Online Words and Images Think also about what you can do online with words and images than you could even 10 years ago. In some ways online publishing is largely something in which the Web excels at. We can create, store, search for, access, download, and navigate content in a variety of formats (text, HTML, multimedia, database content, executable programs). The Web, however, is more than just a big storage and retrieval and information dissemination mechanism, it is also a content creation environment. One interesting electronic publishing tool that has a pretty wide presence is the Adobe PDF (portable document format) format. Many of you have either used or heard of the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, which lets you read documents, manuscripts, and books online or on your machine as the creator intended, with formatting and images and layout preserved. Adobe has been developing a new version of its PDF software reader called WebBuy that would allow an individual to collect a payment from potential readers before his or her document can be opened and read. There is also a version for online content developers called Adobe PDF Merchant. Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster were among the first companies to agree to utilize these tools. Macintosh users have an interesting development as well in the form of TK3 technology from Night Kitchen. This basically provides a drag-and-drop environment that lets a user assemble a document from any set of files, including text, HTML, graphics, audio, and video. The interesting part is that the resulting publication reportedly will appear the same on a PC or Macintosh, something Adobe currently has mixed results with. There is a beta-testing effort for the tool at present, so try it out if you are interested. Document Reader Hardware Electronic publishing, however, has also benefited from the development of portable devices that allow people to store and utilize content when it is convenient for them. The MP3 tools are one example. Then there are e-books. E-book devices basically are capable of holding anywhere from hundreds to thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, or documents with graphics, sound, or plain text. All content is downloaded via the Internet or a selected network, or is made available through some sort of disc or module that can store or update content based on user preference. One the content is stored, you can access multiple large-scale documents, which could be reviewed, searched, enhanced with your own notes, and updated whenever you want. There were earlier devices that did just that, including Sony's Bookman from a few years back. The latest generation of devices, however, are vast improvements over the Bookman in terms of display quality and performance. The problem is that when you choose one device, you are limited to the titles offered in that format. Throughout 1999, there were, in essence, four devices that stood poised to shape consumer interest in e-book technology: NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook: This is the best selling device of the lot, mainly because it was targeted to individual consumers. It connects to a PC or Macintosh to receive documents you download from the Internet. It weighs about a pound, is about the size of paperback book, and curves to the palm of your hand. Introduced at roughly US$500 in 1998, it was reduced to $200 for the base model, which gave you 4MB of flash memory, allowing you to hold about 4,000 pages. You can also get a 16 MB version for about US$250, or a 32MB upgrade for US$150. This potentially gives you a tool that can hold up to 100 books in storage at any given time. NuvoMedia also took steps to increase market share creating a free PC tool called eRocket that can read over 600 Rocket titles without buying a Rocket eBook. SoftBook Press' SoftBook: targeted mostly to corporate users and organizations, sells for roughly $600. It is the size of a 8.5 by 11 inch sheet of paper, and weighs about three pounds, giving you a bigger screen at the expense of sharper resolution. There are some neat gimmicks to this one, though, like the ability to "write" in the margins of your book. The basic model can hold up to 1,500 pages, but with an expandable memory module, it can hold up to 100,000 pages. Unlike the Rocket eBook, it comes with its own modem, so you plug it into a phone jack, and download titles directly from the Softbook Press online store. The Everybook Dedicated Reader: resembles a four-pound, bound encyclopedia volume. When you open it up, you have a device with two 13 inch (diagonal) portrait-type high- resolution, back-lit, full-color, passive LCD screens. The device uses credit-card type "books", giving this device the capacity to hold about 1,000 books (roughly 500,000 pages) at any given time. Everybook comes with its own built in dictionary, Bible, thesaurus, and map. Before you rush right to get one, though, it will not be available until Spring 2000, when it will carry a list price of about $1600. There will also be a smaller version for an undetermined price. Librius Millennium EBook: This would have been the cheapest of the four devices. However, Librius no longer made this device by the close of last summer, in the wake of the more powerful products form NuvoMedia and Softbook cited above. Millennium Ebook was, much like the Rocket eBook, a one pound, paperback sized reader, that sold for about $200, that could store roughly 5,000 pages at any given time. It could download selections from Librius' 10,000 