Hmmm…new blog, interesting ideas [shifted]. What if Google became the ultimate publisher, purveyor of all things digital, books, journals, you name it. Buy a publisher or two, a few aggregators, mash them together, and all of a sudden you have a new content stream, funded by advertising rather than folk in the street parting with moolah. There’s signs of this sort of thing beginning to happen, eg google scanning lots of books, not to mention some publishers eg my own company, Gale, opening their database content to google to index. The advertising model seems to work, and generates enough cash to keep these sorts of projects going. It’s only a matter of time before someone the size of google steps in and throws a bit of weight around.
snail
techie librarian; meatier than a seahorse
snail 
Which leads one to wonder how creators will control their copyrights and protect their works from exploitation. It’s hard enough to be a writer these days, getting by on next to nothing and then these billion dollar companies decide that cyberspace is free of such encumbrances as copyright, it’s all (somehow) in the public domain. It’s up to artists to act collectively, to lobby to keep the electronic/digital frontier from STEALING our work. Look out Google and you lot, you may think you’re untouchable but you’re not…