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<HTML> <HEAD> <META Name="Generator" Content="Lotus Word Pro"></META> <TITLE>Body</TITLE> <bookinfo author="Brian Thomas" publisher="rivertext.com" preparer="B. T." preparerurl="http://www.riverText.com" prepareremail="sophie@riverText.com" coverimage="i_sophie.jpg"> <booktitle>About Sophie, our ebook reader</booktitle></bookinfo> </head> <body> <DIVISION1><DIVISION1TITLE><h2>Introducing Sophie</h2></DIVISION1TITLE> <img src="c_sophie.jpg"> I have never assumed that anyone really likes reading books on the computer screen — and I've been publishing such books since 1988. The cover of my first electronic book, Imitatio Christi, included a view into a monastery cloister accompanied by the sound of a bubbling fountain, various bird songs and a Gregorian chant. That book cover was the beginning of the If Monks had Macs new media monastery library. Inside that first cover were 100 brief chapters that could be read in any order. Categorized, easily accessed, and optionally randomized it became one delightful devotional database. Why should only scientists and accountants have databases? I have received letters from individuals who have been enjoying this e-book for close to 20 years. In software years (which are shorter than dog years) 20 years is about a century and a half. Sophie, our new reading tool was developed as a joint project of riverText and FourthWorld. It is the only universal e-book reader. It works on the classic Macintosh, on Mac OS X, on Windows 95 through XP, and, I hope soon it will work on Linux. (Our If Monks had Macs CD-ROM works on all these Mac and Windows operating systems - but not on Linux). Sophie can read html or plain text files. In addition to the e-books released specifically for it, Sophie can access the hundreds of e-books available in the Gutenberg Project [www.promo.net/pg] and the Christian Classics Ethereal [www.ccel.org] libraries. Sophie provides tools that will make it easy to master any text. The only search available in the Adobe and Microsoft readers is a simple find next occurrence of a word. Sophie, on the other hand, can list every instance of the searched for words along with the phrase and the section of the book in which it appears. Click on the phrase that interests you to make the e-book display that phrase. Sophie's most unique feature is its notebooks. Anyone who has a paper due on Walden, or who just wishes to take a quick trip around Walden Pond can open our edition of Walden and its "goWalden" notebook. As they click on the most famous phrases in Walden along the left side of the notebook, their e-book displays the section of the text in which that phrase appears. The notebook provides a brief commentary on the passage. JFK Witness includes, in an illustrated notebook, a guided tour of assassination witnesses that demonstrates that the Warren Commission testimony contradicts the Commission's conclusions. Readers can create their own notebooks to collect excerpts from a book, take notes, or create interactive commentaries to share with others. The notebook can slice and dice and make a critical salad of any book it gets its hands on. Sophie provides the reader with more powerful reading tools than other e-books. It's true that the birds, fountain, and Gregorian chant, along with multimedia introductions to several of Sophie's books are back on the CD-ROM. Sophie may not have a magical cover, but it does have a magical pocket. That pocket is its plugin folder. As I write this introduction there are just two plugins. "Text to Speech" will read a passage or a chapter to you. You can choose from voices that are nearly human to ones that are merely hysterical. A more interesting plugin is FourthWorld's "Text Blender Pro." Run your favorite literary passages through its digital meat grinder. Text Blender Pro is a razor blade-free implementation of the cutup technique discovered in 1959 by the avant-garde painter Brion Gysin. Gysin taught the Beat novelist William Burroughs how to cut words from the top sheets of a newspaper so that parts of sentences from other unrelated articles showed through. The literary montage that resulted from combining unrelated sentences occasionally revealed remarkable, even poetic, word couplings. Burroughs's work inspired David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to use cutups in their song lyrics. Cutups gave us the title and many phrases in David Bowie's album, Diamond Dogs and William Burroughs's novel, Soft Machine. Text Blender Pro has four settings, Grind, Whip, Puree, and Liquify. Forget the cappuccinos, serve Whipped Shakespeares at your next literary salon. Sophie is a reading tool that its