Editor's Notebook - E-book Alert

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.