free Rev ebook reader & library

[bt]

Hello Educators!

I'd like to tell you about "Sophie" a very educational Revolution 
project that I just re-released and improved for Tiger (Mac OS X) 
compatibility. Sophie is an ebook reader developed by Richard Gaskin 
of Fourth World Media Corporation Inc. and me and my company, 
Rivertext.com. In the new issue of revJournal Richard just published 
my article about the development of the project Sophie was built for 
-- "If Monks had Macs called:

"Gravity sucks less now than it did last year."
    see http://www.revjournal.com/

However, Monks is a huge project and we left a discussion of Sophie 
out of that article. Sophie is part of the Monks CD-ROM but it is 
also available separately and for free.

The new edition of Sophie comes with a library of 12 ebooks including 
the brand new "Kafkaesque" -- a collection of five extraordinary 
stories by Franz Kafka and his precursors that begins with a brief 
foreword I wrote about the deeper meaning of the term 'Kafkaesque.'

All the Sophie e-books begin with an original and thought-provoking 
preface. The preface to the Sophie e-book released earlier this year, 
H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," offers a more provocative and 
timely interpretation of the original science fiction classic than 
Stephen Spielberg's new blockbuster film starring Tom Cruise.

The 12 e-books have many useful features as well as at least one 
delightfully useless feature. Two of the e-books, "JFK Witness" and 
Thoreau's "Walden" include guided tours created with the Sophie 
notebook tool. This tool allows readers to create and share with 
others their own indexed and commented "readings" of important texts. 
Sophie's search feature lists the chapter and the phrase for each 
occurrence of a search string. On the more or less useless side of 
the feature list, a copy of Fourth World's Text Blender Pro is 
built-in to each e-book reader. Paste in any meaningful passage and 
the text blender will, grind, whip, puree, or liquify it until it is 
more or less meaningless. A few poets, song-writers or latter-day 
beatniks will find this to be a useful feature, but for most it will 
be a delectable distraction.

The other e-books included in the free download are: Joseph Conrad's 
"The Heart of Darkness," two books by G.K. Chesterton "The Man who 
was Thursday," and "The Innocence of Father Brown," Thomas a Kempis' 
"Imitatio Christi," "Pencil and Poison - Selected Prose of Oscar 
Wilde," Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" and Robert Louis 
Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde."

Version 1.02k of Sophie is fully compatible with Macintosh OS 9, or 
OS X and it runs Windows 95 and later.

To download Sophie:

http://www.fourthworld.com/products/sophie/download.html


Someone please smuggle this subversive material into our school 
system! (All great literature is subversive.)

-- 
                        
Brian

http://rivertext.com/

mixing art & ideas online since 1986