readers can shape. Not only can you easily create interactive commentaries, you can add powerful plugins. Plugins are made with Revolution, the same program that we used to make Sophie. Revolution is a powerful authoring program that uses a superset of HyperCard's scripting language, and can import HyperCard stacks. (Apple Computer's HyperCard was the world's first software construction kit. Scripting is the easiest kind of programming. Its code is a simplified version of the English language.) Although Revolution is a commercial program, you can download a free demo that is limited only by the length of the scripts you can write with it (www.runrev.com). </DIVISION1><DIVISION1><DIVISION1TITLE> <h2>Understanding Sophie</h2> </DIVISION1TITLE> by Brian Thomas first published in 2003 ⌐ Brian Thomas, 2001 All Rights Reserved Apple Computer, Microsoft, Adobe, Revolution, and HyperCard are Registered Trademarks, All Rights Reserved Get the entire library of Sophie e-books at: www.rivertext.com The e-book reader for which this text was designed is available for free download from: www.fourthworld.com <DIVISION2><DIVISION2TITLE><h2>Sophie's Library</h2> </DIVISION2TITLE> Launch Sophie to enter its library. The books are stacked in a scrolling field. Click on the name of any book to open it. If books recently added to your library are missing from the list click the "Update Library" button at the top of the page. </DIVISION2><DIVISION2><DIVISION2TITLE> <h2>Sophie's Book</h2> </DIVISION2TITLE> A page, the amount of text that fits on one side of a sheet of paper, is an arbitrary way of segmenting a body of text that only exists because paper-based books cannot be built without pages. E-books always seem to be built as if the same rule applied to them. Sophie dispenses with this arbitrary division and presents the reader only with the sections chosen by the author. These sections, be they chapters or scenes, are listed in a table of contents column along the left-hand side of our e-books. You can click on any section to move directly to it. If you move the mouse cursor over the border between this list of the book's contents and the one that holds the book's text the cursor suddenly will look like two horizontal arrows. These arrows indicate that you can hold the mouse button down and drag to make either section wider or narrower. You can also uncheck the check box in the lower left-hand corner of Sophie's window. That box is labeled "TOC" and unchecking it hides and shows the Table of Contents column. When the Table of Contents is hidden you can move to the next section of the book by clicking the triangle arrows at the top of the window or by clicking the right pointing arrow key on your keyboard. The e-book text that you view in Sophie is not locked. This makes it easy to copy, edit, or even erase an entire chapter. Fortunately, you are only working with a copy of of the text. If you mess up a section of the text, just open a different chapter, and then come back to the chapter with the text you edited. When you return, the edited text will be restored to its original state. At the top of Sophie's window are four buttons. The "Library" button takes you back to Sophie's library. "Find" locates text only within the current "page." "Search" scans the entire book and returns a click-able list of every section and phrase in which the word occurs. "rivertext.com" takes you to my web site. Clicking the Page Up and Page Down keys on your keyboard or the Up or Down arrow cursors on your keyboard will cause the the next or the previous "page" of text to scroll into view. The first time a Sophie e-book is closed a message will appear asking, "Bookmark your current place in this book to open directly to it next time?" On that dialog box there is a checkbox labeled, "Don't ask me again." You can make Sophie stop showing the Bookmark Reminder dialog box and, instead, remember how you like your e-books to open. Click a checkmark into the "Don't ask me again" box and then click "Yes" to always bookmark the section of the text from which you close a book, or "No" to never automatically set a bookmark. The Bookmark Reminder back can be turned back on from the Preferences. Bookmarks can also be used to make it easy to return to your place after examining another part of the book. First, select, "Set Bookmark" from the Go menu. Then scroll or skip to a different part of the book. When you wish to return to your place in the text select "Jump to Bookmark." If no bookmark has yet been placed in the book, selecting "Jump to Bookmark" will take you to the beginning of the book. (If you are already at the beginning of the book, nothing will happen). To mark more than one place