A "How To" Guide for the WCT Reader

Tell Me About Ebooks and Bookshelves. What Can Be in Them?

What's the difference between an ebook and a bookshelf?
Not much, in the sense that both behave and are used in exactly the same manner. An ebook is typically a single book in electronic form, for example, Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton, or a document such as the Constitution of the United States. Ebooks are often under 100,000 words. What we have termed a bookshelf is a collection of ebooks, for example The Thirty-Seven Plays of William Shakespeare or The Holy Bible. A bookshelf may be up to 3,200,000 words in size.

If you see the word ebook below, think either a single book or a bookshelf-size collection.
An ebook consists of words.
The underlying purpose of a Words Close Together is to enable people to find what they are looking for among collections of words. One of our companion web sites is www.ProximitySearch.com. We downplayed that name when we found people associated proximity with how close together places are. If you want to include maps as pictures associated with an ebook, that works. But the search is on words.
Ebooks may have graphics.
Have you noticed the large number of screen shots included in this "How To" Guide? The WCT Reader is in part a browser, and browsers can handle references to any sort of graphic images. It is important that the graphics be where they are expected to be. Chances are you are seeing the screen shots with this ebook because your computer is hooked up to the Internet. If you are looking at this through the WCT Reader on your personal computer, accessing the pictures as needed from the Internet saves you the bother of downloading all the pictures before using this "How To" Guide. The pictures are more than 150 times the size of the ebook!

The Project Gutenberg DVD includes a version of the Guide, complete with all the pictures. The installation automatically puts the pictures in a particular directory (c:\Program Files\Marpex\HelpImages) so that all pictures appear instantly as needed, whether or not you are connected to the Internet.
Roll-your-own ebooks.
You may get the drift that at some point you will be invited to make your own Words Close Together ebooks. That has been the plan all along. Don't hold your breath waiting; we are slow. If you want us to speed up, practical encouragement is welcomed at our download site, www.WCTSE.com.
Archives are worth putting into ebooks.
Past issues of magazines, last month's blogs, newsletters, any sort of communication that might be worth looking at again, are all good candidates to be put into ebook form.
Web sites as ebooks? Sure.
World War I song: "How will you keep them down on the farm, after they have seen Paris?" How will you put up with typical web site search systems, once you have used meaningful search? Have you tried searching this site? The link is on the home page.
Corporate data as ebooks? Definitely.
How much time and effort is expended in a large organization finding data from the past? Too much.
Classic books as ebooks? Project Gutenberg is on display.
14,000 books were set up and are all downloadable as examples.
Pre-trial discovery, email, ebooks, and lawyers ... how to save money.
Merger and acquisition time? Pre-trial discovery? Corporate conflict? Visualize teams of $200 an hour lawyers, returning day after day, looking for needles in mountainous haystacks. There is a better way. Cheaper, too.
Distance education courses on illustrated ebooks? Yes.
The first public use of Words Close Together technology was in a university course on e-commerce. Most of the students passed. The technology won high honors.

A distance ed version could be structured much like this "How To" Guide.
Help systems to support software programs? You are reading one right now.
Yep.
Ebooks and stuff on my hard disk -- Why not?
All that is needed is filters to extract text from the many types of files.
Can this list go on forever?
Yep.

Meaningful precision search for text data is available now. Learn more.

words close together.com

The "Research Quality" Search Engine by Marpex, Inc.