The authority of digitized books

An English professor discusses online books and collections in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. He talks about how he slowly built up his own collection of the entire 24 volumes of the collected writings of Walt Whitman along with the nine volumes of conversations, With Walt Whitman in Camden, recorded by Whitman's disciple Horace Traubel - before the era of the internet. Now, of course, "We are in the midst of a technological revolution that will redraw the boundaries of scholarship in ways that are more profound than anything posited by the revolutionary arguments of the last generation."