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Spotlight

Beyond E-Books: Glimpses of the Future
Roxane Farmanfarmaian -- 1/1/01

Twenty years ago, Publishers Weekly (Mar. 20 & 27, 1981) published a report on new electronic media that covered teletex and videotex, videocassettes, home computers (e.g., by Radio Shack), cable TV and an experiment in Ohio that linked 200 computers to an electronic encyclopedia that eventually planned to have audio tagged to the visuals. Today, this sounds like the Flintstones. There was no Internet, no AOL, no Windows, not even a portable computer or a fax machine or a Palm Pilot in sight.

Trying to see into the future, particularly in the case of reading, is a little like trying to solve the chicken-and-egg quandary, says Rich Gold, director of Research on Experimental Documents (RED) at Xerox Parc (www.parc.xerox.com) in Palo Alto, Calif. "New media arrives, and people's first thought is that it will carry old genres. But in fact, new genres are created, and they in turn put pressure on the new media to become something else. Look at the Internet, which created a raft of new genres, such as the home page."

The goal of Xerox's RED, as well as of several other companies around the country, is to experiment with genres and technologies that will determine how we will publish and read information in the near future. On the hardware side, one highly competitive area is electronic paper--creating a thin, programmable display that has the functionality, brightness and flexibility of real paper. On the genre side, one publishing software that's about to hit the market, TK-3 from Night Kitchen, provides consumers with simple tools to create their own multimedia books. RED's current project is Book-in-Time, technology that can publish a bound book in less than a minute from digital files--"which to me," says Gold, "is the difference between TV and movies," i.e., a shift in genre in a new direction.

"The first printing press was created in 1444," points out Bob Stein of Night Kitchen. "The first novel was printed in 1744. That's 300 years. It takes a long time for humans to understand the boundaries of a medium and what it can do."

Given, then, that the human mind will eventually refine and redefine the uses for all the technological developments being experimented with in the area of publishing, here is a look at some of the most intriguing projects on the drawing boards.

Electronic Paper
At Cambridge, Mass.-based E-Ink (www. eink.com), started by two undergraduates from MIT Media Lab, the first steps toward creating a digital display that reflects light, just like real paper, is well on its way. In mid-December, E-Ink and Lucent Technologies unveiled a new product that, through the use of a film of plastic circuitry, is thin and flexible, programmable, high-contrast and uses very little power. As such, it can be "printed" on a range of surfaces, including paper and cloth.

E-Ink (which stands for electrophoretic ink) uses switchable capsules of ink--little balls with dark blue ink on one side, white on the other, that can flip when charged, and stay that way until charged again. Like real ink, it's high contrast, and easy to read from any angle. The company's first product is called Immedia--large indoor signs, being tested by stores such as J.C. Penney, that can be programmed using two-way pagers controlled through the Internet. These messages can be changed all over the country simultaneously, and as often as needed.

Looking into the future, Russ Wilcox, general manager at E-Ink, says that one goal of the company is "to preserve the act of reading into the next century." More people are getting their information from computers because of the vast resources they provide, he points out--despite the discomfort of reading a rigid, backlit display. Aiming to combine the benefits of new technology with the advantages of the old, the company is working on a product it calls Radio Paper, which would be suited to extended reading with good concentration, and could even be bound into books with leather covers if so desired. Newspapers would look like newspapers, but would be constantly updatable; catalogues could be flipped through by hand, but never become outdated; and handheld devices could be taken to the beach, and the sunlight would only increase their readability.

"Ultimately," Wilcox observes, "one of the effects of having this type of capability is to both heighten and broaden the importance of publishing." Since the ruggedness and flexibility of Radio Paper would enable it to be applied to all sorts of new surfaces, such as clothes or appliances, the amount of information beamed everywhere would become even more overwhelming. "So we will be even more dependent than we are today on publishers to sort it out," he says. By the same token, he adds, "by wisely connecting people with content in a digital age, publishers should be able to overcome threats to print and extend their importance in our society."

Multimedia Books
Bob Stein, familiar to many in publishing as cofounder of the innovative electronic publisher Voyager, has begun a new company, Night Kitchen. The company is new, but his view of publishers has not changed. "The real changes we're going to see," he says, "are not coming from publishers but from authors. The publishers generally aren't even investing in the electronics yet."

For the past 10 years, Stein has been working on a book-creating utility, TK-3, that will hit the market this year. Chronicle Books is using it to create its next catalogue. Completely cross-platform, TK-3 provides tools and templates to structure a whole book, complete with imbedded video and audio, searchable sticky notes, Internet links and annobeams ("a contextual tractor beam," as Stein explains it) for annotations. And all this can be created so easily that anyone can do it--and fast.

Though the book can be downloaded from the Net, and can have tangents and tributaries back into the Net, it is still fundamentally linear and story-driven. "The Web is not the model here," explains Stein. "Here, the reader manages the medium, highlighting text, adding notes, flipping easily back and forth, etc."

