Make Way for e-Picture Books
Ipicturebooks.com will soon sell electronic picture books and easy readers online
Staff -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2000
The ipicturebooks.
The growing electronic book market, which has thus far paid little attention to kids, will gain its first publisher dedicated to e-books for children when ipicturebooks.com debuts on the Web at the end of this month. The new site will sell downloadable picture books and easy readers in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format, and many will be titles by well-known authors and illustrators that have gone out of print. 
Ipicturebooks.com will be part of a larger site called www.ibooksinc.com (not to be confused with www. ibooks.com, a Web site that sells technical books). The president of ibooks, inc., Byron Preiss, has been an editor at Bank Street Books and at Doubleday, where he had his own imprint, Byron Preiss Books. One of the first books available will be an out-of-print title from that imprint, a picture-book version of Paul Simon's song At the Zoo, illustrated by Valerie Michaut, that was originally published in 1991. Preiss did not reveal other titles on his initial list or how many would be released, but says that another title will be an out-of-print book by a Caldecott-winning author and illustrator.
The individual picture-book files, once downloaded, will occupy about two megabytes of space on a user's hard drive, which is efficient, says Preiss, when you consider that each file contains high-quality electronic versions of full-color illustrations.
Preiss says he had librarians and educators very much in mind in developing this new venture. "We're going to very aggressively court the school and library market," he says, although the marketing plan and terms are still under development. As with most new e-book ventures, says Preiss, the initial work of both ibooks, inc., and ipicture-books.com has been to set up digital rights management (DRM) software that assures publishers that their intellectual property will be protected once it is posted on the Web. Ipicturebooks.com will use DRM software by Reciprocal, a company allied with Adobe and Hewlett-Packard, to prevent unlimited copying of the PDF files.
Preiss is in negotiations with hard-copy children's book publishers, authors, illustrators, and agents to gain access to more titles that have gone out of print and titles whose rights have returned to their creators. He will also offer established--and new--writers and illustrators of children's books the opportunity to submit new works for consideration. He hopes eventually to publish e-books writtenand illustrated by children as well. --Walter Minkel
