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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <5799@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 31 Oct 88 18:51:20 GMT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.5799
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp> <557@metaps
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 21

In article <5790@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>And I think my two minutes a page estimate may be optimistic,
>not to mention extra costs for indexing and mastering.

In article <557@metapsy.UUCP> sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes:
>There are fairly decent full-text retrieval and indexing programs
>that would make a normal index obsolete.

I was referring to an automatically generated inverted index, not an
ordinary book index, which would be silly on a high-density optical
medium.  It would still require human checking in any case, just as
optical character recognition does, so the time would be noticeable.

Because of the slow seeks and large amounts of data, it is neccessary
to set up an index on an optical read-only medium at publication time;
run-time search algorithms are way too slow.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"What's bad? What's the use of turning?
 In Hell I'll be there a-burning!
 Meanwhile, think of what I'm earning!
 All on account of my name." - Bill Sykes, "Oliver"