It's all in black-and-white: The screen on the RCA REB 1100, Thomson/RCA's intrepretation of the Gemstar eBook, is monochrome.

And read all over: The RCA REB 1200, another Thomson version of the Gemstar eBook, is full-color.

E-books give papers, magazines potential for digital publishing

What started out as an electronic marketplace to sell books has turned into a revolutionary way for publishers to do business.

And don't be turned off by the appellation "e-book" -- the devices and underlying technology work just as well for magazines and newspapers as for "books."

The introduction of e-book technology as a specific type of computer file, containing the text of a printed book (or magazine or newspaper), allows readers to view the material on a personal computer, a personal digital assistant or an electronic device designed specifically for reading e-books.

"'Dedicated' reading devices such as RCA's upcoming REB 1100 and REB 1200 e-books already can be used to receive periodicals," said Jay Small, an analyst for Thomson Consumer Electronics in suburban Indianapolis, manufacturers of the RCA, GE and Proscan brands of products. (Editors' note: Small is a correspondent for this journal.)

"You can get e-book editions of Time, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others," he said. "Of course, these are not perfect parallels to the print editions -- not all the editorial or advertising content is present and the formatting is somewhat different."

Small said that these "early attempts" demonstrate that the e-book platform is well suited to periodical content. He said it's "a much better overall reading experience, in my opinion, than web pages."

These devices represent a good mix between pull-demand models and push-request models for content, Small said.

"You can set some models to update subscription content on a timer -- overnight, for example -- so a user can have a fresh newspaper or magazine waiting when he or she wakes up. But I also think you'll eventually see customization and personalization capabilities that rival today's better web sites. Those, in turn, will enable on-demand news updates targeted to specific users."

When Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. of Pasadena, Calif., and New York City, a global technology and media company focused on consumer entertainment and electronic TV listings services, acquired the two then-leading e-book companies, it became the king of the electronic book business (if you overlook little players like Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.).

Gemstar purchased NuvoMedia Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., the manufacturer of the Rocket eBook, and SoftBook Press Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., who produced the SoftBook Reader, last January.

Gemstar-TV Guide International is an interesting business in and of itself. Formed by a merger of Gemstar International Group Ltd. of Pasadena -- the company that provides the code numbers for TV shows that allow video recorders to tape shows without the consumer having to learn how to make the flashing "12:00" go away on the VCR -- and TV Guide Inc. of New York City, and Radnor, Pa. -- the venerable pocket-sized magazine that provides TV listings and feature stories, which had been owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- the company was not the most likely acquirer of pretty much all the e-book technology out there.

At the time of the merger, Henry Yuen, Gemstar's chairman and chief executive, told the San Jose Mercury News' Joelle Tessler that the company's foray into electronic books was logical. Already, he was quoted in the Mercury News as saying, Gemstar has "latched onto the most favorite American past-time" -- watching television. Next, he told the paper, the company was moving into another popular American past-time -- reading. "We want to take the information revolution and apply it to consumers' leisure habits," Yuen said.

Three technologies
Gemstar does not have any plans to merge the two electronic book solutions together. Instead, they will both be marketed independently, with the Rocket technology focusing on the consumer market while the SoftBook technology is geared toward business.

Both the Rocket eBook and SoftBook Reader use technology to display printed words into digital form that can be easily read on handheld devices with screens. These devices simulate the look and feel of a standard book but are also able to store the equivalent of several books in its memory.

Gemstar recently introduced its own product, the Gemstar eBook, which provides the necessary protection for copyright content. This e-book employs a patented system of encoding each piece of content to be read by only one authorized device. Each device has been factory installed with an individual encryption key, which cannot be shared with another device, so that content delivered to each device is encrypted differently.

Last winter's acquisition had many people speculating on the future of the electronic-book industry. Gemstar has already partnered with newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times as well as Time-Warner to distribute their information in the e-book format.

In addition, Gemstar will try to license and market the new technology to major manufacturers; its first license is with Thomson Consumer. By 2001, Gemstar plans to include wireless paging with its e-book technology to provide instant downloads of newspaper content without the use of a computer.

And with TV Guide as a corporate partner, the company will convert the magazine's content into e-book form and try to coerce the 11 million subscribers of the ink-on-paper magazine to purchase an electronic book.

Original content has traditionally been delivered in a printed format. Nonetheless, how that printed material gets from the author to the reader has changed. In recent years, paperback books -- which have lower profit margins -- have taken the place of hard covers. The printing, storage, distribution and marketing of a book can be a difficult -- and expensive -- task. Book publishers today select manuscripts they believe will sell to a mass audience, producing profits.

New ways of publishing
Electronic books will completely change the way books are created: no need for manufacturing or distribution costs, thereby reducing the financial risk of publishing.

