INSTALLATION = DRAWBACKS

The realistic possibility of delivering the electronic book depends critically on the ease of installation. The world is showering us with software, and we are limited mostly by what we can afford to learn, not what we can afford to buy. So, it is important to be able to set up an installation procedure that will not be too aggravating.

It is always impressive to drop a Macintosh disk into the slot and watch the software magically come up, but we are working with software that we design to run on machines of many vendors. Still, perhaps we should attempt to prepare an ``all binary'' book for a major platform or two. But the problem with binaries is that they may work fine for a year or so, but then the vendor will upgrade the OS and they break, whereas source code is more maintainable.