Can they be sufficiently similar to, and different from, paper books?

One of the biggest selling points for “new media” has been that interactivity creates a new genre for communication that can’t accurately be compared to anything that already exists — the “not a book, not a movie” school of product development.

But in the past few months, the most extraordinary action in the content business has surrounded the most familiar, and in many ways the best-loved, communication medium: the book.

In its “analog” form, so to speak, it is nearly everything that so many wish new media could be: it is portable, intensely personal, interactive. It stimulates the imagination in uncontrollable ways, but it also provides great structure for learning. A book is both art and commerce, form and function, a leopard designed to change its spots.

Take all the wonderful things that books are and add the fact that the most successful computer applications to date were formerly paper-bound metaphors, translated or transferred into the digital domain — i.e., spreadsheets, word processors, databases — and it becomes clear why future thinkers would automatically look at another deeply familiar paper-based metaphor, the book, as the next continent to conquer in the digital world.

THE SENSUAL WORLD OF BOOKS

But can it be done? Will people give up the sensual, physical contact with paper, and all the rituals that surround acquiring, opening and reading a new book? Will they give up their pens for margin-scribbling, their bookmarks, their highlighters, for the keyboard (or the stylus) of the computer screen or a reader device? Does anybody really want to read text off a screen? Are there incentives powerful enough to make them? Are there design tools (and designers clever enough) to create electronic text that people actually want to read?

For the most part, people aren’t wild about the idea. For example, at the ETRE Conference in Opio, France, last year, I led a panel on electronic publishing. Panel attendees to a person scoffed openly at the idea that they might one day want to read any amount of information at all from their computer screens instead of from a piece of paper or a book.

A movement afoot. But despite skepticism, the electronic text movement has been afoot for more than a decade now, with traditional publishers getting their ducks in a row for a move into electronic book publishing as soon as it proves itself economically feasible.

Michael Hart, director of Project Gutenberg in Urbana, IL, says he’s been watching the movement since he started his project in 1971. What Project Gutenberg does is get online in standard ASCII text format books that are in the public domain and immune from copyright protection. There are 24 books in Hart’s archives today, but the goal is to have a 10,000-book library and give away a trillion books by the end of 2001.

Hart says he’s frequently contacted by intrepid publishers who want to take Gutenberg’s ASCII books and turn them into commercial products. After so many years pretending it could never happen, content providers, software vendors and traditional book publishers are beginning to rally around the concept that it may, after all, be possible to transfer the reader’s affections from the printed page to the electronic screen.

Kids have no barriers. Though some adults do have an aversion to reading on-screen, Hart says kids have no such barriers. “You hand a disc to a kid and say it’s a book and they don’t blink an eye,” says Hart. “When I started Project Gutenberg, I thought it was going to be a reference library — that nobody would ever use it until they wanted to look something up. But I knew it was going to be a success when I was talking to the director of Common Knowledge one day and suddenly there was a huge commotion at her end. She thought her kid had fallen off the roof or something.

“Well, it turned out that the kid had been reading our Alice in Wonderland on a computer for the past few days, and the kids from his school had been following him home to read it with him. They hit a funny part and they all fell off their chairs laughing — that’s what the director heard, them falling off their chairs. That was the first time I realized that even I didn’t have the imagination to conceive of what Gutenberg was really going to do.”

And since then, he said, he’s discovered that even adults read books “from end to end” on the screen. “I have notes from hundreds of people who’ve done it,” he says.

Though certainly many other companies are working on the electronic book metaphor, three companies have clearly placed the horse in front of the cart and developed fully dimensional concepts of what they believe the electronic books should be, and why, before leaping into the fray. Those companies are Microsoft, Slate Corp. and the Voyager Company.

In the PC world at least, Microsoft is the acknowledged pioneer in the publishing of CD-ROM-based reference material. Its Bookshelf CD-ROM for DOS computers was released some years ago. Since the release of Windows, the Multimedia Publishing Group developed a version of Bookshelf that includes an encyclopedia with embedded sound, motion video and animation. In addition, the company has some fairly well-developed prototypes of titles it’s creating with Dorling Kindersley as part of the deal it signed with the giant publisher in mid-1991.

Clearly Microsoft has spent at least as much time thinking about the big picture of electronic books and publishing as almost anyone else in the business (don’t forget that it runs its own book publishing operation), and acknowledges there are giant obstacles to effectively bringing printed material to the computer screen. That’s why to date Microsoft has focused on publishing reference books.

The company is likely to introduce titles based on the DK deal during 1992 and is pretty far along with some prototypes, but a great deal of attention is being given to getting the interface right.

“We’re all groping to find ways to help would-be customers figure out what ‘it’ is with this stuff,” says Tom Corddry, director of the Multimedia Publishing Group. “It’s like est where they tell you, ‘Do you get it?’ The question is, ‘What am I supposed to get?’”

Design problems are tradeoffs. The design problems, he says, are centered on the tradeoffs of taking printed material to the screen. “For us there are two big design problems,” he says. “One is reducing the damage that you get when you take a book to a computer. The other is, what can you do on top of that? How can you add value so that readers put up with the technology? We get obsessive about that latter concept in particular. With books, at least, it’s a starting point: we want books with some magic.”

