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Germany demands return of rare book Found in St. Louis

• http://lisnews.org

• Reading this article I could not help but think...

  (Score:4, Interesting) by kylere (3831) on Monday January 24, @09:50AM (#14373) I am disheartened by this article, but the massive private collections of one-of-a-kind books also bother me. I am a more tech than anything and with the current technology there is no reason for such hoarding of rare insights into history. Simple scanning and compression combined with the extremely low cost of data storage, using a popular online computer pricing site (www. price watch. com, spaces inserted to avoid googling them up) I can buy 200GIGS of storage for under USD$100. Even at the obscene per page scan rate of 1MEG (and half of that is more reasonable) that is 200k pages of storage at a price equal to 3 Lemony Snicket books and tax. I admit to having tried multiple Ebook readers and while I love carrying 50 books on my PocketPC I do miss the FEEL and SMELL of a collection of books, so please do not think I am imaging a StarTrekian librarian of data chips, but for ultrarare items it would make a good deal of sense.Add in the fact that the German Courts made copying legal for libraries and there is no excuse for pricing information at rates ensuring that no one outside of curators will even be allowed to access history.

• Re:Reading this article I could not help but think

  (Score:3, Funny) by kylere (3831) on Monday January 24, @09:52AM (#14374) Note to self, actually READ the preview so you are talking about StarTrekian libraries not librarians, so as not to offend the StarTrekian Librarians reading :-) [ Parent ]

• Nope

  (Score:2, Interesting) by opaqueentity (3388) on Monday January 24, @01:03PM (#14379) I'm sorry but this has nothing to do with wether or not people should be allowed private collections of books.He has a letter from them saying that they cannot claim it, simple as that surely?Everything else is just them being silly.I get your point about how easy it would be but if I had in one hand a Gutenberg Bible and in the other a scanned version, which one would you want? Value aside that is. It's a historical document if nothing else and maybe it should be in a proper collection but they also have to pay the going rate.

• Re:Nope

  (Score:2, Interesting) by kylere (3831) on Monday January 24, @02:06PM (#14382) I think you are viewing this from too close a perspective, I do not see the issue here being one person and their quest for profit, but wide open issue of information availability. I tend to look at the big picture aspect of things and frequently skip the low level issues, especially as in terms of how this news relates to librarians, I see it as a collections issue, while I agree that straight reading the artivle it is about greed, lies, and shameful commercialism I think the ramifications are more important than the specific issue.
  The concept of wanting an original versus a scan is one of greed, not need. One is to possess the other is to utilize, I would much rather have a scanned .pdf file that I could search and reference than risk damaging a centuries old original.
  If I had to pass a judgement morally on the specific issue, I would say that he should get what he paid for it as a fee, along with a 50% share of any sales generated from a scanned version and the German Goverment should be prohibited from selling the item for more than they paid for it for all time. [ Parent ]

• Provenance

  (Score:4, Informative) by Lee Hadden (88) on Monday January 24, @02:51PM (#14383)
  ( http://members.aol.com/leehadden/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 13, @02:26PM ) One of the problems of establishing ownership is the record of the Staatsgaelrie library. Were the accession books preserved in the vault as well as the books? Many books were "donated" as "gifts" to Nazi officials from German libraries and museums, which were looted by the Nazis just as they were in the occupied countries. If these became part of a Nazi military officer's collection, they may have been justifiably taken by US officials, in which case the Doty item may have been a theft from the US Government, rather than from the Staatsgalerie.Boris Yeltsin nationalized any remaining German owned materials in Russia in 1998, saying that any Russian materials remaining in Germany can stay there, and any German materials in Russia can stay there. Arguments over ownership when so many people are dead and the records destroyed are just too complex. Certainly any statute of limitations of fifty years make the provenance of the item murky, and with the death of Doty, any infomration on how it came into his possession (legally or illegaly) is argumentative. Did the Staatsgalerie give him the book in recognition for his help in resotiring the collection? Fifty years later, it is hard to say what happened. But the Staatsgalerie would have to have exceptional records showing the ownership of the item from whenever they first acquired it and from 1934 through 1945 to convince me, and even then, I would probably side with Shene. The waters are just too murky for anyone to claim ownership from a collection that was bombed, buried, discovered and restored during war and looting from their own government, not to mention occuping forces (Stutgart was captured by the Frnech, and occupied by African forces as well as the other Allied forces) --
  R. Lee Hadden (These are my own opinions!)