Franklin Electronic Publishers, of Mt. Holly, NJ, recently announced the introduction of the Digital Book System. At the heart of this new product line is a five-ounce device, the size of an index card, which holds two interchangeable rom cards, or “books.”

Electronic books have received a lot of interest this year, especially after The Voyager Company began publishing its Expanded Books series for the Apple PowerBooks, and again after Apple made its Newton Personal Digital Assistant announcement. But Franklin has been publishing consumer electronic books for more than six years.

The DBS-1 (an unfortunate set of initials for anyone in the direct broadcast satellite business) marks a departure for the company as the first multi-function device. With two slots for integrated circuit (ic) rom cards, the DBS-1 can access and cross reference the databases from both cards. Or, the user can keep an organizer in one slot and a book in the other. It will be on the market by November 1, bundled with three books, for less than $300.

The Digital Book System has a qwerty keyboard and an LCD display that is 40×160 pixels and can display five lines of text and simple graphics (see photo). Each IC ROM card has a capacity of 10 MB of data; Franklin has been able to compress the entire Bible down to 1 mb. Franklin engineers developed the IC ROM card to meet the size and weight constraints of a machine that fits inside a shirt pocket.

The company looked very seriously at many of the computer industry-standard tools and rejected them all in favor of hardware and software that would be optimal for database retrieval, a small footprint and long battery life. “No DOC, no Intel Inside, no PCMCIA (the industry’s IC ROM standard). All those things are fine, I just don’t think they’re optimal for where we want to be,” says Morton E. David, chairman and CEO of Franklin. He anticipates that the DBS-1 will be able to operate for 100 hours on four lithium batteries — about 8–9 months of normal use.

The first titles available will be reference works, especially medical resources like The Manual of Adverse Drug Interactions, or Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, which will mark the first releases in Franklin’s medical professional library. But David expects the company to develop both mass-market titles and custom databases. In the latter scenario, Franklin would work with commercial, industrial and financial companies to put their individual databases onto the IC ROM cards. “Where else can you, for less than $200, have a custom database machine for all your brokers, salesmen or repairmen?” asks David.

Next year, the company will also release a docking station that will allow the Digital Book System to link to a fax machine, modem or PC network. While it does not anticipate that the vast majority of its customers are interested in such functionality, the machine is fully capable. Even a cellular modem is in the works.

Franklin’s bread and butter has been inexpensive, credit-card-size reference works, including spelling checkers, language translators, crossword puzzle solvers, encyclopedias and the Big League Baseball Encyclopedia. Its products sell for between $39 and $500, depending upon the complexity of the device. Most of them are sold through channels such as KMart. The top-price devices are specially designed with speech synthesis, extra large display and raised keys for people with special needs. The company has sold more than 5 million electronic books, and its products are used in more than 9,000 schools. (Franklin and Simon & Schuster Education Group recently entered into an agreement to bundle electronic reference books with certain textbooks for primary school distribution.)

With all the anticipation surrounding Apple’s Newton products, Franklin has very quietly developed a digital assistant that may be less sophisticated, but that has many of the functions and features of Apple’s more expensive cousin. “We exist in the consumer marketplace… . This will be the product that people really want, not a product the computer industry thinks people want,” says David.

This probably comes as sweet music to Franklin which, in its previous incarnation, was a manufacturer of Apple IIg clones, until it was sued and nearly bankrupted by Apple. It has since spent many years rebuilding and re-inventing itself into a company with a profitable niche in electronic publishing.

David Baron