Ian Hugo kicks off a tour of the world's research labs by
evaluating the likelihood of success for e-book technology
Lab Reports
This is the first in a series of reports that Business &
Technology will be publishing on technologies being developed
in the world's IT laboratories that could appear commercially in
the next two to five years.
The reason for the medium-term focus is simple. If you'd had
five years' warning of the impact of e-business, wouldn't you have
factored it into your five-year plans? The sudden emergence of
e-business demonstrates, as never before, that 'business as usual'
is as out-of-date as the dinosaur. Businesses in the future will be
faced with increasing numbers of discontinuities and the source of
many of them is already being determined in the world's IT
laboratories.
Our Lab Reports are designed to open a window on what research
labs are working on and which projects may have commercial
implications in the near future. Each will discuss any remaining
obstacles to be overcome in realising a particular technology and
its potential market impact.
The projects discussed may not individually change the world but
they will have the potential to change the way your business
functions or the nature of your industry.
In The Pipeline
Microsoft operates four research laboratories, in Beijing, San
Francisco, Redmond and Cambridge, England. The research work at
Cambridge is broadly split into seven categories: hardware systems,
information retrieval and analysis, integrated systems, machine
learning and perception, networking, programming principles and
tools, and security.
Current projects include:
- Wearable (pen or watch) computers, including the sensing of
body movements, hand-size and orientation
(left/right-handed)
- New models for the efficient use of large databases and
content-based image retrieval
- The more efficient management of network traffic via admission
control, quality of service based scheduling algorithms and
distributed load balancing
Much of this research is necessarily long-term in approach and
uncertain in its specific commercial application. However, much may
be incorporated in commercially available products in the next five
years. In this article, we focus on e-books, an integrated systems
project currently under way in both Cambridge and the US labs.
Are you one of those people who hates reading large amounts of
text onscreen? Do you routinely print documents off so you can read
them at your leisure on the train, in bed or wherever you choose?
If so, you could soon be in for a change of heart or habit - as
could the whole book publishing and distribution industry.
What will bring about this change is the advent of e-books. In
fact, electronic books are already here in their initial form and
early versions have been winning plaudits. The base technology is
proven and can be enhanced fairly easily. And if acceptance of the
technology runs at even a fraction of the levels experienced with
mobile phones, it could significantly alter how most people work
and relax, and revolutionise the book industry.
And the potential consequences don't stop there. The delivery
platform for e-books is a PocketPC. Smaller than the typical
desktop machine, the PocketPC nevertheless holds similar if less
extensive software facilities. The implications for laptops are
grave. Despite their widespread acceptance in recent years, laptops
can be an uncomfortable compromise between physically larger
desktop systems and something that is easily portable and provides
similar facilities.
For many users and applications, the PocketPC could prove a
better compromise between facilities and portability than the
laptop. Laptop sales would clearly suffer, and there might even be
fewer desktops in those organisations with lots of staff out on the
road or where hotdesking is practised.
First and foremost, nobody should underestimate the impact of
e-books on publishing. Book publishing is a significant industry in
itself, with people working not only on the selection and
refinement of texts but their replication, distribution and sales.
Perhaps more importantly, ever since Gutenberg and Caxton, media
industries have had a huge effect on everybody's life. Radio and
television both emphasised this effect, but also changed it.
E-books could, without doubt, instigate the kind of change wrought
by the invention of the gramophone and the camera - but with one
big difference: they will do it in five years rather than 150.
Technology Analysis
Like their name suggests, e-books are books in electronic form.
But to analyse their potential effectively, it makes sense to
separate the constituent technologies from each other. First, the
delivery mechanism is a PocketPC, a Microsoft trademark. The
relevant software on the PocketPC, generically called e-book
software, is primarily ClearType, although there's rather more to
it than that. Then there's the e-book itself, produced
electronically in a form appropriate to the e-book software.
Currently, PocketPCs are made by Casio, Compaq, HP and Symbol,
but anyone making palmtops could make them in liaison with
Microsoft. They usually weigh about the same as the average
paperback book (around 9oz or less), have a screen the size of a
business card (3 by 2.5 inches) with a resolution of 320 by 240
pixels, and a battery life for six to eight hours' continuous
use.
The hardware itself is not wildly different from the average
palmtop. It's the additional audio-visual functionality and
familiarity of Microsoft software that may justify prices double
those for palmtops, currently in the $400-$900 range. For more
detail on the hardware, visit pocketpc.com.
The software is held in ROM and consists essentially of Windows
CE, all the comms software you're likely to need, and Windows Media
Player, Microsoft Reader and handwriting recognition software for
use with a stylus. In addition, there are versions of Microsoft
Office, including Outlook, adapted for PocketPCs but which can
exchange files and messages with desktop PCs via ActiveSync
software.
