e-Reference Books

Lee Hadden writes:

\”The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article from Friday\’s
edition. Who is going to pay for electronic reference books?


When nobody was looking, traditional reference books became obsolete. So
did their successors, those silvery CD-ROMs that so impressed us with their
song and dance routines. And it\’s a darned good thing, too. Forget all that
fussy nostalgia, all the pleadings of the paper fetishists. If you need to
look things up a lot, and you\’d rather not cart around several times your
body weight in books every time you move, then the advent of authoritative
reference works online is an unalloyed good.


The only question about the migration of reference works to the Internet
is: Will they survive it? In other words, who will their publishers charge
and how will they collect?

\”We think about this every day,\” says Pat
Schroeder, the former congresswoman who is now president of the Association
of American Publishers.


Read more about it.

Taste: You Can Look It Up Quickly and Cheaply — So Who\’s Going to
Pay for Reference Books? Wall Street Journal:
Eastern edition New York,
N.Y. Mar 2, 2001 By Daniel Akst
\”