<<
... the amount of unfiltered information out there will be overwhelming, and 
I doubt that Robin's projections of filtering mechanisms will do the trick.
>>

I have serious doubts myself, Mark, and also a worry about the whole notion 
of "filters", which unfortunately given the information/noise ratio (and for 
me it's more the ratio than the amount that's the problem) would seem in 
some instances to be necessary.

Would Emily Dickinson get through any possible model of a filter we set up? 
(But then again, she didn't have that much luck when she tried to push her 
work in the 1850s, and ended up resorting to the fundamental mode of 
self-publication, writing her poems out by hands and sewing them together 
and putting them in a drawer.  Today, maybe she'd have a blog.)

I currently do very much think that we should look at the only two methods 
on the Net that work at all -- the google model and the Wiki model.

Perhaps I *am over-hopeful that one or the other of these two will be 
developed in a useful way.  And god knows, it never occurred to me before 
today that amazon might have a use in this area.

But as an anecdote, I know of at least one publisher who's pretty careful to 
make sure his books are up on amazon.  Not that he expects anyone to buy 
them *from there (and he'd probably lose money if they anyone did rather 
than purchasing direct or via other outlets) but because it's a shop window.

Anyway, better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Or do both, like the Birk, who both excoriates the current situation and 
makes his work available in pdf format to be printed out by any interested 
reader.  That's one very useful model.

        http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/

Robin