The financial Times

INSIDE TRACK:
  21 Apr 99
Publishers turn the page to the electronic age: INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY           E-BOOKS: Cleaner type and a forthcoming
industry standard look set to           putelectronic books on
the map, writes Alan Stewart.

   By ALAN STEWART
After years of anticipation, electronic books have become a
reality. In recent months, several of these hand-held computers
that store text electronically have gone on sale in the US - and
others are due to follow soon.
The long-term impact of this technology is still uncertain. Not
everyone is convinced that "e-books" will prove universally
popular. Paper books, say the sceptics, will never be completely
replaced.
But this assertion is challenged by the technology's champions.
"Whenever I hear people say that, I always point out that it's
already too late," says Daniel Munyan, chief executive of
Everybook, an e-book reader supplier. "Paper encyclopaedias are
already gone."
To ensure that the take-up of e-books is not disrupted by a
standards war (such as the one that took place over the VHS and
Betamax standards for video), a group of interested companies is
developing an Open eBook standard. A draft version is scheduled
for publication at the end of May. The group includes the five e-
book reader companies (see story on right). Other members are
publishers Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Microsoft Press, Penguin
Putnam, Simon & Schuster and Time-Warner Books, as well as
Franklin Electronic, publishers of 200 electronic reference
books, and online bookseller barnesandnoble.com.
In addition to attending in its role as a book publisher,
Microsoft is also bringing to the party a new font technology,
known as ClearType. By addressing an area smaller than a pixel, a
single point in an image, the new technology is claimed to make
screen type clearer and easier to read, especially on the liquid
crystal displays found on laptop computers. A second new print
technology from software company Adobe, another group member, is
Precision Graphics Mark-up Language (PGML). This is a hybrid of
Adobe's proprietary Portable Document Format (PDF) and the hyper
text mark-up language (HTML) used for page layout on the web.
"Adobe's technology provides a 400 per cent improvement on the
current 'blockiness' of pixels, while ClearType, at its very
best, will never be more than a 300 per cent improvement," says
Mr Munyan. He believes that a joint effort by Microsoft and
Adobe, however, would produce truly readable e-books, comparable
to paper, at very low cost.
Everybook decided to use PDF, as 90 per cent of all current
publications already exist in that format, rather than HTML,
which is used by NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press. "At my price, the
quality has to be head-and-shoulders above the competition," says
Mr Munyan. He is not, he says, dealing with fiction for the
beach.
Mr Munyan believes his e-book reader is competing with paper, not
a computer screen. "Paper is perfect," he says. "It's been
perfected over a millennium." Mr Munyan is therefore enthusiastic
about new cholesteric liquid crystal screens being developed by
Kent Display Systems with technology from Kent State University
in Ohio.
"They use a form of cholesterol to create an opaque background of
any colour, and lay down a foreground in sharp 100 dots-per-inch
(dpi) resolution - better than a computer screen's 72 dpi - with
no backlight at all," he says. "It's just like paper. If you take
it outside, it's absolutely clear in natural light."
A cholesteric screen requires no power to hold a static image.
"Once you've turned the page in your e-book, you could pull out
the battery," he says. "If you fall asleep reading, when you wake
up the next morning, you're on the same page, and you've burned
zero battery power."
Not only do the new screens display a clearer image, they are
also completely glass-free, and consequently much lighter than
glass screens. "They're going to completely revolutionise e-
books," enthuses Mr Munyan, who is testing a personal model of
Everybook's eBook reader with cholesteric screens.
Everybook sees a large market for e-books in universities, "As a
freshman, the student will be able to get an e-book reader loaded
with the whole curriculum for the next four years, and then have
updates downloaded from the internet," he says.
Although all five current suppliers of e-book readers are
American, a similar European device was in existence 2 1/2 years
ago. The NewsPAD, manufactured by Acorn, was used in a European
Union-funded electronic newspaper trial in conjunction with El
Periodico de Catalunya, based in Barcelona, Spain.
The project was ahead of its time, beginning in March 1994, when
internet line speeds were too slow to support large downloads.
The method chosen for delivery of news content was therefore
overnight television broadcast. Time now, perhaps, for the
NewsPAD to be dusted off and turned into an internet-connected e-
book reader?
 Countries:  US United States of America.
 Industry:   P3571 Electronic Computers.
             P2741 Miscellaneous Publishing.
             P7372 Prepackaged Software.
 Actuary:    Electronic & Electrical Equipment, Electronic
Equipment.              Media, Publishing. Support Services,
Information Technology.  Subject:    IT & Information Services.
Media - Publishing. Products &              Product Use
Technological Developments.
 Types:      Features.
 MCC Type:   TECH  Technology.

The Financial Times
Page 19
Copyright (C) The Financial Times Ltd, 1997


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