Again and again I flamed Lehman’s Green Paper on alt.activism and at least half a dozen other newsgroups on the Internet. I hadn’t any choice. He hated the bytes-want-to-be-free philosophy of TeleRead. Clearly, if Lehman had read TeleRead, it would have driven him nuts, given his apparent belief that copyrighted books must _cost_ readers. TeleRead, on the other hand, would mean fair treatment of copyright holders and library users alike. With a TeleRead-style library, publishers, writers, and private nets could still charge for many categories of information and earn handsome sums from online conferences and other services and products, including customized software to guide people through electronic libraries. Also, they would receive fair royalties for covered material such as books. At the same time, however, thanks to the cost justification provided by the e-forms, we could make electronic books free in this TV-fixated era and thus encourage literacy. Surely TeleRead could be a logical link between Gore’s plans for reinventing government and his oft-claimed desire to drive down the cost of knowledge. With TeleRead, the old scarcities could be obsolete; rich and poor could dial up the same books. It would be a far cry from the present when Beverly Hills spent many times more on library materials than did some poorer jurisdictions. TeleRead was not a cure-all; but in an era of tight budgets, the national library could be phased in carefully, year by year, topic by topic, with minimal pain. The reduction of expensive, onerous paperwork would be like a tax rebate. For once, a program could simultaneously help schoolchildren and small business people. Perhaps the NII Advisory Council would see merit in TeleRead. The White House didn’t necessarily have to follow its recommendations, but wasn’t this the age of electronic democracy and citizens’ input? A few problems had arisen, however. Bill Clinton’s people had tolerated just one librarian among the more than thirty members of the Council. An overworked teacher was there representing education. But no full-time professional writers of books, and just one newspaper publisher, had ended up tainting the Advisory Council. Nor did any name show up from a distinguished publishing firm such as Knopf or Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Instead the White House blessed the NII with Vance Opperman, a friend of Al Gore’s and a money man for the Democratic Party,[6.46] who was president of West Publishing. By one estimate West grossed some $600 million a year with pretax margins of almost 30 percent, or twice those of rivals.[6.47] West-style firms were famous for Cadillac-priced data. Opperman’s company had set up collections of court opinions and slapped a proprietary system of citations on them. The meter typically ran at $4 a minute or more, adding up to millions from Feds and taxpayers alike.