Stein sees TK-3 bringing about a change not just in the hybrid nature of the book ("Why shouldn't a book have a theme song?"), but in the relationship between creator and reader. "Downloadable books are going to become a producer-driven experience versus a user-driven one," he says. "The creator [author-publisher] no longer has to worry about the lowest common denominator of an audience, but can create a book for one-on-one consumption."

Reading Walls, Tilty Tables, et al.
Xerox Parc's Gold is also working on methods for publishing hybrid media, though his overriding perspective is that the medium is as important as the message. "Reading pure text is a very recent concept," Gold explains. "In the past, it was almost always surrounded by images, and defined very much by context--whether it was on a wall or a billboard or a vase. Business is rapidly moving back that way--to the overall message of the cereal box, or the PowerPoint presentation."

He illustrates the concept by pointing out that the same message becomes increasingly difficult to throw out, depending on whether it is scribbled on a memo pad or printed in a magazine or published in a book. "Or take a children's plush toy/book, where the medium and message resonate together," he says. "You can't simply scan such a book into an e-book reader."

Last year, Gold's RED team designed a show called "Experiments in the Future of Reading" at the Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif. "The driving force behind each of the exhibits was that the right medium enables the message to go deeper and have more meaning," Gold says. The most specific example of this theory was a "Reading Eye Dog," whose combination of camera eyes and speech technology enabled it to read aloud material placed on its reading stand by a museum visitor. "We tried several different entities," Gold explains. "As a human robot, it sounded clumsy and stilted, but as a dog, it came out sounding very smart."

Several of the exhibits experimented with ways to deepen the information resources in a document. One was a "Reading Wall," three 16-foot panels printed with a timeline on the history of reading. Mounted on a roller track on the panels was a big flat-screen color display--a lens, of sorts, that viewers could roll to any point along the timeline to view layers of embedded graphics and textual information. Wherever the lens rested, it expanded and highlighted information about that era, which then receded the minute the lens was pushed on to the next spot.

Another exhibit was called a "Tilty Table," a large glowing screen that provided an "eye" onto a vast document that was otherwise invisible. By tilting the table in any direction, other parts of the document slid into view. There were different "Tilty Tables," including a "Reading Table" that illuminated a document that, if printed, would have been 30 feet on each side, and a "Peace Table," which had a virtual ball that viewers could roll over hotspots, revealing the word "peace" in many languages.

Three of the most original exhibits were the "Glyph-o-Scope," the "Speeder Reader" and the "Listen Reader." The "Glyph-o-Scope," utilizing Xerox's electronic paper technology, displayed data-glyphs (or digital data embedded in regular paper)--graphics and text that were invisible until viewed through a special microscope-like lens.

The "Speeder Reader" used rapid serial visual protocol (RSVP) to present the fictional diary of a young girl's interplanetary travels, propelling 700-800 words per minute toward the viewer's eye--a feeling much like being in a driving car in a video game. The word speed was controlled by a "gas" pedal and a steering wheel changed "lanes" into different stories. "The eye can absorb information much faster in serial form," Gold says, "but RSVP suffers from a lack of context, and can be extremely tiring." For this reason, the exhibit combined a travel story with the driving metaphor in an attempt to provide this context.

The "Listen Reader" was perhaps the most artistically pleasing, a book that looked and felt real, but that provided the sound quality of a movie track. To elicit the sound, readers sat in deep plush chairs and waved their arms in the air above the book (which, in fact, was printed on plasticized paper), "conducting" the sound. Sensors in the book's binding perceived the location of the hands, sending the information to a computer that then chose what sounds to generate. More than any other exhibit, this one experimented with augmenting already existing literature with digital capability while preserving its initial charm.

Many of the ideas discussed here are being pursued in various forms by several companies at the same time. There are four companies in the U.S. alone that have different prototypes for some kind of electronic paper, including LCD manufacturer Kent Displays, which has created an electronic book in conjunction with Honeywell and the Pentagon that is reflective and offers color. Dynamic annotation, for example, whether it is Stein's TK-3 or Xerox's Fluid Document technology, or that of several other document developers, is going to be a regular aspect of text in the near future. Printing of one-off books, each different and each printed only after it's been sold, is another common theme among several research groups, including the scientists at MIT Media Lab.

Interestingly, although the level of our technological acceptance, and usage, has moved significantly beyond that of two decades ago, one of the observations made in that 20-year-old PW article still holds very true: "The thing we're finding is that no book translates directly into a visual medium," said Ann Dillworth, then Addison-Wesley's editor-in-chief. "You have to do something creative, something jazzy, with it to make it interesting."

What's more, the technology has to be top-notch, otherwise publishers don't find markets to pay for what was once just in print. "E-book readers, print-on-demand, these are just passing technologies, like the telex machine was, that do a lousy job of adding high tech to an old medium," Gold says dismissively. "What we can expect in the future is a slew of radically new media where the reader reads at all levels, and content and form deeply resonate."