Australian e-book newsletter August 2002

E-BOOK ARCHIVES

Previous Newsletter - Vol.1, No.4, February 2001

Previous Newsletter - Vol.1, No.5, June 2001

Previous Newsletter - Vol.1, No.6, October 2001

Previous Newsletter - Vol.2, No.1, January 2002

Previous Newsletter - Vol.2, No.2, April 2002

*Tuesday 13 August 2002 at the John Woolley Building, University of Sydney. Dr Simone Murray, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, on: 'From literature to content: media multinationals, publishing practice, and the digitisation of the book.'

Open eBook Forum Fall Working Group Summit September 18-20 2002, W Hotel, New York City, NY. Topics include OeBF Publication Structure, Metadata & Identifiers. Plus the Open eBook Forum & AAP co-sponsor an Emerging Technologies Committee (ETC) meeting, to discuss the International Standard Text Code (ISTC) and Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL). The latter will also hear an update on the progress of the AAP/American Library Association DRM White Paper, and address electronic file requirements and format issues in the Kindergarten -Year 12 education market. The unspectacular yakka that gets us there in the long run.

*6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries Sept. 19, 2002 - Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy. A workshop entitled " Workshop E-books + E-Readers+ E-journals = E-education?" will be a feature. Topics to be covered include: design, interaction models, usability & accessibility of electronic books; new devices for reading electronic books; e-books and e-learning/ e-commerce; adaptive e-books, new roles of publishers, books stores and libraries; legal issues, evaluation & emerging standards for electronic books. A huge international cast of speakers will strut their stuff.

2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI): Gaining independence with e-prints archives and OAI; CERN, 17-19 October 2002 Geneva, Switzerland. Sponsored by SPARC, JISC and OSI. "This conference will guide individuals and institutions interested in pursuing open-access solutions for scholarly communication initiatives through the process of conceiving, implementing and maintaining an e-print archive or OAI-compliant repository". They kindly note that there is a bus connection five times per hour from Geneva, so this is definitely not a limousine crowd, folks. But this is where the Web started.

3rd Internet and Multimedia World Summit, Montreux, Switzerland, October 8-11, 2002. Theme is "Bridging the Digital Divide". The Montreux Summit" seeks to gather major world Internet and Multimedia players striving to promote a fair and accessible Internet for all." Let's hope this jewel on the lake inspires them. http://www.fiam.org/en/summit.html

Digital Media World, London, UK, October 9-11, 2002. Exhibition, a multi-stream Festival, workshops & awards. May be inspirational to those who see huge new multimedia potential in the e-book of the future. Oh, and Spiderman fans will be well catered for.
http://www.digmedia.co.uk

E-Learn 2002 - 7th World Conference on E-Learning (formerly the WebNet Conference), Montreal, Canada, October 15-19, 2002. Covers E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education. Organised by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) and co-sponsored by the International Journal on E-Learning. Very 'eavy, very 'umble.
http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/call.htm

ELPUB 2002 6th International ICCC / IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, November 6th to 8th, 2002 Carlsbad, Czech Republic / Karlovy Vary, Ceska Republika. Topics will include: Electronic Documents: New Roles & Value-added Contents; Facilitating Access: Tracing and Locating Electronic Books for the Academic Sector; Impact of Electronic Publishing on the Developing Countries: An Indian Scenario; Creating a New Marketplace for Electronic Information;& much el-se.
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/elpub02

Whatever happened to the expanded website at www.e-book.com.au? Well it's still on the way folks, & we hope it will be worth the wait. Unfortunately we can only work on this site in our sometimes non-existent spare time. Nevertheless we've actually posted a rough draft of one of our new pages, & subscribers to our email newsletter are already viewing it. If you're keener than mustard you might just be able to find a surreptitious link to it. If you do, please note that the page does not officially exist yet, & is by no means web-ready or complete. Therefore please do not create any links to it or publicise it in any way.

