To be sure, the complex realities of technology, publishing, libraries, and authorship cannot be reduced to a Manichaean notion of progressives battling money-grubbers, because most of the participants in the knowledge industries pursue self-interest, whether it is profit or prestige. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence.
In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet.
