TECHNOFILE

N Welcome to my site, as they say on the Web. Even four-letter words have acquired peculiar new usages in the new electronic media. The uninitiated might be forgiven for thinking that to talk about "hypermedia", you must either have your head in the clouds or your nose buried in a root directory, whatever that may be. There seems to be nothing between the souffle of nebulous prophecy and the indigestible grit of engineering talk. To start at what ought to be the beginning, then, here's a basic principle in plain English: any book you usually enter via the index, rather than the first page, is better on disk than on paper.

Purists on both sides will recoil. Partisans of print may point out that it often takes longer to start up a computer and load a file than to get the dead tree version off the shelf and flick through it. Hypermedia visionaries regard electronic versions of books as no more than a first step on the road to new media genres which we cannot yet even imagine.

Both are right, up to a point. There will always be circumstances in which paper books are more convenient. They will usually be more enjoyable to own and handle, too. But when it comes to work rather than pleasure, people will appreciate the advantages of translating books into digital media. Digitisation frees a text from its covers. Readers can put it to fresh uses; publishers can make fresh profits from it.

New forms certainly will emerge. Andreas Whittam-Smith, who founded the Independent and now fronts Notting Hill, an electronic publishing company, draws a comparison with early railway coaches, whose design was based on that of horse-drawn carriages. He is right that the vehicles of the new media will evolve beyond their prototypes, but the analogy implies that the prototypes will be completely superseded. A place will remain for books, with hyperknobs on. And works specially created for electronic media will actually encourage their hybrid cousins, by getting people excited about reading from computer screens.

The obverse of the argument that new media demand new forms is that old forms of writing should stay on paper where they belong, in touch with the conditions under which they were created. The facsimile images of the original edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (Cambridge University Press pounds 195), which accompany the text of the new CD-ROM version, look jagged and indistinct, ill at ease extracted from their soft bed of paper. But they also serve as a reminder that print publishing has itself evolved a long way. If we imagine we move significantly closer to the 18th century by opening a modern book than by loading a modern disk, we're kidding ourselves.

Dr Johnson's CD-ROM is very far from the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia affairs hailed as the vanguard of the industry. It is resolutely functional, though Anne McDermott's introduction affirms that it is a labour of scholarly love. As a demonstration of the possibilities of new media, it is rudimentary. You can view the texts of the first and fourth editions, separately or together, search them for words and click the icons by them to see what the original version looked like.

Above all, it is a cultural statement. Ventures like these affirm the continuity between the age of print and the age of electronics. As a milestone in the organisation of information about the English language, Johnson's dictionary is an essential addition to the digital canon. The Doctor himself, who laboured nine years over it, would surely agree that lexicographical drudgery, while harmless, is better automated.