And lower risk means higher profits. And potentially higher profits in an industry segment do not go unnoticed. Traditional consumer software companies like Microsoft and Adobe are also looking at e-books to provide better solutions for the publishing industry -- and not just books.

"We are interested in working with newspapers although we haven't actively worked with them yet," said Will Manis, product unit manager for Microsoft Corp. "We want to be seen as a technology provider and do not want to get involved with providing content. We have talked with some newspapers to see how we can fit into the production process but there are a host of technological issues surrounding that."

Many viewers are seeing these changes first-hand.

"Originally, the information on the Web was free but now people realize that they want to start making money," Manis said. "E-books have a digital rights management system in place so they are protected that way. We anticipate going into the newspaper industry, but right now, our focus is on trade publications."

Manis said that Microsoft currently offers three products: Microsoft Reader, a piece of software that runs on hand-held devices that use the Pocket PC operating system; Digital Asset Server, which serves protected content to readers, and Microsoft Reader Content, which is a tool used to convert content into e-books.

"It is important for us to understand the newspaper industry's workload to provide the set of tools to utilize their content effectively in an e-book space," Manis said.

Adobe, of San Jose, focused on the publishing business from its founding in the early 1980s, and has developed an e-book strategy, too. In addition to using its Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) technology, last summer the company acquired a leading e-book software company, Glassbook Inc. of Waltham, Mass. Glassbook, much like Microsoft, has a suite of products, including a reader, a server and a content converter.

Larger displays
"Newspapers had been distributing content to the SoftBook and Rocket eBook prior to the Gemstar purchase," said Roger Fidler, director of the Institute for CyberInformation at Kent State University in Ohio. Fidler, a longtime executive with Knight Ridder, headed up the company's Information Design Laboratory in the mid-'90s, which did an extensive amount of research on digital tablet-like newspapers.

"While newspapers have a niche market for Palm Pilots, presentation does matter," said Fidler. "They must have a larger display for a better presentation with a high resolution. It's important for newspapers to take these concepts and apply them to an entire issue of a newspaper and evaluate it. A page-based system blends the characteristics of print material to Web-based media."

With digital newspaper delivery, the cost of publishing is greatly reduced. A reader must merely take the text of a book, convert it into a format usable by an e-book reader and the data is stored on a computer.

"The benefit of e-books is that the information can be downloaded onto a PC or hand-held device, if it has a large enough display, and read off-line," Fidler added. "It works well but in the newspaper industry, there are a lot of formats. For example, it will not work well in XML [eXtensible Markup Language] formats. We are working to get a combination of the PDF and XML formats to provide a three-dimensional model."

Fidler said his Kent State laboratory is currently working with Adobe to "push the limits of Acrobat" in newspapers and the display medium.

"Newspapers may have to reformat the paper to make it work more compatibly with them in a compatible display format that blends traditional print with hyper media," said Fidler.

The e-book can store thousands of pages and permits users to take instant delivery of any newspaper, book or magazine they purchase over the telephone.

The Arizona Republic is currently using the SoftBook technology as an electronic way to give circulation routes to their drivers and the technology is being marketed by Advanced Technical Solutions Inc. of Wilmington, Mass. "Electronic books accompany one piece of the information delivery," said Howard Finberg of the Digital Futures Consultancy of Tempe, Ariz. Until the recent acquisition by Gannett Co. Inc. of Central Newspapers Inc. -- which owns the Republic -- Finberg was the company's director of technology and information strategies.

"There needs to be another generation of technology to make the e-book concept more compatible to the newspaper industry," said Finberg. Part of the issue, he said, is that most e-books are aimed at providing wired connections and that there seems to be little advantage.

"As a reading device, it has a lot of potential because it can be wireless and provide up-to-date information like newspapers. I think it will be there but it just hasn't reached that point yet. Adobe certainly has a closer relationship with the newspaper industry, probably because Microsoft is just not as strategic to their mission as Adobe is."

An electronic book file can be generated from a digital document in a just a few short minutes. In some instances, the file may then be uploaded onto an e-book retailer for immediate availability on-line.

Most e-book versions of an average book cost less than their paper-based print version and readers are allowed to download for free a chapter or more of the book to read at their leisure. E-books offer the opportunity to read the author's material and determine if they would like to purchase the copy.

Electronic book technology and digital newspaper delivery will provide a wider variety of information on the marketplace today. Since nearly 60,000 books are published each year and as e-books increase in popularity, e-book reader costs will decrease, and the number of e-books published will increase substantially over the next few years.

-- Kellie K. Speed, kkspeed@colepapers.net

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-6000;
Advanced Technical Solutions Inc.,
(978) 657-6500;
Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc.,
(626) 792-5700;
Microsoft Corp.
(425) 882-8080.

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.