Corddry remembers showing a prototype of an interactive application to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who was unimpressed. “He said, ‘You mean you have to sit here and click like a madman all day to get anywhere?’” Corddry recalls. “It dawns on you after a while — a lot of people have a blind spot that says interactivity is inherently good. The rhythm of it is kind of engaging, but if you end up having to do a lot of interactivity that you didn’t have to do before, it’s going to make you angry.”

But making an electronic book, at least a multimedia reference book, sufficiently different from a paper book almost always means making it more complex to use. Corddry says the other end of the dipole is to make as simple as possible a user experience, a more direct translation from an actual book to the screen, which would mean a less confused neophyte and the squashing of some of the value that’s gained by having the title on a computer in the first place. “From a user standpoint, it becomes easy but not very valuable,” says Corddry.

VOYAGER: WITH EXPANDED BOOKS, FICTION IS THE ‘NEXT FRONTIER’

Microsoft’s thorny interface problems today come from trying to make an electronic book personal enough that you feel as if you’re actually in some kind of communion with the information, but without gratuitous interactivity. To do so, one must corral all the available media types — digital video, audio, graphics, animation and text — into one, interactive, hyperlinked application.

But Voyager Company, the Santa Monica-based electronic publisher, decided to skip all the multimedia stuff and cut right to the chase with fiction. Using HyperCard running on Apple’s new PowerBook notebook computers, Voyager has designed a simple and elegant text interface around the literal metaphor of a book page, allowing the user to commune with it in the same way he or she would a real book.

Power to the reader. Linguist and computer scientist Florian Brody, who with Voyager co-founder Bob Stein has done most of the design work (and has been dubbed technical director) for the Expanded Books project, thinks electronic books are the next step toward delivering more power to the individual reader.

“The most important thing that happened was not Gutenberg,” he says. “It was cutting up the scrolls into pages — changing books from a purely linear experience to direct access by page. Expanded Books are the next step — direct access by word. As we get more power in computers, we’ll have the ability to work with the book, to have more direct connection with the book and the information in it. It makes you a more active reader while preserving the very intimate experience of reading.”

Voyager will debut the Expanded Books at Macworld this month, unveiling Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, complete with dinosaur pictures and sounds and a new and highly complimentary preface by Crichton for the special Expanded Books edition.

Also at Macworld will be the Expanded Books editions of Martin Gardner’s Complete Annotated Alice, with renderings of the lovely original artwork, and, of course, the complete Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. All Expanded Books are expected to be priced (intelligently, I might add) at $19.95.

Hands-free reading. The most marked benefits of the PowerBook/Expanded Books combo are ones you wouldn’t have thought of until you experienced them. For the first time, for example, you have totally hands-free reading. You can drink, eat, knit; if your hands are cold, you can keep them in your pocket until you have to hit the arrow key to turn the page.

The second thing you notice is that if you have a backlit PowerBook, you don’t have to have a light on in the room to read. And not least by any means, there is no glare off the pages, a maddening thing about reading books by electric light at night. These three features alone are sufficient to make an impression on traveling executives who spend a lot of time on airplanes.

Navigation and changing type size, the easy stuff, is too easy to mention. What’s significant about Expanded Books, though, is that what they’ve done doesn’t just replicate but also enhances the experience of reading by using the computer’s power.

Like a book, only better. You can “dog ear” the corners of pages to mark them (without hurting the book, by the way). You can type in the margins. You can mark text with black bars and search for all the pages marked with black bars. You can search for the first occurrence of a word, the previous, the next, the last, all occurrences, and all occurrences in context (this latter is fabulous).

You can’t read the end. You want to know how far you have left to read? Look at the bar at the bottom of the screen. A marker will show you how far you have come. Are you the kind of person who sneaks a glance at the end of the book first? Brody says it’s possible to lock the last chapter of books such as murder mysteries so you can’t read the end unless you’ve read all the previous pages.

Will anyone go out and buy an expensive, backlit PowerBook to read Voyager’s Expanded Books? If they had the money to burn, they might, but it’s not likely. However, if they already have one, it may turn out to be a safer bet than you’d think that they’ll have at least one Expanded Book on the hard disk. Why lug around a paperback and a notebook computer?

Dizzy with excitement. Adding a powerful computer to the printed page is making New York book publishers, and book authors, a little dizzy with excitement. “The response we’re getting is off the map,” says Voyager co-founder Bob Stein. “It’s not that it’s so good, it’s that you don’t expect it to be so good. This looks enough like a book that people can actually read in this environment. To a person around here [at Voyager], we now prefer to read everything on it.”

The Expanded Books interface. When author Michael Creighton saw it for the first time, his comment was, “This is a place in which I want to create my books,” says Stein. “What he was saying was he wanted to write books that would be read in this environment so he could hang stuff off them he couldn’t now. For years I’ve felt that interactive stuff would not come from all the super-branching things that people did, but from linear narratives with layers built into them — to explore not alternative directions, but additional layers.”

