If the e-book world complies with these guidelines, it can decide now to avoid the legal entanglements faced by Napster and Gnutella, music sites often in the news these days because of copyright infringement. There was an afternoon panel session that focused on the library side of the house and what a handful of institutions are doing with the technology. The overarching theme here was lack of appropriate content, lack of appropriate content, lack of appropriate content. The NASA Goddard librarian spoke of their experimental program, i.e. internet access to a product rather than hand-held devices. Ultimately, Goddard went with the internet access approach, and the items are cataloged.
More action still needs to occur to integrate the e-book into daily activities.
If you have been reading the headlines about Napster, then you are aware of the MP3 file searching application that has turned the music industry upside down and is challenging our copyright ideas. Napster and similar applications are introducing a new way to search for information, one that could do away with the need for search engines. This idea is based on the cooperation of all Web publishers, who would have to actively share their hard drives with the rest of the world. One of the earliest Internet ideas was that you share out the workload of processing across a network of computers. Google, Altavista and others use spiders which crawl over the Web, deconstructing Web pages and recording their finds in their search index.