Adobe Systems CEO John Warnock has a new business: burning books. He's founded a Palo Alto, California-based venture, Octavo (www.octavo.com), that aims to digitize old, rare tomes - such as Newton's 1704 Opticks and Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia. The hi-res CD-ROMs capture water stains, paper grain, and other details. But Octavo sells more than pretty pictures - a layer of hypertext and PostScript type behind the image makes most books fully searchable and connects to translations and related Web resources. CEO Patrick Ames promises Octavo will keep pace with technology. "Imagine," says the digital antiquarian, "reading Galileo's original workbooks on a 300-dpi wall-size monitor."
ELECTRIC WORD
Guiding Light
PostScript
Scrabble Rouser
Hollywood Shakers
Flight Delay
