The man reminded me of myopic publishers and authors. Not quite grasping the full potential of the Internet, they fretted too much about copyright protection, and not enough about making their wares friendly to shoppers. A pay-per-read company in Virginia was typical here. You could download its books off the Internet, but you did not enjoy such niceties as links to other titles online. Nor could you print more than a page or so at once. Beyond that, you had to clutter up your computer system with a $25 gadget hooked up to the printer port. If you were working on tight deadlines and were rich and desperate enough, you might stomach this copy protection system. But I dreaded the possibility of its adoption by the book industry as a whole; established publishers and writers just might see the world pass them by if they cared too much about cybersafes and not enough about customer amenities. Many megabytes of good, free reading awaited the public on the Web, and not everyone understood the value that professional editors and writers could add. Nowadays, however, more publishers and hangers-on were catching on to the nuances of the Net. Among them was Laura Fillmore, a publishing consultant who owned the Online BookStore in Rockport, Massachusetts. She must have driven some traditionalists crazy. Fillmore actually had the notion that ASCII—text in a popular format, without italics and the other trimmings—should be free to everyone. She loved Project Gutenberg, which an Illinois academic had started to put classics and other works on the Net at no charge. Fillmore was the antithesis of a techno-geek, the kind of woman who just might read Dickens to her two children on snowy days, and who was a regular on the speaker circuit within her industry. She had majored in English at Barnard College and worked for a publishing company that dated back to the nineteenth century. Fillmore helped bridge the past and the electronic era. Her vision wasn’t quite the same as mine, but it was worlds apart from that of piracy-fixated publishers who saw electronic readers as a criminal class.