Larger publishers, too, pushed ahead on the Web. Time Warner was selling “Quick Reads.” It was a series of reference books, self-help guides, and others that you could download in full and search for, say, the right quote from a famous business executive (Bartlett’s Book of Business Quotations) or the appropriate recipe (the Cooking Library). I could understand Time Warner’s fondness here for reference books. Most readers didn’t want to gawk at electronic novels hour after hour. The big question, in cases of tech-savvy conglomerates like Time Warner, was not whether the publishers were ready. It was whether the public was; whether enough people would end up soon enough with the proper hardware for reading books in bed or on the sofa.
That, of course, was where TeleRead came in. Whatever their sizes, publishers needed to hook the nonelite in this videocentric era before they gave up on the written word.
The above is not to suggest that text is the only way to communicate knowledge over the Net. The right graphics certainly can as well. One of the most intriguing examples of the potential here is a remarkable endeavor—the Visible Human Project—in which, so to speak, a murder lives on forever in cyberspace to the benefit of medical education and cancer research. I’ll discuss this in the next chapter.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Wired Knowledge:
When They Let a
Murderer Loose
on the Internet
Paul Jernigan was a tattooed ex-mechanic just under six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds. He had been a drug addict and a chronic drunk, but nearly all his organs still looked in textbook shape by the standards of gross anatomy—a stroke of luck that would later help him win him a macabre competition. Jernigan had fatally stabbed and shot a seventy-five-year-old watchman after stealing a radio and a microwave oven. More than a decade[than a decade] had passed. So had his hopes for a successful appeal to the courts.