I have an unreducible pile of paper books that I can’t bear to send for recycling, even though they are as cluttersome and unsearchable as all paper books. What will become of them? I’m starting to get a clearer idea, after hearing about a start-up which charges to digitize your books, recycling them in the process (for the obvious reason of copyright). There’s clearly a chunky opportunity here for the big players – after all, they already have my books on their hard drives. What’s stopping them offering a book-disappearing service? The law, probably, but that will change. And greed – they’ll make sure to exhaust the supply of suckers who are prepared pay for a digital copy of the book they already own. I can wait. And if it takes too long, I’ll find another way to get a digital copy of the content I paid for. An infinitely cheaper way.