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OK, this is not about ethics, per se, but it is a very interesting article on the effects of being hyper-connected. Maybe we are losing contact with our domestic lives, family and our ability to think. Or, maybe the predictions that our always-connected society is heading for intellectual doom are just natural reactions to new technology. Consider this quote from the article, "Socrates believed that scrolls would erode thought by permitting people to forget what they had learned because they'd be able to look things up, that 'they wouldn't feel the need to remember it from the inside, completely on their own.' Worse, writing wouldn't 'allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.'"

Debate on the costs of college textbooks.  I think we did a better job at last year's SPI.

This is not likely to have any real effect. Textbooks are sold to a captive market. Those who are paying their tuition without benefit of student loans will buy the books without thinking too much about the cost. Those who are going to school on student loans will go into debt.

Copyright battles looming.

Holy moly! Our precious long tail is being called into question? The article referenced is here: http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/.

As Amazon does everything possible to compete with brick and mortar stores, and drive small book sellers out of business, how much control will they have over the industry? One of the upsides of electronic publishing is that information will not be controlled by corporate America in electronic form.

The good news is that publishing, as you and I have come to love it for the last couple of decades, is not dying. The bad news is that it's dead.

Chunka Mui is looking forward to the day that a company offers a similar service for eBooks. But he'd like to go one step better. He wants Apple (or Google or Amazon) to credit him for all the paper books he's bought over the years. He wants to be able to read them as eBooks, too.