Digital Kielhorn

[Birgit Kellner]

Dominik Wujastyk schrieb:
> This is an interesting idea, but the problem of needing a librarian 
> (and a salary) still arises.  Also, as soon as one starts putting even 
> modest numbers of PDF books together, one starts to eat up very large 
> amounts of disk space, and bandwidth.
>
> I sometimes think that Bittorrent might be relevant to our situation. 
> Distributed, low-overhead, free...
>
> Dominik
>
... but requiring a significant number of file sharers to be online 
(otherwise, the download will just not exist), and, as a file-sharing 
protocol, perhaps already on its way out, as file sharing gets 
increasingly criminalized by the entertainment industry and at least 
some US universities and internet providers already per default block 
the ports that Bittorrent might use or find other ways to lock out file 
sharing.

File sharers will always find other ways to share files, but I doubt 
that (as a caricature) your 55-year-old Indologist in his tweedjacket 
has the energy, time, patience, interest and technological knowledge to 
become a file sharing nomad, constantly keeping himself up to date as to 
which protocols, ports and software to use :-)

(I definitely do wear my sceptic's hat today ...)

Best,

Birgit