Hi everyone,

I think having the book published as a proper book is a must.  Having a
reference book to read through over coffee, take home to bed, browse up a
mountain, is essential to this type of publication.  Reading
electronically stored information is generally tedious and much harder
work than a proper book.

Of course, having a book published on CD-ROM does not preclude linking.
Either having the documents in HTML on the CD, or having any type of
hypertext, eg PDF or TeX which allows onscreen viewing, high quality
printing, and hyperlinking would do the job perfectly, and would mean that
someone could view the CD on an Internet capable computer and use links to
documents outwith the CD.  Having said all that, I think the CD-ROM is the
least attractive option for publishing.  Using any propietary formatting
for the information could preclude the use on Linux, Unix, Mac, Amiga and
older Windows machines.  But if the information was on CD, I think most
people would want a system "stronger" than a web based interface.  I
suppose that if the information is made web-ready, then having a CD
version would still be a good thing for some people, even if it did mean
viewing the contents through a web browser.

I'd love to see a book of this type converted to a web-type document.
Being able to search, bookmark, condense and browse the book from a
comfortable interface would make it very useful.  A huge number of us must
have free, fast Internet by now, both at work and at home.  As I expect
most of the information to be text, even a slow connection should be fine
for this kind of viewing.  It is easy to modify information and very
portable across a number of computing platforms.

I think we are still a long way from have electronic information of this
type completely replace written books.

Andrew