But when it comes to content that's not created by the user himself or herself, completely disappearing online often runs into legal barriers, cautions Daniel Solove, a professor at Washington University and author of The Future of Reputation, a book about online identity management.
Despite William Styron's literary reputation his books have not sold particularly well in print in recent years.
He made his reputation with books and features about business and finance.
Steiner made his reputation with books like "After Babel" (1975), a long and dazzling inquiry into the possibility of translation.
But present-day historians are becoming steadily less keen on it, and the struggles of our Thatcherised economy since 2007 don't augur too well for the long-term reputation of books that present her rule as having solved all our problems.
Between its $.99 e-book deals and wealth of used print books, Amazon already has a reputation for selling books for low prices that are difficult for other retailers to compete with.
One of the earliest of the atomic-age defense intellectuals, Bernard Brodie, had made his reputation with a book called "A Guide to Naval Strategy," published in 1942.
Mr. Irving contends Ms. Lipstadt severely damaged his reputation in her book "Denying the Holocaust" by painting him as a leading spokesman for Holocaust denial.
But the class rebel, Satin (Caitlin Van Zandt), a plain, stout girl and lapsed Christian with a bad reputation, dismisses the book.
As a result, it has gained a reputation as a book more written about than read, the ultimate in modernist incomprehensibility.
Oil companies are sponsoring the arts around the world on an "epidemic" scale as a cynical PR strategy to improve their reputation, a new book argues.
