Re: e-books pricing

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Wed Jul 26 2000 - 17:23:31 MDT


Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > Stephen Pendergrast <pend@skylands.net> writes:
> >
> > All three formats we sell (Palm Doc, Acrobat, and Rocket) have a search
> > feature built-in, so there is no need to convert to another format to do a
> > search for a word or phrase. Authors and their agents get antsy if you let
> > people manipulate the files, so we don't explicitly allow that.
>
> Searching in /one/ document is bloody useless. /None/ of the formats
> mentioned qualify as "searchable", because they can't be searched and
> indexed en masse with every other plain text document on the web or in
> whatever other medium the user has documents in.

Actually, Lee, this is not true. If you have Acrobat, you can create your own
index of every PDF document you have access to. I do this for the PDF version of
the manual I publish for Datamann and other documents I keep on my system here.
I have a customer index that only indexes the manual, that goes on the CDROM,
then a superindex that our customer service people use that includes a number of
other PDF documents as well.

On the subject of indexes, I'm looking for a seach engine I can install on a
CDROM as part of an HTML version of the manual I produce. It must search an
index on the CDROM that it, or an app with it, can generate on my office machine
here when I generate the content for the CDROM. Any recommendations. NOTE: Cheap
is good, free is great. I really want the index generator to generate links in
the index that point to the anchor in an HTML document that is closest above the
desired search object, something no search engines I can find do.



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