A quiz set by word buff Tony Augarde has boosted a new Internet company which has launched a website giving access to dozens of reference books.
The company, Xrefer, has 19 titles, including the Macmillan Encyclopaedia and Oxford Companion to English Literature. Bloomsbury and Penguin are also involved and another 20 titles will be added soon.
The site, www.xrefer.com, searches the books for entries on a particular topic.
Xrefer is the brainchild of Adam Hodgkin, who in the 1980s helped to put the Oxford English Dictionary on to a CD-Rom. He later ran electronic publishing company Cherwell Scientific, based at Oxford Science Park. The company is patenting the software it has developed to allow users to search and cross-refer between titles. It aims to attract more than one million users, mainly by word-of-mouth recommendations over the Internet.
The quiz prizes are books published by Oxford University Press.
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