The Smart Book involves the direct application of computer technology to the book marketplace. It employs speacial‐purpose equipment to simplify the user's access to information that would normally be found in a printed book. The concept invovles two distinct components: a reader unit and a book pack. The reader unit is a device that contains computer equipment, a custom liquid crystal display screen, and six user control buttons. All facilities for reading, searching, indexing, and so on can be performed using those six controls. The Smart Book Text Pack, or The Book, is currently a one‐megabyte ROM pack using conventional micro‐computer read‐only memory chips. This on‐megabyte pack contains the text of a book and its appropriate program functions. The text is held on the ROM pack in a proprietary compressed format.