Moving image-based serial publications

The printed book or journal article enables readers to give a work careful scrutiny, and to control how they read the text: readers can "enter" the text at any point, repeat passages, pause to consider a passage, and decide for themselves how much of the notes and appendixes to consider. The book or journal is a highly portable, randomaccess storage device. To date there are few video analogues of the printed publication. However, existing and anticipated hardware promise that video analogues are on the horizon. Films and videos have existed for some time. Producers have had access to equipment that allowed for interaction with the moving-image documents, as have a few users such as football coaches and kinesiologists. More recently, relatively inexpensive home video units have provided the opportunity for interaction with documents, though saving programs for later viewing and skipping over commercials seem to have constituted most of that "interaction." Only since it recently became possible to control frame-addressable rapid serial or virtual random access with a microcomputer has it been possible to produce moving-image documents that can be given the detailed study that is possible with print documents.