[lbo-talk] Fahrenheit 451 :Analysts: Borders may have trouble surviving bankruptcy

[Bill White]

On 2011-02-17, at 12:40 , Wojtek S wrote:
[WS:]  But you can still buy books online where it is much easier to find
> obscure titles than at Borders.
> 
> What concerns me more is not the disappearance of brick and mortar
> bookstores - even though I loved them for their ambiance - but the
> disappearance of print media.

I'm mostly a lurker on this list, but I worry about this as well, and have
been for some time.  I read this short article:

  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

in 1997 when it was first published in the Communications of the ACM (a
somewhat obscure journal for academic computer scientists).  I thought it
was overblown then, but I'm changing my mind.  The author, Richard Stallman,
is a genius and a visionary, but at the same time a certifiable lunatic.
He's certainly incorrect about scientific literature, which is becoming
freely available more and more often with arxiv.org and plos.org.