Alan Kay wrote a foreword for the Douglas Adams edition, and Stein believes it’s the first time the Apple Fellow has ever endorsed a product. But what gets him really excited is the idea of publishing “double-features,” the kind of mixed-media metaphor you would expect from a company that also publishes the industry’s most respected videodiscs, The Criterion Collection.

Two books, one floppy. First, Stein says, he wants to publish Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “Postman’s book starts out saying that 1984 came and went and nobody was concerned because it didn’t come true,” he says. “They weren’t paying attention, because Huxley’s vision did. A single floppy could carry both those books — and together they make such a strong statement.”

Voyager’s also preparing Expanded editions of Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers and “30 or 40″ other books that don’t have enough contract on them yet to mention. And when the books are launched in January, Voyager will also launch a forum on the CompuServe Information Service called “The Community of Readers,” so people who are reading Voyager’s books can talk about them. “I’m expecting to see a tremendous debate about the form, and I want there to be a forum to track it,” says Stein.

Some time in 1992, Stein says, Voyager will publish the text stack itself, a comprehensive toolkit for people who want to use the Expanded Books shell — for writers who want to write in it, or publishers who want to publish in it. “I love the idea of uniformity being developed, where there’s not 117 different interfaces,” says Stein. “Ours is a good start. I’d love to see two or three publishers buy in and give us the kind of resources we need to keep evolving it.”

SLATE’S PENBOOKS: YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU

There are great similarities in concept and spirit between Slate’s PenBooks and Voyager’s Expanded Books. But instead of publishing electronic fiction, Slate, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based vendor and publisher for pen computer applications, is helping customers presenting referential information with its PenBook development tools, scheduled to be shipped in the second quarter of 1992.

PenBook consists of an authoring system and a Reader based on the PostScript page description language. Like Voyager, what PenBook produces is designed around the metaphor of the book page.

Turn a page by flicking the pen-stylus on the pen computer’s touch-sensitive screen. With gestures only, move back and forth a page at a time, a section at a time, or from the beginning to the end of the book. Find all occurrences of a word or number, or just the next occurrence. Electronically “mark up” the book as well, with a traditional (translated) device such as a highlighter, underlining, bookmarks and “white out.”

Reading and using a PenBook application really does approximate the feeling of reading a “real” book. There is no gratuitous interactivity or pointing or clicking. For the most part, pages are designed not to scroll, so text holds still instead of rolling up and down the computer screen.

And a backlit, non-deskbound pen computer not only provides its own reading light, but allows the reader to view the text at a familiar angle. Mark Moore, PenBook’s interface engineer, is on a mission to make a PenBook as much like reading a real book as possible. “If someone isn’t compelled to read cover to back without printing it out, then I’ve failed,” he says.

As important as the user interface is the ease by which a PenBook can be made. PenBook’s Mac and PC-compatible $695 “Author” component translates, compresses and stores any document that can be printed to a PostScript printer, including text and graphics; it thus creates a “book file” that can be viewed or read on a pen-based computer. Part of the transform process automatically creates an index of every searchable word or number of text in the book. A PenBook Reader, required for PenBook, is $99 and the company is looking at ways to get it bundled with pen hardware.

Right now the perfect PenBook applications are such books as the 600-page manual that all airline attendants are required to carry, as well as technical manuals and customer catalogs.

But it’s not farfetched to imagine companies publishing real PenBooks — i.e., actual fictional reading material — for when pen computers are a market reality. “Initially it’s a fleet product,” says Debby Meredith, vice president of Slate’s development center in San Mateo, CA. “But a secretary can easily make a PenBook. Or executives will be able to pick up a PenBook at the airport to read on the way back. Nothing limits this except the imagination.”

WHERE’S THE BIG WIN?

The first big win that’s necessary to gain any kind of widespread acceptance for the electronic book metaphor is for enough players to ship — be they MPCs (or MPC consumer players), PowerBooks or pen computers — to convince the Random Houses and McGraw Hills of the world to come out of the closet with their vast archives of textual material in hand.

Not surprisingly, since the gestalt of reading a book includes the book itself and not just its contents, this is a shared hardware-software problem for the new media community. In this sense, companies like Apple, which control both, have a clear edge.

When Kaleida (Apple’s and IBM’s new multimedia spinoff) comes around, it will have a similar edge. Once there are sufficient players, it seems that electronic books will have the potential to kick-start a slow-moving “new media” market. If companies other than Microsoft, Slate and Voyager can figure out how to add value to existing paper-based information by digitizing it, it will be a transforming thing.

Voyager’s Brody sees the power as spawning a new generation of “active readers.” Project Gutenberg’s Hart, on the other hand, sees the benefits as running far deeper. Right now, he says, when someone does a research paper, 90 percent of his time is spent doing the research and 10 percent writing the paper. But when the necessary information is in digital form and searchable, he says, the statistic will reverse and we’ll spend vastly more time writing and refining our thoughts, not gathering data.

“When your paper, which now is nine times better, goes into the library, you start to build a library that’s nine times easier to use with nine times better books,” says Hart. “Everything just keeps getting better.”

Denise Caruso