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A U S T R A L I A N__E - B O O K__N E W S L E T T E R

***Vol.II, No.1, January 2002**

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1. Oz-e Feature Stories

Ruby Slippers and the e-Book of Oz

Looking as lovely as Cinderella at the Ball, the three leading ladies of the Australian e-book world, Sue Hutley, Mylee Joseph and Pam Saunders, sparkled in ruby slippers for a special occasion in Melbourne last November. The dazzling shoes were in honour of their joint paper entitled "Follow the eBook road: eBooks in Oz public libraries" at the Australian Public Libraries Conference, held in the Victorian capital's Exhibition & Convention Centre.

It wasn't all champagne & glittery slippers though. The report contains some sobering reminders of the difficulties facing Australian - & indeed all - e-book pioneers. For example "…eBook technology is still evolving and can be cumbersome" the report noted, adding "…there is a lack of standardisation…ebooks (e-readers) are currently expensive, and the content is primarily American."

Pam Saunders reported on the steep learning curve when introducing & managing e-books in libraries. But although it was tough going to start with for librarians, the public were enthusiastic about e-book devices. Moreover negotiations for a national consortium of netLibrary users would represent the first expression of a national public library in Australia. E-book collections built around research needs and reference books were the most suited to library use of the technology, while e-readers could be particularly valuable in Home Services, for example for the print-handicapped.

From NSW Mylee Joseph reported on the Shorelink experience (Shorelink serves the library needs of five local municipalities on Sydney's North Shore). Four hundred netLibrary titles were obtained for Web access, while SoftBook e-readers were used in a device trial. Publicity was regarded as of great importance, for e-books can be "invisible" unless promoted. A survey is also being undertaken and general information about the trials posted to the Web.

Reporting on her Toowoomba, Queensland, experience Sue Hutley - who trail-blazed an e-book revolution in the south-east of that state - confessed to encountering much discouragement, indeed "a gravel road full of stones" in establishing an e-book service. Enormous supply difficulties, and software problems & incompatibilities were among the miseries of library startup. As well, poor or non-existent service from Gemstar, some devices taking forever to arrive (Sue was still awaiting their colour REB-1200s at year's end), administrative headaches, and the difficulty in obtaining suitable titles were among the factors illustrating that the path of the pioneer can be a tough one indeed.

Two other S.E. Queensland libraries, at Maroochy Shire (fielding three related types of e-readers) & Toowong (the latter has twenty REB 1100 e-readers for loan) were luckier in their timing & managed to avoid much of the hassle. Sue confesses privately to a degree of e-book burnout at this stage (she's also a proud mum with a two-year old to look after), but concludes her report: "The eBook industry changes weekly and we must ensure that libraries are not left behind when the wave finally comes."

You can read the full report & follow each state's links at:

http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/public/2001/papers/hutley.joseph.saunders.html

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2. Conferences and Reports

Australian Library & Information Association (ALIA), Acquisitions National Section:

Nov. 16, 2001, State Library of Victoria Theatrette, Melbourne,

with: The Printed World is Dead, Its All Gone Electronic.

Chaired by Jenni Jeremy. Speakers included Linda Carmichael of James Bennett Pty on "Ebooks: the Australian supply chain"; Pam Saunders, needing no introduction, addressed "The hardware and software"; and Dean Mason of Common Ground Publishing tackled "Print vs Electronic". We feature another speaker below, namely Carolyne Cohn of Blackwells, who presented a take on Ebooks: options and issues for libraries.

Carolyne examined the current library environment, highlighting an ever increasing volume of information; an increase in user expectations; greater complexity in identifying, locating & analysing information; and the continual need for updating skills. The existence of a myriad of formats and a lack of standardisation are also important factors. Advantages of e-books in the library setting include: no storage required; no wear & tear or lost & stolen books; they support distance and distributed education; and access can be 24x7x365.

Issues requiring consideration include access (optimising access, OPAC integration, authentication, metadata, purchasing by consortia & rights to titles); collection policies (selection criteria, choosing formats and budgeting for e-books); acquisitions & management (technical services workflows, usage statistics & analysis, archiving, weeding, preservation of access); costs (hardware & maintenance, staff training, cost savings from the virtual format or online access); and licence & copyright issues (problems with current restrictive models, DRM, copyright & "fair dealing").

