The future of ideas and information

I've been watching MIT World Videos--a large collection of lectures by some of the top thinkers in academia. It's a good site that I recommend. One great benefit of the internet has been in its potential in giving ordinary people cheap access to quality ideas and intellectual debate. I was thinking today how great it would be if book publishers would simply allow us to sign up to large consortiums of book-sellers and then download any book we wanted to read (or listen to). I've seen some timid steps in this direction, but there's still a huge gap between the knowledge available to researchers at the top universities and what the average low-earning citizen has access to on the internet.