title library by connecting to your PC's serial port to receive content you selected in your "personal library" via the Librius online system. Rather than a pen-type device, it relied on a four button control system to perform its tasks. By the summer of last year, Librius refocused its energies to become a provider of titles that could be read on both the Palm OS and various e-book readers. Not to be outdone, Microsoft will release its own Microsoft Reader software this year. It will work on desktops, laptops, and a special Reader device not compatible with other available e-book readers. Reader will use something called ClearType technology that purports to enhance the clarity of LCD display screens by tricking your eye into seeing fonts and images sharper than they really via the color components of the dots that make up the display. Rather than explaining the technology here, check out Microsoft's press release and Webreview's semi-critical piece on ClearType. Only 10,000 reader devices were reportedly sold in the States last year. This is a pretty good indicator of the reluctance consumers have towards replacing paper copy with digital copy. One reason, to be honest, is that the displays to date have been pretty bad compared to printed versions of text. Of the two actual e-book readers made last year, Rocket e-Book had the best display at 105 dots per inch (dpi) using a backlit LCD screen. For comparison, here's a quick rundown of comparative dpi resolution:

• 72-96 dpi = average computer monitor; fax machine copy in normal mode
• 200 dpi = average fax machine in "fine" mode
• 300 dpi = older laser printers
• 600 dpi = current inkjet and laser printers, minimum level used in print publications
• 2460 dpi = typeset used in most printed magazines

No matter how much like a book an e-book is--full color content, the ability to "turn" to the next page rather than scrolling down a screen, and the ability to mark up content--it still doesn't feel enough like a "real" book to have people want to purchase it. Even multimedia content and on-demand access to a wide library of titles has not so far been a guarantee to greater use of these devices. PDAs, are another story, however. They represent the most successful portable reader available today, especially the PalmPilot with its current user base of some 2 million users. In fact, there are publishers - like Mind's Eye Fiction and Peanut Press -- that have been developing titles for handheld devices for quite a while. Some of these titles require the use of special software, others are formatted for downloading. It is no accident that both the Rocket eBook and SoftBook resemble PDAs: both utilize a writing stylus that enables users to take notes, highlight passages, make bookmarks, and do searches within the text on their touch-sensitive screens. The applications that can be developed around these and other tools is especially important in this light, because it also factors into the battle for the PDA operating system standards (at last count the Windows CE operating system was losing the battle to the Palm OS) and wireless Web publishing standards. The outcome of both contests will determine what gets published for existing handheld devices (also including next-generation pagers and cell phones). The ultimate problem for the NuvoMedia and Softbook had been producing and selling enough devices to attract the attention and interest of traditional publishers to make more popular titles available in their respective device formats. Harboring a guess that the convergence of e-book hardware with other technologies might be the only way to make e-books viable in the marketplace, a company called Gemstar pulled a fairly big surprise early in 2000 when it made deal to acquire *both* NuvoMedia and Softbook Press in a stock-swapping arrangement. Gemstar, which also bought TV Guide last year, is the developer of the VCR Plus technology, which lets you enter one code, printed in a number of television listings worldwide, in order to automatically program the recording of shows. The expectation is that Gemstar (which also licenses its technology to a number of interactive online and cable services) will be in a position to provide access to electronic documents and books to cable subscribers already using VCR Plus technology. There is also talk of extending on-demand digital documents via two-way paging devices and personal digital assistants (PDA). So in order to get more people to use an e-book readers, you have to guarantee that there will actually be content for people to read. Publishers, meanwhile, will not risk the money to produce titles for e- book tools if there is (a) no market demonstrating an interest in the technology and (b) few, if any, effective procedures to guarantee that their works will be protected from piracy. While (a) is still in doubt there have been a number of developments in encryption and anti- piracy measures. The Industry Wakes Up Early online publishers relied on ASCII text files and later the Adobe PDF technology, but found that distributing both PDF files via e-mail turned out to be a lot of trouble, and were not encouraging greater sales. Shoppers were particularly wary of downloading and passing along content from places that did not have any reputation or track record. A lot of publishers, however, according to Janelle Brown in a 1998 Salon article, are still suspicious of technological advances after being disappointed by their lack of success in the CD-ROM publishing field. Brown points out that if the publishing companies are to