After years of anticipation, electronic books have become a reality. In recent months, several of these hand-held computers that store text electronically have gone on sale in the US - and others are due to follow soon.
The long-term impact of this technology is still uncertain. Not everyone is convinced that "ebooks" will prove universally popular. Paper books, say the sceptics, will never be completely replaced. But this assertion is challenged by the technology's champions. "Whenever I hear people say that, I always point out that it's already too late," says Daniel Munyan, chief executive of Everybook, an e-book reader supplier. "Paper encyclopaedias are already gone."
To ensure that the take-up of e-books is not disrupted by a standards war (such as the one that took place over the VHS and Betamax standards for video), a group of interested companies is developing an Open e-Book standard. A draft version is scheduled for publication at the end of May.
The group includes the five e-book reader companies (see panel). Other members are publishers Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Microsoft Press, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster and Time-Warner Books, as well as Franklin Electronic, publishers of 200 electronic reference books, and online bookseller barnesandnoble.com.
In addition to attending in its role as a book publisher, Microsoft is also bringing to the party a new font technology, known as ClearType. By addressing an area smaller than a pixel, a single point in an image, the new technology is claimed to make screen type clearer and easier to read, especially on the liquid crystal displays found on laptop computers.
A second new print technology from software company Adobe, another group member, is Precision Graphics Mark-up Language (PGML). This is a hybrid of Adobe's proprietary Portable Document Format (PDF) and the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) used for page layout on the web.
"Adobe's technology provides a 400 per cent improvement on the current `blockiness' of pixels, while ClearType, at its very best, will never be more than a 300 per cent improvement," says Munyan. He believes a joint effort by Microsoft and Adobe, however, would produce truly readable e-books, comparable to paper, at very low cost.
Everybook decided to use PDF, as 90 per cent of all current publications already exist in that format, rather than HTML, which is used by NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press. "At my price, the quality has to be head-and-shoulders above the competition," says Munyan. He is not, he says, dealing with fiction for the beach.
Munyan believes his e-book reader is competing with paper, not a computer screen. "Paper is perfect," he says. "It's been perfected over a millennium." Munyan is therefore enthusiastic about new cholesteric liquid crystal screens being developed by Kent Display Systems with technology from Kent State University in Ohio.
"They use a form of cholesterol to create an opaque background of any colour, and lay down a foreground in sharp 100 dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution - better than a computer screen's 72 dpi - with no backlight at all," he says. "It's just like paper. If you take it outside, it's absolutely clear in natural light."
A cholesteric screen requires no power to hold a static image. "Once you've turned the page in your e-book, you could pull out the battery," he says. "If you fall asleep reading, when you wake up the next morning, you're on the same page, and you've burned zero battery power."
Not only do the new screens display a clearer image, they are also completely glass-free, and consequently much lighter than glass screens. "They're going to completely revolutionise e-books," enthuses Munyan, who is testing a personal model of Everybook's e-Book reader with cholesteric screens. Everybook sees a large market for e-books in universities: "As a freshman, the student will be able to get an e-book reader loaded with the whole curriculum for the next four years, and then have updates downloaded from the Internet," he says. Although all five current suppliers of e-book readers are American, a similar European device was in existence two and a half years ago. The NewsPAD, manufactured by Acorn, was used in a European Union-funded electronic newspaper trial in conjunction with El Periodico de Catalunya, based in Barcelona, Spain. The project was ahead of its time, beginning in March 1994, when Internet line speeds were too slow to support large downloads. The method chosen for delivery of news content was therefore overnight television broadcast. Time now, perhaps, for the NewsPAD to be dusted off and turned into an Internet-connected e-book reader?