Updated/ repost: Elisabeth Sifton on "Goodbye to Books"

A superb essay, "The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes," by Elisabeth Sifton, senior vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in The Nation. Sifton critiques, quite strongly, the initiatives by technology firms, such as Google and Amazon, to digitize knowledge and distribute it according to their terms.

Subsequent to my initial post, a friend points out that the publishing industry has not exactly been altruistic to authors nor should it be seen as a hapless victim. That is a fair point. And, yes, as the friend also points out, initiatives like Google books make a lot of excellent books easily available and accessible to large numbers of people. Again, no disagreement. Books that are in the public domain such as the writings of nineteenth century colonial administrators on India are easily available to readers-- in complete form-- with a few clicks. The question for me is whether both authors and readers stand to gain from the new world of letters. I can think of benefits to readers-- especially in terms of informal networks of book selling and buying. Authors, I am not so sure of.