Last Friday morning, the writer Cory Doctorow took the stage of the Royal Ontario Museum's Bronfman Hall and, over the course of 45 minutes, delivered a lecture entitled "How to Destroy the Book." He began his keynote address of the TD National Reading Summit with an elegy to our love affair with books, before launching a blistering attack on those trying to remake copyright laws to snuff out copy and sharing culture, which he sees as the lifeblood of books. Take e-books, for example. The convoluted fine print, which runs into the thousands of words, makes clear that the reader does not own this version of the book - with the ability to, say, sell it to a second-hand bookstore - but rather "licenses" it.
