The squat building that sits atop the hill that rises to the west from North Charles Street just before University Parkway holds its treasure underground. When you enter the Milton S. Eisenhower Library on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, you travel down to get to the stacks. Once there, the environment-conscious motion-controlled lights provide an unintentional metaphor. When you walk into the darkness between the more than 10-foot-tall Library of Congress-numbered bookshelves, your very presence illuminates the stacks. There, spine-out, cataloged, and stored in all its inefficient analog glory is that great instrument and growing anachronism of learning and wisdom: the paper-and-ink bound book.

America’s university research libraries, its public libraries, its bookstores, and its readers are in a period like no other in the history of reading. The digitization of the printed word, while gaining steam for more than a decade, has reached a critical mass, where difficult political decisions will determine what the future of reading may entail.

There’s no greater player in determining that future than the many-tentacled Google. Beginning in 2004, Google Books has digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages—laying the foundation for its professed desire to become the largest library the world has ever known. Building on this searchable Google Books behemoth, the company launched its Google e-bookstore in December, instantaneously becoming the largest retailer of books, broadly construed, in the world.

And while e-book selling is nothing new—Amazon and its Kindle, launched in 2007, now marshal more than 40 percent of the e-book market (even after the rollout of Apple’s iPad)—Google monetizes (the euphemism for getting paid in the digital realm) the downloadable, networked, cloud-inhabitant book in new and perverse ways. Most perversely, the research university libraries that signed on with Google to allow their holdings to be digitally scanned, free of charge, have been profoundly played by the corporate juggernaut. Those library holdings, the patrimony of taxpayers and tuition-paying students, are now repackaged and ready to be sold back to those very libraries.

This January at the second annual Digital Book World conference held in New York, Google representatives also gave an upbeat assessment of the less than two-month-old retail operation. Google Books product manager Abraham Murray told the conference that the free Google e-books app was installed more than a million times in the first few weeks. Google books were read on all kinds of devices, Murray said, from iPhones to tablets to Mac and PC screens.

The depth of that collection and the variety of devices on which its books can be read are the very things with which Google hopes to trump Amazon and conquer the e-book world. Yet Amazon’s desire is just as megalomaniacal as Google’s. Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content, told the Los Angeles Times in December, “Our vision is [to make] every book ever written, in any language, in print or out of print, all available within 60 seconds.”