On a related note I happen to know that there are at least a couple print houses out there who are willing to print a single copy of a book on demand, if they have an electronic copy of it. It costs a little more than you'd pay at Barnes and Noble for a single copy but for most of the obscure titles I want I'd gladly pay the extra. If the major publishing houses ever wake up they'll start getting their own out of print titles into digital format and offer vast online warehouses of obscure books available for one-time printing. Heck, maybe they could partner with Google, who's apparently doing the scanning already, and achieve some kind of trade where Google gets to index and offer the search while the print-house/author who owns the copyright gets to use the scanned digital copy to provide one off printing of their work. That would solve the obscure book problem at least.
I mean honestly, they should already be doing that with all the books they're publishing now. They've got to have an electronic copy of some sort, so they could have all these titles available for one-off printing from their websites, thus at least partially solving the short shelf-life problem many books have. The music indistry has done something very like with the iTunes store and the rest, why not publishers?
Well, Stacer?