Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

Coleridge is a writer/thinker whose own life and works, particularly the later ones, seem to defy the eye of future standard, especially in an age of slick convenience. He is looking for "the vast," does not ignore German idealism like so many other Brits, nor philology, and seeks the vast from the socio-political context of a well-booked, if ne'er-do-too-well, remote, clergy-trained, English townsman.

A friend of mine holds the considered opinion that beaches and books go together like peanut butter and jelly. If that is so, the people on the Georgia coast are as well-fortified as a fifth grader's lunch box. I went down to Glynn County the other day to visit with Friends of the Library, meaning the regional library in Brunswick. …

Substantial and well-booked as the Glynn County library is, it is not, as the Friends pointed out, the only library in the area.