“Creating a virtual Library of Alexandria has long been a dream of techies and book-lovers alike. Project Gutenberg, a digitisation initiative dating back to the 1970s, currently boasts over 17,000 books in around 45 languages. This summer, European nations backed a “digital library” plan to place literary works online. For readers, the idea of being able to access the aggregate knowledge of humanity on a single device from anywhere in the world seems a benefit of mythic proportions, and the obvious next step in man’s quest —from stone slabs to papyrus to movable type to ethereal digital bits—to document the world in words and symbols.”