Book to the Future

KUSHAL DAVE/YH

Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, in their book The Turing Option, envision a world where paper has been virtually eliminated. Instead, people use "reprintable paper", containing little bits that are turned from white to black or vice versa by electric fields, and thus can represent a wide variety of text. While it sounds unrealistic, the idea might not be that far from reality. Research is being done on such materials and electronic products that digitally mimic books using customized screens and interfaces are hitting the market. Electronic textbooks have become on focus of these projects, as many experts in the field feel that the education market will be the most hospitable to the new digital medium. Whether they will be successful is another matter entirely.

"This concept has been around for 30 years or more," says Martin Ewing, Director of Information Technology in the Engineering Department. "The technology will certainly be there in a few years. The question is the sociology: what are people willing to carry around?"

Despite the risks, Microsoft and three smaller companies have all entered the contest. Recently, Nuvomedia has been grabbing headlines with its Rocket eBook. However, they still have had no luck getting textbooks to come online. Jonathan Poretz, their spokesman, had little explanation. "At this time, all I can say about the education market is that NuvoMedia recognizes the potential . . . and is actively pursuing relationships with publishers in that space. I don't expect NuvoMedia to make any specific announcements about its plans for this market over the next several months," he said.

Everybook, Inc., producer of a competing product, sees significant cost savings from their product. Karolyn Kelly-O'Keefe, Vice President of Marketing, explains, "Owners of an EB Dedicated Reader(TM) will receive at least a 25 to 40% discount off the retail price of each publication they purchase through the Everybook Store. Research by McGraw Hill indicates that textbook production involves as much as 18% of the eventual cost of the book. And that's just printing and binding. Material handling and distribution costs are also significant. Returns represent not only a cost, but a loss, of product and revenue to the publisher." Kelly-O'Keefe goes on to address specific issues of distribution and sales. "The discounts that we envision for both the college and K-12 markets will allow colleges to lease EBs and allow schools to amortize the EB cost over the entire educational career of the student," she said. The system is set up so that a book can be read on only one reader at a time, thus preventing copying of texts without paying.

In her opinion, digitizing texts is easy for newer ones and a necessity for older ones. "Publications physically printed between 1900 and 1975 are dissolving because of the high-acid paper and chlorine bleach used to make that paper. Those books must be digitized in order to save them. It is our conclusion that everything printed on wood-based paper will be digitized or lost in the next 10-20 years," she said.

SoftBook Press, a third entrant, has put out a product targeted at professionals, and is trying to get professionals to support the platform. In addition, a number of publishers are participating with Mircosoft, Nuvomedia, and National Institute of Standards and Technology, on an open book standard, much like an HTML standard for ebooks. However, there is still much dispute as to what the standard should contain, and two different camps seem to be forming.

Por que?

However, Kuc worried about the oppurtunities for people to make illegal copies, since copies made of electronic information do not degrade the way photocopies of books do. "The thing to do is make books cheap enough and convenient enough to load down that other methods are not cost-effective," he said.

He also stressed the importance of preserving a general sense of the paper's feel, since people often remember things by their location on the page and will find a passage by rifling through a book, a sort of "tactile memory." This might no longer be an option. "We're going back to scrolls," he said, looking at the example of web pages. "Information is one thing, and aesthetics is another."

The products currently being released are a bit costly, though the books are discounted, and the devices are limited in features and readability. Still, they do allow automatic lookup of words in dictionaries, cross-references, and high-quality images. in addition, the technology can scan for and highlight the most significant parts of the passage—which makes it easier to skim a book for the good parts. And, of course, the less paper that is used, the better off the environment is.

The technology may spread with time. "What I think is neat is once you develop a product for mass production, the price comes down," Kuc said. He added that resolution may not be so significant—people have already gone from the high resolution of printing press to the lower resolution of laser printers with little complaint.

Of course, students would the ones most affected if the technology spread to textbooks. William Edwards, PC '02 thinks that the benefits will be minimal compared to what might happen if reading were somewhow eliminated all together. "Ebooks would be very convenient in that they might reduce long-term book costs, save trips to the bookstore, and facilitate note-taking," he said. "As novel as the new technology might be, however, it all comes out in the wash: reading for classes will always be reading for classes, an often arduous and time-consuming experience. Ebooks will not change that."

Other students have a much stronger stance against electronic books. Armando Valdés-Prieto, BK '01 feels that nothing will replace the printed page. "I think there is much to be said for the book in the good old sense," he said. "I am against any effort to replace book resources with digital media."

Yale!? Taking the lead in something?

In the same breath, she explained that Yale is taking tentative steps forward. In addition to digitizing parts of its collection through the Papyrus project, this week library staff saw a presentation from NetLibrary. "Success of this vendor will depend on uptake (this is expensive) and on publishers' willingness to license print books in an e-version over time, as well as this developer's staying power in a market that will not be really quick to change, for a many reasons. I should say that the NetLibrary developments will include standard academic works from mainstream university and scholarly publishers—not textbooks (which have a sizeable economy and life of their own, one that publishers are not eager to endanger) nor arcane scholarly works," she says.

At the presentation, a suave and technologically-aware Brian J. Stern, General Manager of Higher Education, espoused the virtue of the NetLibrary system. The crowd of library employees seemed impressed. While the NetLibrary product is currently based on an enhanced web browse, he did not discount the possibility of eventually integrating with reading appliances. "We have some representatives that are starting to get involved and attend those meetings," he said of the standards committees. With all of their content, the only problem would be the cost of converting the format of their archives to any new standard. He personally was fond of the reading devices, but he was not sure if they would ever make it on the academic stage.

Matthew Beacom, Catalog Librarian for Networked Information, was impressed. "It's as close as any that I've seen as gotten to having a reasonable approach," Beacom said. He added that they understood the library market. "They've got a business model that works." He pointed out that there were certain limitations, such as the ability to only print one page out of a work, and time restrictions, that, while needed, could become burdensome and would need to be resolved.

Stern was certain that things would change. "We absolutely believe that this model will evolve," he said. He also said this not only of his business, but of the entire electronic book industry. There would have to be new methods of pricing, perhaps something closer to leasing. Still, he stated it will be cost effective to libraries in the long run because libraries must not only pay for the books initially but also must replace and maintain damaged items, as well as constantly shelve and store their books, functions that would be replaced by NetLibrary's management. An ROI study is being done at the University of Colorado.

Ewing sees the benefits for libraries as obvious. "It's much better from a library's point of view to have people viewing a CD rather than pawing through their books," he said. He pointed to a recently released CD-ROM of some original Ben Franklin documents he had seen. While the high quality of the images made it slow, it did at least accurately reproduce the documents.

That famous Texan ambition

Of course, just as tough as dealing with the educational bureaucracy is confronting the entrenched book publishers. "Textbook publishers are cautiously observing our project, but I am sure most will come to see that electronic publishing is mutually beneficial," he said. "With digital textbooks, the cost per copy should be lower because publishers can be expected to pass on to schools a significant portion of their savings from reduced manufacturing, warehousing and distributing costs. A lower price per copy means that school districts will be able to purchase more digital books each year."

In the meantime, the pioneers of the technology have high hopes for their idea. William N. Schilit and others imagines the appliances, originally envisioned by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in the 70's finally coming to fruition in an IEEE Computer paper, "Network-based digital libraries increase the availability of information, but people still tend to print the documents to work with them, " the abstract said. "Electronic book and document readers will neither replace paper nor will they replace desktop computers. Instead, they will occupy their own unique and valuable role in our lives, bringing the paper and computer worlds closer together."