In effect, the purchaser does the work of accessing the material and paying for its delivery. Here's an example of the reach of the Internet. In the first issue of Jacket , I published an interview I had recorded with the British poet Roy Fisher, and received an enthusiastic e-mail from a fan. Video and stereo sound are still difficult to send or receive on the Internet because they need a lot of bandwidth, and the telephone lines the Internet uses don't have much bandwidth. We still don't have video-phones, for that reason.
Some older people find the technology daunting.
And it's true that until a few years ago the Internet was hard work. You needed a degree in computer science to get a handle on it. Now, it's easy to browse the Internet. Most contemporary word processors even come with a built-in program for constructing Internet Web pages. For the consumer, the first problem is quality, or rather lack of it.