Last year a single letter written by Albert Einstein changed hands for . But could a printout of an email or an electronic file ever reach similar heights?
Thatās the question facing those who deal in the literary artefacts of public figures, as they struggle to work out how to do business in a world where information can be copied and distributed more easily than ever before.
Booksellers, collectors and libraries are already trading in digital objects, Joan Winterkorn, of antiquarian booksellers , told attendees at the at the British Library earlier this week. When Emory University Library , it received a desktop computer, three laptops, an external hard drive and a alongside paper files.
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And the writer John Updike, who died last month, started using computers in the 1980s, Winterkorn pointed out ā so his āpapersā will include a substantial cache of electronic documents.
Tumbling prices
So far, however, digital archives have been traded as just a small fraction of a larger, mainly paper-based, archive, and to date the paper component has largely driven the prices achieved. Indeed, no-one is quite sure how much the digital ephemera of an authorās work are worth.
āI donāt feel the same way about the printout of an email as I do a letter,ā said , a literary manuscript specialist at auctioneers Sothebyās, adding that more tangible digital objects were easier for auctioneers to price and sell.
āWhat about a laptop? For example, the one used by JK Rowling to write Harry Potter and the Philosopherās Stone in an Edinburgh cafĆ© has real value,ā he said, ābecause she used it.ā Even if the hard drive had been cloned by a library, the artefact alone would still be valuable. Barack Obamaās Blackberry, even wiped of data, will likely make some archivist or collector very happy in future, he added.
Although a panel of auctioneers and booksellers suggested that digital archives would end up being valued at levels close to their paper equivalents, conference delegate , from , suggested that prices should actually fall to almost nothing. āIsnāt it about scarcity? Once itās been copied and distributed the value is gone, itās just a piece of memory.ā
āThe nature of digital information is that itās near-infinitely copyable,ā agreed Peter Hirtle, who works on technology strategy at . To turn it into something of value, āyouāre having to deny the nature of the mediumā, he argued.
Unintended revelations
Digital collections also pose new problems for archivists, pointed out Winterkorn. āIāve appraised collections that included disks that an author no longer has the computer to read, and Iāve had to take it on faith there is information on them.ā
People giving up their archive are also likely unprepared for a digital world, she pointed out, because computers and emails can reveal much more about someoneās personal life than paper letters.
Winterkorn says authors may find themselves divulging more than they realised, and that those valuing collections may have to search through them for potentially embarrassing material to avoid later arguments.
