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Comment by thudson | Hacker News Reader

The CD-ROM is now on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993

Brad Templeton wrote about it: "I believe this CD is now a piece of history, as the world's first major eBook project using current fiction. At the time it was the largest anthology of current fiction ever published in one volume, and it may retain that title even today. Prior ventures were small or featured either unpublished writers or public domain works. This anthology featured novels that in most cases had not yet come out in paperback."

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WOW!!!

“These directories contain the "raw" form of the anthology, which is to say RTF, GIF and JPEG files, along with a few ASCII files. They are found in the online version, and in a special directory on the CD for people without MS-Windows or a Macintosh.” [read.me]

The format description for the .txt annotations is at: "hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/exnotes.txt"

To take a first quick look at the notes:

    unzip hugo.zip
    cd 'hugo-nebula anthology 1993/hugo/novel/vinge/'
    rg '^\^ '  # or grep -rn '^\^ ' .

The footnotes appear to be missing from the text files, but are present in the RTFs.

FYI for Mac users: I can see footnotes when I look at the raw source for the RTFs, but on macOS Catalina neither TextEdit nor Pages show them.

Hmm. Perhaps someone needs to transform those RTFs to HTML, with appropriate management for the footnotes. Then we can finally have the HTML version of the annotated novel that was promised 27 years ago. :)

Good news! I got bored and spent the better part of a day doing this.

The code I used is here: https://gist.github.com/bocajnotnef/f3f43acc065a2a1a4dd433b8...

It's pretty hacky, but you end up with a single HTML file with Vinge's notes in a side margin, with numbers and everything. There's probably ways that the title bits could be improved, but I'm too lazy to fix it now that I have the actual HTML file.

Good luck! Let me know if you have questions, I may be able to help.

Awesome!

It looks like some files are missing from the photos directory, or maybe the index is just wrong.

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