make any money in the online world, in fact, it won't be through the technology they embrace. It will be because they can command potentially huge fees for selling and converting their catalogs into e-book compatible formats. Notwithstanding the hype, Amazon.com proved, among other things, that there are people willing to buy special order content online. Traditional book retailers, however, recognized somewhat late that one way for them to ensure their importance in an online world was to build confidence in available technology, including allowing users to print electronic versions of books. All that was missing was the capacity to actually get the hard to find content at a place and time convenient to users-- in other words, on- demand publishing or print-on-demand. This technology has actually been around for a while. Think about kiosks that have allowed you to print out the major events that took place on your birthday, or your horoscope, or a self-designed greeting card. We found one machine recently that goes back to 1982 The technology involved? A database stored on a computer disk hooked up to a printer using a touch screen interface. Granted, you didn't have a lot of choices, but the basic idea was that you could pay for a product that met your needs and choices and pay a price that in some cases was cheaper than getting it from another source or a middleman. That's the basic idea of this generation of print-on-demand technology. These machines would actually be placed in stores, allowing one book to be printed at a time, based upon a customer's order that access a digital file stored on a server. This would eliminate the guesswork for publishers as to how many copies of a special-order book to print (particularly if they don't think it will sell). Distributors like Ingram Books have played with this for some time. It keeps digital files of books from various publishing companies in its system; so that when a customer orders something from a bookstore, the book gets printed and shipped. This does not work for hardcover books or publications that require dolor pages inside, but everything else comes out like a regular book. Getting this into an actual bookstore has been trickier. Though in the long run, the argument goes, a digital library is much cheaper to maintain than a warehouse, it was not until last year that both Barnes & Noble and Borders (the first and second largest retail bookstores in the US respectively) began to move to bring on-demand publishing to their stores. This is a little surprising when you consider that the average annual sales of Barnes and Noble, according to Brown, is roughly 750,000 books, yet the only stock 150,000 individual titles. This means that the majority of their sales came from things like special orders. What else has the publishing industry been up to? Here's a sample list of developments from last year:

• Random House (owned by the German media and e-commerce giant Bertelsmann, which is an investor in NuvoMedia, and a joint partner with Barnes & Noble online in a few ventures) and Simon and Schuster (owned by Viacom which has a pending merger with CBS) are currently making plans to convert all, if not large portions, of their respective 20,000 back listed titles to e-book accessible formats;
• NuvoMedia made a deal with Barnes & Noble to allow Rocket eBook users to download their choice of over 1,000 titles through the retailer's online division;
• Softbook Press made arrangements with Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins (owned by News Corporation, parent company of Fox Media) to make some of their titles available for the SoftBook reader device;
• Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to develop an eBook superstore, which will produce e-book content exclusively for the Microsoft Reader software starting sometime during the summer of 2000. Simon & Schuster has, however, expressed nervousness about security and privacy issues, and has been hesitant to let Microsoft have access to their electronic titles. Microsoft has, however, gotten agreements from major French and Italian publishing company (Havas and Mondadori respectively) to publish titles for the Microsoft Reader;
• Barnes and Noble attempted to buy Ingram Book Group, the parent company of Lightning Print, which in turn uses a company called iUniverse to print its books. After losing that battle, Barnes and Noble turned around and bought a 49% stake in iUniverse. IUniverse is one of the pioneers in e-publishing, and offers six publishing plans for writers and authors (you can publish an out-of- print book you own the rights to for free, a "private" book with a limited circulation for about $300, or your own musings for the general public at a cost of $99);
• Borders, following Barnes and Noble's lead, has a financial investment in a print-on-demand provider (Atlanta book wholesaler Sprout). It has, according ot Wired Magazine, set up a print station at its Tennessee fulfillment center, with plans for stations in a few stores this year. The whole sixty square-foot station costs around US$40,000, consists of two high-end laser printers. It prints digital files of specialty books in Adobe PDF format, which are then bound and trimmed by employees.
• In a sign of how seriously some of the larger actors are taking the e- book movement Microsoft, SoftBook, NuvoMedia, and Glassbook jointly created a new category (and an accompanying $100,000 prize) for the year's best book originally published in the Open eBook (OEB) format at the annual Frankfurt (Germany) Book Festival.

