Scan This Book! - New York Times

In Scan This Book!, Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses the universal library, the (ending) hegemony of the copy, the legal tug of war between Google and publishers, and the larger conflict between old, copy-based business models and new technology. Here's a brief snippet:

What is the technology telling us? That copies don't count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library. Soon a book outside the library will be like a Web page outside the Web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

Kelly offers more than the idealistic, "information wants to be free," argument. Definitely worth a read.