ts
about digital literature.

= Educational Books

In 1998, Murray Suid was living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon
Valley. He was writing educational books, books for kids, multimedia
scripts and screenplays. He was among the first to choose a solution
that many authors would soon adopt. He explained in September 1998: "If
a book can be web-extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an
author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author
would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next
edition ever came out. (...) I do not know if I will publish books on
the web -- as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will
happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop
multimedia learning materials, and it is a form of teaching that I like
a lot -- blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and -- when
possible -- interactivity)."

Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we
are now web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products -- to update and
enrich them." A few months later, he added: "Our company -- EDVantage
Software -- has become an internet company instead of a multimedia
(CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students
and teachers."

= Hypermedia Writing

In 1999, Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, was the webmaster of
cotres.net, a site telling stories in 3D. He really enjoyed the freedom
given by online publishing. He wrote in August 1999: "The internet
allows me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies,
publishers and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize
what I have in my head: the print medium (desktop-publishing, in fact)
only allows me to partly do that. Then the intermediaries will take
over and I will have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is
greener..."

Jean-Paul added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all
directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links
on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as
the links appear). You can do this in the print media, of course. But
the difference is striking. So the internet didn't change my life, but
it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website
as you do for a script or a play.

But it wasn't exactly the internet that changed my writing, it was the
first model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myse