There has also been, since late 1998, developments by the Open eBook Authoring Group to create standards governing the numerous incompatible e-book creation and distribution formats. Some of the players in this group include Adobe, barnesandnoble.com, Bertelsmann, EveryBook, HarperCollins, Librius, Macmillan Publishing, Microsoft, Motorola, netLibrary, Nokia, NuvoMedia, Simon & Schuster, and SoftBook, among others. What Next: E-Paper? Now, let's assume that if you find any shortcomings with printed materials, it would be the inability to do edits on as specific or generic a level as possible. (okay, some of you may nitpick and suggest that you could use correction fluid, a thick eraser, or a big red pen, but just go with me on this one--it is really hard to do this to a magazine or newspaper). Well, there's always 'electronic paper' or "digital ink." No, we are not kidding you. Electronic paper consists of a thin plastic sheet containing really small duo- toned (black & white) particles randomly placed within individual oil-filled chambers. In essence, it is not unlike a larger (and electric) version of an Etch-A-Sketch. When a voltage pattern comes into contact with the screen, you get the makings of an image or words. When a new voltage pattern hits the screen, you, um, wipe the slate clean, so to speak. The two big advances in this area, so far, have come from Xerox's Gyricon project and The MIT Media Lab. The Gyricon has been experimenting with a "wand" that could be utilized as a printing device such that, when "wiped" across the screen, would produce the desired image. The idea is that this wand could also be used as a scanner, fax, or any output device you use now to a surface than can be used or updated an exponentially high number of times. You might be able to read a newspaper as it is constantly updated, or read different drafts of a report as others are editing it. Even better, you might be able to put together an entire library of documents in one book. MIT is going in the other direction by exploring how actual circuits might be incorporated into real paper. You might be able to guess which of the two efforts is having more immediate success. Unfortunately, this level of application is still far off from consumer use. For the time being, estimates figure that each piece of each "page" of e-paper output will cost about a dollar (compared to the few cents for printed material). Also, researchers are not yet able to achieve the capacity of more than a few pages before they need to be "wiped" to accommodate new information. You are starting to see gradual application of the e-paper principles in some high-tech billboard signs, for example. Protecting Material One "e-publisher" utilizing anti-piracy tools is netLibrary. This is a company that sells digital book collections to libraries. Doreen Carvajal, writing in the New York Times this past December, profiled one library that took advantage of netLibrary's services, the University of Texas at Austin library system. The library boasts access to some 6,000 electronic books in its collection (1000 directly, 5000 shared through a consortium) on art, economics, and sociology and a range of other disciplines. netLibrary offers libraries 24-hour access to a full-text search database and digital library of reference and academic titles (although there are plans to include trade books for individual users). The service, interestingly, is not compatible with the Rocket e-Book or SoftBook readers. When you select manuscripts, you are literally "checking out" an online copy of a publication, with exclusive viewing rights to that particular copy for a fixed period of time, unless a library has ordered multiple copies of a document.. After the "check out" period, other users can access that document, depending upon their queue order for requests. netLibrary, however, does not allow self- published works to be offered through its service. It will only present works that have undergone a peer-review by professional editors, in order to maintain a sense of credibility which will help increase user confidence. How do they get their material? Carvajal notes that netLibrary is a global operation, utilizing workers in China, India and the Philippines who convert books to an electronic format by actually typing the text by hand. This is because scanning reportedly posed to many errors. These copies are then edited by two shifts of editors at the company's headquarters in Boulder, Colorado from 7 a.m. to midnight. As such, they are able to crank out about some 50 books daily (plans are to increase the output to 200 a day by the end of 2000). The system requires individual user registration, so that if you are attempting to copy individual pages, it tracks the date and time you viewed those pages. A user can only print or copy a limited number of pages from any document. If it suspects you are trying to copy the entire work (or if you happen to be an usually fast reader), you will have a copyright notice pop up on your screen with a warning to stop your copying. If you continue to copy, you will be shut out of the system and your account is flagged with a note of your activity. This type of publishing environment has some real benefits to the library and academic communities. Consortia can be developed such that individual members do not have to pay the administrative fees and costs associated with acquiring, printing, marketing, storing, shipping, tracking, or returning print publications. Materials are less likely to be lost, stolen, or damaged. More Voices One of the benefits to publishers offered by netLibrary and similar services is that it gives new or increased value to out-of-print titles, exposing them to a wider potential audience, without spending the amount normally required to market a book. The fact that a potentially democratic publishing environment has limitations that attempt to provide quality controls seems antithetical to the nature of the Web. Yet people are still somehow suspicious of works that do not make it through the traditional industry weeding out process (including bestseller lists and book clubs), or that don't seem credible. Of course, as with websites, e-mail (and let's face it, phone calls), the greater the speed with which information can be disseminated, the greater the risk that incorrect information, uncorroborated info, or even fact-checking may fall by the wayside. In an environment, however, where a few large publishers control the publishing industry, the idea that anyone who feels like writing something can do