Marie Lebert

“ In 1998, Amazon.com was offering 3 million books, CDs, audio books, DVDs, computer games - more than 14 times as many titles as the large chain superstores - to 3 million people in 160 countries. "Businesses can do things on the web that simply cannot be done any other way", wrote Jeff Bezos. "We are changing the way people buy books and music." Amazon.com quickly became the largest online bookstore, with a catalog of these 3 million items that could be ordered online, authoritative reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer reviews, and book recommendations. ”

“ If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. ”

“ Randy wrote in September 1998: "Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco." ”

“ Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e-zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and Gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'. ”

“ With more and more computers available in schools and at home, and more and more internet connections, teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print book culture to digital culture was changing their relationship to knowledge, and the way both scholars and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print book culture provided stable information whereas digital culture provided "moving" information. ”

“ The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. ”

“ There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at the Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, Gaelic online terminology database. More hits on our web site. More use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now available continuously worldwide via the internet. Major project has been translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of any size available in Gaelic. ”

“ When one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. These search mechanisms work well if one is searching for something very precise, such as information on a person who has an unusual name, but they produce a confusing number of references if one is searching for a topic which can be quite broad. ”

“ So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.) . The answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. ”

“ A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalyzed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register) . Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe. ”

“ For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
Answering the same question, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle wrote in May 2001: "I would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help." ”

“ As more and more people were using digital technology, previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing and publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was named "multimedia convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. ”

“ Often an academic working paper will be on the web and will be available for full-text downloading. We are currently investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the internet."
Peter added: "The internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the internet. ”

“ Text and image processing began to be handed over to desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios. Impression costs went on decreasing with desktop publishing, photocopiers, color photocopiers and digital printing equipment. Digitization also accelerated the publication process. Editors, designers and other contributors could all work at the same time on the same book. For educational, academic and scientific publications, online publishing became a cheaper solution than print books, with the possibility of regular updates to include the latest information. ”

“ Our vision of network access encompasses all these. (...) The development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to the collection will become boundless with users from all over the world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials using computer networks, particularly the internet." (excerpt from the website)
Other national libraries started digitizing their collections to offer a free digital library. ”

“ The internet got its first boost with the invention of the web and its hyperlinks by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in 1990, and a second boost with the invention of the first browser Mosaic in 1993. The internet could now be used by anyone, and not only by computer literate people. There were 100 million internet users in December 1997, with one million new users per month, and 300 million internet users in December 2000. In summer 2000, the number of non-English-speaking users reached the number of English-speaking users, with a percentage of 50-50. ”

“ Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but that doesn't worry me..." Nevertheless, despite the internet, she was pessimistic about the future. "I am very pessimistic, because the internet is killing off specialist bookstores." ”

“ And more and more print books were scanned to be included in digital bookstores and libraries.
At the end of the 1990s, there were no reliable statistics yet proving that the large-scale use of computers and electronic documents would make us paperless and save some tress, as hoped by all of us who believe in nature preservation. We were still in a transition period. Many people still needed a print version for easier reading, or to keep track of a document in case the electronic file was accidentally deleted, or to have some paper support for their documentation or archives. ”

“ In the US, lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes copyright laws, even if only snippets are made freely available on the search engine. To counteract copyright concerns and the problems of a closed platform, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and make them searchable and downloadable through any search engine. ”

“ Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. ”

“ DP Europe was available in 12 languages in April 2004 and 22 languages in May 2008.
The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all the European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide books for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries. The goal is for every country to have its own digital library (according to the country copyright limitations) , within a continental network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for the whole planet) . ”

“ Some fear a future in which individuals will be forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle. And the survival mechanisms which have been developed in recent decades, such as relatively stable employment relations, collective agreements, employee representation, employer-provided job training, and jointly funded social security schemes, may be sorely tested in a world where work crosses borders at the speed of light. ”

“ Google Books was launched in August 2006 to replace the controversial Google Print, stopped in August 2005 because of main copyright concerns. Google Books offers excerpts of books digitized by Google in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library) . Google scans 3,000 books a day, including copyrighted books. The inclusion of copyrighted books is widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. ”

“ It is now actively acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages with a particular focus on endangered languages. It is overseen by a blue ribbon panel of linguistic experts from all over the world."
Answering my question about multilingualism, Robert Beard added in January 2000: "While English still dominates the web, the growth of monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various solutions to the font problems. Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems) . ”

“ Computers made catalogs much easier to handle. Instead of all these cards to be patiently classified into wood or metal drawers, librarians could type in bibliographic records in a program that was sorting out books by alphabetical, chronological and systematic order. Librarians also began using computer programs to lend books and buy new ones. By networking computers, the internet gave a boost to union catalogs for a state, a country or a region, and furthered interlibrary loan. ”

“ Some publishers decided to use the web as a new marketing tool. In the U.S., NAP (National Academy Press) was the first publisher in 1994 to post the full text of some books, for free, with the authors' consent. NAP was followed by MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1995. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, wrote in 1997: "As university publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering scholarly documents online, some early innovators are finding that making a monograph available electronically can boost sales of hard copies." ”

“ With 55 languages and 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. Project Gutenberg promotes digitization in "text format", meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. Contrary to other formats, the files are accessible for low-bandwidth use. The main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks is Distributed Proofreaders, conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks to help in the digitizing of books from public domain. ”

“ Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. ”