What we're concerned with here is Microsoft Reader, the core of
which is the ClearType software. ClearType uses colour monitors'
association of three colours for each pixel to refine the crispness
of the image of black type on a white background. The success of
this, which seems now to be established, is the first CSF [WHAT?]
for e-books. Another CSF has been to accept that the printed book
has stood the test of time and to copy it meticulously. You turn
pages rather than scroll, and footnotes and illustrations are
catered for. In essence, what is being created is a book with all
the attributes of the average paperback except that the pages are
smaller. But what you also have at the same time on the same device
is a subset of what you have on your desktop PC, including the
ability to play music and watch video clips.
The book market, like the video market, is software-driven. So
another CSF will be the rate at which books can be e-book-enabled.
Key to this are the standards currently being formulated and the
pace at which publishers take up the technology.
Currently, PocketPCs come with some 30 classics (Alice in
Wonderland, Great Expectation, Tom Sawyer, etc)
pre-loaded, with a further 15 Star Trek titles freely
downloadable via a deal with Simon & Schuster and Barnes Noble.
So some parts of the book publishing industry are alive to the
challenge. The principal means available and foreseen for adding
books to a library are Internet downloads or CompactFlash
cards.
Market Analysis
Drama looks guaranteed given that the industry most affected,
book publishing, is one of the most hide-bound and traditional of
all. Accordingly it is the least well equipped to respond
effectively, and could easily end up with its head in a basket
under a revolutionary guillotine that is already falling.
Consider Amazon.com, a company that has already shaken up
book-selling. Suppose it can dispense with all physical aspects of
its logistics system and become an all-electronic enterprise, as
can all other booksellers. Imagine the impact on such high-street
stalwarts as WH Smiths if book distribution becomes electronic.
What will be the impact on the printing industry if physical books
largely disappear? What if your local library can supply unlimited
copies of most of the books in the world? And anyone who ever
wanted to write a novel can publish it more easily and cheaply,
although the problems of making a living from writing may not
change greatly.
The ramifications are clearly enormous. Equally clearly, the
changes won't all happen overnight. The effects are likely to be
felt within the next five years and even more dramatically in the
succeeding five, following the usual S-shaped learning curve. So
it's worth thinking a bit more precisely about what may change and
when. The most obvious early casualties could be business books.
Business people are the ones most likely to have a PocketPC and
find using the technology natural. You get any pending business out
of the way by looking at a spreadsheet and writing some memos, and
then you read that book you've been intending to - all on the same
device.
Students could be similarly seduced by the ability to append
notes to texts as they read them and recall them as needed, by
subject across their reading list, for revision. So bye-bye
traditional student book market. The mass, pulp paperback market is
equally susceptible. You just load your book along with the
train/plane timetables and diary on the same device. When
travelling, many people may prefer having their essential work
documents, favourite music and a small library of paperbacks in
their pocket rather than their case.
What will stay, for the foreseeable future, is the market for
printed books as valued objects in themselves: the coffee-table
book. You can add collectors who line the walls of their homes with
first editions. In the future, though, first electronic editions
may be all there is and they won't have the same cachet.
Some of these changes and the rate of change can be gauged
through the consequences of MP3 technology for the music industry.
And one corollary is that e-books, together with advances in PC
printing technology, mean that the often separate book, music and
picture publishing industries are set on a collision course. If the
book publishing industry tries to defend itself, as it
traditionally has, by pleas for the protection of established
practices, it will fail and be supplanted.
Timescales
It's taken centuries to get from Gutenberg to where we are now.
It could take 15 years for the changes induced by e-books to bite
globally but, locally and in specific market sectors, significant
change is likely within five years.
Microsoft's own forecasts suggest that by 2003 we'll see e-book
devices for under $100 and with a battery life of 24 hours. By
then, any parts of the traditional book market that haven't reacted
to the challenge will be obsolescent, and within a further five
years dead. Drag in embracing this technology will come from
technophobes and the older population, but this drag is already
being undermined on other fronts: home PCs and Internet use,
digital television, mobile phones and WAP devices.
Verdict
E-books are based largely on proven technology that is easily
capable of enhancement. There are therefore no technological
hurdles to be overcome. Acceptance of the technology seems
similarly inevitable, with only the pace of acceptance debatable.
*B&T*'s verdict must be that e-books will succeed.
The rate of acceptance of e-books in the market is likely to
follow the same S-curve as for all new technologies. Book
publishers who fail to plan for the upward 'knee' in that curve or
fail to plot it accurately before its arrival will cease to exist.
And this technology will, at some point in the next 10 years and
possibly sooner, revolutionise the traditional book publishing and
distribution market.
Further Information