Other topics discussed included possible future models for library e-books and user expectation & reactions.

All in all a comprehensive survey. So who could deny now that Aussies are in there with the best of them in e-book analysis? Thanks, Carolyne, for access to your excellent presentation.

 

*The National Library of Australia's Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources undertook a survey from September 2000 to identify major electronic collections in Australian libraries. Thirty-five libraries responded, including 90% of national & state libraries and 60% of university libraries, but unfortunately very few (3) public libraries. Read their final report at http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/eag_aer_survey_finalreport.html.

 

*Electronic Book 2001, the 4^{th annual} biggie, was held in Washington DC 5-7 November 2001 under the gloom of recent terrorist events. Attendance was unsurprisingly smaller & more subdued than in 2000. Despite that, Simon & Schuster president Jack Romanos was relatively upbeat about the e-book future, seeing progress as "on schedule" after disallowing unrealistic hype.

Moreover Steve Potash, Open eBook Forum President & OverDrive CEO, announced a long-term e-book promotional campaign, "Open an eBook", to start January 2002. The campaign will include more than mere exhortation, e.g. a free eBookstore for young readers. Good one, Stevo.

Of device interest was E-Ink's prototype e-reader, which weighs only 9oz & is a scant 1cm thick. The revolutionary design, based on the alternation of charged microparticles, features a 7in diagonal high-resolution screen & runs comfortably on two AA batteries. It will apparently be priced at around $US300 when released some time in 2003. A colour version will appear later.

The French Cytale Cybook was also reported as available for around $US350, with functionality for the upload of personal documents still under development.

Some snippets: Karen Brown of NIST opined that the e-book industry must collaborate with librarians, educators & end-users to succeed. Mitch Freedman, American Library Assn. President-elect, noted that print book technology is incredibly costly & wasteful, libraries continue to reinvent themselves and that librarians have always been early adopters when they get the right answers. Libraries could even serve as laboratories for e-books & e-publishing, if publishers see them as allies and not enemies. And James Alexander of Adobe mentioned that Adobe's 2002 e-book Content Server software will include library functionality. . Library of Congress head James Billington made the memorable remark "Librarians are dream-keepers, not gate-keepers. We need to help library users reconstruct the dreams that lay behind the books".

From Apex e-Publishing Shimon Rosenberg observed that although OeB has promise as a mother lode for linear content (sequential text), non-linear content might require a different approach. George Kerscher & James Pritchett noted the wider possibilities of XML source files, for example for the simultaneous production of text & audio e-books. James Hendler from Maryland Uni. noted limits in XML as semantically poor, and looked beyond it to semantic web tools and an ontological approach. Anji Kalita Cornette saw multimedia e-books including even 3D representations.

Carlos Bazzarella from Poliplus Software spoke of the possibilities of interactive e-textbooks, & stated that they could almost become tutors if software and content converge to maximise individual learning possibilities. Gill Hope spoke compellingly of solar-powered e-readers which will be distributed to 50,000 health teachers in Africa, and which will assist in fighting the AIDS pandemic.

Thanks to Tom Peters, Director of the Center for Library Initiatives, Illinois USA, for access to his notes.

*BookTech 2002 Feb.11-13, New York Hilton Hotel. E-books & e-publishing will be one feature area, with a keynote address by Frank Romano "What makes a book a book" of interest

*17^th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2002) March 10-14 2002 at the Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain. Will feature a special track on electronic books for teaching & learning, with twelve e-book topics targeted.

*4^th Internet Librarian International Conference 17-20 March 2002, Olympia 2 London. In conjunction with the London Book Fair & aimed at information professionals. An Australian, Mary Peterson of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, is a member of the Advisory Committee.

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3. Software

* EInfo Solutions is an Aussie company we've neglected to mention in the past. They're based in Adelaide with another office in Darwin, and supply e-readers to companies & libraries along with various software & other services.

One of the latter which caught our eye is e-book web capture. It's been developed primarily for government & corporate use, where staff need to keep copies of dynamic web pages for reference. Rather than have the staff member print out all those pages, some of which may be confidential Intranet documents, the webpage publisher insert 3 lines of code in their page source code. The staff user who sees a SoftBook reader icon on the page then enters his unique Reader ID & clicks for delivery to his device. Mighty handy for staff on the go who don't want to lug manuals around, or carry sensitive documents in their briefcases. The SoftBook & it's successor the REB 1200 are both large enough to make this a sensible viewing alternative for substantial texts.

