Tech Survivors Get Down to Business

A great uneasiness accompanied attendees to BEA's technology exhibits. Fearing unwarranted exuberance and a lack of return on investment, venture capital sources had dried up, and by June, the e-publishing ranks were missing many of the stars of the last two years: Hungry Minds, VersaWare, Digital Goods, Xerox, IBM, iUniverse, XLibris, Gemstar. The buzz, such as it was, was all business: Where is the revenue?

For those exhibitors who did make it to the expo floor, the show was very productive. Christopher Warnock, founder of online research company ebrary.com was typical. "This show was terrific for us," Warnock told PW. "We had a lot of traffic, and they were serious leads. We met with about 40 publishers that we hadn't seen before, and did a lot of demos."

New formats made a big splash this year. ION Systems released its publishing and distribution operation, GalaxyLibrary.com, as well as its new e-book reader format, eMonocle. The Java-based reader runs Open eBook (OEB) files without modification on Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux machines. EMonocle lets the user choose the size of the type, from 10-point up to 192-point (exceeding the Americans with Disabilities Act specs), then resizes the column widths and art and adjusts page numbers, all automatically.

For publishers who want their texts available in multiple formats, Galaxy Library will work through digital services provider Texterity to convert PDFs to MSReader.Lit, Palm, OEB and Adobe eBook Reader, as well as to Braille, Daisy and print on demand, according to Jill Thomas, ION's CEO.

Another new e-book format shown in Chicago for the first time was Echyon Co. Ltd. (from Korea, with offices in Fort Lee, N.J.). Echyon's file format is OEB-compliant, and includes the ability to run streaming video and audio files along with the text on Windows PCs.

The International DOI Foundation (IDF) made two large strides forward at BEA. First, IDF announced, and Content Directions Inc. founder David Sidman demonstrated, the Multiple Resolution feature of the Digital Object Identifier system. Second, Content Directions and Korea's Enpia were named the first two commercial Registration Agencies for the DOI. Publishers now have a place to establish their DOIs.

Multiple Resolution refers to the situation where there may be copies of a text at several sites, plus such ancillary materials as book reviews and promotional materials at other sites, all referred to by hypertext links. In the demo, Sidman began with a story in Business Week Online on U.S. v Microsoft, a bestselling book from McGraw-Hill. By clicking on the cover shot, users were offered a free sample chapter download, a review of the book and the option to order the book from one of several retailers.

Because the DOI makes use of a central registry of identifiers, the DOI will not go out of date, as often happens with URLs: "No more 'Error 404: File Not Found' messages," Sidman jibed. And, best of all from the publisher's and retailers' perspectives, users can be pointed to the materials in question without ever leaving the original Web site.

Like the autograph sessions at BEA? Been wondering if there could be a way to sign e-books? Palm Digital Media (formerly peanutpress.com) has come up with an extension for its Palm Reader software. The new software feature allows authors to autograph any Palm Reader file, and then encrypts the image of the signature directly into the digits for the page.

Sunday morning DAW Books and Palm Digital had the world's first e-book autographing session. Julie Czerneda (The Company of Others) and Steven Krane (The Omega Game) signed attendees' Palm Reader pages, and discussed the effects of e-books on SF publishing.

With these new tools, publishers should begin selling e-books this year. And then the industry can get down to business.