eedom to read the book in the form in which they
desire to read it, the Book Object also has complementary provisions by which a
book owner can control or restrain the freedoms allowed. This includes not only
presentation constraints, but also permission to print or permission that may
require monetary payments. The Universal Library Book Object is still a work in
progress, but we have now overcome a few of the more fundamental hurdles in
establishing the question of its feasibility."

Founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, The ETEXT Archives are home to electronic
texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to
the personal. Their duty is to provide electronic versions of texts without
judging their content.

The contents are:

- E-zines: electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal;

- Politics: political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups;

- Fiction: publications of amateur authors;

- Religion: mainstream and off-beat religious texts;

- Poetry: an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and

- Quartz: the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.

The ETEXT Archives were founded in the Summer of 1992 by Paul Southworth, and
hosted by the User Services Department of the University of Michigan's
Information Technology Division.

"The Web was just a glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was
still the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast majority of
users. The origin of the project has caused numerous people to associate it with
the University of Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official
relationship and the project is supported entirely by volunteer labor and
contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the project maintainers.

The project was started in response to the lack of organized archiving of
political documents, periodicals and discussions disseminated via Usenet on
newsgroups such as alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and
alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came later and was also
a substantial source of both materials and regular contributors.

Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines (e-zines) began their rapid proliferation
on the Internet, and it was clear that these materials suffered from the same
lack of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the fact that
the lines between e-zines (which at the time were mostly related to hacking,
phre