11/23/99

First up is iUniverse, a new publishing venture that Barnes & Noble has backed with money and promotions. Barnes & Noble is obviously a business with an eye on the future, because they also promote eBooks.

iUniverse is important for a number of reasons. First, it will reprint out-of-print titles with its printing on demand system. Essentially, iUniverse is promoting a concept that means that books don't have to go out of print. Second, iUniverse is offering a bargain priced vanity press. Anybody with $99 can get their work published.

Internet sites like ABEBooks and BiblioFind have made it easier than ever to track down out-of-print books. Now iUniverse has come up with an even better plan that pays writers royalties to boot! And as a by-product of reprinting the book in a physical edition, they will offer the reprint in an electronic form too. That's two dead birds with one stone.

Yet, the same stone got a third bird too. iUniverse publishing on demand system also allows publishing new books for $99. I think this will have an impact similar to songs distributed at MP3.Com. iUniverse isn't offering free publishing like musical performers get at MP3 sites, but the would-be writers are getting a tremendous bargain for their money. With five twenty dollar bills in hand, any writer can have their book published in both paper and eBook format. iUniverse puts that book into the standard distribution channels and pays the writer a royalty on each sale. Not bad.

I think eBooks will follow the path of MP3 music and start a revolution. MP3 players are really catching on, and the one that has caught my eye is Personal Jukebox that incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive and can hold 1200 MP3 songs. Rocket eBook Reader with 32MB of memory is supposed to hold about 100 books. So 300 books per 100MB, times 10, equals 3000 per GB, times about 5, equals 15,000 books.

Now that's no Library of Congress in the palm of your hand, but it's more books than I could read in the rest of my life. IBM is selling a similar size drive with five times the storage that theoretically could hold 75,000 books or 6,000 songs. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? That's so much room why not put books and songs together on one device? I could have one little gadget that has everything I've read, plus all the songs I love to listen to in one handy box. The implications are tremendous!

What does it mean to an individual to walk around with instant access to everything they have written, read or heard in their lifetime? It's like having an auxiliary brain! What if you could talk to it and it could talk to you? I think technology is close to building such a gizmo, but are we ready for the impact in our lives and on the economy?

Ebook readers haven't caught on yet like MP3 players. Flip through the advertising flyers of your Sunday paper and you will find MP3 players for sale everywhere. At parties I even hear nongeeks talking about their MP3 collections. Ebooks will take off soon. When they do, it will be an obvious development to see ebook readers and MP3 players combined into one device. And you don't need to wear a pocket protector to predict that such a device will also combine the features of a PalmPilot. Having the larger ebook screen, with more computer power will allow users to easily manage their MP3s and datebooks.

In other news, Rocket eBook has launched a new Pro version, with twice the memory and more additional features. No word on Microsoft ClearText though. However, Softbook and NuvoMedia have announced a joint agreement on the Open Ebook File Format, implying that eventually you will buy ebook files like darwinia.oeb that will load on any eBook reader. Hopefully, OEB will become as famous as MP3.

On a strange note about how small our world is, while visiting Rocket Library I ran across an old friend I haven't heard from in six years. I was just cruising the new uploads and came across the name Jorge Nelson. Damn, I thought, how many Jorge Nelsons are there in the world? So I clicked on the SOAR filename and found a picture of the old Jorge I knew, who it turns out is living down in Anaco, Venezuela. I zapped him an email, and he wrote me back about his homepage. Seems he is a superintendent of a school and wants all the students to use ebooks. So ebooks are even making an impact down in the jungles of South America.

When I first started reading about eBooks the general consensus was it was a dumb idea. I even thought that. Now I think within a year or two, we're going to be holding little slate reading devices like the characters on Star Trek. Just look at SciFan's Overview of Ebooks or read EbookNet.Com to see how fast this newborn industry is growing.