While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, amachine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill,decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. Inthis approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and theauthors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost. Needless to say,this approach would hide its tracks so that it would be hard to send a nanopayment to an author who hadbeen aggregated.