Bush Foods and e-books
In sunny Queensland, the Department of Primary Industries earlier this year ran an e-book trial of their own departmental titles for sale. These ranged from Barramundi Farming, & Introduction to the Bush Foods Industry to the Stress Pocketbook & Managing Change. Result? At half the price of paper versions the e-books were good value. Consumers thought so too, and the trial was regarded as a shining success with over 1600 downloads in 3 months. So they're still available from: http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/thematiclists/7832.html

Whitehall opens e-library
(UK) "Government librarians are to provide a new information resource in the form of the Electronic Library for Government, it was announced on 28 May 2002. Over 20 library and information services will provide content for the site, which will be hosted by the Knowledge Network team in the Office of the e-Envoy." Initially the site is likely to be used by central government librarians and some other civil servants, but in the long term it could be extended to other parts of the public sector. Development and deployment took less than a month and cost “significantly less than £20,000”. This was made possible by using an existing application, the Legal Information Online Network, as the template for the Electronic Library. It required only a few changes in the design. See full report at: http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Frontpage/AFA96D70A20C944F80256BC60058E1F7?OpenDocument

UK Kids E-book Study About to Begin
The Dept of Information Science at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, England, is about to conduct an 18 month research project into children & e-books. The AHRB funded study, which will be called "'Electronic Books: Children’s Reading Practices and Comprehension", will employ two researchers to investigate 9 to11 year olds reading from a variety of e-book formats. Other studies at Loughborough have included Privacy in the Digital Library and Economic Models for the Digital Library.

One URL to Find Them All -Well Some of Them Anyway
OverDrive, Inc has launched an eBook Locator service, for web shoppers to find e-book titles in three of the leading digital book formats. The service covers tens of thousands of e-titles from over 400 publishers worldwide, & will locate titles published in Palm Reader, Microsoft Reader & Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader (PDF) formats. Each e-book record offers information on where to purchase the title immediately, & includes current bibliographic data and details of covers, jacket copy, table of contents, excerpts, and author information.
To use the service, surf to http://www.ebooklocator.com

Super Briefs * Mega-publisher Simon & Schuster has signed up with the aforementioned & seemingly unstoppable OverDrive to have OD convert & distribute their current & backlist print titles in four e-book formats. Thousands of S&S titles will eventually be available as e-books through OverDrive's Content Reserve, which has outlets to over 300 online booksellers.* S&S have also published the complete works (23) of Ernest Hemingway in electronic form, with all titles US $9.99 each*

*Books24x7 announced on 9 July a non- exclusive distribution agreement with Perseus Publishing for some of the latter's business titles to be added to their 600 BusinessPro collection, which is available to subscription clients & is searchable online.* The eBookMan was a real Nowhere Man for Franklin Electronic Publishers last year. The company lost US $26.6 million in its last financial year, including a US$9.9 million write down on its eBookMan inventory.* On the rebound though, Franklin signed a distribution deal with AOL Time Warner for the latter’s Warner Books and Little Brown and Co e-book offerings. Franklin also has distribution deals with Collins U.K., Columbia University, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Merriam Webster & Vivendi Universal*

*Baker & Taylor is uniting its e-book and print-on-demand sectors into one division, an action we predict will become a common trend in publishing. A thorn for libraries though is that although they'll still be able to order a single copy of a hardcover title in POD, the minimum print-on-demand order for paperbacks will be 40 copies. Date a librarian & talk shop, B&T - how many libraries want 40 copies of anything?* Meanwhile B&T have signed on biggie publisher Houghton Mifflin (reference, fiction and non-fiction titles for adults and children), to distribute the latter's e-books through ED. ED, as you'll recall from the April newsletter, is Baker & Taylor's eContent service, in fact a rival to netLibrary*