Oh, in case you think this company is all Gemstar they're also offering Franklin eBookMen; & lately the hiebook at $A499.

 

* On. Jan. 8 Palm, Inc. announced the release of the Palm Reader Pro, the next generation of its e-book reader software. It includes a built-in Webster's New World Dictionary - to use it simply hold the stylus on a word for a few seconds until the definition appears. You can also look up definitions within definitions. In addition Palm Reader Pro will intuitively find root words or related words if a definition is not found.

NB: the Websters is only the 12,500 word Vest version, but users can upgrade to the School and Office Dictionary (65,000 definitions), or the 160,000-word Webster's New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition.). Be warned, American spellings only.

This upgraded version of the Palm Reader includes the option of a new collection of fonts from Agfa Monotype. The fonts come in four sizes -- 10, 12, 18 and 24 point. The eBook Font Pack is available for both the Palm OS(R) and Pocket PC versions of the Palm Reader software, and this new Palm Reader Pro also incorporates sophisticated font-smoothing technology for a better read.

Unlike the base version the Palm upgrade is not free. Palm Reader Pro with built-in Websters Vest dictionary is available from http://www.palm.com/ebooks for $US9.95. If you want the larger Webster's New World School and Office Dictionary, that's an extra $US7.95, while the full Webster's New World College Dictionary will set you back $US23.95 more. The Agfa Monotype eBook Font Pack

sells for $US14.95. The Font Pack also can be purchased directly from Agfa Monotype at http://www.fonts.com.

* For Pocket PC users: if you are upgrading to the Pocket PC 2002, check out

http://www.ipaqtoday.com/ppc2002compatibility.asp. This site is a big help with figuring out what applications work & what don't between the two operating systems

4. Print Me

Let's face it, sometimes you just gotta. Print something out, that is. Fine for many of us at home or at the office, but if you're running around with a handheld device then printing something from it can be a complicated business - or even impossible. But now there's a project under way, called Print Me, which aims to change all that. The idea is for new PrintMe printers to become ubiquitous, & old ones to be converted with an add-on device to fill the bill equally.

The concept - or service really - is backed by Adobe, Xerox & Yahoo amongst others, so it's chances look good. Copy centres, hotels & conference venues are likely starting points. Libraries to follow? You will simply beam your document to the PrintMe printer from the infra-red port of a wireless device, or send it over the Internet if you have Net access but no printer available. A "cheques on demand" service may enable people to send money to each other through the same PrintMe server network. Yahoo is already running a limited version of the service for maps & email.

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5.Some e-Casualties in 2001 (see also Editorial)

iPublish Remaindered. A Time Warner Books venture to discover worthwhile e-book manuscripts online through a peer review process, iPublish has had its plug pulled. The company ran into heavy criticism from the Authors Guild for allegedly unfair terms. Time Warner will now not have a separate e-book division but offer ebooks alongside paper editions. A similar case is Random House's At Random e-book imprint, now absorbed into its Trade Group & Villiard imprints. Meanwhile XLibris, an e-publisher partly owned by Random House, is reported struggling.

Mibrary, as we reported last issue, also folded later in the year, as did Contentville.com on Sept.28. netLibrary filed for bankruptcy in November, but is being taken over by library cooperative OCLC and lives on.

Mighty Words, an e-book distributor, shuts up shop January 12, 2002.

Reciprocal Unreciprocated. Digital Rights Management company Reciprocal has, well, carked it.

A terse message on Reciprocal's Website confirmed: "Effective immediately, Reciprocal, Inc. has ceased operations."

Seybold Under Stress: SeyboldReports.com reported earlier this year a downsizing of employees from 165 to around 115. Once valued at over $US100 million, Seybold's investors include Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft & Xerox. The company's e-book zone offers some useful free information & then rather pricey fuller access.

