Wired

When nurses need to find out the latest drug information—whether to verify a dose, check for possible interactions with other medications or side effects—many of them turn to the "Nursing Drug Handbook." Making sure this critical information is accurate and clearly presented is the task of nursing and medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), a unit of Wolters Kluwer Health, which produces the annual "Nursing Drug Handbook" as well as 4,000 other titles. To streamline the process of publishing the 1,400-page "Nursing2006 Drug Handbook," LWW decided to switch from producing PDF pages using QuarkXPress to an XML-based publishing program. By doing so, LWW

by Tatyana Sinioukov The next big idea -- the electronic book--has materialized in this fall's releases of SoftBook and Rocket eBook by the two Silicon Valley companies, SoftBook Press, Menlo Park, CA, and NuvoMedia, Palo Alto, CA. BookTech asked some publishers their opinion about a possible onslaught of e-book products. Even those who don't believe it will lead to a sudden death of the paper book want to know how the e-book will read, how it will feel when held, how, if at all, it will affect the book-publishing and book-selling businesses and, ultimately, consumers' perception of a book. Is a book a