and reversalist workaround. The radical tactics of the offline: abandoning the online for more secure offline transfer. Taking inspiration from ancient libraries as copying centers and Sneakernet, Henry Warwick describes the future of the library as digital and offline. <em>Radical Tactics of the Offline Library</em> traces the history of the library and the importance of the Personal Portable Library in sharing knowledge and resisting proprietarian forces.</p> <p>The library in Alexandria contained about 500,000 scrolls; the Library of Congress, the largest library in the history of civilization, contains about 35 million publications. A digital version of it would fit on a 24 terabyte array, which can be purchased for about $2000. Obviously, most people don’t need 35 million books. A small local library of 10,000 books could fit on a 64 GB thumb drive the size of a pack of chewing gum and costing perhaps $40. This is an astounding fact with immense implications. It is trivially simple to start collecting e-books, and then to share the results. And it is much less trivially important. Sharing is caring. Societies where people share, especially ideas, are societies that will naturally flourish.</p>