As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involv…

- Robert Darnton

The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and …

- Robert Darnton

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

- Robert Darnton

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

- Robert Darnton

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google woul…

- Robert Darnton

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

- Robert Darnton

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

- Robert Darnton

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

- Robert Darnton

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was …

- Robert Darnton