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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tinroad who wrote (11595)	3/20/2000 3:26:00 PM
From: cksla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

tinroad- a follow-up story on E-books: World's Greatest Books Become E-books By Stuart Glascock, TechWeb Mar 20, 2000 (10:56 AM) URL: techweb.com The people who brought "Emily Post on Etiquette" to the Internet are extending their reservoir of classic fiction, nonfiction, and reference works onto a newly redesigned website launched Monday. Bartleby.com is adding to its growing library of reference books with collections from Columbia University Press and Boston-based education publishing giant Houghton Mifflin. Stephen King's immensely promoted foray into digital publishing last week illustrates the demand for e-books and the new devices that store and display them. But Bartleby.com, which published its first book on the Web in 1994 (Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"), still operates under a different revenue model. All access to the site is free. The site features a searchable database containing over 200,000 Web pages, 29,000 quotations, 4,765 poems, and 37 nonfiction and 15 fiction texts. "We are already making money," said John Kibler, president and CEO of the New York-based, ad revenue-driven site. "The idea is to make our content attractive enough so that people come to our site and utilize our site and investigate Bartleby." The site offers an expanding list of great books, and the focus is on both content and technology. Among the main headings of searchable reference books are "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations," "Columbia Encyclopedia," "Simpson's Contemporary Quotations," a dictionary, and a thesaurus. "Our users can search a book to find a passage and cross reference that passage to find another author in another work," Kibler said. "The technology is not that we have individual books, but that we have the data set that it can be parsed in any way we want." Need a pithy quote from T.S Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or any of the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States? Bartleby's got it. The company said its primary audience is the intellectually curious and educators. "We are carefully selecting our books, building out this classic reference shelf," said Rajesh Raichoudhury, chief technology officer and an architect of Yahoo Calendar. After the reference classics are online, additional categories, from information technology to modern fiction, could be added, Raichoudhury said, noting the tremendous response to King's novella, "Riding the Bullet." The publishing industry has seen a cascade of deals aimed at the emerging e-books market, with established publishers such as Random House and Penquin Books forming alliances with new media companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.com. In a deal last week, digital Publisher Fatbrain, which has targeted mainly the corporate information market launched a new site, Mightywords.com., expanding its target customer base to consumers. The rush to publish on the Web has given traditional printers cause to wrestle with the Internet. Large printing industry conferences, such as the Seybold Publishing Conference in San Francisco last fall, have been dedicated to the topic. Traditional printers and publishers are struggling with moving more of their products and business practices to the Web. One publishing executive at that conference distilled the phenomena succinctly: "The Web is the most important thing to happen to the written word in the last 500 years."