nd the world.

Dawson Information Services Group is Europe's largest journal subscription agent
and corporate and academic book supplier. It is also a main information services
group, providing resource acquisition and management services to libraries and
corporate research centers around the globe.

Old books are now being sold through the Web. For example, Paulus Swaen Old Maps
and Prints, run by Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, specializes in
maps, atlases and globes from the 16th-18th century. The stock of maps of all
parts of the world is produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius,
Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The company also
sells atlases, globes, travel books, Medieval manuscripts and playing cards.
Since November 1996, it offers an on-line Internet auction - twice per year, in
March and November - for old maps, prints, globes, travel books and medieval
manuscripts.

3.3. Digital Books

When he buys through an on-line bookstore, the customer can almost instantly
select, order and pay for the books he is interested in. The only delay is the
shipping of the books to his house, which can take anywhere from one week to
much longer.

The problem of delay - as well as the problem of weight - should be solved soon
with digital books - or eBooks. A digital book is a book-sized electronic reader
that can store many texts at once. Some pioneer companies have created digital
books which will be available in 1999 - such as the Rocket eBook (created by
NuvoMedia), the Everybook (EB) (created by Everybook), the SoftBook (created by
SoftBook Press) and the Millennium EBook (created by Librius.com).

Rocket eBook was set up by NuvoMedia, Palo Alto, California, founded in 1997,
and is dedicated to becoming *the* electronic book distribution solution by
providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users to
publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and
efficiently over the Web. Investors of NuvoMedia are Barnes & Noble and
Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the PC or the Macintosh
is made through the RocketEbook Cradle, which provides external power through a
wall transformer, and connects to the PC with a serial cable.

Everybook is "a living library in a single book". The Everybook (EB)'s mass
electronic storage is one removable disk cartridge which can hold 80-100 college
textbooks, or 500 to 1