This last week, I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Jay Datema of Library Journal and Bookism, and Jessamyn West of Librarian.net (details to be announced soon).

Of course anytime I am asked about anything for more than 10 mins, I tend toward pontification on various points, and through the richness of dialogue, new thoughts emerge.

As we talked amongst ourselves about digital books and the problems of unequal access, it seemed to me that librarians and publishers should be talking about the same kind of initiative for digital books that many STM journal publishers have embraced for access to articles in the Third World. In a few years time, when most non-fiction works are born and maintained digital, and when the texts are far more portable and granular than they are now, we need to develop and take advantage of the new opportunities for access that digital provides.

Providing free or heavily subsidized access to digital texts in the Third World provides huge advantages: first and foremost to our global society. Lessening stratification is an imperative that should be addressed with urgency through all means at our disposal. Second, from a more commercial perspective, a large chunk of the world is very much a growth market for knowledge, reading, and books. Providing access now grows potential demand for the long term.

Book publishers might worry about loss of sales, pirate sites, and so forth. I think there are several rejoinders to this, the first being that journal publishers have evidently managed to figure this out satisfactorily. Perhaps Elsevier can provide some assistance to text publishers, if they have qualms. There is also the potential argument that there is more to lose - a whole book, vs. an article. Here again, I think there are fallacies: I think many people are interested in only parts of books, not whole ones, and access could be provided granularly. Further, there are ways of policing downloads and pirate sites to prevent loss of copyrighted material.

While this is not a simple or straightforward path, now is the best time for us to start thinking about these issues, at the time when so many of us in the industry are beginning to build digital repositories.