Public libraries have become substitute offices for the recently disenfranchised, so it wasn’t unusual that 40 bright, talented and unemployed people found themselves in a conference room on a dreary day at the Montclair Public Library last January.

But they had something else in common: They were all refugees from The Star-Ledger, which had required deep layoffs to stay in business.

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It won’t be easy for publishers to overcome the Original Sin of giving away their valuable content for free. But it could be done. Theoretically.

The most logical way, as suggested prominently by David Carr in the New York Times and Walter Isaacson on the cover of Time Magazine, is some sort of micropayment system.

Here’s how it would work: Consumers would use their credit cards to fund accounts to purchase online content through a single system deployed at the largest possible number of participating Web sites. We might call the system the Universal Simple Interactive Network, or UN-SIN for short.

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Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices. The digerati crowed over the collapse of the hated digital rights management (which Apple never liked, either) and record companies kicked up their heels at the thought of leaving behind the tyranny of the 99-cent price point.

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Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s (GOOG) headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me.

Having grown up in the vapor trail of the ’60s, I learned to be wary of large, centralized organizations, and yet Google, a huge enterprise with a market value of $80 billion, is my ever-present wingman.

My increasingly exclusive relationship with Google started with search, of course, when I switched from Yahoo (YHOO) years ago. Eventually I accepted an invitation to Gmail, with its oodles of storage and very granular search function, and it has oddly become my default database–deep, rich and personal.

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In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: Fire the most talented, experienced employees.

Of course, those workers were the retail chain’s single most important point of difference from the legion of Internet retailers and general merchandisers, but in a single stroke, Philip J. Schoonover, the chief executive of Circuit City, wiped out that future.

As a pal of mine used to say when I described a particularly boneheaded course of action I had pursued, “How’d that work out for you, buddy?”

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In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

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Not that long ago, I needed some advice on the book business and thought to ask my friend Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights” and “A Prayer for the City.” The only sticking point was, we’d never met.

Although he used to be a reporter, we are not what I would call peers. He wrote one of the greatest sports books ever, and oh, one of the best books about city government ever. “Friday Night Lights” became a movie and then a television series, and apart from me being a hopeless fanboy of the show, we have nothing in common.

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