Continuing the Democratization of Knowledge through eBooks

Definitely an improvement. Now that we have removed the brush, we can see where the gaps really are that you need to fill.

It turns out, in this account, that the book thing is really just "next verse, same as the first," with respect to the arguments you hear from the publishers, and the things you want to say back. But that overlooks the immense differences between recorded music and video, on one hand, and the print stream on the other. The historical and economic differences are greater than they appear, instead of negligible, as your analysis at present seems to indicate. Which accounts for the mystery of timing: given that the filesizes of books are smaller even than music (never mind the crappy forms used by e-book readers: I can give you BOTH the actual images of the book pages as printed, for a 1,000-page text, along with an e-text version automatically made by OCRing the book page that makes the human-readable page images fully searchable, in less than the space taken up by a mid-quality mp3 three-minute pop song), why is the book meltdown occurring a decade after the music one? If you ponder that awhile, you'll see something important.

Something else important is that the Edisonian revolution happened a moment ago, while we have been using writing in order to produce what we call civilization since we've had it. In other words, the market for music and video recordings distributes evanescence, but everything we are is in books. And all books, whether they contain contemporary rubbish that wastes good toilet paper or are Aristotle, and technically the same. There's no DRM for the printed page.

The whole Google books pretend battle assumes that you have to be Google to scan all the books in the world. You don't. You should learn enough about book scanning to understand how easy and cheap it would be FOR YOU to scan, prepare, and distribute as e-books on the Net all the books you own. Each existing book in the world only has to be scanned once, which means anywhere there's a copy, there can be a perfect digital copy that will last forever for everybody. Using any digital camera and software everyone in the world can use, copy, modify and redistribute for free, you can make a perfect copy of any book that everyone in the world can use forever in less than two hours. If you can afford $400 once, and the book copies you are scanning don't have to remain intact, you can cut that time in half.

So Google Books is irrelevant. All the books in the world will be available to everyone everywhere for free, thus making the human mind, for the first time in the history of humanity, everywhere able to learn whatever it wants, within one generation. Publishers are in the final period of play. That affects economic reality and strategic behavior very deeply. You don't write about that because you haven't seen all the way around the subject yet. But you've got a good start here, and you should finish the job.