However, some writers are happy for their works to be digitised without a payment.
Within a few decades, says Dr Turner, the entire observable universe will have been digitised.
Below, projected on the wall, is a digitised video animation of elegant korai statues (pictured above).
In this age of digitised information, knowledge, it seems, must be seen and heard, not just read.
The many hours of film have been acquired and digitised for posterity by the county Archives Service.
Before long his brain will appear in three digitised dimensions on the internet, for researchers to pore over.
The researchers based in South Africa can now pursue their work by computer, as they view digitised images of the manuscripts.
It will see all Burns papers held in Scotland examined, digitised and stored at the university's Centre for Robert Burns Studies.
Arrests of his associates in Switzerland turned up digitised versions of an even more sophisticated warhead than that passed to Libya.
Fed with digitised topographical data and a weather forecast, it can make a fair stab at predicting the behaviour of a bush fire.
ECONOMIST: Computer models may soon help to predict forest fires
The letters are kept in the collections of 100 institutions worldwide and the Wallace Correspondence Project has so far digitised about 95% of them.
Only 1% of the holdings in national libraries across the 27 EU members states have been digitised - and complex copyright laws are partly blamed.
He described "an age of algorithms" where connected sensors digitised all kinds of data about an individual's health and daily activities, and then provided them with useful material.
"We have digitised the sights and sounds of this fantastic place so children can make music as they learn the science, " said Braunarts director Terry Braun.
Common to all such services is a need for some form of speech recognition, as well as an engine that can generate speech from digitised text.
These devices have brought eclipsed authors and classic texts back into circulation, millions of which have been digitised and are available as free or cheap downloads.
Japan's NEC, for instance, sells face-recognition technology to allow advertisers to tailor what ad is showing on a digitised screen depending on the viewer's sex and age.
The British Library has digitised more than 1, 000 of its 19th-century novels and nonfiction works and made them available on Apple devices via a free app.
The evidence was so complex that, had the documents not been digitised, it is estimated the courtroom would have been awash with more than five million sheets of paper.
Shlomo Angel, an urban planning expert at New York University, gathered historical and census data from hundreds of cities, digitised thousands of maps and had computers count millions of pixels on satellite pictures.
Google has already digitised millions of out-of-print titles.
Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library's website and stored in perpetuity within the Library's digital archive.
ENGADGET: British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
The first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775).
ENGADGET: British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Boeing is still sounding out customers about a 747 big enough to carry 500 passengers (about 100 more than the jumbos that fly on long-haul routes today), but has already reworked the 747's electronics and digitised the original fuselage drawings, which date back to the 1960s.
We realised that if you had digital music, music that was digitised that is, then you could store it on flash memory or a hard drive and thus create a music player that could store many more songs that the Sony Walkmans or portable CD players that were the rage at the time.
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