Whose book is it, anyway?

Even after I wrote a couple of posts about Amazon's Kindle announcements last week, something still nagged me - I sensed there was an angle I was missing - and two nights ago it finally hit me. I woke from a fretful sleep and discovered a question pinballing through my synapses: What the heck does Kuzuo Ishiguro think about this? Or, more generally: Whose book is it, anyway? You might have thought that question was put to rest a few hundred years ago. For quite a while after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the issue of who controlled a book's contents remained a fraught one. As is often the case, it took many years for laws, contractual arrangements, business practices, and social norms to catch up with the revolutionary new technology. But in due course the dust settled, and control over a book's contents came to rest firmly in the hands of a book's author (at least through the term of copyright). Which seems like the proper outcome. You probably wouldn't, for instance, want book retailers to be able to fiddle with the text of a new book at their whim - that would be annoying, confusing, and wrong. And...