Using the PalmPilot as its launch pad, a small New England publisher is making a bid to become the Penguin Books of the electronic publishing market.
Peanut Press started publishing electronic books to the PalmPilot format just last week, and already it's offering 41 titles at prices between US$5 and $15.
"Peanut e-book is to RocketBook what a paperback is to a hardback," said Mark Reichelt CEO of the Wayland, Massachusetts, company.
The bigger competitors in the nascent e-books market are asking readers to shell out between $300 and $500 for special handheld reading terminals and about $20 for each title.
Nuvomedia's RocketBook, backed by Germany's Bertelsmann publishing house, has developed a portable, full-sized color display terminal, which costs US$499, and SoftBook's device rings in at US$299.
Peanut is taking a different approach.
"Instead of trying to develop new hardware, we're going after the three million PalmPilot users," said Reichelt. "We're not asking people to pay hundreds of dollars for a new device, and we will be adding support for other devices, such as Windows CE and Apple's Newton, shortly."
In addition, 3Com has plans to make the next version of PalmPilot more reader-friendly.
"When we visited 3Com they said that the display was not ideal for reading but that the company was being shamed into providing a better screen in the next version," Reichelt said.
The biggest challenge for Peanut and other e-book manufacturers is convincing publishers that electronic versions of their titles are safe from software pirates.
"We are using very strong encryption so it is easier to go to the bookstore, buy a book, and scan it in than it is to copy our eBooks," said Reichelt.
Peanut eBooks are encrypted with 56-bit DES, and can only be unlocked with a unique password assigned to each book.
Peanut currently features authors such as Ken Hanson, author of The Dead Sea Scrolls, mystery author Clarence Nero, and science fiction writer Robert Silverberg.