Update/Correction: Mark Walter, Senior Editor of Seybold Publications, based in Pennsylvania & these days a Key3Media company, has objected to our report above concerning Seybold.. Although our source for that report is normally authoritative, it seems that on this occasion facts were confused with those in another report. For the record, it was the parent company Key3Media which "downsized", not Seybold itself, the downsizing number reported is evidently incorrect & the investors mentioned are not Seybolds. Our apologies to Mark and Seybold. See April 2002 for more on Seybold.

Questia's Unfulfilled Quest for Customers

Questia's subscription-based online research library, aimed primarily at "college" students in the good ol' USA (that's university students to the rest of us of course), is not doing well. In November they halved their staff to about 70, the second major slash of the year (earlier from 283 to 139 staff in May 2001). The company was still able to raise another $US20 million, some of which will be spent on TV advertising.

Franklin not overwhelmed by sales

Franklin reported axing 15% of its workforce; a development not entirely unrelated to heavy returns of its eBookman e-readers. People weren't happy with them! Justifiable dissatisfactions with the device (see our June issue) have now been addressed to a significant extent in a major software upgrade, prices have fallen substantially - in America anyway - & an alliance with the popular French company MobiPocket increases content availability. Time will tell if this is enough to reverse the sales curve.

Meanwhile reports say that Franklin will also release a cheaper e-reader sometime in 2002 - as cheap as $US50 in fact - which will have several convenient features & could corner the market in affordability. But they'll be smaller!

Comment: No guys, the eBookman is small enough already. Bigger would be better in fact. You'll lose too many potential customers if you forget that 20/20 vision is confined to a small segment of the population, and most people want to read something longer than an SMS message. Try adding the Palm Reader too, to broaden your appeal.

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6. E-Book Success Story

Not all e-book entrepreneurs stumbled or worse in 2001. Among e-publishers for example, Fictionwise.com proclaimed themselves happy, as in "we're doing great." Site founders brothers Scott & Stephen Pendergast have over thirty thousand customers, & boast two-thirds of sales from repeat buyers, while their site reports over 11 billion words served since June 1 2000. Part of their success the brothers attribute to factors that fly in the face of big biz bean-counter logic.

For example, Fictionwise offers e-books in a wide range of formats rather than the minimal two or three proffered by retail giants. That way any e-book fan knows in advance that the site won't often frustrate them -even if the only e-reader they have is their web browser. Then too their affiliate programme is generous & recurrent rather than miserly & one-off (up to four times as much as Barnes & Noble's to start with). Most surprising of all, they don't encrypt their texts. It wouldn't do for best-sellers and textbooks, but it would be interesting to see if sales are really "lost" by not encrypting the majority of books, or whether purloined copies are more than made up for by extra sales resulting from the interest stirred up.

Comment: There's a dissertation in there for someone, which might even shake the e-book world to its foundations. Any takers?

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7. Editorial

2001 was a year in which e-book pioneers often paused and sometimes stumbled. Scoffers wrote off e-books for the umpteenth time, and high drama abounded. As the year ended it was clear that many e-book businesses were in trouble or had had fallen by the wayside, & it was more difficult than ever to confidently predict the shape of things to come. Although some were rash enough to try.

Format wars, vicious DRM fights & a frustrating lack of common standards inevitably took their toll. The fickle, fashion-bound side of the media now demurred where they had initially cheered, & some commentators proclaimed the death of the e-book before it was really born. Device buyers were bewildered by the market & often found prices excessive anyway. Many librarians grimaced at the practical difficulties of providing an e-collection, or took fright at the unsettled nature of it all. There was a lot of gloom in the air, and not a little doom. Meanwhile e-book authors, publishers & distributors experimented with different roles and sales models, a process still in its early days, and confessed that they weren't really sure yet just what will work in the long-term.

Less noticed was the appearance of a body of solid research showing that people, particularly but by no means exclusively students & the young, can be very comfortable indeed with e-books & would really like them to be part of their future. "Bring back the Rocket, price it at $(US)50 and the e-book will sweep the planet" proclaimed one observer, referring to an early e-reader which fell victim to company politics just as it was really taking off. He may well be right; for the Rocket eBook remains a device equalled to date only by far more expensive models.

In a marked change it was Asia as much as America that provided some of the most important new developments in both hardware and user services. For example, China's Xinhua e-reader & educational e-text network plans, Korea's hiebook, Hong Kong' s mini-devices, Singapore's e-library hub and other innovations. Australia & even tiny New Zealand were also in there pioneering, while Europe was no slouch either.

