A database, it seems, is a directory on a disk in which the files associated with it are kept. Some files may be kept elsewhere, but they can be tied to files in the directory in some way so that the database management system can get them. The database, then, is a container of sorts, but in a loose sense, like a corral. And in our emerging world, it can be a lot looser than a directory and some links. The directory may give way to simply being a server (computer) out there somewhere. Or a distributed complex of servers. A database might be something seemingly ephemeral, like a horizon disk on the open cyberseas.
Most other things on my desktop were things. A WinHelp help-file, for instance, was a file. Inside, it was more complex. There were topics, contents, indexes. Somewhat like the innards of books. Then, Adobe Acrobats .pdf files contained books. Publishers even published reference manuals and journals in WinHelp files. Books that were just books didnt seem to be around to draw my attention. A book had to be inside something. It could be in a word processor or desktop publisher file to be read inside the application until printed. And there were the read anywhere .hlp and .pdf files.
With web publishing, HTMLs manuscripts, and books with CDs containing whole chapters that would not fit into a bind-able stack of pages or on-line copies of other books the publisher was hawking ...the image of the really loose leaf book floated down before my eyes. No ringed binder, but just a web of webs of linkings. The binding as a whole was pretty much invisible. You could get some organization surfaced in tables of contents or reference lists of some sort. But the book wasnt there until you opened it and started reading in it. Youve seen those books in the kids section of a bookstore. You open the book to a pair of pages and an edifice comes up out of the gutter. A three dimensional model. Well, the books written in HTMLd eText are sort of like that. Move around in a book like that and you come to know, or get the heft, anyway, about how things hook up, what cn be pulled in when (or where). Live readers have always had this sense of a books whole content. You cant remember where in the book a passage you want to check was, but you know it was on the right hand side near the top. You can almost (but not quite) read it with your minds eyes and will recognize phrases from it or from the pages quadrant.
Still, the eBook, to give it some sort of generic name, needs to be a bit more handle-able than that. You ought to be able to pick it up in your virtual hand, or your physical one if you cn shoot it onto, say, a floppy disk. More to the point, its a lousy idea to have bits and pieces lying about ready to fly into the page gutters and become those edifices. Particularly over long periods of time and in the vicinity of other eBooks.
One solution is to make the covers out of the same materials as the pages. So the book or binder is a web page (scroll). To get a little shape, it can be a frameset page. It organizes some of the innards including things like tables of contents and indexes that organize the rest. My eManual, which can be opened from the Help menu with a few extra clicks, is this kind of a book. Its not fancy. A top frame is a title page and copyright page. A left frame is a table of contents. No glyphs, no collapsible tree toc (though Ive done that in HTML tocs). I use those client-side form buttons because I like them, though they are a bit big and, in a stack, can seem a little clutzy. The main frame is for reading (which is what books are for). To make that even easier, I have a full window option. That opens another browser window without all the toolbars and such for a clean reading copy. If you get different pages in the reading frame and click on Full window without having closed it, the pages are stacked in there and you can move among them with Forward and Back keys, Alt+ left and right arrows.
Zip up all the pieces of your book, and youve a handle-able copy. When you want to read it, unzip it in a reading room (directory). Among other things you dont use up HDD clusters for a lot of piecemeal books lying around in storage directories. Use good (file) labels and pull a book off a shelf (book directory) into the reading area when you want to read it.
Your personal elibrary/den will have a tree of stacks for books, journals, correspondences, and other materials ...if the books can be picture books, sound-able music books, video-holding books, interactive books. You might have a bank of reading directories (youll want more than one book open at a time). Unzip a book and pull it up into ...well, wait. Maybe not directly into a browser from the browser because this can be a clumsy job.
Use eWriter. Pull a books frame page (or other master page) into eWriters top editor. Tools/Browsers gets this page up fast. And you can Alt+Tab back and forth, bring up other book pages in eWriter for that doubled reading or even to push around for printing if your browser gives you Print Preview. (My Navigator 3.0 does, my Explorer 3.02 doesnt so I print from Navigator.)
