Hi,

Yesterday I mentioned a NPR story talking about electronic books.  Below is
an article which is freely available on the New York Times web site and
therefore reproduced here.  As I said yesterday, should any of these
technologies take hold (it is only a matter of time before one catches on
in my opinion) the opportunity for better accessibility to the printed word
is going to be lost without serious effort on the part of developers.  I
suspect that in the case of RocketBook and SoftBook, the basic design and
operation of the product is long completed and the opportunity gone like so
many electronic bytes deleted from a hard drive.  Still I think those of us
who could benefit from the electronic publishing of books need to join
together and find ways to communicate to those creating the infrastructure
of this environment.


July 2, 1998

Taking on New Forms, Electronic Books Turn a Page
By PETER H. LEWIS

Let's face it, if the printed book had just been invented, it would
probably get three stars out of five in reviews from the computer
magazines. A review of Paper Book 1.0 might conclude with the following
summary:
"Pros: Lightweight, portable, inexpensive, high resolution, practically
unbreakable, available in multiple languages, easily annotated with
write-only stylus, requires no batteries. Can be read while sitting in the
smallest room of the house."

"Cons: Pages are static rather than dynamic (they cannot be updated once
printed); fonts and type sizes are fixed; lack of backlighting makes it
difficult to read at night without an external light source; topic
selection is limited; paper is inefficient, bulky and subject to mildew and
yellowing; paper production is environmentally unfriendly, and content is
vulnerable to rampant copyright violations." "In subsequent versions," the
electronic reviewers might write, "we would like to see the Paper Book add
interactivity, hyperlinking, a built-in dictionary, animated illustrations,
online connections to content repositories, encryption to protect the
publisher's copyright and other features we take for granted in electronic
books."

Printed books have been popular for five centuries, of course, and have
enjoyed great success despite the aforementioned shortcomings. But that
hasn't stopped recent generations of science fiction authors, futurists,
entrepreneurs and even politicians from fantasizing about electronic and
digital books.

Speaker Newt Gingrich told an audience last month that replacing printed
textbooks with computers should be a goal of the Federal Government. "I
would hope within five years they would have no more textbooks," Gingrich
said. In Texas, the chairman of the State Board of Education has proposed
spending billions of dollars in coming years to replace printed books with
laptop computers and electronic books.


The following are the specifications listed by the manufacturers of three
electronic books expected on the market. The actual performance data might
differ from these numbers.

1. NAME: Rocketbook.
MANUFACTURER: Nuvomedia.
PRICE: About $500.
MARKET DATE: By the end of the year.
CAPACITY: 4,000 pages.
WEIGHT: 1.25 lbs.
DIMENSIONS: 7.1 inches high by 4.9 inches wide by 0.9 inches deep.
SCREEN: 6.5 inches on diagonal.
BATTERY LIFE: 20 hours with backlight on; 40 hours with it off.

2.
NAME EB: Dedicated Reader.
MANUFACTURER: Everybook.
PRICE: $1,400 to $1,600.
MARKET DATE: Early next year.
CAPACITY: A half-million color pages.
WEIGHT: 3.7 lbs.
DIMENSIONS: 11.8 inches high by 9.5 inches wide by 1.8 inches deep.
SCREEN: Two screens, each 13.3 inches on diagonal.
BATTERY LIFE: Four to six hours.

3.
NAME: Softbook.
MANUFACTURER: Softbook Press.
PRICE: $299.
MARKET DATE: September 1998.
CAPACITY: 100,000 pages of text and gray-scale illustrations.
WEIGHT: 2.9 lbs.
DIMENSIONS: 11 inches high by 8.5 inches wide by 1 inch deep.
SCREEN: 9.5 inches on diagonal.
BATTERY LIFE: Six hours.


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"Like a comet on some weird, loopy orbit, this idea comes around every 10
years or so," said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future,
a research group based in Menlo Park, Calif.

"Each time we get a closer approximation."

This time around, at least three digital approximations of books are
scheduled to be introduced, beginning in the fall.

You would casually entrust none of them to a fifth grader and would not,
for that matter, take any of them to the beach in a bag filled with sand
and tanning lotion. All are essentially portable computers with
touch-activated screens and special modifications for retrieving, storing
and displaying digital versions of printed material.

The first scheduled to arrive is the midsize Softbook, a sleek tablet with
a supple leather cover. The Softbook weighs about three pounds and has a
screen not quite big enough to display a single page of a hardcover book.

The Softbook is expected to cost $299 when it goes on sale in September,
but the buyer will also be required to pay a monthly subscription fee of
$9.95 for a package of services that will include local telephone access to
the Softbook Press library and a bundle of public domain and special
publications. Additional fees will be charged for downloading copyrighted
books and publications. A $19.95 monthly plan for more active readers will
also be available.

To load the Softbook with "content," as writing is known these days, the
user will simply plug any standard phone line into the Softbook's built-in
modem port and tap a connection icon on the screen, and the Softbook will
do the rest. No desktop computer will be needed.

Sometime before the end of the year, the Rocketbook will be on the market.
The smallest of the three electronic books, the Rocketbook can be held in
one hand; it weighs about half as much as the Softbook (the Rocketbook's
designer also designed the Palm Pilot). Nuvomedia, the Rocketbook's
creator, has financial backing from the investment arm of the global
publishing giant Bertelsmann A.G. and from Barnes and Noble. Both companies
apparently see a potential cost advantage in not having to print, ship,
stock and store paper-based books.

No subscription fee will be required for the Rocketbook, but the device
will cost about $500 when it reaches the market, about the time when winter
weather sets in and people are thinking of curling up in front of a
fireplace with a good book.