2002 should show that the e-book is by no means dead, although lately it has been suffering from a bad cold & is currently resting up some. Perhaps the role of the e-book needs to be defined in a clearer & more realistic way for the immediate future. Certainly, much more infrastructure needs to be created to support the electronic book for a larger role in society in the longer term.

What is needed to make the e-book the resounding success it deserves to be? Many current difficulties must be resolved. First of all e-reader devices need to be inexpensive - that's critical to widespread adoption. For what over-priced devices are doing at present is merely chasing their own tails. Yet e-readers must also be of a good quality. They need to be both rugged & updateable, & be open to personal & public domain material while also supporting secured distribution systems. And more imaginative marketing is also called for - even the mobile phone model of the $0 device tied to content purchase should be seriously considered.

In education, e-readers could be subsidised or even supplied free. As well consideration could be given by publishers, educators, libraries & governments to underwriting the cost of large production runs. Is this "forgetting the expense"? No, because the plain fact is that buying lots of dedicated e-readers is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying lots of computers for kids & teenagers. E-readers can in fact be a way for under-funded schools and nations to catch up. And being simple & immediate technology -no lengthy boot-up, no "wrong" way of turning them off, no Windows nightmares - they can be successfully introduced to children at a very early age. Introducing e-books into education systems so that children grow up to use them as naturally as they do games devices, & teenagers as easily as they do mobile phones, will perhaps provide the biggest boost of all.

E-books as texts must be more easily accessible and not just from the Net. Both devices & downloads should be available in at least larger bookstores -why ever not? A worthy goal is for all e-books to be available to any device that is designed to support the medium.

There needs to be a common digital "mother tongue" or meta-format from which e-texts can as desired be made available in any particular form. Lots of work is required on industry standards too. It needs to be easy to buy & pay for e-books. And in the public arena, formulas need to be worked out to allow for certain traditional library rights, so that libraries will crave e-books as an affordable means of providing a larger number of texts to more borrowers than ever before, while still allowing authors & publishers a reasonable financial return. So much e-text material being legally available for nothing is a huge reader bonus also calling out to be more widely promoted.

The list goes on. All of this and more is achievable. It is also asking a lot. Is it too much to expect? No, for without it the e-book cannot realise more than a tiny proportion of its vast potential to revolutionise the spread of knowledge & literature, both traditional and interactive. The e-book can make possible the greatest leap in publishing, education & reading for pleasure since the advent of the printed page. Or it can remain the province of a few early adopters, more a niche market with promise than a presently significant reality.

Perhaps the pioneers now need above all the support of a second wave of practical enthusiasts, dogged organisers & resolute committee folk, to allow their dreams to well and truly fly. Are you out there, second wave?

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8. Evil Empire Update

* January is the release month for the latest version of Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, a modular software called Windows CE.Net. The latest Windows little brother for mobile devices, some of which can be used as e-book readers, will support two wireless standards (including the fabled but lagging Bluetooth), & allows for IE 5.5 & Windows Media Version 8.0. The OS release to hardware developers will also give the latter tools to customise & where desired slim down CE to particular devices & uses.

Not before time, for the present Windows CE is far too ponderous for some of the devices onto which it is loaded. Microsoft of course hopes to tie the new version's users into the MS .Net grand design of web-based services. They're hoping that it'll be used in digital cameras, set-top boxes, smart phones, car computers, smart fridges & other relatively new-wave technology, as well as in the more usual PDAs, dedicated word processors and so on.

Comment: Hmm, do I detect a Gatesian aspiration for a future in which all our lives from breakfast to restless are dominated by devices talking to & updating each other in languages & processes that are all controlled by Microsoft?

* For those who are confused about Pocket PCs & their e-reader software, please note. Only Pocket PC 2002 devices - the new wave with "skins", reminder bubbles & a plethora of add-ins both useful and decorative - will allow for Microsoft Reader Version 2.0. The exception is the Compaq iPac, which may be upgraded. Otherwise, if you have an original Pocket PC it is already graced with the title "legacy device" (as in planned obsolescence), & you must stick to Ms Reader Version 1. Sucks, doesn't it! Those of us who are old enough to remember will recall that computers were originally promoted on the basis that they would be constantly & easily upgradeable, with nary a whisper of incompatibility (laugh, he nearly had kittens).

