E-Book Currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2001), "E-Book Currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918cae.001

E-Book Currents

Howard Falk

How E-books Grow

A misconception about the growth of e-books has led many observers to look for signs of a broad replacement of print books by e-books. What they find is that, as yet, there has been no such acceptance. Often, comments about the virtues of print books in general, and comparisons with the shortcomings of e-books in general have led to predictions that dominance by e-books will take a very long time, and may never take place.

What is now becoming clear is that e-book growth will not initially take place in the broad book marketplace. Instead, that growth is moving into those niche specialized markets where the characteristics of e-books give them a clear edge over paper books. Readers are usually well aware of their needs. As they discover that e-books provide a superior way to meet those needs in niche areas, e-books will be able to dominate in those specialized niches.

By infiltrating the niche edges of the book marketplace e-books will win growing numbers of readers. When these readers find they want to view other books as well, e-books may be able to move into a position to contend for a bigger share of the broad book marketplace.

Niche: Textbooks and Technical Books

E-textbooks are a major niche area where e-books have clear advantages over paper books. For example, unlike paper books on library shelves, e-books can be accessed online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. E-textbooks editions can be rapidly updated as needed. Students equipped with computers can copy text from e-books and paste text and citations into their own documents.

Recent developments in e-textbooks include trial offerings of netLibrary (www.netlibrary.com) online e-book collections to students and faculty at Jackson State (Mississippi) University Libraries, where over 6,800 users can download e-books to their laptops, copy and print text pages. These e-books are available for specific checkout periods and are automatically checked back into the library collection when the checkout period expires. A total of 13 other institutions began offering their faculty and students a trial collection of 618 netLibrary e-books. The institutions include the Dewey Library at MIT, the Fuqua School of Business Library at Duke University, Loyola University Chicago, McGill University Libraries, National American University, New York University Division of Libraries, Stanford Business School, Thunderbird American Graduate School, University of Chicago, University of Iowa Pomerantz Business Library, and University of Rochester.

The MetaText division of netLibrary (www.metatext.com) is developing and managing e-book versions of college textbooks for Jones and Bartlett, a publisher of nursing, life sciences, and computer science textbooks. The e-textbooks will be available to instructors and students for the fall 2001 semester. MetaText also announced an agreement with Blackboard, Inc, a provider of e-learning software, to allow instructors to browse a list of MetaText e-textbook editions during their course setup procedures. E-textbooks that are selected in this way will be available to students and instructors starting in the fall 2001 semester. Blackboard users will also have access to netLibrary e-book collections owned by their educational institutions.

The Questia site ( www.questia.com), which went online in January 2001, now offers about 50,000 e-book titles in the humanities and social sciences and plans to expand to about 250,000 titles by 2003. Users can search the collection by keyword at no charge, but a subscription fee (48 hours for $14.95, $19.95 a month or $149.95 a year) is required to read the text of the titles. An unlimited number of users can read a title simultaneously. Every time a page is viewed, the publisher of the title is compensated. This incremental compensation is drawing publishers to Questia, which now has contracts with over 170 publishers including Harvard University Press, Stanford University Press, Columbia University Press, University of Chicago Press, W.W. Norton and Company, Pearson PLC, Greenwood Publishing Group, Perseus Books Group, Brookings Institute, RAND Corp., Facts on File, Harry N. Abrams, Rizzoli USA, Folger Shakespeare Library, Four Walls Eight Windows, Moscow News Press Service, New Directions, Off Our Backs and Regnery Publishing.

Ebrary ( www.ebrary.com) is a commercial site designed to sell access to its online collection of e-document, one page at a time. Currently Ebrary has 130,000 volumes in its database and expects to have 600,000 by the time it opens to the public (date not yet specified). Searching is to be free, and users will be allowed to freely read retrieved pages. Copying or printing a page will cost 25 cents. Users will sign up for a debit account from which page payments can be drawn. It is these payments, and the hope that users will want to buy their paper books that are attracting the attention of paper book publishers. In January, Ebrary announced that Amsterdam University Press will make all its titles available through ebrary.com. English books, including high level academic research works as well as more popular titles, will be the first priority. Subject areas in which AUP has particular strength include art history, political science, economics, history, cultural studies, women's studies and sociology. Previously a content agreement with Taylor & Francis, the international academic publisher had been announced.

Niche: Travel Books

By the time printed travel books reach retail bookshelves, the information they contain is often out of date. E-books, which can be easily and rapidly updated do not suffer from such time limitations. To take advantage of this e-book edge, Hadami.com has begun offering the book "Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame" at its www.hadami.com Web site. Users can buy individual chapters of this e-book. Hadami offers a selection of travel books at prices substantially below those of bookstores and newsstands.

Niche: Periodicals and Catalogs

With rapidly changing content that must be quickly distributed, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, catalogs, and newsletters are publications that can take advantage of the rapid updating and online distribution that e-books offer. The fact that the stake of such publications in development of e-book technology is a vital one was signaled by the formation of the Electronic Book Newsstand Association (EBNA), an organization with the aim of raising consumer awareness of e-reader devices as a means of distributing their publications. The first meeting of EBNA was held in February 2001. Founding members are from organizations such as Barnes & Noble, The Reader's Digest, American Journalism Review, University of Florida, Kent State University, Editor & Publisher, Christian Science Monitor, and Thomson Multimedia.

