What Comes After 'E'?

E-books haven't yet found much acceptance from the public. More people have probably read about e-books than actually read one. The RCA/Gemstar e-book reader (the successor to the RocketBook) appears to have failed; the company has not released any figures, but industry analysts say that few have been sold.

Speakers at a recent TextOneZero get-together of electronic publishers in New York City discussed the future of e-books and online publishing cautiously. Roger Sperber of the Electronic Publishers Coalition admitted that "something is not working in terms of e-books" right now. He said that everyone—the publishers, the education community, and the public—is confused about what e-books are.

But the TextOneZero speakers were more optimistic about two developments—electronic ink and print-on-demand—that show great promise for the near future. Jim Iuliano, president and CEO of E-Ink Corporation (www.eink.com) discussed the development of electronic ink on electronic paper, an ingenious hybrid of paper and PC screen. "Imagine a piece of paper," Iuliano said, "filled with hundreds of thousands of microscopic points." These points are tiny bubbles of blue dye filled with bits of titanium dioxide, "the whitest stuff known to man, the stuff that makes paper and golf balls white." When a weak electrical charge passes through these bubbles of dye, the bits of white are either drawn to the top (and keep the surface of this electronic paper white), or are pushed away, creating a blue so dark it looks black. Iuliano said that research on the readability of screens vs. that of paper shows that "paper has survived for millennia for a reason—no surface is more readable."

Electronic ink in paper looks like regular ink on paper, but it can transform in a millisecond to any of millions of pages or documents, and will then remain as it is indefinitely, with no further electricity needed. E-Ink is now working with Philips to create products expected to appear in the marketplace by late next year. These could include reusable newspapers, forms, and e-book readers that look like a book with a single pair of facing e-pages. Michael McCreary, E-Ink's vice president for research and development, says that his company is working with a vendor (whom he wouldn't name) to create ways to use electronic ink and paper for K–12 schools—in student testing and test preparation, for instance.

Print-on-demand (PoD) will please librarians, and everyone else, frustrated because books they want are out of print or "permanently out of stock." They will soon be able to have a single copy, or a few copies, printed and bound in an hour or less. Lightning Source (www.lightningsource.com), an Ingram subsidiary, is the largest PoD service, and offers over 15,000 titles to be printed, bound, and delivered to a consumer or library within 48 hours. But almost all available PoD titles are text-heavy adult titles.

Harold Underdown of ipicturebook.com, a firm that has pioneered selling e-picture books in PDF format, says that printing a few copies of out-of-print picture books with any color accuracy to the illustrations "would be too expensive for consumers or libraries." A paperbound PoD picture book would cost as much as a list-price hardcover edition. But will we see them in a few years, as the technology improves and becomes more accepted? "Oh, definitely," Underdown says.