26.1 General

The PC-Library (the German name PC-Bibliothek is trademarked) has been developed in parallel with Hyper-G. It is based on the same general concept but focuses on different issues.

It is intended as a tool to market electronic reference material on floppies and CD-ROMs at a time when such marketing on the Web is still difficult. The goal is, however, also to publish the material on the Web, while not relying entirely on such Web publishing for revenues. One main difference from other sources of information on the Net is that this data comes from publishers whose only asset is this material. Not only must adequate tools to view this material be developed, but publishers must also be convinced that they are not giving away the source of their income. They must believe that they can earn money by publishing on the Web without risking ``data piracy.''

The is an MS-Windows application for working with electronic books and encyclopedias. So far there is only a German version of the program. A test version in English has also been implemented.

The basic idea of the is in its name: it just works like a real library, where you keep books you have bought in a book shop. If you want to look up something in a book, you take it out of your library (shelf) and put it on your desktop, together with other books and other items you work with. The uses the same metaphor: you can buy single titles in a book shop and you put them in your library by installing them on your computer. As a side effect, the software can be updated automatically. With a mouse click or two you can take a book out of your library and put it in your working area or vice versa.

Figure 26.1: The Library in the center and the desktop at the right-hand side

26.1.1 Features

26.1.2 Published titles