E-Books Target Pricey Print Books

Softbook Press and NuvoMedia aim to lure you away from paper.

Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld Electric

At DemoMobile 99 in San Diego on Monday, SoftBook Press announced a package of products and services that will allow access to as many as 50,000 pages of information on a single 8.5-by-11-by-1-inch, 2.9-pound SoftBook Reader tablet.

And NuvoMedia is announcing this week two new features for its 5-by-7.5-by-1.5-inch, 22-ounce Rocket eBook.

The SoftBook tablet has been shipping since September 1998 with some consumer content available--Bill Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought, for example--and the company will be offering more corporate solutions with four products shipping this week.

Corporate developers can use SoftBook's Publishing Toolkit to prepare proprietary documents for download and display onto e-book readers. Included in the package are utilities that automatically convert HTML documents for use with the Reader.

SoftBook Express is a hyperlink technology that will appear as an icon on an intranet site and will be used for downloading Web content to the Reader. SoftBook Network Services will authenticate and encrypt documentation when a user downloads content.

Content for e-books comes from a variety of sources, such as company training manuals, maintenance information, and database updates, but it also can be used for professional information and recreational reading.

The text is in black and gray-scale, and is highly readable on a white background.

Search Me

One analyst said he believes e-books have a defined role in vertical markets.

"E-books have a place where there are lots of publications that need to be referenced. [Searching] works a lot better electronically than it does on paper," said Gerry Purdy, president of Mobile Insights.

The benefits of distributing large manuals by means of e-books can be measured in the reduced paper costs of creating, copying, and disposing of thousands of document pages. Also, by moving distribution from costly and slow courier services to instant downloads via the built-in 33.6-kilobits-per-second modem on the $699 SoftBook Reader, companies stand to save considerably.

The SoftBook Reader with 8MB of flash memory and the Publishing Toolkit is priced at $995. The SoftBook Express services for delivery of Web content will be priced on a per-seat basis starting at $100.

NuvoMedia: Download Your Documents

The NuvoMedia solution is somewhat different, and is priced at $499; however, like SoftBook, it will be offering more business solutions.

Content for NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook can be downloaded via a cradle connected to a PC serial port only, and the device holds as many as 4000 pages of content displayed on a smaller screen.

This week NuvoMedia will be introducing RocketWriter and Rocket-Library.com.

RocketWriter will allow users to download their own content created in Microsoft Word or any content saved as an HTML document.

Also being introduced is a community Web site for users of the Rocket eBook to share content.

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