* Xplore Technologies has announced a development agreement with Microsoft to develop a "ruggedized" Tablet PC called the GeneSys IIITPC, which will run on the Windows XP Tablet PC edition OS. What we'd like to know is, can't standard models of devices be made less vulnerable to knocks & shocks as a matter of course? * E Ink are talking 2004-2005 for commercial e-readers sporting their revolutionary, extra-thin, active-matrix display technology. E-ink displays will work with steel foil and plastic. Significance -a move from glass will mean a more flexible, stronger yet lighter display panel (almost 90% thinner!) with, ultra-low power consumption, and displays which will read well everywhere, without a need for backlighting.*

One of the dangers of competing technical standards in the marketplace is that people who own several portable devices may end up with a variety of incompatible Flash memory cards, helping make the lives of trendsetters on the go even more complicated than they already are. A definite case of more is less & less is more

. A new Mini DigiDrive, from Addonics Technologies, at least eliminates the need to carry different types of Flash readers. This drive reads and writes to 7 flash media formats - CF-I, CF-II, Smart Memory, Memory Stick, MicroDrive, Multimedia Card (MMC), and Secure Digital (SD) card. The Mini DigiDrive measures 3.75 (W) x 3.18 (D) x .6 (H) old-fashioned inches, and weighs just 5 ounces. Remember ounces? The compact size combined with the simple USB 1.1/2.0 connection make the Mini DigiDrive worthy of consideration. At $US49 it won't bust the budget either. Best of all though is their Tolkienesque slogan "One Drive To Read Them All". Cute, eh? http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/mini_digidrive_datasheet.htm

Among the current crop of Pocket PCs, don't overlook the Toshiba PC E310. If glamour jobs like the Sony Clie are well beyond your price range, the Toshiba E310 is not only the cheapest Pocket PC around ( $US399 in the States), it also has a very good high-resolution colour screen. Added to that is its light weight & ultra-slim, sleek design, making it a true pocket device. Caveats are the low included memory (32MB) & limited battery life (5-7 hours per charge). But you can expand the memory via an SD slot, and this little baby can double as a digital music player too. You can even watch a little video, though not very much with the onboard memory. But hey, even 32MB is quite a few text e-books.

Or you can go up to the Toshiba e740, which will cost you half as much again. 400Mhz processor -whoopee do! Not to forget a 240-by-320-pixel color display. The e740 has 64MB of RAM & the 802.11b (WiFi) standard built in, with Bluetooth as an optional extra card. Which is probably a bit safer at this stage as there are still compatibility problems with Bluetooth. Still only 32MB of inbuilt ROM, but it has two different types of slots to add in more memory, & with the SD memory slot you can add cards as big as128MB, so if you wanted to import multimedia book files it's quite feasible. You can apparently add GPRS to it too, and if you get the expansion pack it has an extra USB port, so it's quite a PDA all told. If you set up a wireless network at home you can even use the Toshiba e740 to send emails directly. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,101939,tk,mcx,00.asp

Pocket LOOX, bit of a Toshiba e740 clone The Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX, a new Pocket PC running the 400MHz XScale processor, has meanwhile just hit the European market, priced at around US $625. The LOOX also features 64 MB of RAM and 32 MB of ROM and both a Type II CompactFlash slot and an SD/MM card slot. It weighs in at just over 6 ounces, and measures 5.2 x 3.2 x .67 inches. The Pocket LOOX includes an integrated Bluetooth module. An optional GSM/GPRS module is scheduled for October 2002. http://allnetdevices.com/wireless/news/2002/07/22/a_400.html

HP Announces New iPAQ Pocket PC H3900 Series Or if you'd rather HP/Compaq, there are the new iPAQ H3970 and H3950 Pocket PC 2002s. Both have those 400MHz Intel X-Scale processors, plus new transflective displays, which provide higher contrast and increased color saturation. The H3970 model has Bluetooth built in to allow you to use your own local network they call a PAN ( Personal Area Network). Plus optional expansion packs allow the use of PC or CF memory cards, wireless cards, and other peripherals.
http://www.mobileplanet.com/find.asp?find_spec=ipaq+H39&src=EPPC2

