Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!csdev!ll1a!spl1!laidbak!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ll-xn!olsen
From: olsen@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Jim Olsen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <8804@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 88 18:12:52 GMT
References: <300.236DAA95@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG>
Sender: news@spl1.UUCP
Reply-To: olsen@xn.ll.mit.edu (Jim Olsen)
Organization: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Lines: 17

In article <300.236DAA95@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG>, Bernard Aboba writes:
>Not to mention the copyright problems, which many publishing firms have 
>already concluded to be insurmountable.

But there is a wealth of important works in the public domain, such as
government documents and works of pre-20th-century authors.  While one
would still have to recover scanning costs, these are small compared to
the costs of producing an original work, and will continue to decrease.
Much of the more recent material is already in digital form.

>Imagine the damage that could be done, say if a volume of legal
>references were copied by virtually every student at a law school, who
>then took the pirated copies with them into their practices?

Imagine the value to those law students of having, for modest cost,
the entire United States Code, Code of Federal Regulations, or United
States Reports (Supreme Court decisions) in their shirt pockets!