World wide wisdom

It may not be time yet to consign those 32 leather-bound volumes to the antique mart, but the gilt-edged set of the Encyclopaedia Britann...

It may not be time yet to consign those 32 leather-bound volumes to the antique mart, but the gilt-edged set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will sit a trifle less pristinely on countless bookshelves in well-appointed libraries. With the 44 million words of this traditional repository of knowledge being put out free on the Internet this week, the complusions and innovations at britannica.com have highlighted the cyber revolution in the world8217;s reading habits. Just as newspapers and magazines have learnt over the years that their survival at the newstands hinges on a prominent online presence, the folks at the two-century-old publishing house have taken note of these journals8217; learning curve. One, amidst the information glut on the Net nobody is going to pay subscription, however nominal.

Erudite journals and newcomers like the ezine Slate took their time over declaring free access, Encyclopaedia Britannica has only taken a little longer. Two, in a compulsively multitasking world, simply reproducingprint editions will not animate a Netizen burdened with the freedom to choose. So, the information at britannica.com will be updated almost instantaneously, besides being supplemented with articles from dozens of journals.

This begs the question, if these sites offering insight and wisdom for free are confident of making ample profits through advertisements and e-commerce by attracting surfers across the globe, are we looking at a suddenly more literate world? If surveys indicating that ever increasing per capita Net time is extracted from busy schedules at the expense of television, does it mean we are reading more? The answer, according to James Gleick8217;s breathless new book Faster, is a sad no. He cites research conducted two years ago by Sun Microsystems into Netizens8217; online reading habits. 8220;They scan, sampling words and phrases. Why? In part because any one page, on the which the fluttering user happens to have lighted momentarily, competes for attention with millions more8230;. They proposedguidelines for catering to such users guidelines that came to describe more and more of the Internet reading experience: highlighted keywords, bulleted lists, frequent subheadings, and paragraphs containing exactly one idea.8221; As more and more of our dog-eared staples for lazy Sundays and rainy afternoons are placed on the Net, the more susceptible they become to hurry sickness and short attention spans.

And it will not get any better. At the Frankfurt Book Fair this month Microsoft offered a peep into the future: electronic news kiosks that would enable information freaks, armed with lightweight computers and of course software from the Seattle-based company, to download newspapers and magazines. The scan and sample perusal this encourages will in no time spill over to the sacred realms of books, with publishers racing to format their ware for easy downloads, with Penguin saying it will be issuing spineless versions of 1,000 classics by early 2000. Will notes in the margins soon be a metaphor for anotherera?