Authors sue U.S. universities

Authors from the UK, Australia, and Canada have filed a suit against the University of Michigan, California, and Wisconsin, as well as Cornell and Indiana University over those schools’ plan to digitize books for libraries. The authors claim that this is taking place without their permission. The colleges say that these are all out-of-print books and that this is an effort to maintain the works in a permanent collection. It doesn’t take long to get existential with books these days but this situation brings up the issue of whether a digitized book and a paper book are two separate things or two different manifestations of the same thing.