| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ VIEWBOOK (c) INFORMATION EDUCATION ★ |
8000Plus) |
Have you ever realised you can use a PCW to read as well as write? That's the idea behind Information Education Ltd's list of 24 Viewbooks now available for the PCW. These are computerised text books mainly for GCSE social science subjects, but the company are widening their range of subjects with discs for Primary School and CSE English. The idea with Viewbooks is to make traditional text book information more accessible by using all the technology of the PCW to find your way through swathes of text. You buy a book on a disc with on average 20,000 words split up into manageable pages. Think of ft as a large database already packed full of information. You get a menu of chapters with details of the subjects covered and each chapter is similarly split into sections. If you can't find the precise part of the text you want there is an Index (subjects in alphabetical order) or a List (subjects in page number order). Find the section you want and go straight to it with the Turn to Page' option. Should you still not have found exactly what you want there is a search facility to look for a specific word. Say you are using the Marx: An Introduction disc and have decided to home in on Kail's brothers Groucho and Harpo; you can search the text for occurrences of the name. Each page usually has three references, either to another part of the text or to the extensive bibliography. To follow these up just press the right number and you're there. Should you want to go back to follow up another line of enquiry a Retrace key press takes you back a page at a time until you find the right place. Once you've found the information you can then use it in a number of ways. You can take short notes to be printed out later. This is necessarily a very limited facility, using only the three lines of space at the bottom of the page so that you can copy details direct from the text. More interesting is the ability to print out any number of pages or transfer a file with chosen pages to M-drive so that you can work on the text in a word-processor - in other words instant essays. One slightly annoying feature is that bigger books are spread over two sides of the disc, so flipping back and forward can cause a constant successions of disc changes. But apart from that the main problem seems to be that you can't read it on the train. 8000Plus |
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