Thinking goes something like this. The fear is of course that the commercial services will make a killing off of this format. Storage needs for digitized text are considerably less than bitmapped pages, and instead of slowing down the networks, digitized text even with current phone systems, would move smoothly along. That, from my perspective is a reactionary approach. Because they are missing the obvious.
Libraries have a much different approach in the electronic world than commercial entities.
First, let's talk about preservation. Because long term access to text is the primary respon- sibility for libraries, we are as committed to protecting the text from change as any publisher. With libraries and their institutions as guardians of the sacred text, there is a built-in institutional guarantee of that. I'm sure there are libraries out in libraryland right now who would be delighted to establish such electronic archives with individual pub- lishers and would be willing to work to establish access and charging systems. Several library-related consortia, I would guess, would also be interested in some real pilot projects that weren't intended to bankrupt computer systems.