Read A Good PowerBook Lately?

THE HARD-COVER BOOK IS A PRETTY venerable piece of technology. The letters on the page are descended from movable type pioneered by Johanes Gutenberg in the 1400s. The paper is not all that different from papyrus used by the Pharaohs. Books today may be written with word processors, but they are still printed in ink, bound with thread and delivered essentially by hand.

Computer enthusiasts have long predicted that the digital revolution would soon liberate the word from the printed page and put it directly on the screen. In the past decade, hundreds of reference books -- including such well-known titles as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Roget's Thesaurus -- have appeared in electronic form. But when it comes to literature, the electronic-publishing movement has run into resistance from both readers and publishers. As inevitable as the paperless book may seem, neither group could quite imagine sitting down to read Faulkner, Fielding or Flaubert on a computer.

So it was something of a breakthrough last week when Harold Evans, president of Random House, and John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computer, met in a New York City boardroom and announced that titles from one of America's most famous book series, the Modern Library, will be published in electronic form. Among the first to be issued on disk are Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Melville's Moby Dick and Dickens' David Copperfield. The disks, priced below $25, are designed to run on Apple's portable PowerBook computers, which are widely considered to be more reader-friendly than IBM-type laptops.

The PowerBook packs the features of a Macintosh into a machine the size and weight of a dictionary. But driving the new venture is a bit of magic performed by programmers at Voyager, a Santa Monica, Calif., software company, that makes the experience of reading a book on a screen amazingly close to reading it on paper. "It's the first thing I've seen that I could curl up in bed with," says Nora Rawlinson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

Voyager's software displays the text on clean white pages that replicate the design of the hardback rather than using the scrolling strings of text so familiar to computer users. A touch of a button turns the page or allows the reader to flip back and forth. Users can dog-ear the corner of a page to mark their place, or attach an electronic paper clip for easy reference. Passages can be underscored or marked on the side, and there are generous margins for putting down notes.

The computer also brings benefits not offered by ordinary books: a backlit screen that permits reading in a darkened bedroom without disturbing a spouse, the option of enlarging the type to reduce eyestrain, the ability to copy passages onto a "notebook" page, and a search feature that displays occurrences of any chosen word, name or phrase. This last option could prove handy for, say, recalling the identity of an obscure Dostoyevsky character who suddenly reappears after 100 pages.