It's great news. She reaches writers in a way that few others have been able to. Her recommendations were incredibly powerful, and she elevated authors whom the greater public had largely not known of.

It's not for third parties to come in and digitize copyrighted works of 10s of thousands of authors and decide what they'll do with it.

It's potentially a good thing, if it succeeds in getting the public's attention on books and reading. We would hope some of the benefit would spill over to lesser-known titles.

A lot of authors get by on the bits of money they get from various users of their work, and the Internet doesn't change all of that.

Books that are out of print frequently come back in print. A university press or a smaller house may bring it back, or it may come back when the author publishes a new book with a major publisher.

This sounds like the way to go. If there is a new way to extract value from a book, then the author and the publisher should share in this income.

We've never heard of anything like this. It really undermines the author's credibility and authority even if it's mostly inconsequential details. It's like putting a negative book review on the cover.

The Amazon programs are the way copyright is supposed to work.

I don't think it's particularly close under copyright law. You're not allowed to copy works for commercial purposes without a license, and that's precisely what they're doing.

We hope Amazon and others can make it work.