in the text first create a new notebook. Then create a "New Linked Entry" for each bookmark. See the section of this book entitled "Notebooks" for a more detailed explanation. </DIVISION2><DIVISION2><DIVISION2TITLE> <h2>Sophie Preferences</h2> </DIVISION2TITLE> Sophie can be configured by selecting Preferences from the Edit menu. You can show and hide the tool bar that holds the "Library", "Find" and "Search as well as the navigation arrows. All of these tool bar options can be accessed by making selections from the Edit or Go menus or by pressing the control or command-key shortcuts listed in those menus. The Preferences window also allows you to select and preview the type face and type size for the table of contents column and select a different type face and type size for the book's text. You can also change the text color, the page color and the color and of an optional backdrop (that hides your desktop). Finally, you can decide whether or not Sophie should ask, each time you close a book, whether or not you wish to bookmark your place in it. </DIVISION2><DIVISION2><DIVISION2TITLE> <h2>Notebooks</h2> </DIVISION2TITLE> Notebooks are created by choosing "New Notebook" from the Notebook menu. They have the same layout as Sophie. In the upper left of their window is a + (plus) and - (minus) symbol. The easiest way to create a new note is to click on the + (plus). A new blank note will be created and the label field below the plus and minus symbols will have the words "New Entry" highlighted. Start typing to name your new entry. The name you type will appear in the table of contents. Clicking on that name will show you whatever text you type into the larger field reserved for your notes. Click the - (minus) button and a message will appear asking, "Delete this Notebook entry?" The second item in the Notebook menu is "Open Notebook." Selecting this menu option brings up a standard dialog box that you can use to find previously written Notebooks. The three ebooks shipped with If Monks had Macs... that come with their own completed Notebooks are: Imitatio Christi, JFK Witness and Walden. To find the Notebooks for these ebooks from the If Monks had Macs folder open this series of folders: Sophie > books > rivertext.com > imitatio or Sophie > books > rivertext.com > JFK_witness or Sophie > books > rivertext.com > Walden Highlight any text in an e-book and select "Copy Book Selection" from the Notebook menu to move that text to the current notebook page. You highlight text, or select text, by holding the mouse button down as you drag over it. If you highlight text in the e-book and instead select "New Linked Entry" from the Notebook menu, then a new entry will be created in the notebook. The notebook will look the same as if you clicked its plus symbol. It will say "New Entry" in its label field and you will need to type a name for this new entry. However, when you click on the name of this new entry the e-book will display the text that you highlighted when you created it. Type your commentary about the passage on the new notebook page that you have just created. This is how I made my guided tours to Walden and JFK Witness. Below the text field for your notes is a check box labeled "Show Source Text." If this is not checked the e-book will not display the text to which a notebook page is linked. We added this feature because you might simply want to look at the note on a different page in the notebook without worrying about losing your place in the book. Make sure this box is checked if you want to see the passage to which a note has been linked. You can combine linked and unlinked entries in any notebook and create multiple notebooks. Notebooks can be linked to a particular e-book or used to copy and take notes on several e-books. The last selection in the Notebooks menu exports the contents of your notebook to a text file that you can open, edit and print in any word processor. </DIVISION2><DIVISION2><DIVISION2TITLE> <h2>Concluding Remarks</h2> </DIVISION2TITLE> Sophie is a tool - a powerful reading tool with a sense of humor. If you prefer humorless tools, you can remove any insufficiently serious plugins from the Sophie "Plugins" folder. Sophie is shipping out with two plugins. "Text Blender Pro" is just as serious as its name suggests. "Read to Me", which allows your computer to read the ebooks to you, needs to communicate with your computer's built-in text to speech software. Unfortunately, "Read to Me" is not currently compatible with Windows XP. We expect that eventually we will be able to provide a fix for this limitation. Sophie is a work in progress. Send your bug reports to Sophie@rivertext.com. </DIVISION2></DIVISION1> </body> </html>