NuvoMedia, producer of the Rocket eBook, has announced, in the last few weeks, several upgrades to its product, according to Martin Eberhard, CEO and cofounder of the company based in Mountain View, Calif. -- including a deal for Barnes &Noble to sell the Rocket eBook through its Web site. Eberhard said that Barnesandnoble.com, which has been selling Rocket software editions since fall of last year, is the first book retail site to sell the book-reader hardware as well.

Announcements concerning titles began early in March, when St. Martin's Press published Andrew Morton's Monica's Story for the Rocket eBook simultaneously with the hardcover edition. Eberhard told PW, "We have sold several hundred copies, which is pretty remarkable, considering the Rocket eBook has only been available since October. St. Martin's is very happy."

In mid-April, two more title releases made news. First, Stephen King's new book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, from Simon &Schuster, was released in simultaneous print and Rocket editions. The second was Michael Prescott's Stealing Faces, which is scheduled for Penguin Putnam's fall list, but will be available May 1 in a Rocket edition (see Book News, p. 25).

NuvoMedia has made agreements to publish Rocket editions with more than 20 of the best-known trade publishers -- Random House, HarperCollins and McGraw-Hill, among others -- as well as several electronic-only publishing houses, including Hard Shell Word Factory.

Publishing Functions, Too

Extending its reach as a publishing platform to personal and corporate writers, the Rocket eBook also recently added two new publishing features, RocketWriter and RocketLibrary.com.

RocketWriter allows users to create their own Rocket editions with such simple tools as Microsoft Word, which can automatically add HTML tags to the text for publishing on the Web. Rocket eBook users can also download and read documents or copies of Web pages and upload and display their works on the Internet for dispersal to other Rocket eBook users. Importing Web pages to the Rocket eBook is as simple as copying the site's URL into the RocketLibrarian software that manages the Rocket eBook, similar to a PC's operating system. Web pages loaded this way even retain internal hot links and images.

The storage area for these personal publications is RocketLibrary.com, a kind of virtual public library or community of Rocket eBook users, in which people can deposit any document for distribution to other users. It is interesting to note that because the software managing Rocket eBook transactions is available for free download at NuvoMedia's Web site (www.rocket-ebook.com), writers who don't own a Rocket eBook can "publish" to Rocket users this way.