In a message dated 10/20/2004 4:41:26 AM Mountain Standard Time, marcello@perathoner.de writes:

Well same limitations for PDF. It
hasn't stopped people from buying paper books.

They've da** well stopped ME from buying

paper books. I CAN'T READ THE BLOODY

THINGS! I have about 800 paperback books

right beside my bed that I CANNOT READ IN

BED and most of them are in no other format.

I read them in the living room, using a magnifying

glass when necessary. Most of my hardcover

books I can still read in the living room, but I

can't read them in bed either. I'm to the

point that I would far rather read a hundred-

year-old book on screen than a brand new one

on paper, even if it's a topic in which I am

extremely interested.

I'm really not interested in converstion

from XTM or XTL or whatever it is, if

you're expecting the reader to do the

conversion. Back to my third-world

schoolmaster with his donated 486

and a slow CD reader--if we send

him a CD of PG books in English he

can read them and he can use them

to teach his students English, which will

greatly improve their chances of finding

decent work when they are adults.

But he can do this only if the books are

in TXT format.

Please. I am not trying to start a flame war.

I detest flame wars. I am simply returning,

again and again, to Michael Hart's original

vision. No matter what ELSE we do to the

texts, we are betraying what makes PG

special if we require everybody to have this

program or that program which probably won't

run on most obsolete or obsolescent computers.

All this other stuff sounds grand. I wish I

could understand it. But I can't. Neither

can 99.9999999% of the other people who

use PD.

Anne