* Meanwhile Microsoft's absence from the biggie NIST November 2001 e-book conference was duly noted. Adobe was there, though. Could it be that in the end, the OneCanOBe boys have the most perseverance of the two jousting e-giants?

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9. Adobe Additions

*And speaking at the NIST conference, Adobe's e-book director James Alexander announced that his company will soon abolish transaction fees for users of its e-book Content Server application, & just charge for the software. Also on the near agenda are Palm & Pocket PC versions of the Adobe Reader that will support Adobe's DRM.

* Bigger news was that Adobe's eReader software will become part of a new version of the Adobe Reader, one of the most successful pieces of free commercial software in the world (Adobe estimates 170 million users).

Comment: Of course, the Adobe Reader is not quite as ubiquitous as the Windows OS. Is that the direction this struggle is going in? But Microsoft's ultimate sanction - making the Adobe Reader incompatible with Windows XP - would almost certainly backfire, outraging customers, firing up support for Linux & the Mac & likely bringing another anti-monopoly prosecution crashing down on the MS Empire. State of play seems to be: Adobe ahead on points but very difficult for either player to defeat each other.

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10. Of Academic Interest

Other less wealthy nations gape in envy at the amount of grant money up for grabs from private American foundations. A benevolent U.S. social custom offers unequalled opportunities for rich individuals or their families to leave a posthumous philanthropic legacy. So the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (more the work of his descendants) has tipped a cool $US1.5 million into the coffers of the University of Chicago Press, enabling the launching of the Chicago Digital Distribution Center.

About half the cash will go towards preparing backlist titles for a digital Bibliovault, which will also house new University of Chicago texts. All texts in the Bibliovault will be searchable online. The rest of the grant will help develop software, cover some administration costs & provide for a handy short-run printing press for digital works summoned from the vault.

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11. Library Vista

* Earlier newsletters (February & October 2001) have commended Texterity Inc.'s file conversion service Textcafe, which provides an advance towards the e-book grail of common access by offering simultaneous e-book editions in six formats. Now Texterity's President Martin Hensel has floated for comments & suggestions a proposed draft commercial model for a library e-book lending service by his company.

Martin proposes as follows:

• Texterity provides participating libraries with MARC records for adult trade front-list ebook titles.
• MARC records include links to image of book cover, publisher's blurb and a URL to download the title in Palm or Pocket PC format.
• Library pays a set fee ($US2.95) for each download until a certain threshold (perhaps based on population served or number of patrons) is reached, then the library is only charged $US1 foreach download thereafter.

• Downloaded ebook files contain a timed expiration.
• There is no limit on the number of patrons simultaneously downloading a single title.

The last-mentioned feature is a major advance on some other models such as netLibrary's. However the e-books would not actually be purchased, only in effect leased under licence for a rental based on usage.

We emailed Martin with some comments & suggestions. These included such issues as price (too dear in $A?) & the possibility of keying non-U.S. fees to local currencies. Then there's the idea of a multi-stepped rather than two-stepped fee structure to attract larger libraries; the possibility of eventual residual ownership with or without conditions; the issue of archival copies; & the question of inter-library loans.

Comment: This is an important topic & a potentially significant service, & it's refreshing to see a business sounding out its potential customers in advance rather than presenting a non-negotiable model that may be significantly flawed.

 

* Academic Libraries take a look At E-Books. Funded by an Educate and Automate grant from the Illinois State Library, two small U.S. tertiary institutions, Eureka College and Spoon River College, undertook live trials of two e-reader devices in classrooms and libraries. Out last December was the final evaluative report of the study. Undergraduates in English at Eureka read a set English text on the RCA REB 1100 (a paperback-sized device), while their counterparts at Spoon River did the same on the smaller Franklin eBookman 911. Note that the Franklin also provided various PDA functions (e.g. calendar, calculator, and memo pad) & could play MP3 music files and record voice audio. The larger REB could do none of those, but had superior e-book function.

