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Weaknesses cont'd

I personally find the text-oriented CD-page irritating, far more so than I find the comparable pages of real text. Part of this problem is that each virtual page contains portions of two or more printed pages. The result is a web page which is too long for the computer screen, requiring the reader to scroll down each page until the bottom is reached, usually in mid-sentence. I would not really recommend that anyone buy this CD for reading.

Printed page numbers are given unobtrusively in the text, which allows the researcher to give page citations. It would be even more useful if the current page number was displayed in the small page-search window in the upper right-hand corner. I spent long moments hunting for the unobtrusive page number appropriate to a particular quote.

The absence of an introductory chapter is likely to be felt more keenly in the CD than in the text, particularly by novice readers who lack the experience to create their own 'hyper-texts'. Not knowing the key words to search for, these readers fall back onto the Table of Contents (easily reached from any point in the text) to provide structure for their reading. This inevitably reconstitutes the linearity of the book.

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Last updated: Mon Aug 6 2001