Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies.
To be sure, the complex realities of technology, publishing, libraries, and authorship cannot be reduced to a Manichaean notion of progressives battling money-grubbers, because most of the participants in the knowledge industries pursue self-interest, whether it is profit or prestige.
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