Course-related material was loaded onto the devices by the college libraries. Experiences, impressions & suggestions from those connected with the project were collected and analysed as part of the project. A few brief conclusions: the devices were found more suitable for out-of-class reading & review than for classroom discussion; the larger REB device performed much better in education situations, was more reliable, and overall was more popular than the Franklin. Particularly favoured by students were the embedded dictionary, the ability to underline, the note-taking feature, and the long-life of the rechargeable battery.

Least happy were the librarians involved, who found the whole enterprise involved far more work than expected (which kind of shoots down the idea that e-books will put librarians out of jobs - rather, they'll need to learn additional skills but gain new relevance to the needs of their patrons.)

One student quote: "I feel e-books are an excellent step in education and I would love to have all my college books on one little computer".

The full report is available at http://www.geocities.com/lbell927/index.htm.

Comment: This survey supports the notion that a book-sized, dedicated e-reader, with or without extra PDA-type functions*, holds great promise in education, just as Marion Scholnik's prior study confirms that people like to use such a device in reading for pleasure. Now we just have to get the rest of the e-book equation right (see Editorial).

*Not that there's anything wrong with such features as long as they don't compromise provision of an inexpensive, quality e- reader which behaves like a book, only better.

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12. Super-Briefs

Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.de (both estab.Oct.1998) are the British and German faces of Amazon.com, and have chosen Lightening Source to enable their new e-book stores in those two countries. Looks like "the Source" will be doing Amazon's Japanese e-books as well. They've also notched up a supply deal with major distributor Baker & Taylor. * Palm Inc announced Nov.20 a deal to distribute HarperCollins's e-book imprint PerfectBound through Palm Digital Media. PerfectBound authors include Clive Barker, Mario Puzo, the currently incarcerated Jeffrey (Lord) Archer, & Nobel Prize Winner Gao Xingjian. Palm already offers over 3,000 e-titles for the Palm Reader, available to Palm handhelds running Palm OS 3.0 & higher & installable on the Pocket PC also.* Meanwhile HarperCollins clinched another deal with OverDrive, who will create the alcoholic-sounding HarperCollins Private Reserve, a worldwide digital warehouse for the News Corporation subsidiary's e-books from which retailers can draw. Adobe & MS Reader formats only will be supported in this arrangement.* Franklin has licensed First Convergent Communications Worldwide Inc, a Filipino company, to manufacture & distribute the eBookman in the Philippines. Alemar's Booklight Inc, a bookstore chain, will distribute the eBookman & in fact have already been selling them for a while. With more than 200 Filipino titles available so far the Philippines is one Franklin brightspot, & their forthcoming cheaper devices may well be a hit there. The locals are hoping that e-book conversion services could become a valuable industry too (as it already is in OverDrive's Montego Bay, Jamaica, eBook Center).* Microsoft strongly pushed its Web Tablet PC prototype at last November's Comdex exhibition in Las Vegas. Expect models released mid 2002 from Acer, Compaq, Fujitsu, NEC, Toshiba & Taiwanese manufacturers FIC and Tatung. A Tablet PC version of Windows XP should be available soon after. Oh yes, they'd make nice e-readers too, for those for whom money is no object.* A visionary new concept is " multi-channel seamless content", where your e-book text will be accessible wherever you are from a variety of devices, even one fixed in your car (for passengers only, one would hope!). The practicalities of it are a bit tricky though, & involve multiplicity of cost too -why not just keep a portable e-reader with you?* Apple Korea have teamed with Korean software company SoftMagic to promote the latter's Project M, a PDF & XML-based software solution for publishing which may challenge Quark. For e-book or tree book alike, Project M will interface with the new Mac OS X & enhance its array of applications, so there.* The REB 1100 e-reader is being offered online for as low as $US149.99 through Amazon's Circuit City* iUniverse, announced Jan.7 the availability of on-demand eBook production to its authors, who now have the option to produce their self-published titles in eBook form as well as hard copy using print-on-demand.* The Colorado Bankruptcy Court on January 11 approved netLibrary's sale to OCLC, the giant library cooperative that publishes the Dewy Decimal System & provides resources to 41,000 libraries in 82 nations. netLibrary continues!*.And that's all for now folks.

