Xref: utzoo comp.sys.next:667 rec.arts.books:4405
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!cit-vax!wetter
From: wetter@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Pierce T. Wetter)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <8530@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 8 Nov 88 04:22:56 GMT
References: <1686@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 28

> I think you will find that libraries, including the Library of
> Congress will be doing this for us.  Book preservation is very
> expensive and putting them all on CD while the actual copies get
> stored in CO2 or such is one answer to this problem.  It may be
> a lot cheaper for a library to give you electronic access to
> its collection than actual access.  The only thing is, I like
> to read in bed, and even a laptop gets heavy on my chest.
   
  The last time I was in the library of congress, they were scanning the
books at 300dpi and displaying them on special terminals. Clearly not the
most efficent way of doing this. What really needs to be done is to make a
standard for electronic books. Here's my quick draft of a storage method:

Every book is composed of a series of records. Each record consists of a header
followed by some data. There are three major types of records: formatting,
text and pictures. A format record contains formatting information for a
following record of text or pictures. (Formatting codes could be either TeX or
RichTextFormat or Postscript or something special.) Pictures are stored in
Postscript, GIF or Tiff format depending on their origin (line art or pictures)

Pierce
____________________________________________________________________________
You can flame or laud me at:
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Caution: All my postings are 100% accurate from my point of view. However, my
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posting are your fault for not interpreting it correctly.