Erudite journals and newcomers like the ezine Slate took their time over declaring free access, Encyclopaedia Britannica has only taken a little longer. Two, in a compulsively multitasking world, simply reproducingprint editions will not animate a Netizen burdened with the freedom to choose. So, the information at www.britannica.com will be updated almost instantaneously, besides being supplemented with articles from dozens of journals.

This begs the question, if these sites offering insight and wisdom for free are confident of making ample profits through advertisements and e-commerce by attracting surfers across the globe, are we looking at a suddenly more literate world? If surveys indicating that ever increasing per capita Net time is extracted from busy schedules at the expense of television, does it mean we are reading more? The answer, according to James Gleick's breathless new book Faster, is a sad no. He cites research conducted two years ago by Sun Microsystems into Netizens' online reading habits. ``They scan, sampling words and phrases. Why? In part because any one page, on the which the fluttering user happens to have lighted momentarily, competes for attention with millions more.... (They) proposedguidelines for catering to such users guidelines that came to describe more and more of the Internet reading experience: highlighted keywords, bulleted lists, frequent subheadings, and paragraphs containing exactly one idea.'' As more and more of our dog-eared staples for lazy Sundays and rainy afternoons are placed on the Net, the more susceptible they become to hurry sickness and short attention spans.

And it will not get any better. At the Frankfurt Book Fair this month Microsoft offered a peep into the future: electronic news kiosks that would enable information freaks, armed with lightweight computers and of course software from the Seattle-based company, to download newspapers and magazines. The scan and sample perusal this encourages will in no time spill over to the sacred realms of books, with publishers racing to format their ware for easy downloads, with Penguin saying it will be issuing spineless versions of 1,000 classics by early 2000. Will notes in the margins soon be a metaphor for anotherera?