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13. Here, There and Everywhere

Roughly estimated, world e-book device (e-reader) sales in 2001 were said to be 153,000. Somewhat rubbery figures put sales of e-books (the texts) themselves in the USA last year as about a million, for around $US11 million dollars. In more exact figures Palm Digital Media sold almost 180,000 e-book copies in 2001, which the company said is up more than 40 percent up from the previous year. Palm's e-bookstore is averaging about 1,000 new customers a week. It's on a small base, but despite the nay-sayers growth continues…

Comment: Lots of room for expansion there folks, & sales opportunities surely exist for someone to make an inexpensive, quality e-reader that will sell by the million.

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14. Kidz Korner

* An Australian e-book site for kids? Yes indeed eKIDna eBooks fills the gap at http://www.eKIDna.com.au. They arrange their titles in six age categories to 14 years, including books to read aloud to the real littlies. You can pay by Visa, MasterCard or the increasingly popular PayPal service, & many of their titles are in the imaginative TK3 format (available as a free download from a link onsite). There's also FLASH format and web browser-suitable HTML for some others.

In a bonus for schools, activities designed to enhance individual titles are available free on site. Prices are surprisingly quoted in U.S. dollars only, & range from $US4.10 to $US5.40. An extra direct pay option by cheque or money order to Melbourne is a bit problematic, given that the $A price is not shown; that needs a fix. More titles are needed too, especially for older children. So let's hope parents, teachers & kids support the site enough to make this possible. Founder Roger Carr is a member of the Electronic Publishers Coalition. Good one, Roge.

* Meanwhile, five libraries including two in Australia have partnered with TumbleBooks (see "Sites" in Feb. 2001 edition) to provide interactive e-books for kids. The libraries pay a yearly fee based on size & circulation for access to the Tumblebook collection (currently 25 titles), plus a small extra amount for any new books released within the year.

* Manga comics online? Yes! Classy e-comics, with sound effects too, for a fraction of the cost of the printed type ($US2.95 v. $US9.95). Available from ComicsOne (http://www.comicsone.com).

They currently have around thirty varieties of comic books available, usually ranging from 200-400 pages. A couple of free samples (currently, 40 page segments of Storm Riders & Redmoon 1) offer good previews. Mostly Japanese or Korean in origin, they've been translated - & rearranged left to right - for English speakers. Adobe provides the software behind it all, & the result does them proud.

*StoryPlus (http://www.storyplus.com/) is a children's e-book site that for once shows some marked international sensitivity -e.g. they quote their prices in virtually every known currency (with the Aussie dollar listed second - how could we not be impressed?). In fact adults could send their kids to the site just to learn about world currencies - amaze your oldies by referring to the Angolan New Kwacha, the Bhutan Ngultrum the Lesotho Loti, the Mauritanian Oug & even the Botswana Pula.

Interestingly enough Jean Chalopin, creator of ‘Inspector Gadget,’ is the founder, backed by a team of writers, editors and illustrators from a range of cultures and backgrounds around the world. With five selection modes (age, genre, author, title, & child's particular interest) & a dedication to "fascinating and compelling stories rich in interesting characters and events," this site is well above average. Prices are cheap, too, with some free titles available.

Books are available as Text Only, Illustrated Text, Animated Version with Illustrated Text & Audio version with Illustrated Text. The first two require an Adobe reader (Acrobat or e-Book), the third is Flash (needs Macromedia Flash), while the audio version needs MP3 capability as well as Adobe (NB: all software can be downloaded free from the site). And for coolness that will delight the child in even the oldest adult, move your cursor on the initial site & watch the stardust follow you.

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15. Disabled Services

In these days of ferocious DRM struggles, it's surprising to be reminded that U.S. copyright laws allow for copyrighted material to be distributed free to the visually disabled for personal use. The U.S. Librarian's eBook Newsletter reports that authorised persons will be able to access a pool of such material in audiobook & digital braille formats, from February 2002. Volunteers will scan texts or submit those already prepared. The texts will be encrypted & traceable to the original user to deter scammers. It'll be done through Bookshare.org (http://www.bookshare.org). Sponsored by the Benetech non-profit organisation, the books are regrettably so far only to be available to U.S. citizens. Do we have an emulator?

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*Got a story? If you have an e-book story you feel is worth mentioning, please email it to brucep@acon.com.au

 

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This site last updated 20 January 2002