> However, if a popular site arose that handled, among other things,
> anonymous file-sharing, and e-books became a significant proportion
> of the shared media, it could manage to capture enough of the web
> population to start to generate the kind of e-book transaction
> numbers (however fair or ilicit) that every pub would have to take notice of.
Yep. Thats exactly what happened in Russia -
www.lib.ru - Moshkow's Library. That place had pretty much everything up on free access that they managed to OCR. And perhaps not coincidentally, they now have the most customer-friendly e-book business one could wish for.