How Do You Value a Historical E-Mail?
Einstein's letters fetch thousands of dollars but what about Obama's e-mails?
Feb. 16, 2009— -- Last year a single letter written by Albert Einstein was sold for more than $400,000. But could an e-mail printout or an electronic file reach similar heights?
That's the question facing those who deal in the literary artifacts of public figures, as they struggle to work out how to do business in the electronic 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 Bernard Quaritch, told attendees at the Digital Lives conference at the British Library earlier this week. When Emory University Library bought author Salman Rushdie's archive in 2006, it received a desktop computer, three laptops, an external hard drive and a Treo smart phone along with his paper files.
And the writer John Updike, who died last month, started using computers in the 1980s, Winterkorn pointed out, so his "papers" will include a substantial cache of electronic documents.
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