For those into colour combination/convergence devices there's now the Treo 270. This is a Palm OS handheld, which combines PDA, mobile phone, and wireless Internet access. At US$499 (say a thousand Oz dollars) the Treo 270 is about a hundred US$ dearer than monochrome predecessor the Treo 180 now sells for. The screen is no good in bright sunlight though. Look around guys, the technology you need exists already. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,101463,tk,mcx,00.asp

And looking ahead, Microsoft has licenced the production of Tablet PCs with a special version of Windows XP, unsurprisingly called Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Manufacturers intending to offer these attractive tablets (also called slates) include Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Motion Computing, NEC, Paceblade, Toshiba, and ViewSonic. Expect them out in two or three month’s time.

While the Tablet is pitched towards text entry by hand stylus or touch-screen keyboard, attachable keyboards for typing will also be included or offered as an optional extra in the various models. You can handwrite & get the tablet to convert your input to not always accurate editable text, or use a "Journal" facility to save your input, including drawings and your masterwork doodles, as " digital ink", in a handwritten facsimile of your writing (in which case any mistakes are all your own work). However you can also later use the OCR feature on the text of the latter.

. And of course Tablets will make appealing large e-readers. Very appealing. Alas, also very expensive ones. Though no prices are officially available, the industry goss. is that circa US$2,000 would not be too far wrong .

There'll also be a (thankfully cheaper) second type of slate, this time home-oriented, running a Windows CE for Smart Display operating system. Well it ought to be cheaper, because this one's really just an add-on for a Windows XP Professional PC. So it's like a portable monitor you can use up to 50 metres away from your desktop setup, connecting by an 802.11b (WiFi) wireless network. With this gizmo so you can compute with any application (including browsing the Web) in front of the TV, in bed, in the bathtub or wherever. Whatever happened to watching TV, sleeping & just soaking? Our lives are too busy folks! For the privilege, expect to pay US$500 to US$1,000.

For those who want a portable, book-sized e-reader at the price of a full computer (which is fine I guess if you're filthy rich or someone else is paying) there will shortly be Tigit's Eightythree. Actually it is a full computer too, complete with Windows XP, 10GB hard drive, 300-MHz processor, USB and full connectivity. Price when released late this year will be around US$1,000. To read more go to: http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,101681,tk,mcx,00.asp

Also expensive, though rather nifty, will be Samsung's new foldable computer. South Korea's Samsung says the flat LCD screen, which folds like a book, will be ideal for Internet users reading online e-books.

"We tend to overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term." Arthur C. Clarke.

Philips have unveiled a tiny 1.2 inch "CD" drive powered by blue laser technology. This drive could be integrated into PDA's or other e-readers to allow for removable disks that could each store large collections of e-books, even multimedia ones. An "obsolete" idea with a bright future? http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102000,tk,cx062102a,00.asp

TriBeam Technologies's LINUX- based "Extended Range Infrared Communications" (ERIC) technology enables standard infrared in handheld PDAs to communicate with what they call" WebTarget Access Points" (WTAP), & provide local wireless access to the internet or an intranet from anywhere within a 4000 square foot Access Zone. Each WTAP will allow multiple users to access the network at the same time

. The standard infrared port on most PDAs can be web-enabled with ERIC software, meaning you don't need new or more expensive model PDAs to access such a network. As an option WTAP can support the 802.11b (WiFi) RF standard, and will soon support Bluetooth devices too. In future releases the WTAP will support Windows CE as well as the present offering, which is for Palm OS 3.1 or later PDAs. http://tribeam.com/index.html

French R&D company b is developing higher resolution displays for mobile phones, PDA's and e-books that will also drastically reduce their power consumption. The technology is called BiNem, which stands for Bistable Nematic (no I don't know what that means either). While many rival companies are now working in this field, Nempotic's efforts must be quite advanced as they've signed a deal with Taiwanese LCD manufacturer Picvue, to use the technology in the latter's production lines in Taiwan and China. Said Jacob Lin, President of Picvue," The BiNem technology… provides excellent solutions for e-books". More about Picvue at www.picvue.com.tw, while Nempotic hang out at http://www.nemoptic.com

