Like many artists, Jean-Paul began exploring the internet and searching what hyperlinks could offer to expand his writing towards new directions. He switched from being a print author to being an hypermedia author, and created Cotres furtifs (Furtive Cutters), a website telling stories in 3D. He also enjoyed the freedom given by online self-publishing, and wrote in August 1999: "The internet allows me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize what I have in my head: the print medium (desktop publishing, in fact) only allows me to partly do that." He added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is striking. So the internet didn't change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play."
I interviewed Murray Suid, a writer of educational books, who was living in Palo Alto, California. Back in Paris, I interviewed Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, who wrote some interesting comments about digital literature.
In 1998, Murray Suid was living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He was writing educational books, books for kids, multimedia scripts and screenplays. He was among the first to choose a solution that many authors would soon adopt. He explained in September 1998: "If a book can be web-extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next edition ever came out. (...) I do not know if I will publish books on the web -- as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop multimedia learning materials, and it is a form of teaching that I like a lot -- blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and -- when possible -- interactivity)."
Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we are now web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products -- to update and enrich them." A few months later, he added: "Our company -- EDVantage Software -- has become an internet company instead of a multimedia (CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students and teachers."