so, and make it available online, especially for a fee, has definitely provoked both activity and new businesses to help support this growing trend. One major concern has been that with the number of publishing industry mergers in the last couple of decades, fewer new authors and an increasingly limited range of publications are available for the public to be exposed to. Roughly half a million books written each year, yet only some 50,000 actually get printed. Coincidentally, about 50,000 books-- due to the costs of printing, storing, and shipping costs or poor sales-- go out of print each year. Approximately 30-40% of the books sitting on all store shelves are returned unsold to the publishers each year. By maintaining digital copies of books, titles that go out of print might find a new (or wider) audience, and thus produce a new revenue stream for publishers. This also potentially opens up the limited marketplace to new voices, authors, and subjects. Larger publishers are both loathe and unable to support new authors and titles, and even those with traditionally strong reader bases go only attract so many eyeballs. Moreover it has grown increasingly more expensive to make printed books available to the public, given the costs of paper, printing, cataloging, inventory, shipping, returning books that don't sell, etc. More people are increasingly turning to online sources to fill different information needs. The ability to receive updated information or find related content at a moment's notice is particularly attractive. But there are difference between putting something up on the Web and providing access to something via the Web - hence the rising emergence (and importance) of smaller publishing houses and a growing number of "vanity" or "do-it- yourself" publishing. While it may not seem like a big deal, consider that, according to the Industry Standrad, in December 1999, one individual e-book (Leta Nolan Childers' The Best Laid Plans actually surpassed the total sales of the 150 significant e-publishers, selling roughly twice as much as their total number of offerings. (As a footnote, reportedly some three-fourths of all e-books currently sold to consumers are romance novels). One reason behind this success? The limitations of the traditional publishing industry model for pricing content. In addition to the costs we mentioned above, you also must consider what it costs to market a publication in the real world, without knowledge of whether or not it will recoup its costs. Then there are the costs associated with actually selling the material. In part to compensate for their costs, to help control their presence in the market place, and the flow of their materials, traditional publishing entities have responded to online efforts by charging for content in their catalogs. This is why it will cost you from $1 to as much ad $5.00 to download, print, or access the full version of a story that appeared only one day or two weeks ago from your favorite newspaper or journal, regardless of the size of the article. What does not get factored into their pricing are the numerous alternate ways still available to access this content. Using some of the services available, it doesn't seem like a such a daunting task to shell out zero to a few hundred dollars to be able to publish and sell your content through an online publishing house that will handle the shipping (mostly downloads) and transaction costs for you. You still potentially will get a better royalty than you would normally, and you reach a wider audience than you might not normally. You can also print material that would be otherwise unviable in the marketplace, and charge a price that reflects your costs more directly. Moreover information can be enhanced and updated when and where it is needed, because you can make edits, updates and revisions faster, and without the cost of reprinting an entire document all over again. Users, moreover, can access the information most relevant to their needs from a wider range of sources. Who Will Read E-books? One thing to keep in mind with all these developments is, according to Carvajal, that the people in America who are most likely to take advantage of electronic publishing for reading are in fact people under the age of 40. The group of Americans more likely to read-- and who indeed spend the most on books--are people 40 years and older. Moreover, people will continue to seek out and absorb information from whatever sources they can. It is not simply a question of affordability or capacity or features, it is sometimes simply a matter of whatever means is easiest, most convenient, most affordable, and most effective for them. We'll close for now, with a final observation from Daniel Will- Harris. Writing in the Jan. 15, 1999 issue of Webreview, he suggests that "[t]he Web was revolutionary not only in the way it distributes information, but in that it has been the only text-based medium where designers and authors had no control over how the text looked. Browsers added audio and video long before they even considered adding font control.... [U]ntil those letters and numbers are as easy to read on-screen as they are on paper, electronic communication will not reach its true potential." Resources Cited Adobe PDF Merchant Night Kitchen NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook eRocket SoftBook Press' SoftBook Everybook Dedicated Reader Librius Millennium EBook Microsoft's press release Webreview's article on ClearType Mind's Eye Fiction Peanut Press Gemstar netLibrary New York Times article on netLibrary and the University of Texas at Austin library system(free registration require) Industry Standard article on Leta Nolan Childers' The Best Laid Plans "Do-it- yourself" online publishing services 1stbooks.com E-matter service Epubs.com Fatbrain MyPublish Upublish Salon 1998 article Janelle Brown Microsoft and Barnes & Noble's eBook superstore iUniverse Borders and the Sprout book station Glassbook Open eBook (OEB) and the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Festival Open eBook Authoring Group Etch-A-Sketch http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper">Xerox's Gyricon project http://www.media.mit.edu/micromedia/elecpaper.html">MIT Media Lab http://webreview.com/wr/pub/1999/01/15/webfonts/index.html">Jan. 15, 1999 Webreview Daniel Will-Harris Additional Resources Portals on electronic book and publishing technologies eBookNet PubSpace Other Resources Commercial Websites for Writers "E-AUTHORS" discussion list Publish Magazine Research Services Online (in Australia)