None of the electronic books mentioned in the main story are designed to hook up to a TV set or work in a consumer multimedia player such as CDTV or CD-I. Though such titles exist, it’s clear that the only way an electronic book will cut the marketplace mustard is if it replicates as closely as possible the features that people cling to about print books.

And one of the most important of those is privacy. People don’t like others to look over their shoulders while they’re reading. Why on earth would anyone want to sit in their living room and let everyone in the house watch what they’re looking up in the multimedia encyclopedia?

Now think about your teenagers, or about when you were a teenager. What kind of information were you looking up in an encyclopedia or dictionary in those days? Would you want your mother to watch you do it (not to mention what the sound bytes might reveal, even if she were in another room)?

After privacy, people like touch — the feeling of direct manipulation, of having a book in their hands, up close. Again, sitting across the room or even a few feet from a screen of text and pictures is not a way to get physical, so to speak, with information.

DATADISCMAN: SO MANY WAYS WRONG

But you’d like a completely different example of how to do an electronic reference book absolutely wrong, then invest a few hundreds bucks in Sony’s DataDiscman. When we spoke with Olaf Olafsson of Sony Electronic Publishing in mid-1991, he believed the DataDiscman would find itself a sizable market among mothers who wanted to make sure their children had adequate references at their fingertips for their education.

There has almost never been a product so misconceived, misguided and badly designed. I spent two hours with the DataDiscman at a friend’s house a couple of months ago. I wasn’t just playing: I was actually looking for a specific piece of information. I wanted to know the latitude and longitude of Paris, and was looking in the World Almanac.

Let’s start with the fact that the text you type on the DataDiscman’s eensy-beensy keyboard is in ALL CAPITALS. THAT’S THE KIND OF USER INTERFACE THAT DROVE PEOPLE CRAZY EVEN WHEN THERE WASN’T AN ALTERNATIVE.

Next is the small problem of the on/off switch, which is located at the lower right-hand corner of the device, on the front panel. In other words, if you want to move the device closer to you or farther away, and you happen to be right-handed, you almost inevitably will grab the on/off switch to move the device, which turns it off. And unlike more friendly devices, when you turn the machine back on, you are not where you left off. You have to begin your search all over again.

Then there’s the database and search engine itself. At no point is the user given any idea what is actually in the database or where one might start the search. There are no search menus to speak of, only a long list of blanks to fill in search parameters. I put in Paris, France, latitude, and a score of other things in the time I was honking away at the DataDiscman.

What I got for my trouble was pages upon pages of the Helen of Troy-Trojan Horse-Paris myth. After two hours, I gave up. I’d accidentally turned off the machine three times, and completed numerous fruitless searches for an incredibly simple, non-technical piece of data that should have been available at the touch of a finger, or at least down only a couple levels in an intelligently designed hierarchy.

I was far beyond frustrated — if the device had been mine, and not my friend’s, I would have heaved it through a window.

Denise Caruso