Cliff Lynch's "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World" (First Monday, Volume 6, Number 6 [2001]) is so full of eloquent summaries of issues in the future of libraries that I want to collect some extracts for speed readers, including both important matters of fact and bits of elegant prose. This is no substitute for reading the whole thing (50-odd pages... though a lot is concerned with e-book issues that are more than two years back in the stream of development, and aren't the reason I read the piece), and is meant to prompt that activity. I'll lay the quoted bits down in the order they appear, since there's no pagination in the original, and add (...) between quoted passages:
...the convergence of different types of content into a common digital bit-stream... (Abstract)

(...)

The real issues are more fundamental: how do we think of books in the digital world, and how will books behave? How will we be able to use them, to share them, and to refer to them? In particular, what are our expectations about the persistence and permanence of human communication as embodied in books as we enter the brave new digital world? Will our thinking be dominated by the conventions and business models of print publishing (and the current power relationships among publishers, readers, and authors), and by our cultural practices, consumer expectations, legal frameworks and social norms related to books, or will we discard these traditions, perhaps in favor of evolving practices from industries such as music? These are questions about which I believe we need to think explicitly and deeply, and not just answer by default, as mere by-products of shifting trends in the consumer marketplace.

(...)

Legal tools such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed (largely unnoticed by the public) in 1998 are being exploited to support lawsuits against new technologies and against consumers who employ them. The DMCA represents a massive change in the balance of control over content in digital form when compared to historical traditions surrounding the sale and use of intellectual works in the United States. A series of arcane and stunningly disingenuous legal assaults...

(...)

...completely left behind in the focus on reading technologies, control of intellectual property, and the economics of publishing (and all of their broader social implications) is the deep, important, and exciting question of how the digital medium may permit authors and readers to reconceptualize the acts of communication and documentation that have been embodied in the printed book for some or all of the purposes that the book has historically served. This may be the area with the greatest promise of truly transformative changes.

(...)

Sometime in the 1980s I heard this statement about digital books:

"Here's a "view from the future," looking back at our "present," from Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT: "Can you imagine that they used to have libraries where the books didn't talk to each other?"" [perhaps Alan Kay]
This is simultaneously provocative, asinine, and inspiring. Perhaps the idea was that digital books would somehow create hypertext linkages among each other; this is reasonable and useful. Perhaps there was a perception that books would become active knowledge structures, and would somehow enhance each other through some technique deeper than simply making links; this is a powerful and important idea, but the necessary knowledge representation structures have proved hard to develop and to populate. But as I think about personal digital libraries populated by publishers, I now find myself thinking about another memorable talk by Bob Lucky of Bell Labs. Lucky described an imminent future where he discovers that his personal computer is swapping e-mail, expense reports, and other digital gossip with other corporate computers over the network; the computers know who is getting fired and promoted before the people involved. What might the books in a personal digital library be saying to each other? They might well be sending inventories of holdings and reading patterns upstream to each publisher that has provided books that are part of the collection, so that the owner of the personal digital library can be notified of new books to add to the collection; they might be trading statistics about how often each book is being consulted, and through what search terms. As e-book readers morph into personal digital libraries, we need to think about what information is being shared, and with whom. We also need to think about vulnerabilities. For example, imagine one's personal library being wiped out or corrupted because you've downloaded a virus-ridden digital book. Or, even more powerfully, an e-book full of crazy or maliciously false information that starts "talking" to your other books.

(...)

Certain specific genres have been a great success in electronic forms, and these are rapidly displacing printed products. For example, bibliographies, abstracting and indexing guides, citation indexes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, product catalogs, and maintenance manuals for complex systems such as aircraft work well in digital form. In a sense, by moving to the digital medium we have been able to understand these kinds of works more deeply, and to bring out their essence. It is not an accident that computerization was applied to the construction and editing of these works very early, and in a great irony we have now undone a perverse process where computers were used to construct these works and then reduce them to print because the infrastructure did not yet exist to make them available to the public as digital content directly.

(...)

All of these genres share several key properties: their readers want to find and then read relatively short chunks of specific text; they are frequently updated; and, in some cases they can be greatly enriched by the larger amounts of content and multimedia amenities that the electronic environment can inexpensively accommodate (the cost of increasing from 1,000 pages to 3,000 pages of content and adding large numbers of illustrations is much cheaper for an electronic work than for a printed work). They are more like reference databases than traditional books that are read sequentially from beginning to end. In their digital versions, these items are often quite different than the printed works they superseded. These digital works are now well-established in business, consumer, and library marketplaces, both as networked information services and as CD-ROM-based content that is used with custom programs. Interestingly, they are not always a good fit with e-book readers because they aren't really read like books, and indeed in digital form aren't even presented like traditional books, but rather as databases to be searched or browsed. In this sense, they have succeeded precisely because they are not literal translations of the predecessor print products to the digital world. They have moved the content with little change, but radically restructured the presentation interface.

(...)

Numerous studies in university settings have discovered what people do with these electronic offerings: They use the online (or other computer-based version) to browse, to do quick checking, to decide what they do and do not want to read carefully. But if the piece is over a few screens in length, they print the article for reading. In essence, they are using paper - a mature, robust, and exquisitely effective viewing technology - as their preferred user interface for reading.

(...)

In the digital world, the palette of capabilities available to the author has been vastly enlarged; there are new ways to communicate, to structure arguments, to provide insights.