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A Review of New E-Publishing Products From Adobe and Microsoft By Danny O. Snow New technologies may make publishers want to echo Robert Frost's classic lament, that a traveller can follow only one fork in the road at a time. Major new products specifically designed for delivery of online content have set the publishing industry abuzz, amid a flurry of controversy over earlier efforts to bring e-books more squarely into mainstream markets. Software industry leaders now offer e-publishers new strategies for the presentation of online content to readers -- but both systems must face the challenge of protecting intellectual property for the author and publisher. WebBuy and PDF

A publisher turned to an online e-book purchase and delivery service to convert a traditionally printed bestseller into an electronic product by Tatyana Sinioukov It's no secret that more and more publishers turn to the Internet to market their printed books. Few take it to another level by offering a book in a different shape and form--electronically. In the case of Washington, DC-based Regnery Publishing, a division of Eagle Publishing, two of its bestsellers, The Millennium Bug by Michael S. Hyatt, a #7 bestseller in 1998 on the New York Times business list, and The Year of the Rat by Edward Timperlake and William

by Rose Blessing How many e-book content distributors should a publisher partner with? Which books should be made into e-books? How should the process be managed? What are the pitfalls? If it's your job to figure that out at your company, take a tip from Kate Tentler, a publisher at Simon & Schuster Online in New York City who has been arranging to make Simon & Schuster books available digitally for about a year. Tentler's approach is to keep things simple, with an eye to the long term. For example: how are online distributors chosen? Simple: They are evaluated one by one. Among the

by Rose Blessing While Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com are seen as major competitors in the online bookselling arena, they diverge sharply when it comes to selling electronic books. While Amazon.com sells no electronic books, Barnes & Noble.com has seized several opportunities to sell e-books on line through its Web site, www.bn.com. --More than 2,300 e-book titles are available for NuvoMedia's Rocket E-book, which uses a proprietary software based on the OEB format. --In January, the company began posting Glassbook Reader software on its Web site for free download with a collection of free e-books for it. Glassbook Reader software can be run on Pentium-class Windows

ONLINE BOOKSELLERS Since it was impossible to include everyone, we offer this listing below as a mere snapshot of the emerging business models in this exploding field. Browse this list to get an idea of how today's book publishers sell their wares--both printed and electronic--online. By spending just a few minutes on the Internet yourself, you will probably find even more companies . . . WHO: www.agoodbook.com, "Your basic $4.95 download" WHAT THEY SELL: e-books downloadable for $4.95; the site has an association with www.amazon.com WHAT FORMAT: PDF, HTML. WHO: www.amazon.com, "Earth's biggest selection" WHAT THEY SELL: printed books, CDs, gifts, DVD and video,

Fire alarms screamed and lights flashed just as Dick Brass, vice president of technology development at Microsoft's research division, began to speak about the future of e-books at a recent conference. The conference, Electronic Book '99, was hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD. It attracted major e-book makers, display makers, disk drive producers, college librarians, conversion service providers, printers, book and journal publishers and representatives for the blind and vision-impaired. As loud as they were, the shrieking alarms, which were not a special effect arranged by Brass but an NIST building alert (for which we

by Rose Blessing "E-books are more than hype right now. E-books are definitely here," asserted Victor McCrary, group leader, Information Storage and Integrated Systems Group, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). McCrary was speaking at the Electronic Book 1999 conference held in Gaithersburg, MD, in September, the second such conference sponsored by NIST; he chaired the event. McCrary and many other speakers--including the reading-device makers--agreed that improved displays, lowered device weights and decreased power requirements are desired. "A lot of work still needs to be done in terms of (creating) a thriving electronic book industry," added McCrary. He credited SoftBook Press and NuvoMedia

A three-day turnaround of The Starr Report is just one example of the fast footwork constantly required of this rapidly growing, independently owned West Coast book publisher by Rose Blessing When a national drama unfolds and is reported by an author who may be unpopular but writes in succinct English prose and provides the copy for free on the Internet, what's a publisher to do? When this happened last year, a few publishers jumped quickly, capturing the text and publishing printed versions as books. Among that group was Rocklin, CA-based Prima Publishing. The "official report of the independent counsel's investigation of the President," written