Authors shouldn't be so afraid of letting their work out on the internet. No one reads an entire book on their computer screen.

Name recognition is all that matters.

Add to that the fact that books-on-disc access, though handy, could potentially be the vicitm of the "PC police" who, if they had control of the database, could excise objectionable sections of novels and/or non-fiction works, the same way in the past certian schools have tried to ban Twain's "Huckelberry Finn" due to objections to its content.

Like the left's complaints about those diobolical Diebold voting machines, in this case, there will need to be some form of non-partisan certification, and an actual paper trail, to make sure what books people download off the Internet are the real thing, and not something fixed up to suit a censore's point of view.

This will be a tremendous resource for moving scholarship out of universities, and breaking the left's hold on academic research.

PJ,

Very true. It will democratize academia the same way that blogging has democratized journalism.

I am a law librarian and I remain somewhat skeptical of all this discussion of digitizing books and the death of the book. There are lots and lots of books out there and to think they will all be digitized is a bit ambitious. The Internet is a great thing but it pales in comparison to a good academic research library.

If anyone thinks these materials will be available for free needs to think again. I think publishers of current materials will be very much against this because of the money/revenue/income/profit. Reid Elsievier, Thomson and other publishers ain't gonna allow their stuff to be freely published on the Internet.

Finally, if this does occur I would buy stock in paper companies. People print stuff out, plain and simple. I see law students, law professors and lawyers pull things up on Westlaw or Lexis and then print them out. We are still a book culture when it comes to reading larger documents.

It has always amazed me that low circulation academic journals are not entirely digitized, available to subscribers for a user fee, far lower than the cost of a hardcopy subscription which is beyond the reach of the independent scholar.

Eventually, if one wants a book to hold, they'll simply have the text downloaded at the local Kinko's or whatever and have it printed there on micro-demand.

Easy prediction: There will be blogs devoted to browsing Google Library, and commenting on interesting stuff found there. One or two of them will become bigtime blogs.

I suppose I'm a total geek, but I do read a lot of books on my computer screen (actually my Pocket PC screen). It's great for reading in bed with a spouse who wants to sleep. No light required; no rustling pages. It's also good for extended travel when you want to have a bunch of books to read without taking up packing space.

Having a googlable library in addition to Project Gutenberg--time to buy a bigger flash card and wireless for the Pocket PC.

Ted, one of my fellow law librarians is a big gadget guy. He is really into ebooks and the like. Those things really haven't caught on and many of the companies have gone under. The electronic book just hasn't taken off like some thought; however, there are many different reasons for that.

I thought downloadable books or books on disc would be great, since I'm 200 miles from the nearest decent library.

But reading on a screen is a pain.

I find I can get most of what I want on eBay,.