There should be a term in the language to describe a person just enough older and grumpier than oneself that, by comparing his or her responses to things and the passing scene, one can judge oneself not so old and square and out of it as all that, and with an admirable tolerance for and understanding of the Modern World.

This occasioned by a John Updike rant (gentle, but a rant) about Google's plans to digitize every book ever written and permit everyone to have acces to everything, cut it up, build their own personal versions of whatever and then disperse them to the world.  There is some kind of category error that (old) people make when faced with the World Wide anything:  they don't see that making things available to all the world will not actually mean that everyone in the world will avail themselves of it.  It appears to them that the value and uniquenss and quiddity of literary works will be somehow infinitely diluted by the Whole World having infinite and instant access to it.  But they won't want any of it except the things they want, and now can find and have, and those who want to cut up books and paste their contents into fanbooks and hommages and imitations and then distribute won't be doing it with books that will remain inaccessible to them for other reasons:  Ulysses and the Odyssey and and and and  will be just as invisible to them, or just as randomly likely to appear before them and captivate them, as they ever were, i.e. not very likely.

From ancient times to the end of the 19th c. when books became vastly available and accessible, those who could get them and read them used to cut and paste them in copybooks and beautiful quotation books and collections of homilies (and recipes), which collections then circulated, some of them becoming more available than their originals, in fact becoming in some cases all we know of those originals.

So JU should probably rest easy.  Though I love bookstores as much as he does.  The contents thereof a different matter:  some yes, some no.