Keith Schultz asked why text and not scans? Here are the most obvious advantages of text over scans: 1. Speed 2. Storage 3. Searching 4. Quotations 5. Corrections The Details 1. Speed Reading from online scans can be a real pain as changing pages involves downloading another large file of scanning. Flipping through the pages becomes virtually impossible. If you have the time you can download the whole thing and then start reading, but flipping through the pages might still be a pain if they are not relationally linked, and many places still seem to forget that THEIR links do not work on YOUR SYSTEM unless the links are proper for that. 2. Storage You can store about a million eBooks of about a million character each on a terabyte drive at minimal cost and with very little hassle setting up the drive, even just a pocket terabyte drive will do, though it is slower. However, storing a million scans of books is virtually impossible for the everyday person, not to mention the problems reading them listed above. More terabytes and more cables than the average person is really willing to put up with, even for a library. 3. Searching In my own personal and professional opinion the greatest advantage to having text versus scans is searchability. I won't go into every kind of file pretending to be text but the plain text files are the most searchable and the storage space required is the least, particularly in the .zip or similar compressed formats. All the other formats seem to create errors that we have all seen where the search program can't find a word that is right there in front of us on the screen. Pretty much ANY editor or reader program does .txt files without much hassle, both for reading and searching. 4. Quotations I can cut and paste any text quotation into this article without any hassle at all from text files, but you can't do that from a scan. Same for cutting and pasting into your emails, Twitter & other IM formats, and even into .pdf files. For those who never quote anything, not a problem. However, when someone recommends I read something I will likely ask for a few choice quotations to evaluate. 5. Corrections It's difficult in the extreme to correct a scan error... you literally have to do it somethingm like Photoshop as if you were changing pixels, which you really are. It's still not easy to make those same corrections in an Adobe "Portable Document File" as they are NOT PORTABLE! Just try it a few times and you will understand. The more elevated the format, the harder is correction. /// Also, about copyright and public domain. . . . No, you can't have it both ways. . . . You can do a number of things like the PG and GNU, even the EFF, stuff like various forms of "Copyleft," but it is either copyrighted and with permission or it has the legal status of public domain to give everyone a legal, if not totally understood right to redistribute. Some of these give you ONLY the right to your own copy, without the right to hand out other copies. This means you have to read the fine print. With PG's license there is no difficulty: ALL PG eBOOKS CAN BE REDISTRIBUTED WITHOUG PG HASSLE-- there may be other laws in other countries that apply, but not from the PG license. mh