  We present a simple adaptation of the Lempel Ziv 78' (LZ78) compression
scheme ({\em IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1978}) that supports
efficient random access to the input string. Namely, given query access to the
compressed string, it is possible to efficiently recover any symbol of the
input string. The compression algorithm is given as input a parameter $\eps
>0$, and with very high probability increases the length of the compressed
string by at most a factor of $(1+\eps)$. The access time is $O(\log n +
1/\eps^2)$ in expectation, and $O(\log n/\eps^2)$ with high probability. The
scheme relies on sparse transitive-closure spanners. Any (consecutive)
substring of the input string can be retrieved at an additional additive cost
in the running time of the length of the substring. We also formally establish
the necessity of modifying LZ78 so as to allow efficient random access.
Specifically, we construct a family of strings for which $\Omega(n/\log n)$
queries to the LZ78-compressed string are required in order to recover a single
symbol in the input string. The main benefit of the proposed scheme is that it
preserves the online nature and simplicity of LZ78, and that for {\em every}
input string, the length of the compressed string is only a small factor larger
than that obtained by running LZ78.
