/tab\/tab\NEW PRODUCTS FROM THE NET/tab\/tab\

At the code layer, the Internet is a set of protocols. These protocols make
new digital products possible. These are products that could not, or would
not, have been built before the Net. Among these we could include the dy-
namically generated maps with driving directions;[8-2] massive translation en-
gines, covering scores of languages, translating texts and Web sites on the
fly;[8-3] and on-line dictionaries covering hundreds of languages that otherwise
would not be available except in the largest libraries.[8-4]

But let's focus on a few of these products and their relationship to the ar-
chitecture of the Net.

/tab\/tab\_HTML_Books_/tab\/tab\

Physical books are extremely durable information sources. They are
stable and preserve relatively well. They read well in many contexts; they
will be a central part of culture for the next century, at least.

But there are things paper books can't do, and constraints on paper books
that limit how far the knowledge they carry is carried. These limits thus
suggest the place of a different kind of book -- the "HTML book," or a book
produced for the World Wide Web.

HTML books are the passion of Eric Eldred. Eldred was a computer pro-
grammer in the navy. In the mid-1980s, he became aware of the Internet.
The Internet then, of course, was not the World Wide Web -- the Web
would not appear for another five years. Nonetheless, the Net facilitated an
exchange of information long before the Web made that exchange hyper-
textual.

When the Web came on-line, Eldred wanted to experiment to see what
the Web might do for books. Eldred's daughter had an assignment to read
Hawthorne's _The_Scarlet_Letter._ He tried to locate the text on-line. What he
found was essentially unusable. So Eldred decided to make a version that
was usable. He cleaned up the text, added a few links, and created his first
HTML book -- a book designed to be read on the World Wide Web.

An HTML book can do things that a paper book cannot. The author of
an HTML book can add links to aid the reader or to guide the reader to
other related texts. It can be easily searched and copied into other texts. And
because it lives on the Web, it is available to anyone anywhere -- including
to people who can't afford to purchase that particular work and to machines
that index the work to be included within search engines.

[[122]]

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