So, lets ride the shift. This new sort of book or publication allows a greater interaction between reader and read. Suppose, youve grabbed source from a paper for your personal library, along with its embedded charts or other materials. Before I get into how this will affect reading, studying, and insighting, I better say something about the shifts in context with legal implications. A printed copy of a book exists in one copy on your library shelf. Anything you write in it, highlight in it, or do to it is obviously done to it and is, in any case done only to that one copy. Unless you make photocopies, theres little chance of this copy of this book going anywhere or to anyone whos likely to irritate the author or copyright holder.
Your eCopy is a digital dance of bits. Its at once ephemeral and persistent, infinitely reproducible, and awfully easy to hand off to some correspondent when youre frustrated trying to get a context around what you are saying. The personal in personal library has to disciplined management. Off the top of my head, Id guess that you cant readily invite a colleague whos half way around the globe in to sit down with your printout or computer screen to read your reading of something. So, the handing back and forth has to be handled carefully, with destruction schedules carefully set. Discourse on levels Im going to talk about in a moment must be free, but ownership of materials and even the integrity of originals has to receive tender. loving care.
The answer is to write, as you would on the fly-leaf of a book, in two places in a master or first scroll file. This identifies whose personal copy it is, and an informal citation for the original. Good library habits in any case. First, this should be in comment tags at the top of the file and, second, it should be in displayed text at the top of the body section. Any satellite scrolls linked in should likely have an abbreviated note displayed at the top of the body. All this is something. This isnt going to seem like any great extra activity when you stop and think about what you can do to aid your study or even simple reading given this new type of book.
Given a paper book, a reader can use highlighting and underlining, marginalia, including references to other materials or pages, and, then, as my library shows, pieces of paper, both Post-its and ungummed pieces, as well as brochures, carbons of letters, and what-all can be inserted between pages.
Now, given those habits and the new doubled reading which includes reading the engine or manuscript copy, it becomes possible do some of your organizing of what youre taking in out if front of you. You sketch some of your framework thinking as a painter might sketch in pencil aspects of a canvas growing inside.
I got onto this while trying to read a paper on line. It was a summary of what was going on in XML development. It was black text on a dark brown background. Because it had been written in Winword, there were gaps in words where arbitrary line-ends had fallen. And there were other things that made reading on screen difficult. I got rid of the background color by printing it. But, I didnt want to leave it at that. So, I grabbed the source and became a source-erors apprentice. I fixed those line endings by running it into eWriter, putting word wrap on, and kicking down through the lines, deleting a space and putting it back in. Then, I decided that since I was going to print it from this source, even though Id given it a white background in that source, Id push things around to get page breaks that were useful. And then, I had an idea that, I think now, birthed this notion of a personal copy. I inserted some notes. In BLOCKQUOTES and blue FONT COLOR. Nothing very fancy. Now, extend the idea. Some materials will have links, images, and other embedded materials. Others can be added. We can insert pieces of paper or link to other, really big, pieces And to local spots therein, maybe, if anchors are available.
Thats the birthing of this vision of a 21st century personal copy of a publication. The end of it is out there beyond our imaginations. What we have is live material. It can be rearranged not just for printing, but for reading. If it is a truly digging sort of reading, you can put in anchors and, at the top, a stack of labeled buttons to take you to those anchors. In eWriter, you have a menu item for putting in a stack of client-side buttons by clicking the menu item. You add labels and URLs or anchors.
Presumably, you keep a pristine copy. And maybe more than one reading perhaps accumulated over years. You can go back through an earlier reading and, in a doubled reading, you can note what was put in during that reading, the anchors and links as well as the immediately present comments and notes. Something noted and not followed up might be useful in a future reading. And there is always the possibility of, then, with these highly active readings settled in, to return to the pristine original, and start a fresh reading, maybe even a straight through reading.