I was wondering if the participants in this thread had any thoughts on the potential G or K status of the ebook game. I had assumed it was at best a developing royalty game with several formats and players. Then in the hardcopy version of UpsideToday that arrived this week (September 2000) I read the following on page 54:
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E-Book of Tomorrow
The future of electronic book publishing has been written, and techno publishers won't be using HTML or Adobe Acrobat. The soon-to-be established Open E-book Standard, developed by the industry's leading e-book device makers, will turn downloadable publishing in to a viable industry without the piracy problem that plagued the online-music industry.
Softbook CEO and co-inventor Jim Sachs patented his technology in 1996, bringing to the market a device that downloads secure data of books and magazines from the Web using an open-source code that can't be cracked, and that is being accepted by nearly every publisher in the market. The Softbook Reader weighs less than two pounds, uses flash memory to store up to 85,000 pages of text and gray-scale graphics, and comes with all the amenities of digital technology.
Gemstar International has acquired the company and its only competitor, Nuvomedia and its Rocket EBook, and licensed the technology to Thomson Consumer Electronics, which will produce the devices under its brand by the holiday season.
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While the above suggests some GMST may own some important IP in electronic publishing, the following item dated 8/18 from the UpsideToday site suggests the issue is far from resolved:
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upside.com
McGraw-Hill to sell e-books on multiple formats
by Louise Rosen
McGraw-Hill's (MHP) new e-books site, to be launched Monday, will make digital content
available on multiple electronic platforms, giving it the widest selection of formats
available from a single publisher.
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Customers will be able to purchase titles in a variety of formats including McGraw-Hill's,
an Adobe (ADBE) PDF secure document. Other formats will include Rocketbook,
Softbook, PeanutPress, iBook and Glassbook.
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The company decided on a multi-format approach to e-publishing because the electronic
book market is new and no clear format has emerged as the outright winner. "This is an
experiment to find out what [consumers] want, and how they want to get it," a
McGraw-Hill spokeswoman told UpsideToday.
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In September, Time Warner (TWX) subsidiary Time Warner Trade Publications will launch
its e-book Internet site iPublish. This will allow consumers to print on demand -- order
single copies of books long out of print.
For its e-books, it has chosen the secure Glassbook PDF document format. Later in the
year those titles will be available on the Microsoft(MSFT) Reader.
Houghton Mifflin (HTN) has been experimenting with making textbooks available via the
Internet on a PDF format.
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Pearson Education allows customers to search through textbooks and buy chapters
piecemeal that can be delivered in a PDF format.
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That's a lot of devices, and McGraw-Hill is hedging its bets to see which format will be
the clear winner.
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Comments, anyone? |
