This week’s announcement from Google got me dreaming again:

The next stage of Google’s book strategy became clearer on Thursday when the company announced that it would begin offering electronic books to any device with a Web browser through a new online store, beginning in the first half of 2010.

Of course, I was dreaming about something for which I have no contract, but which has tantalized me ever since I started with Ain’t Marchin’s Facebook page. A bunch of perhaps hopeless what-ifs, considering all the triple copyright issues involved; I used Google’s Bloomsday image, above, both to honor the great artificer (who invented the mashup in some ways) and acknowledge the anti-creative efforts of his grandson.

None of which prevents me from engaging in  series of what-ifs. For example, what if:

• each tight chapter offered an e-link to more extended documentation, and even longer scenes?
• readers curious about, say, John Huston’s “Let There Be Light” got an actual clip of the film, and another click to find where they can secure the whole thing?
• similarly, documentaries by Judith Ehrlich and Dave Zeiger cd be glimpsed and co-marketed?
• ditto hundreds of pages of now-declassified FBI files on Medgar Evers or the Berrigans, or Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s mad alchemist works?

I know the book needs to stand alone, and provide a full picture and satisfying story. But it seems silly not to make use of this place in the information undertow, once quaintly named a simple highway.

What do you think?