There's a good chance that in less than a year, you won't have to spend three hours convincing yourself that in-flight magazines make interesting reading.
Instead, you'll be able to choose from the thrillers of Grisham and Stephen King, the witty prose of Anne Lamott and Pam Houston, and the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Maya Angelou -- all from a menu on your handheld reading device. You'll also be able to pull up the morning's news from The Wall Street Journal or the Internet.
Electronic books are coming, and Thursday's announcement at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind the establishment of industry-wide voluntary guidelines for formatting and distributing electronic texts -- the "Open eBook standard" -- strengthens a coalition hoping to prevent a standards stand-off like the ones that daunted the introduction of VCRs and 56K modems.
Two products, NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook and the SoftBook, are slated to hit the market as early as next month. (Contrary to a SoftBook-spun report that appeared in Thursday morning's USA Today, the Open eBook standard does not favor SoftBook's product over NuvoMedia's.)
Wired News spoke with NIST keynote speaker Dick Brass, Microsoft's vice president of technology development, about his company's attempt to kick start the e-book industry by championing an industry standard -- and averting a Beta versus VHS format war before the e-book industry gets off the ground.
Wired News: When did you and Microsoft get interested in electronic books?
Dick Brass: Microsoft's most recent interest in e-books dates to my hiring last year. But Microsoft has always been interested in electronic books. Microsoft Bookshelf, which in many ways was the first electronic reference library, came out in 1987. Encarta was developed in the late 1980s, and it's been one of the most successful examples of an electronic book competing against paper. There we have a case where a superior product -- better, faster, easier, and radically cheaper than the paper product -- succeded in taking away the paper market and turning it into an electronic one.
The first time I met Bill Gates in 1981, we talked about electronic books. I had invented the electronic synonym finder, and came to Microsoft to peddle spelling checkers and electronic thesauruses. So Bill has been interested in e-books for almost 20 years.
The important thing, from my point of view, is that we don't repeat a Beta vs. VHS disaster. In the VCR field, consumers delayed their choices. Ultimately, if they wanted to watch movies or tape shows, they had to pick one format or the other. With e-books, if there are 6, 7, 8, 10 incompatible, narrow, non-interoperable, competing standards, the public doesn't have to choose any of them. They can simply go with what's worked for the last 1,300 years: paper books.
In this particular arena, it may not be that we duke it out and the winner survives. If a standards war breaks out, the loser could be everybody. Without standards, we may not have an e-book industry.
WN: What is the current state of the Open eBook standard?
Brass: The standards are based on HTML and XML, which is what many of the e-book pioneers are choosing to use. The standards are designed to be compatible with what the earliest pioneers are already doing, so there won't be a penalty for buying early. The last thing we want is for people to wait six months until the standards are fully implemented. We think they can buy now and safely, and we'll create the final specifications in such a way that the content will be usable on later machines. The standards provide for a file transmission format in which all the titles can be packaged, [as well as] a markup language and a rights certificate so that the titles can be distributed securely.
We could have completed the standard, and announced it as a fait accompli. We didn't want to do that. It's very important that we have input and buy-in from as broad a segment of this emerging industry as possible. We've left the door open for significant changes and additions, so that as the standard emerges over the next several months, we'll have an industry standard that's widely supported.
WN: What companies were involved in the Open eBook initiative?
Brass: NuvoMedia and SoftBook were very important, because these guys are the first to market, and they have considerable experience. We also had input from Glassbook, Everybook, Librius, and Audible -- among the pioneers. We're working with Hitachi and other manufacturers who we can't yet mention, and barnesandnoble.com, along with Bertelsmann, Simon and Schuster, Harper-Collins, Penguin-Putnam, and Time-Warner Books.
WN: What's going to be Microsoft's role in this?
Brass: Because of our long belief in the promise of e-books, as well as the content publishing that we do with Encarta and Bookshelf, we're in an excellent position to work with these firms in a collaborative and genuinely open way to make this standard coalesce. This is a free, open standard -- no one's going to charge for it.
WN: Right, but Microsoft is interested in money. Where's the money?
Brass: We think eventually this will become a very viable business. But right now, we're not focusing on making a quick profit. We're focusing on making e-books successful enough to become an industry. We think there will be plenty of time later to identify all kinds of categories where we can make money.
The publishers think it's going to help them tremendously. It's going to lower their printing costs, make it possible for books never to go out of print, and eliminate returns. It's going to dramatically lower the cost of distributing books. All those things are very good for publishers.
Some people think, in the world of e-books, you're not going to need publishers. But I think the public is always going to want to see some editorial guidance as to what's good to read, and what's not worth reading. I think e-books will enable authors to reach the public much more easily than they have before. Most publishers no longer own printing presses and paper mills. The role that they serve is an editorial and a marketing one, and that role won't change.
WN: When people look into the future of e-books, they can see being able to carry 10 books onto a plane in a device the weight of a single book.
Brass: Not 10. Ten is today. Think 10,000. I'm not being facetious. One of the great benefits that e-books have is the density of storage. Don't think of it as a book in your hand. I think of it as a library in my hand. In the future, you will see e-books with the storage capability of 200,000 books -- which is the same size as a Barnes and Noble superstore. When you put that level of information density into a person's hand, you have an interesting and attractive proposition.
