"You have to admire them [Ocean] for doing this. They're going to get a lot of customers very quickly. . . It was just a question of who jumped first."
- Colm Grealy, co-founder of ISP Ireland On-Line on the alliance of BT and the ESB's move last week to allow people access the Net for free.
"There's a lot of pressure. The students of today hardly know there are books. If they have to write an essay, they start surfing the Net."
- Wim van Drimmelen, head of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands, addressing a New York conference on how li- braries can keep up with an increasingly digital world.
"It's certain that the future of libraries lies in part in the digitised library. But you cannot afford to digitise everything. We don't have the time or money. If you take a piece of paper, it lasts 500 years. If you take a CD-Rom, it lasts 10 years. It's frightening. There's a new type of CD-Rom, which might possibly last 100 years, but it's very, very expensive."
- Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France at the same conference.
