Send your comments, letters to the editor, and related articles to seltzer@samizdat.com For information on who we are check www.samizdat.com/who.html
To access other issues, go to www.samizdat.com/ioad.html. The full text of all issues is available for free, with hypertext links to the sites referenced. (Please keep in mind that URLs frequently change. We will attempt to update the information in this on-line edition, but don't expect perfection.)
For plain-text books on CD ROM, a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You can now receive Internet-on-a-Disk by email, by signing up
at Yahoo Groups. Either send email to subscribe-ioad@yahoogroups.com
, or register at the Web site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad.
You can also use that group to discuss related matters and share insights
with other readers and with me (Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com).
Gutenberg Project ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext94. http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/pg_home.html
For those who do not have the capability or the time to retrieve the above mentioned texts, they will be available next week (Feb. 23) at a nominal price from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a project of The B&R Samizdat Express. (For further information, send email to samizdat@world.std.com)
Putting texts in electronic form opens opportunities to spread them very rapidly and cheaply. Classic works of literature and government information that are costly in printed form, can be freely and quickly copied in electronic form.
Today, some traditional publishers are moving into the CD ROM business and are searching for ways to "add value" to public domain electronic texts. If they edit or enhance the look and feel of the text or even if they put together a number of separate items into an anthology, they can claim copyright to their electronic version of what otherwise is in the public domain. If you buy such an etext -- which may look great on your PC and have useful search capabilities and hypertext links built in -- all you have bought is that one copy. If you want to give one to a colleague or student, you can't simply duplicate the files; legally, you have to buy another one.
Fortunately, many people are working diligently to make sure that there are public domain electronic versions of many important works, which can be freely copied and are labeled to make that clear. Prominent among these are the Gutenberg Project, wiretap, the Oxford Archive, Project Libellus, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But new opportunities and new dangers are on the horizon. The Worldwide Web and its browsers (such as Mosaic) make it possible to enrich texts with color graphics, sound, and even video, and to interlink texts on a global scale. Instead of struggling with user-unfriendly commands, and getting lost in mazes of directories and subdirectories, you can point-and-click you way around the Internet, get to what you want quickly, and read it on-line in an attractive format, rather than having to download whatever you want to use.
With the Worldwide Web, we see the prototype of a new mass communication medium. Today it is used to mimic print, radio, and television to a small, yet global audience. But that audience is growing rapidly, and this capability should soon evolve into a distinct, unique mass communication medium, in which anyone anywhere in the world can, for relatively low cost, become a publisher/producer/broadcaster.
(Already, just a couple weeks ago, two US high schools came on-line with their own Web servers -- Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology in Alexandria, VA -- http://boom.tjhsst.edu/ --, and Illinois Math and Science Academy, Aurora, IL -- http://imsasun.imsa.edu/)
It is important that we establish at the outset public support for principles and goals which will preserve in this new medium the culture of sharing which has predominated on the Internet in the past. We should strive to make sure that in this new realm public domain texts will belong to the entire people of the world, rather than being the private property of corporations.
As we begin to make public domain texts available in this new medium, adding hypertext markup code to make them attractive and easily readable on-line, with links to related material, we need to establish an expected practice of clearly labeling these texts as in the public domain or freely available in electronic form.
We don't want the open range of the electronic frontier littered with legal barbed wire. We don't want to see everybody who marks up an otherwise public domain etext for distribution through a Web server claiming exclusive rights to his or her version of it.
And as the medium evolves its own unique characteristics, as creative people find new ways to express themselves through it, we hope once again that this can be done in ways that allow many to share their work.
What can you do? Support the people who are working to keep public domain etexts truly public. And spread those texts widely in the schools. By sheer market pressure, these free etexts will either keep commercial publishers away from this field or force them to produce truly excellent enhanced editions to attract your business.
Spread the word -- the heritage you preserve is your own.
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, Orange, CT 06477. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business
success.
Reviews.
A
library for the price of a book.
Return to Internet-on-a-Disk
Go to Readers' Room
and Writers' Showcase
Return to Samizdat Express
<