The New Yorker magazine plans to offer its first three e-books, collections of business, medicine and fiction material previously published in the magazine, through Barnes & Noble. Writers to be featured include Matt Kalm, Nicholas Lemann, and Ken Auletta. The e-books will be offered in Microsoft Reader format and will sell for $7.95 each. They are aimed at the audience of professional and educational users of e-books.

Niche: Audio and Braille Books

Devices used to display e-books, such as desktop computers, portable and handheld computers, and e-book portable readers are capable of playing digital audio files as well as displaying e-book text files. In fact, audio material can be incorporated in e-book files, and text-reading software can be used to convert text files into spoken words. With the TextAloud MP3 software from NextUp ( www.nextup.com) existing e-book text files can be converted into audio books using voice synthesis techniques.

RD Textos, SL, a Spanish e-publishing firm is building a catalog of literary works in Spanish with HTML versions that can be read by visually impaired readers who use screen readers or magnifiers, and literary Braille versions for Braille line users. The books, which can be downloaded from the www.rtextos.com Web site for one to three Euros each, include titles by authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Miguel de Cervantes, Leopoldo Alas, and Julio Herrera y Reissig.

Niche: Interactive Books

Unlike paper books, e-books offer users the ability to access supplementary materials, such as related documents and information sources. It is also possible for readers to interact by selecting alternative narratives within an e-book. Based on Internet communications, other forms of e-book interaction are also possible. For example, the first chapter of "The Motive", a mystery e-book written by Indian actress Tara Deshpande, was posted at the end of January at www.themotive.net in one of the wilder current efforts to explore ways of utilizing e-books. Deshpande invites readers to contribute versions of Chapter 2. She will choose the winner for that chapter and she will then add Chapter 3. A similar process is to be followed for Chapters 4 and 6, while Deshpande will write Chapters 5 and the final chapter, number 7. Winners she chooses can win trips to Goa. Readers can also win prizes by guessing the outcome of the novel.

Niche: Wireless Documents

Display of electronic documents on handheld devices can be a significant asset to mobile professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and salespeople who need to access financial reports, medical or legal references, price lists and similar items. With an eye to extending this type of display to wireless handheld devices, Coola, Inc (www.coola.com) has entered into partnerships with seven providers of document reader software for Palm and other handheld devices. Users visiting Web sites enabled by Coola software can have information from any page on the site converted for viewing on any Palm handheld device that uses reader software, including WordSmith, Quickword, iSilo, Qvadis, RichReader, TealDoc, and TomeRaider from one of the partners.

E-book Syndication

E-books are inexpensive to produce and can be economically delivered to purchasers via e-mail and file downloading, but to sell an e-book it must first be brought to the attention of interested readers. Syndication is a powerful technique for selling books via the Internet. For example, Amazon.com sells its books by syndicating them through thousands of affiliate Web sites, each of which displays a few Amazon book choices appropriate to its audience. Affiliates receive commissions for each Amazon.com book they sell.

On a smaller scale, McGraw-Hill Education has decided to use syndication to sell a selection of its business, computing and technical e-books. The publisher has set up an alliance with DigitalOwl ( www.digitalowl.com), a Web-based company that has syndication agreements with a growing number of business, finance and career Web sites, such as Career.com, CareerNet.com, and EmployMax.com, as well as book Web sites such as ReadGoodStuff.com and AlphaCraze. com. The McGraw-Hill e-books will be sold through these sites, as well as through McGraw-Hill's own Web sites.

Simon & Schuster has a similar arrangement with Digital Goods (www.digitalgoods.com), to syndicate sales of author M.J. Rose's e-book erotic suspense novels at $4.95 each. The e-books will be available from www.simonsays.com, from the Digital Goods Web site, and via hundreds of online retail Web site affiliates. These affiliates are identified using search methods designed to locate sites that may attract an audience suitable for the M.J. Rose e-books. Once such sites are located, Digital Goods targets them and signs them up as affiliates by offering bonuses and other inducements.

Dot Com Casualties

During the past few months, stock market declines have had a severe impact on many Internet-based businesses. Much of the capital that has been used to develop and market Web site businesses came from stock offerings. With the decline in Internet stock prices these sources of capital have largely dried up, and many of these business have failed. Surprisingly, e-book Web sites appear to be largely immune to these financial woes.

One exception is the Bookface (ww1.bookface.com) site. Unable to raise the financing needed to expand its facilities, this site ceased operation at the end of 2000 after building a database of over 2,000 titles. Bookface provided the full text of contemporary books to be read on the Internet at no cost. Users who gave their e-mail addresses and a password could read as many of the books as they liked, but could not copy or download text to their own computers. Even though millions of Bookface pages were being viewed each month, the site ran out of money before it could reach its potential ability to license its book browsing system to publishers and booksellers.

Out of the hundreds of Internet e-book sites, only a handful went out of operation during the past few months: St Martin's Press appears to have abandoned its Books2Read site; the Electronic Bookstore and Reading Edge are no longer available. Two sites that had planned to launch are still not in operation: Tara Publishing (www.tarapublishing.com) remains unavailable, and ALLe-books ( www.allebooks.com), an ambitious site that promised to be a portal for all e-books in all formats, is still "under construction".