NY Times: Battle Over Access to Online Books. Now, new technologies are igniting a similar battle closer to home. Librarians have seized on the potential of digital technology and offered users free online access to the contents of books from their homes, and they are squaring off with publishers who fear that free remote access costs them book sales. [Tomalak's Realm]

This type of development coupled with government coercion like CIPA will get us in the not too distant future a dearth of trust based information on sex and sexuality over the internet. One of my plans for future versions of this site is a way to search local card catalogs for books The Safer Sex Page recommends. I figure if in a future version I allow the user to sign in then I should be able to make calls to various card catalogs based on zip code. It would be pretty nifty I think to have a reference to an article and then be able to check it out or check on its local status. If this was linked deeply enough in conjuction with a commerce engine like Amazon it would make a great platform for research about safer sex issues.
6/17/02 11:07:48 PM