The Future Of Books

Could come with the downfall of book stores. Anthony Grafton explains and worries about monopoly control of information:

For years, Google has kept rolling out one new application after another, from Street View to Fast Flip, and rolling over most of the competition as it does so. They’ve just done it again: [Thursday], Google announced that they would allow On Demand Books to produce paperback versions of two million out-of-copyright digitized texts on the Espresso Book Machine, which can print and bind a book in less than five minutes. For the recommended $8 a copythe price of a paperback romancereaders will be able to buy anything from “Moby Dick” to “Dame Curtsey’s Book of Candy Making,” The Google-On Demand partnership could transform retail booksellingespecially of books for university courses.