| Sažetak: | <p>Extract:</p>
<p>In 1999 I attended a conference about digitizing manuscript corpora at which the participants were convinced of the imminent demise of print culture: all access to document images would be online, all ‘facsimiles’ would be on CD-ROM. That didn’t happen. On the contrary: the British Library found that putting manuscript images online stimulated the sales of paper facsimiles of those books. Despite Amazon’s success with Kindle (sales of eBooks finally outstripped sales of hardbacks in 2012), there is still no substitute for a paper copy for performing; for handling a physical object to understand the relationship of pages (and pieces) to one another; for getting simple pleasure from ownership of something beautiful. The demand for facsimiles, particularly of objects that simply cannot be handled in the everyday way for which they were intended, is still high, and will probably never be lost.</p>
<p>This is far from the whole story however: Google Books was launched in 2004, and despite the almost continuous lawsuits that have accompanied its progress, by March 2012 it had digitized more than 20 million books. Online delivery and access is unstoppable, and the demand for more online materials escalates with it.</p>
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