Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The Personal Portable Library is basically a very simple device. It is a hard drive or USB memory stick filled with files. What kinds of files depends on curator or librarian's interests. Many people have hard drives filled with music, and they share drives, USB sticks, CDRs and DVDRs filled with music. In fact, according to the RIAA, Offline File Sharing exceeds online file sharing of music. [1] Music files, like font files, are small and easily transferred from one machine to another. Video files are another issue. A film can be 2 or more gigabytes in size and can take a fair amount of time to download. Also, due to their file size, fewer films can fit on a drive or USB stick. As a consequence, the MPAA has not released a study showing similar file sharing patterns for films. Film also suffers from a re-use problem. One rarely watches a given film more than once, while music has a high re-usability factor. So, low re-use combined with large slow file size and transfer times has made film sharing more a product of streaming technology, ranging from online broadcasts of TV shows on network websites to industry and capital approved systems like Netflix to unapproved torrent based viewers like PopcornTime. Books have a low reuse value. People will re-read books, but not often. People will share common fiction books, and will re-read the fiction that really touches them. Scholars and students have a completely different approach to books. For them, they are containers of knowledge and information.
Repository Citation
Warwick, Henry. "Affordances and Possibilities around the Personal Portable Library in Art and Research." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–15. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/8