Except, in Gibson's case, he did it with a self-destructing floppy disc—optical media were nowhere near so commonplace then—and a book whose pages blackened themselves on exposure to air.

And Gibson didn’t do it from a DRM perspective—in fact, he fully expected the text of the book to be made available via the Internet (yes, even in 1992), and it was. I recall clearly sitting in a UVA computer lab downloading the samizdat from the Usenet or an FTP site. His point was rather about the fungibility of life and of memory—and maybe about the fact that although the physical artifact disappears, the essence remains among the collective memory.

Of course Matthew knows all of this, but I wanted to put it out there for everyone else. Gibson's own remarks on the text are at the bottom of this page: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp.

Right on all counts, Tim. Including your last remark: FWIW, AGRIPPA forms the intro to my book. ;-)