you can't read the books?

If it costs $1,000 to create an electronic book through a government or foundation grant, then $1,000,000,000 funds for electronic libraries should easily create a 1,000,000 volume electronic library in no time at all.

After all, if someone paid YOU $1,000 to type, scan or to otherwise get a public domain book onto the Internet, you could do that in no time at all, and so could one million other people, and they could probably do it in a week, if they tried really hard, maybe in a month if they only did it in their spare time. For $1,000 per book, I am sure a few people would be turning out a book a week for as long as it took to get all million books into electronic text.

There has been perhaps ONE BILLION DOLLARS granted for an electronic library in a variety of places, manners, types and all other diversities; IF THE COST IS ONE THOUSAND OF THOSE DOLLARS TO CREATE A SINGLE ELECTRONIC BOOK, THEN WE SHOULD HAVE ONE MILLION BOOKS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE TO USE.

HOW HAS THIS PROCESS BEEN STOPPED?

Anyone who wants to stop this process for a Public Domain Library of information is probably suffering from several of the Seven Deadly Sins:

Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, greed, envy, and sloth.
Merriam Webster Third International Unabridged Dictionary
[Above: Greed = Gluttony, and moved back one place]

[Below: my simple descriptions of the Seven Deadly Sins]

1. Pride: I have one and you don't.

2. Covetousness: Mine is worth more if you don't have a copy or something similar. I want yours. I want the one you have, even if I already have one or many.

3. Lust: I have to have it.

4. Anger: I will hurt you to ensure that I have it, and and to ensure that you do not have one.

5. Envy: I hate that you have one.

6. Greed: There is no end to how much I want, or to how little I want you to have in comparison.

7. Sloth: I am opposed to you moving up the ladder: it means that I will have to move up the ladder, to keep my position of lordship over you. If I have twice as much as you do, and you gain a rung, that means I can only regain my previous lordship by moving up two; it is far easier to knock you back a rung, or to prevent you from climbing at all.

Destruction is easier than construction.

This becomes even more obvious for the person who has a goal of being 10 or 100 times further up the ladder of success. . .given the old, and hopefully obsolete, or soon to be obsolete, definitions of success.

    "If I worked like a fiend all my life to ensure I had
    a thousand dollars for every dollar you had, and then
  someone came along and wanted to give everyone $1000,
  then I would be forced to work like a fiend again, to
  get another million dollars to retain my position."

Think about it: someone spends a lifetime achieving, creating, or otherwise investing their life, building a talent, an idea, or a physical manifestation of the life they have led. . .the destruction of this is far easier than the construction. . .just as the building of a house is much more difficult, requires training, discipline, knowledge of the laws of physics to get a temperature and light balance suitable for latitudes, etc., etc., etc.

But nearly anyone can burn down a building, or a pile of books without a fraction of this kind of training.

People are used to lording it over others by building and writing certain items that reflect their lordship over themselves, their environments, and, last/least, over other people. If they were not engaged in power over themselves [self-discipline, education, etc,] or over their environments [food, clothing and shelter], then they have only other people to have control over and that is the problem. They don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "If I did it with the hard ways and tools of the past, then YOU would threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the present has to offer, and I don't want to learn the new tools, since I have invested my whole life to the mastery of the old tools." I have literally met very highly placed souls in the system of higher education who have told me they will quit the system on the day they have to use email because it removes the control they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls and the paper mails. It is just too obvious if a big wig is not answering your email, since email programs can actually tell you the second it was delivered and also the second the person "opened" it.

This is why SOME people fear the new Internet: other people fear it NOT because they lose the kind of lord position that comes with OWNERSHIP; rather they fear, in a similar manner, they will lose the CONTROL which they have used to achieve their position of lordship, such as one kind of professor mentioned below.

*****As Hart's DOS prompt sometimes states:*****

    "Money is how people with no talent keep score!"
  "Control is how others with no money keep score!"

These Seven Deadly Sins, while named by various names and by most civilizations, have nonetheless often been actual laws; in that certain people were required, by law, to be victims of the rest of their populations in that a person might be legally denied ownership of any property, due to racism or sexism, or denied the right to a contract, even legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an assortment of rights to vote, contract and own property— there have even been laws that forbade any but the "upper crust" to wear certain types of clothing, a "statement of fashion" of a slightly different order than we see today, but with similar ends.

You might want to look up laws that once divided this and other countries by making it illegal to teach any persons of certain races or genders reading, writing, arithmetic, and others of the ways human beings learn to have a power over their environments.

Power over oneself is the first kind of power…if you do not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control of anything.

Power over the environment is the second kind of power… if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are going to have a hard time controlling anything else.

Power over other human being is the third kind of power— described above in the Seven Deadly Sins, a third raters' kind of power. Those who cannot control anything else… must, by definition, have others control things for them. If they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation of others, then they must find some way to control them.

We are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't BUILD the Internet to control it, and the 40 million people who are on it; people from the goverment to big business, who feel "Freedom Is Slavery" or at least dangerous; and, who feel the Internet is the "NEXT COMMERCIAL FRONTIER" where customers are all ready to be inundated with advertising, more cheaply than with junkmail. Fortunately