You ever watch Star Trek and see a character sitting around reading one of those little notepads that has access to every book ever written? If you are wondering how that sort of thing is going to happen, I think it starts with these two articles. The first is one written today from the AP “Publisher warms to Scribd store” and the second is “Is Google Hurting Book Publishers” was published on CNBC today.

The issue here is how books are going to make it online. The much talked about Google deal is of course a gateway for these “Orphaned” books. No one likes the idea that Google’s hands are the only ones in the cookie jar, but either way the books are still making it online. The first story listed is talking about how copyrighted books might make it online. If you mix that with what Amazon is doing, and Gutenberg, you have a bunch of people racing to digitize the entire sum of all written human knowledge. This is, of course, how one day you and I will be able to sit down and access any written text from our Kindle like device.

In 10 years the fighting and bickering, and piracy won’t really matter all that much. Right now, as I’m typing this there is a massive push to catalogue, organize, digitize the sum of all of our written knowledge. For readers it’s a great thing. They are all fighting, and working, and suing each other to build our central access point. They may not know it right now, but some day we’ll be sitting down to read whatever book we want on our handheld and it won’t really matter to us all that much if we buy our books from Google or Amazon or Scribd.