The future of electronic literacy (abstract): will hypertext ever find acceptance?

Extended Abstract The vision of the technologies that will lead to practical interactive electronic literature was clearly expressed by Bush, Engelbart, Nelson and others several decades ago. The pmctical application of such technologies have been established during the last decade. Despite the fact that such hypertext technologies are now largely effective in operation we find that:. hypertext technology suppliers have not, in general , found a ready and profitable market for their wares. Many suppliers have stumbled and several have failed. q outside the limited area of arcane technical and procedural documentation it is still very difficult to identifj a hypertext product which has experienced any substantial measure of success. q non-hypertext solutions, such as Document Image Processing, and Full-Text Retrieval, continue to grow despite their lower effectiveness in many practical applications. So what has gone wrong? Were we all over ambitious about the eflicacy of interactive documenta-tion? Are we still waiting for the " killer product " to kick-start the market? Can literature and electronic delivery ever mix; or will society look to the electronic device solely to deliver picture and voice? Will the public ever accept text from other than the printed page? The answer lies in a combination of circumstances: q The existence of suitable infrastructure, including such factors as high bandwidth communications channels and effective marketing channels. If our existing channels are compared to, lets say, the transport systems of two hundred years ago, how long will it take us to build the equivalents of the canals, railways, highways, and air transportation systems that we will need? Who will provide them and what will be the commercial basis of their success? As we supply solutions which, due to technological inertia, are non-optimal; how long will it take us to recover from such cul-de-sacs?. The successful new consumer electronic literature products must meet demonstrable mass-market needs. Public accept ante will be driven by the effectiveness of the product at delivering information in a way which is clearly superior to other methods. It will also be driven by factors such as style and fashion which are notoriously difficult to predict. The attitude of the public was also be damaged by highly visible failures-and there may be several on the way! History has shown that technology companies have been poor at predicting such changes in social behaviour, and that when supplied their products often miss the real target. What …