Re: Content Provider Problem?

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Mon, 19 Sep 1994 17:52:52 +0200

>Given some improvements in display technology, and assuming that the on line
>copy is _free_, I'm not sure this is true. The price of a new book that I'm
>only going to read once is worth some amount of inconvenience.

Personally, I find reading anything greater than about 20 sequential
pages of online documents, in *any* browser, to be rather tiresome, to
say the least. I wish there was a feature in every WWW browser which
would allow one to pull down the entire hypertyext document, format
it, and send it to the printer! Of course, this is both technically
somewhat hard to do (loops in hyperlinks, data relevance issues), and
entirely against the spirit of the WWW. I think few people will read
large books sequentially online because the medium doesn't suit it
very well.

>I think some of us may have been missing (at least I think I have) that Rob
>Raisch is in fact concerned about free redistribution, rather than simply low
>cost (eg copy center) redistribution. The copy center is relatively easy to
>track down, since they're charging money, but somebody who just throws a text
>on a public bulletin board someplace is, at least potentially, completely
>anonymous.

Right. And while things like novels will noy find a large audience,
reference manuals, dictionaries, and such, will find a large potential
audience.