This year's Seybold San Francisco, held late last month, was a markedly smaller event than just a year ago--both in terms of individual booth size and attendance--but the e-book sessions were well attended. Overwhelmingly, attendees and panelists agreed that, as the hype surrounding e-books has died down, the real work is getting done.

Much of the discussion and product announcements at Seybold involved digital rights management. Both Adobe and Microsoft introduced products to facilitate the use of their handheld technologies while protecting rights to the content.

"We are now on the cusp of an area when there is enough penetration on the receiving and consuming ends to make it an interesting market for the business infrastructure, of which DRM is a critical part," observed Jeff Ramos, Microsoft's director of worldwide marketing for its emerging technology division. During that keynote session, Ramos urged attendees to compare the growth of e-books with other technologies--the telephone and television--that were slow to take hold. "We've only just scratched the surface," he said.

At the following full-day session on e-books, BinaryThing.com 's Karl DeAbrew served as co-moderator and went right to the crux: Just how long is it going to take for a critical mass of people to be walking around with handheld devices on which they choose to read e-books? The consensus was two years.

DMCA Debate

As the balance between security and usability has yet to be struck, a session on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act turned into a heated debate. Robin Gross, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has called for the reform of the DMCA, said the law eliminates the fair use of information by people who have paid for it. To protect the copyright, encryption technology limits the number of devices on which an e-book can be read. (The new MS Reader allows for four.) Bill Rosenblatt, president of Giant Steps Media and author of DRM Business and Technology, said that the problem with fair use is that "lawyers can't define it, and software can't monitor it."

Part of what makes the debate so heated, according to Allan Adler, v-p of the Association of American Publishers, is that people misunderstand the notion of fair use. "We are fair users of content just like everybody else," he said of the publishers. "Fair use is not a constitutional right, it's the breathing room in copyright."

Much of the discussion addressed the fair use issues in the case of Dimitri Sklyarov (News, Sept. 3) who was out of jail and attended Seybold. "Anti-circumvention is the essence of DMCA," said Kurt Foss, editor of PlanetPDF.com, the Web site that broke the Sklyarov story. Rosenblatt pointed out that it "often takes years for us to see what legitimate use these things have." "Five to 10 years from now we'll have let go of all of this," said Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital. Adler agreed that it will take years to work out the issues around copyright, and said publishers will eventually move to open standards "so that the consumer doesn't have to worry if their favorite author's work plays on whatever device they have."

At another session, Leo Dwyer, COO of Rosetta Books, said the dilemma of DRM came from trying to emulate the physical book world. "If it's priced at $30, you'd better put a lock on it," he said. "From the consumer side, most want to read it and then throw it away."

One clear area of agreement is that real strides have been made with the use of extended markup language (XML), which makes it easier to transfer the content among formats. "A single version of a multipurposed file is a good thing," said Texterity's Cimarron Buser. From a research perspective, observed David Seaman, director of Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, "it's been a wonderful year for e-books." He added that the industry learned that there is demand, and the idea to build something just once is spreading. "Your book has to be nimble," he told PW.