partnerships to take advantage of all this.²⁴ Like e-journals, e-books also have a history that goes back to the 1980s. In this arena, modern history can be said to have begun when two brothers opened the first Borders bookstore in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan, and invented the bookstore superstore chain that is by now commonplace. Until then, most bookstores were small, and unless they were subject-oriented, their stock comprised mostly popular literature with a smattering of less popular works.²⁵ With the opening of Borders, followed by dozens of off-spring across the United States, the consumer of serious books knew that he or she could walk into a bookstore and find instant gratification. Thus, Borders began—but only began—to fill the role that hitherto had been met by the library. If you were to visit a superstore in the springtime and see the customers sitting on the floor of the travel section or surrounded by travel books in the cappuccino bar, with no intention of buying but taking careful notes, you might think you were in a well-appointed public library. The book superstore comes closer to the kind of service for readers that hitherto only libraries could aspire to and added some of the congenial atmosphere that libraries provide (comfortable reading spaces, for example). However, in the bookstore superstore, taking a book home requires an economic transaction, sometimes a substantial one.

In the mid-1990s, an entrepreneur making a car trip with his wife had a vision of “the world’s largest bookstore,” a virtual shop in which the discerning reader could obtain every book—or nearly every book—currently in print. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 1999, achieved his dream: situating bookselling at the core of e-commerce and radicalizing the bookstore concept, to say nothing of notions of business success (Amazon.com, for all its millions of dollars in turnover, had yet to make a profit as of mid-2000²⁶). Through the Web, the Amazon.com shopper fills a virtual shopping cart with the desired books, which are delivered a day or two or three later to the reader’s address of choice. Through Amazon.com, large