In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this: if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products.

Imagine now, writing your own book and earning on-going royalties for many years off of that effort. Now I know the thoughts that are going through your mind, "Yeah, that would be nice, but I'm certainly no John Grisham."

It is amazing that the traditional archivists of human knowledge - the libraries - failed so spectacularly to ride the tiger of the Internet, that epitome and apex of knowledge creation and distribution.

Content Suppliers is the underprivileged sector of the Internet. They all lose money (even sites which offer basic, standardized goods - books, CDs), with the exception of sites profering sex or tourism.

In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.