look, jim, you raised some important issues.... which i am willing to talk about. and you raised some unimportant "issues", which i am not all that eager to talk about. so i should just tell you "no" right now, but i'm gonna say it one more time, just for you.
You make great big assumptions about the nature of the machines that people are reading on
i assume you can search the "metadata", yes. (and if you cannot, you need to take that up with someone else, because that is a basic.) so if you want to find "sun tzu", you'd search for "sun tzu", and if that didn't work, then you'd search for "sun" and "tzu" separately... so it wouldn't matter where in the sort order that this record fell, because you could find it. same with marquis de sade and walter van holst and any other name you want to come up with... if you want to read more on this general idea, i would suggest "everything is miscellaneous".
But while in there you decide to look at the fiction stacks just for fun to see if they have your favorite author.
you're still carrying around a physical mindset -- one which has always been riddled with problems -- when the world has moved to an electronic one. which is why i won't bother to discuss this any more. but those missing italics of yours? i'll discuss those. -bowerbird