MarketLibrary of the Future
Company Profile

Library of the Future

Library of the Future was a collection of public domain texts published on CD-ROM by World Library, Inc. Initially released in 1990, it was one of the first commercial collections of books on CD-ROM. The fourth and final edition was released in 2000 by Ablesoft.

Development
Library of the Future was published by World Library Inc., a company founded by brothers Robert and William Hustwit in Garden Grove, California. The idea for the project after Robert spent days struggling to locate a single quotation of Immanuel Kant in an eight-volume printed text. While he had no formal training in Library Science and did not graduate from college, he was an avid reader and advocate for self-education. He wrote proofreading software to help increase the accuracy of the digitizing process. == Features ==
Features
Library of the Future enabled full-text searching of all included texts, as well as searching by time period, geographic area, or genre. The first edition displayed text in 21 lines at a time with the option to print any number of screens or an entire work. The second edition added a split-screen function to view two works side by side. The program supported a selection of boolean operators to conduct advanced searches. == Sales and reception ==
Sales and reception
By September 1991, World Library Inc. had sold 25,000 copies of Library of the Future. Several scholars criticized the collection's lack of bibliographical information about which editions of texts were included. == References ==
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