I've moved several times since acquiring all of those magazines, which fit neatly into nine very heavy boxes. Toting them from place to place added to the pain and expense of moving.

Imagine my surprise this week when I learned that National Geographic is selling digital versions of . No, there are no typos here. They'll sell you 120 years of brilliant photography, insight and commentary about our world for essentially the price of taking your family to see "Avatar." For $200, they'll even send you .

Meanwhile, the Library of Congress was good enough to scan some , many of which were too fragile even to let historians touch them. These documents were next to impossible to access, even by historians. Now, anyone in the world with an Internet connection can access all of them -- if, that is, they're not too busy poring over the more than 10 million books has scanned and put online for free.

Speaking of free, that appears to be the magic price point for big sales. Amazon announced this week that the majority of its record-breaking Kindle eBook sales over the holiday were, in fact, books the company was "selling" at the . Many of these were public domain books with expired copyrights. But surprisingly, many were not.

Where is all this going?