The tail's wagging the dog at Palm, to the advantage of handheld fans & their e-books. At the Macworld Expo in New York on July17 last, Palm Digital Media released Palm Reader for Desktops, new versions of its Palm Reader e-book software for Mac and Windows PCs. But why read a Palm e-book on your desktop? Well you can of course, but it also means that once Palm Reader is installed on a hard drive, e-books can now be downloaded from the Net & transferred to read on any of Palm OS, Pocket PC, Windows or Macintosh platforms without modification. In other words you can start reading an e-book on your desktop & finish it on your Palm - or vice versa. Do note though that each computing platform requires a different version of Palm Reader, which you need to install first.

Palm Reader for Desktops runs on Mac OS 8.6 or later, and Windows 98, ME, NT4.0, 2000 and XP. Get it free at: www.palmdigitalmedia.com

Also available from the above URL is Palm eBook Studio, an authoring tool allowing individuals, businesses, publishing companies and online retailers to create, distribute and sell Palm Reader e-books. You can either create e-books from scratch, or cut and paste information from existing documents -- such as MS Word or any application that supports Rich Text Format (RTF) -- into the Palm eBook Studio. It is available for both Windows and Macintosh computers, and also supports the use of graphics and images.

The personal version of Palm eBook Studio is available at an introductory price of US $29.95 until 19th August, and will cost US$39.95 thereafter. This program prepares unencrypted e-books & enables Palm people to make Palm Reader compatible e-books for themselves, their friends or other "unprotected" use. There's also a version allowing retailers to distribute encrypted titles - Palm eBook Studio Commerce Pak, for small publishers, which sells atUS$129.95.

1. "The Paris Option" by Robert Lublum and Gayle Lynds, St Martin's Press
2. "Glimmers, The Prologue to Crossroads of Twilight," by Robert Jordon, Simon & Schuster
3. "Knots & Crosses" by Ian Rankin, St. Martin's Press
4. "The Cabinet of Curiosities" by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Warner Books
5. "God's Debris" by Scott Adams, Scott Adams, Inc.
6. "The Emperor of Ocean Park" by Stephen L. Carter, Alfred A. Knopf
7. "Numbered Account" by Christopher Reich, Dell Publishing
8. "Vector" by Robin Cook, Berkley Publishing
9. "The Ice Limit" by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Warner Books
10. "Cathedral" by Nelson DeMille, Warner Books

1. The Holy Bible, New International Version from Zondervan
2. "The Multi-Orgasmic Couple" by Chia & Chia, HarperCollins PerfectBound
3. Webster's New World College Dictionary, from Hungry Minds
4. "There Is A Spiritual Solution To Every Problem" by Wayne W. Dyer, HarperCollins PerfectBound
5. "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey, Franklin-Covey 6. Webster's New World Compact School & Office Dictionary, from Hungry Minds
7. "The Female Orgasm" by Evelyn Strauss, iBooks
8. "The Procrastinator's Handbook" by Rita Emmett, Walker Publishing
9. "Satisfaction Guaranteed" by Rachel Swift, Warner Books
10. "A User's Guide to the Brain" by John J. Ratey, Pantheon Books

Since netLibrary was sold in April to the nonprofit library group Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the new owners have striven to make the Web-based service more appealing to libraries in the education sector. NetLibrary sells or licences e-books to about 7,300 libraries, of which around 3,000 are in tertiary education . However many of these joined on a trial basis only or have made only small orders of e-books.

One of netLibrary's big problems in the past is that there weren't enough titles available, & many of them were too old to be of much use in academia. This situation is now improving, with the collection up over 12% to over 43,000 books. More importantly, 66 percent of the new additions were published between 2000 and 2002.

