Library of the Future sounds very cool, at first. It's a CD-ROM chock-full of Literature: the Bible, the Koran, Confucius, Euripides, Tacitus, Chaucer, Spenser, Blake - it's all terribly high-minded. Well, not all: there's also Conan Doyle, Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, and, oddly, K. Eric Drexler's manifesto about technology, Engines of Creation. It's plain ASCII text with a nifty search engine, exactly the kind of thing that the inventors of CD-ROM were thinking of when they filed the patent.
It lets you down, though, and I think the word "library" has a lot to do with it. A library contains books that one might read. If you think you're going to read Billy Budd on a VGA monitor, in a monospace font, you're kidding yourself.
So if you're not going to use this library for reading, what can you use it for?
- Reference. Now when you wake up at two in the morning and can't get the phrase "tender mercies" out of your head, you'll have a place to turn. St. Augustine heads the list of hits, but the phrase shows up in the Book of Mormon, which you can get to with just a click or two of the mouse. (True, then it's two in the morning and you're reading the Book of Mormon, but that's a hazard of research.)
- One-upsmanship. Nothing intimidates like quoting from Milton and Joyce, and with the Library of the Future you've got them at your fingertips.
- Test data. Want to shake down your implementation of a Markoff sieve? A 20K block of the Brothers Grimm is just the thing.
- Paste bombs. When some clueless blowhard blathers away about the Second Amendment in your favorite newsgroup, revenge is at hand. Slurp the Melian dialogue up into your clipboard and let him have it.
It's like any other good tool: useless, unless you know what to do with it.
Library of the Future, Third Edition: US$149.95. World Library Inc.: (800) 443 0238, +1 (714) 756 9500, fax +1 (714) 756 9511.
STREET CRED
Cosmology of KyotoMind Your Net.Manners
A Manual of Factual Self-Defense
The Paste-Bomb Machine
