A Study in Scarlet
                         by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
                            Electronic Edition
                              (Public domain)

Centuries ago, few people could read because books were scarce
and unavailable. Nowadays, books are plentiful and inexpensive,
but most people would rather watch TV instead. So much for
technical progress.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend today is the quick assumptions
people hold about books. Take a book into a restaurant and people
will think you're only reading because you're studying for
school. The entire idea that someone could read for pleasure
seems spoiled by our early days in school with required reading,
book reports, and Cliff Notes.

Yet, computers can help alleviate this problem. Although
computers have promised to bring about a paperless office for
years, most people use computers to produce more paper than
before in the form of faxes and desktop publishing. Doesn't it
seem likely that computers could somehow help reverse the growing
illiteracy trend and bring about the paperless office dream after
all?

That's the idea behind the HOLMES.EXE program, for reading the
1887 Sherlock Holmes novel, "A Study in Scarlet."

The HOLMES.EXE program lets you read each chapter in a separate
window on the screen. For serious Sherlock Holmes sleuths, you
can display different chapters side-by-side in separate windows
for easy reference. Try doing that with a paperback edition of
the story.

Of course, to read "A Study in Scarlet," the HOLMES.EXE program
supplies the complete text of the story on disk. This story is
not copyrighted since the copyright expired years ago, and is
considered in the public domain so you can load the story text
files in any word processor you wish and print it out.

By modifying the HOLMES.EXE program, you can read any text file
from classics such as "Moby Dick" or "The Red Badge of Courage"
to "Robin Hood" and "The Three Musketeers."

Most classic novels are in the public domain, which is why
different publishers can sell a copy of "Moby Dick" in your
bookstore. With older literature, the copyright issue is less of
a problem than translating the printed text on to disk.

The tedious solution is to type the entire text yourself into a
word processor. The faster, but still monotonous solution is to
use an optical character recognition device to scan text in. Once
you have scanned in text, you need to go back and search for
minor errors.

For example, most scanners get confused between the letter 'l'
and the number '1.' Likewise, the letter 'o' and the number '0'
confuses the computer as well as the letter 'E' and the letter
'B.' Despite these problems, scanners can do most of the dirty
work for you, leaving you free to edit the work afterwards.

After storing text in disk format, you need to break up the text
file into separate chapters. This lets you retrieve only the text
you wish to read, making the HOLMES.EXE program run faster
without wasting time retrieving the whole novel at once.

Finally, once you have the text stored in separate files for each
chapter, you need to modify the HOLMES.EXE program to display
menus for that particular novel. For example, the HOLMES.EXE
program is designed to work with "A Study in Scarlet." Slight
modifications would let this same program work with "A Call to
Arms," "Alice in Wonderland," or "The Last of the Mohicans."

Besides being able to reference separate portions of a novel in
side-by-side windows, you can use the electronic edition of a
classic novel to read at work. Any office manager would frown
upon catching you reading a dog-eared, paperback edition of
Sherlock Holmes stories, but few office managers would blink an
eye if they caught you reading the same novel on your computer
screen.

The logic is simple (because we all know managers must have
simple minds). If someone is staring intently at a computer
screen, they must be doing important work.

If you have a laptop, you can always have a good book to read
during waits between airplanes, busses, or trains. Instead of
lugging around fat paperback books, you can store all this
information on your hard disk instead. (Then again, you won't
have anything to read if your laptop computer's batteries run
out, except maybe your laptop computer manual, warning you not to
let the batteries run down.)

While books are fairly plentiful and cheap (free, if you visit
your public library), nothing beats copying a floppy disk
instead. Before scanning or retyping a book, check the publishing
information at the front of a novel. Most classic novels will
state something like "Afterword and bibliography copyright 1988
by John Doe." That's a good (but not conclusive) indication that
the classic novel is in the public domain.

Once you've determined that a classic novel is in the public
domain, feel free to spread copies of it to everyone. This way,
more people can spend time reading classic literature, the
average literacy rate in America increases, and more people can
understand the real classic stories and not the sanitized
children's editions that they first learned from Saturday morning
cartoons.

So give a copy of HOLMES.EXE and "A Study in Scarlet" to a friend
and store your own favorite classic in computer format. This
might not be the most effective way to increase literacy among
the general public, but it certainly can't hurt. At the very
least, it might get programmers to read something else besides
program manuals in their spare time.


                                 END