This is a real polarizing issue, with many academics believing that they are the annointed guardians of literature and recorded knowledge. They feel threatened by groups like PG and DP which have by-passed their institutional traditions. Many academics today feel threatened by etexts in the same way that the clergy felt threatened by the printing press. I asked for a copy of the TEI source for Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation last month from some academic group. They asked me to submit a formal request which would explain what I would use the text for! There are any number of academic etext repositories which block people from accessing public domain material because of `copyright issues'. Worse is how many university presses are making IP land grabs worthy of the RIAA and MPAA. There are a number of books which are now only available to astonishingly expensive editions. The OED is an example of this. Oxford has pumped a huge amount of money into the dictionary, but the dictionary has also been built with an enormous amount of volunteer help. There are no libraries anywhere near where I live in Bangkok with a copy of the OED which I can use. Since I don't have a credit card, I can't get access to the online edition even if I had the money to pay for it. The academic preisthood feels that their powerbase and institutional pupose for existence is threatened so they are circling the wagons and giving the world good reason to threaten them. On the other hand, academics, _are_ often the only people preserving a lot of man's older and mostly forgotten knowledge and placing it in context so that it can be understood today. Academics feel horrified when they hear people say, I don't care about all that stuff, just give me books. This is the same horror that geeks experience when they hear people say with pride that they can't program their VCR and never will. Being proud of being ignorant is something that I have never understood and never will, but I think that what Joe Sixpack is saying is that geeks and scholars should do their job and shouldn't bother him with the details. He's only concerned with the resulting text or software not the process of how it was created. In a sense he's right. That's our job, and we shouldn't try to force the end-user to understand the larger or technical issues involved in doing our job. The great unwashed masses have no idea how much work is involved in doing our jobs and sometimes believe that we're making things far more difficult and complex than it really is. As Neil Stephenson said, most people want a mediated experience like you get from Disney. They don't want to see or deal with the enormous complexity behind it all. I believe that we should think more like special effects artists who believe the best effects, and the ones that they are most proud of are the ones that no one realises are effects in the first place. Many academic editions are so burdened with analysis, and annotation that they get in the way of the text itself. Electronic editions can hide the glorified and sanctified academic Cliff Notes but make them easily accessible if you need or want them. Personally I like it both ways. Sometimes I want I want to work at a text and really study it and all the scholarly apparatus is a godsend. But other times I just want to read a story, and leave the stuff I don't understand for another time. The great promise of the computer age has been to provide tools which allow the average person with no experience or skills to do the work that required highly skilled workers using specialized professional equiptment. Desk top publishing in the 80's is a great example. As soon as laser printers and colour monitors became cheap enough everyone thought that a secretary who barely could use Wordstar could do the work of a team of professional graphic artists and typesetters. Visual Basic was touted as being a language that could be mastered by the average person and produce applications of the same quality as apps written in C by experienced programmers. Right. Apple is now pushing the dream that anyone with an Apple and a good video camera can be the next Stanley Kuberick with less than US$20K in hardware and software. The barrier of entry and access to the tools for the next Stanley Kuberick is now much lower, but that doesn't mean your Aunt Cindy is going to be making the next Full Metal Jacket in the corner of her family room on her iMac. People like Bowerbird (who I suspect is still here, despite giving his formal swan song) want to reduce the complexity behind the scenes to something as simple as what the end-user sees. The thing is, that at first glance it really doesn't look like it's too difficult. And the plethora of cheap, professional quality tools availible through chain stores makes it seem, at first, not to be too difficult. This has had the negative side-effect of giving Joe Sixpack the illusion that all of this stuff is a lot easier than it is and to give the impression that professionals who have spent decades studying and honing their craft are just full of crap and making things more difficult than they have to be. I suspect that over the next decade, institutions will be re-cast and professionals will re-establish themselves so that their education, experience and skills will be respected. But for those of us in the trenches during the transition it won't be easy and it won't be pretty. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand