Shakespeare's Hamlet is a tiny file in PVASCII, small enough for half a dozen copies to fit [uncompressed!] on a $.23 floppy disk that fits in your pocket. But, if it is preserved as a PICTURE of each page, then it will take so much space that it would be difficult to carry around even a single copy in that pocket unless it were on a floppy sized optical disk, and even then I don't think it would fit. Another way to ensure no normal person would read it, to mark it up so blatantly that the human eyes should have difficulty in scansion, stuttering around pages, rather than sliding easily over them; the information contained in this "markup" is deemed crucial by those esoteric scholars who think it is of vital importance that a coffee cup stain appears at the lower right of a certain page, and that "Act I" be followed by [<ACT ONE>] to ensure everyone knows this is actually where this is where an act or scene or whatever starts. You probably would not believe how much money has had the honor of being spent on these kinds of projects a normal person is intentionlly deprived of through the mixture is just plain HIDING the files, to making the files so BIG you can't download them, to making them so WEIRD you wouldn't read them if you got them. The concept of requiring all documents to be formatted in a certain manner such that only a certain program can read them has been proposed more often then you might ever want to imagine, for the TWIN PURPOSES OF PROFIT AND LIMITED DISTRIBUTION in a medium which requires a virtue of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION to keep it growing. Every day I read articles, proposals, proceedings for various conferences that promote LIMITED DISTRIBUTION on the Nets. . .simply to raise the prestige or money to keep some small oligarchy in power. This is truly a time of POWER TO THE PEOPLE as people say in the United States. What we have here is a conflict between the concepts that everything SHOULD be in LIMITED DISTRIBUTION, and that of the opposing concept of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION. If you look over the table of contents on the next pages, you will see that each of these item stresses the greater and greater differences between an history which has been dedicated to the preservation of Limited Distribution and something so new it has no history longer than 25 years-- *** Contents Chapter 00 Preface Chapter 0 Introduction Saving Time and Effort The New Scholarship Chapter 1 General Comments Plain Vanilla ASCII Versus Proprietary Markups Chapter 2 Copyright Chapter 3 Luddites Chapter 4 Internet As Chandelier [The Famous Chandelier Diatribe of 1990] Chapter 5 The Rush To The Top Chapter 6 Those Who Would Be King Gopher, WWW, Mosaic, Netscape Chapter 7 Listowners vs List Moderators Those Who Would Be King, Part I Chapter 8 Lurkers Those Who Would Be King, Part II Chapter 9 "Lurking Is Good. . .Remember. . .Lurking Is Good" Those Who Would Be King, Part III The Netiquetters