Over the next year netLibrary expects to add more than 20,000 further titles, particularly in the subjects of business, education, medicine, science, social science, technology, and reference content. A netLibrary Reference Center is under development as a collection of several hundred reference titles to include almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, and indexes.

As a library group OCLC also realizes that netLibrary's relationship with librarians is of critical importance to its success. One of the developments from this has been to make it possible for librarians to choose and order e-books using the same systems they use for print orders. Another is that OCLC has linked its WorldCat electronic catalog with the netLibrary collection, so that netLibrary customers who have bought an e-book can allow patrons to access the full text of it straight from the WorldCat database.

A drawback to the overall service has been the "one user at a time" policy, forced on netLibrary by publishers who were only too aware of the enhanced availability electronic access has the potential to offer to customer libraries. NetLibrary hopes this acute drag on its acceptability will now begin to change. For one thing, under OCLC netLibrary is now much less vulnerable to immediate commercial pressures than the previous - and precarious- private ownership was. So it can afford to hold out for better deals with particular publishers.

Iin the longer term, though, academic publishers should want to come to the party anyhow, because they will begin to realize that the netLibrary service could provide them a steady revenue stream worldwide, if sufficiently attractive in nature. Whereas if netLibrary continues to be hamstrung on its best selling point & most libraries ignore it, then scholarly publishers will have dropped the ball on one of the best opportunities publishing can offer them today. There are, after all, an awful lot of libraries out there, with enormous combined purchasing power. It is kind of sad that the penny hasn't dropped so far.

The Open eBook Forum, which just this month promoted a successful Open an eBook Week, has released the results of an industry-wide analysis of e-book sales growth and new product innovation. Nicholas Bogaty, executive director of the Open eBook Forum commented "The initial hype that surrounded the early days of eBooks has overshadowed the steady growth of a burgeoning industry. By providing concrete numbers on the solid growth of this market, we're able to tangibly assess its impacts on the traditional publishing world and on consumers."

Data was collated from Adobe Systems, AOL Time Warner Book Group, HarperCollins, Microsoft, OverDrive, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Palm Digital Media and McGraw-Hill. Some findings: Palm Digital Media reports that nearly 180,000 e-books were sold in 2001, a more than 40% increase from 2000. Adobe reported that downloads of its Acrobat eBook Reader have increased by approximately 70% from 2001 to 2002. From Microsoft came news that over 5 million copies of Microsoft Reader have now been distributed for use on desktop, notebook and Pocket PC systems.

McGraw-Hill reported that sales of professional e-books are up 55% over the same period last year, while Simon & Schuster has seen double-digit growth in e-book sales from the first half of 2001 to the first half of 2002. Similarly HarperCollins' PerfectBound e-book imprint has sold more e-books in the first five months of 2002 than in all of 2001. Again Random House Inc.'s e-book revenues doubled year-over-year in 2001, and in the quarter ending March their 2002 revenues were the highest since the company began selling e-books in 1998. Although these figures represent growth on a low base they are nevertheless encouraging.

Also worth mentioning is that Random House now creates print and e-book formats simultaneously. Adobe's long-mooted library server has become a reality too, and in a recent survey of librarians 41% of respondents indicated intent to offer Adobe PDF e -books to their patrons. Meanwhile Overdrive puts the number of publishers and independents offering a commercial e-book library at 450.

Overall, there are indications of solid e-book growth, following last year's "slough of despond". Part, perhaps, of a substantial period of consolidation before advances in e-readers and the strengthening of the foundations of this new media make for a truly spectacular rise of the electronic book. As they say in the entertainment business, overnight successes are usually long years in the making.

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

***Bruce’s AUSTRALIAN E-BOOK NEWSLETTER is published quarterly,
plus occasional special issues & updates. Back issues available on request
. If you wish to subscribe please email to brucep@acon.com.au,
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