about Voyager Expanded Books

[Colin Holgate]

I chanced across an old topic to do with the Voyager Expanded Books, 
I think someone was asking about whether it would be possible to do 
that in Revolution. Well, of course it would be possible! I don't 
think though that converting the HyperCard versions would be the 
right way to go. Instead you would just want to reproduce the 
features of the HyperCard version, using whatever the best approach 
would be for each feature. In some cases the feature could be 
improved, no doubt.

A while ago I did try to do exactly that in Director. I have The 
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy posted here:

http://staff.funnygarbage.com/colin/hitch.html

It has many of the features of the HyperCard version, though nowhere 
near all of them. You can click to advance through the opening pages, 
or press the right arrow key. In the table of contents you can click 
on the chapters to jump there. On the main pages you can click and 
drag out a paper clip (up to ten of them) to mark that page. You can 
click and drag in the progress gauge at the bottom to scrub to any 
page. Most interesting of all you can click and hold on any word to 
search for that word, and get a list of everywhere that word is used 
(try the Find in Context, it's pretty useful). Clicking on a line in 
the found list will take you to the right page and will highlight all 
the places that word appears.

There are legal issues in using text from non-public domain books, 
and even if Voyager was still around they wouldn't have had the right 
to let you use the text. As for the features of the Expanded Books 
software itself, I don't think anyone would complain if another 
electronic book reader used some of the same ideas.