It's not giving away a trade secret to admit that a favorite habit of the media is to declare an industry or technology dead, in order to rediscover it, a bit later, as in fact alive and kicking. The latest defunct technology due for resurrection is the electronic book. And this time there may be some new twists ahead for magazines and newspapers as well.
New York publishers gathered last week at a Manhattan conference organized by the Open e-Book Forum and sponsored by Microsoft to showcase their Tablet PC. The Tablet PC is their new computer, sans keyboard, that is shaped more like an 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper notepad than the traditional laptop--and hence a more natural electronic platform for books and magazines.
I tend to be cautious about Microsoft-dominated conferences that portend new media breakthroughs. My first such experience was back in 1986, when Bill Gates invited a bunch of publishers to Seattle to convince us that CD-ROMs were "the new papyrus," primed to revolutionize our business, and we believed him. Unfortunately, over the next decade, for media companies CD-ROMs primarily turned out to be a way to lose many millions of dollars.
At the Manhattan conference last week there were more than a few survivors of the mid-Nineties CD-ROM disaster, and a certain caution prevailed as we heard Microsoft representatives extol another publishing opportunity. But by the end of the day--although the Tablet PC itself remains an unproven platform--it was hard not to feel that the electronic publishing industry itself was beginning to show some legs.
Major publishers like AOL Time Warner, Random House and McGraw-Hill all reported that their electronic editions--across a polyglot set of devices from PDAs to laptops to Gemstar's dedicated e-Book--were showing sales growth in double digit percentages. HarperCollins reported that in its first two weeks the electronic version of Michael Crichton's new blockbuster "Prey" had already sold more copies than any of their previous e-books had ever sold in total.
By now there are more than 40,000 titles available in various e-book formats, from over 400 publishers. And in the past few months, several companies have introduced library-lending systems for e-books--for the first time making it possible for a public library to circulate e-books with expiration dates (instead of due dates, as with physical books) so that the same title can be lent over and over.
Beyond that, there was also work with magazines and newspapers that suggested new paths for periodicals beyond the current Web site model. There is, of course, already a non-Web electronic publishing alternative for periodicals, using the Adobe Acrobat format--software that creates an exact replica of each page of the print version on screen. This has attracted some publishers: it is cheaper than building a Web version of the magazine, it presents advertising in the same form as print, it keeps the magazine's exact look, and it counts toward the total official circulation of the publication.
But the Acrobat approach offers little interactivity compared to Web publishing, no opportunity for regular updating, and the files tend to be large for dial-up users. Worst of all, though, it takes designs created for the ultra-high-resolution medium of paper and displays them at the same scale on the lower-resolution computer screen. That requires ungainly software tools to "magnify" portions of the page in order to actually read the words.
Is there a compromise between the total flexibility of the Web and the highly controlled graphics of Acrobat? That was the question posed at the conference by Roger Fidler, director of the Institute for CyberInformation at Kent State University. Fidler is a legend in new media: back in 1981, he was asked by Knight-Ridder to speculate about what newspapers might look like in the 21st century. Fidler was already working on videotext--the text-on-television system that was the precursor for online services like Prodigy and AOL. He had also just seen one of the first working LCD screens, not much more than two inches square, capable only of low-resolution black and white images.
In his mind Fidler created a "news tablet" based on this then-primitive technology: it would be a lightweight, high-resolution 8 1/2 x 11 inch tablet. This, he decided, would be the platform for the newspaper of the future and although it was technically impossible at the time, that didn't stop Fidler from resolutely pursuing the tablet concept for the next two decades.
Computer hardware--high resolution LCDs, fast Internet access, the Tablet PC--is finally catching up with Fidler's vision. Now, along with the Los Angeles Times, he's working on software to match: a modified form of Adobe Acrobat in which the newspaper is reformatted to a layout and organization tailored for the electronic screen, rather than paper.
Microsoft is working on a similar publishing technology, specifically for the Tablet PC; several magazines, including the New Yorker and Forbes, are experimenting with that approach. In both cases, most of the content of the publication is "local"--stored on the user's reading device--rather than flowing in off the Web. This means that publishers can use their characteristic fonts, for example, and fill the entire screen with content, rather than being hemmed in by the browser.
If implemented with live Internet updates, solutions like the "Kent format" or the Microsoft approach may finally create a balance between graphically sophisticated content optimized for reading and the interactivity we expect from the Web. One thing is certain: by the end of last week's conference, I had the same sense I did in 1986, when Bill Gates demonstrated "the new papyrus." The earth is shifting beneath the publishing world and ultimately that process will change the way we deliver our words as fundamentally as did Gutenberg. If we keep trying long enough, sooner or later we'll get it right.