Microsoft Bookshelf

~ the goodbye ~

bookshelf showed up on our home pc the same way encarta did, on a pirated copy of the microsoft home suite that came back from somewhere in ankara on a stack of burned CDs. encarta was the one we used for school assignments. bookshelf was the smaller disc next to it that you opened when you needed an english word and the offline dictionary in word was somehow not enough.

inside that one CD was the american heritage dictionary, the roget thesaurus, bartlett's familiar quotations, the world almanac, the chicago manual of style, a few smaller bonus references. for a turkish kid with a non-native command of english around 1999, this was a reference set that took the place of a shelf of books nobody we knew owned in english. you double-clicked the icon, you got a splash screen that looked like a wood-paneled library, you searched a word, you copied the definition into your assignment. the loop was unglamorous and useful.

the product ran from 1987 to 2000. it started as a DOS release with the original roget and ended as a windows app folded into the encarta deluxe suite. by the time the final english edition shipped, encarta had its own built-in dictionary and bookshelf was redundant. microsoft did not announce a wind-down. they made encarta 2002 with the dictionary baked in and never shipped a bookshelf 2001.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

bookshelf was one of the first commercially successful CD-ROM titles ever shipped. when it came out in 1987 a CD-ROM drive was a $1000 peripheral and a single disc could hold the contents of a small reference shelf, which was the whole sales pitch for the format. microsoft's idea was to put the most-used english reference works on one disc and let you keyword-search across all of them at once. that was an actual selling point in 1987. by the mid-1990s the same idea sat inside the encarta deluxe box on every windows OEM that wanted a "home reference" bullet on the spec sheet.

~ the inheritance ~

most of what bookshelf had got folded back into encarta or scattered across the open web. encarta absorbed the dictionary as a built-in. word kept the thesaurus as a right-click feature, where it still sits. by the time encarta itself died in 2009, every page bookshelf had ever held was already free somewhere online, and the CD in the drive had become the slow way to get to any of it.

~ what got buried with it ~

the moment when a reference CD was a useful thing to own. for me that moment was around 1999, when ttnet was still expensive enough that you did not load dictionary.com over a 33.6k modem for every english word. once broadband arrived, the bookshelf disc was replaced by web tabs you left open. the disc itself is somewhere in a box at my parents' place in ankara, with a felt-tip number scrawled across the top.

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