Letter: Net paintings

In your article "The big picture book that no one can afford" (13 October) concerning the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, you state that "There are huge copyright problems to getting the electronic reproduction rights". This, you imply, is a barrier to placing the book on the Internet. In fact, it is quite the opposite: if MicroSoft puts up its own World- Wide Web site with all the pictures available, then Macmillan needs only to pepper its own web site with the addresses of the appropriate paintings on MicroSoft's site and the images will be loaded automatically without the reader necessarily even noticing that they were coming from elsewhere.

Richard Bartle

Colchester, Essex