If you follow the trend lines for book and magazine availability, pricing and the costs of distribution and digital storage, we'll soon find ourselves living in a world where literally millions of titles are available to just about everyone, just about all the time. How will that change human culture? Here are the implications:

A magazine subscription will include all back-issues. What happens when you subscribe to the electronic version of Esquire , and they toss in every issue of Esquire ever published? You can now include the magazine in your global searches for information. A magazine subscription suddenly becomes more valuable to readers. Business model anyone?

Intellectuals lose their monopoly access to some content. I started out in the newspaper business, and very quickly began writing opinion columns. We small-town newspaper editorialists used newspaper clippings in a self-constructed "morgue file" as our primary resource. The big-time, national and syndicated columnists had pricey subscriptions to the Lexis/Nexis database, which is billed as the "world's largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information." Well before journalists used the Internet for anything, deep-pocket columnists could conduct what were essentially Google-style searches to find all kinds of information, while we hacks in the hinterlands had to thumb through paper folders jammed with newspaper articles.

A similar thing is happening with historians. There are thousands of amateur historians with insight, talent and knowledge, but without access to documents and other materials. Thanks to the Internet, Google and now initiatives like the Library of Congress' historic book scanning project, the playing field has been leveled dramatically.

This same thing is also taking place with university courses. Just take a gander at of free online university lectures. The Internet has given us all a direct window into Ivy League classrooms.