Unlike the Softbook, the Rocketbook will have to be inserted into a special
"cradle" connected to an personal computer with Internet access. The user
will shop at any online bookstore but the book ordered will not be sent by
mail; the words will stream into the Rocketbook instead.

Both the Softbook and Rocketbook companies contend that they have struck
agreements with almost all of the world's great book publishing and
information companies and that current best-sellers as well as specialized
publications will be available when they open for business.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Don't try reading one while soaking in the bathtub or sunbathing on the
beach.

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----


The only one of the three new models that actually resembles a book is the
EB Dedicated Reader, which is being developed by Everybook Inc. of
Middletown, Pa. Now in the prototype stage, the Reader is not expected to
reach the market until next year. When it does arrive, it is expected to
cost $1,400 to $1,600, a rich vessel indeed for bodice-ripping romance
novels but perhaps reasonable for a twin-screened book that can display two
full-size, facing pages at once, in the exact format of the
printed-on-paper version, with color and the ability to show engineering
diagrams and mathematical formulas.

"A single-screen device is not a book -- it's a tablet," said the Reader's
inventor, Dan Munyan, who says that his product will be the first true
electronic book. "The last person to read and enjoy a tablet was Moses."

Unlike the two other contenders, the Reader is designed to use the Portable
Document Format (.pdf) files that recreate a paper document's layout and
type styles on any computer screen. Munyan said he expected the Reader to
appeal mainly to customers on the high end of the professional
reference-book market, those who spend a thousand or more tax-deductible
dollars on reference works a year.

Even the inventors of these first models stress that they are not intended
to replace the paperback novel. "You can't beat paperbacks," Munyan said.
"Paperback books are too cheap." Instead, all are trying to win customers
among professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and
others who need to keep reading updated journals and reference works. Yes,
there will be room in the digital book's memory for a guilty pleasure or
two -- the smallest digital book can hold the equivalent of 10 trashy
novels -- but realistically, the economics of it will make sense mainly for
getting instant access to professional texts.

A digital book would have some undeniable advantages. Students would not be
bent under bulging backpacks filled with heavy textbooks. Children would
not have to read by flashlight under the covers after curfew at night
because a button turns on the illumination for the book's display screen
(and shuts it off quickly when footsteps approach). The children's parents
could dispense with unstylish reading glasses because another button would
instantly swell the book's text to a larger size.

In theory, an online bookstore could have hundreds of thousands of book
titles ready for instant delivery. There would no longer be out-of-print
books because once a title was digitized, there would be no cost to "print"
another copy, even for one customer. In reality, though, very few books
today exist in digital form, so publishers or distributors would have to
pay several hundred dollars each to have older books retyped or scanned
into a computer. Establishing electronic royalties for authors and
illustrators would be a legal morass. Other than that, because the
publisher has no paper, printing and distribution costs, one could expect
the cost of a digitally delivered book to be less than that of one tattooed
onto dried paste made from dead trees. Then again, one would have thought
that audio CD's would cost less than vinyl LP's.

For teachers and students, the digital books hold the promise of never
being outdated. Unfamiliar words and concepts would be defined with a tap
on the screen, calling up a dictionary entry or supplementary text, all
through hyperlinks. For professionals, things like medical journal articles
and timely tax and legal information would be a click away.

As CD-ROM encyclopedias have shown, digital books can be enhanced with
sound, video, animation, hyperlinking, automatic updating and interactive
story lines. Of course, paper books don't crash, run out of battery power
over Nebraska, spew error messages, demand periodic upgrades, require
technical support, attract professional thieves, entice the purchase of
expensive upgrades or go to the repair shop for days at a time -- all
issues that Gingrich and the Texas schoolbook officials apparently believe
won't apply to digital books.

And experience suggests that even if people own expensive, high-resolution
desktop displays, they typically prefer to send long blocks of text to a
printer rather than read them on a computer screen.

But digital books seem inevitable, as an alternative, not a replacement,
for paper books. Microprocessors are getting smaller, more powerful and
cheaper as displays are getting bigger, thinner and cheaper; memory
capacity is getting bigger and cheaper; Internet access is becoming
ubiquitous and cheaper, and book production and distribution costs are
getting more expensive.

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E-books: Versatile, but hard to curl up with.



And in the even more distant future, the line between paper and electronic
books may blur. In Cambridge, Mass., Prof. Joe Jacobson of the Media
Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is trying to create
an "ink" sensitive to electronic fields that, when printed on thin plastic,
fabric or even paper, will lead to a book that can publish itself.

The ink is actually microscopic particles embedded in the paper, inside
tiny capsules, that flip over in response to changes in an electric field.
When they are flipped one way, they appear black; when they flop the other
way, they are white. Electrical signals originating in the spine of the
book tell the particles how to line up, creating text that can be rewritten
over and over.

A book printed with so-called electronic ink could very closely approximate
a traditional printed book, including paper pages. But depending on what
the user wanted to read, the book could erase and redraw itself with new
text and illustrations.


A digital book with electronic ink is years, if not decades, away. But
Professor Jacobson has formed a private company, E Ink, to find commercial
uses for electronic ink in the near term, in products like clothing and
wallpaper that could change patterns and display advertisements. Several
newspaper, magazine, advertising and electronics companies have poured
millions of dollars into the research this year.

What's next? Professor Jacobson thinks that it might soon be possible to
print logic circuits, transistors and other computational devices on paper,
cloth or plastic, creating, in effect, a two-dimensional personal computer.
If his group of physicists, chemists and engineers is successful, someday
people won't have to carry books or computers -- they can simply wear them.


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