All this Internet Archive hubbub made me rifle through our archives to see how WIRED covered its early years. I found “The Great Library of Amazonia,” a fascinating 2003 Gary Wolf article on Amazon’s efforts to archive every book. Many of the copyright issues it triggered remain, uh, extremely relevant: 

The copyrights to these titles are spread among countless owners. How was it possible to create a publicly accessible database from material whose ownership is so tangled? Amazon's solution is audacious: The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all. "This is not an ebook project!" Manber says. And in a sense he is right. The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures — pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume — which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages in the archive, and they won't be able to view more than a few thousand pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book.

Manber has built a powerful, even mind-boggling tool, then added powerful constraints. "The point is to help users find a book," says Manber, "not to make a new source of information."

Bezos is vehement on this point. He has sold publishers on the idea that digitizing hundreds of thousands of copyright books won't undermine the conventional bookselling business. "It is critical that this be understood as a way to get publishers and authors in contact with customers," he says in an interview at Amazon's Seattle headquarters. "We're perfectly aligned with these folks. Our goal is to sell more books!"