Dont Print, Publish It!

Stephen King is the horror story novelist who, together with his publisher Simon and Shuster, recently made his novel "Riding the Bullet" available in electronic format for only US$2.50. He has since made another book "The Plant" able to be downloaded in instalments (minus the publisher) at his website http://www.stephenking.com/ . So does this herald the death of books, newspapers and magazines in paper form? Well not quite but....

The reality of publishing is that it is incredibly more efficient to send bits and bytes via a communications line than physically printing information and distributing it via normal methods. But most people would say "Id far rather read a physical book or newspaper than one of those electronic versions."

Electronic paper aims to display electronic text on thin, flexible sheets that look and feel like paper. The sheets are filled with millions of microscopic capsules that show either dark or light images in response to electrical charges. The latest technology touted by iridigm (www.iridigm.com) looks to micro-machine structures on glass that mimics the interference patterns seen on butterfly wings. Other companies such as E-Ink, MITs Media Lab, Xerox and many others are pushing hard to make electronic or digital paper commercially available in two to three years time.

Presently most PC screens have resolutions of 70-80 pixels per inch(ppi) and are therefore harder to read than good quality print on paper which equates to around 300ppi. But what about a future where:

-- The electronic reading resolution was better than the printed type.

-- Your electronic reader was actually a piece of almost paper-thin material that you could roll or fold up and take anywhere.

-- You could store 50 normal size books on this electronic reader downloadable from the Internet at a fraction of todays paperback prices.

-- Your electronic reader could be configured to receive and store the overnight news, ready for you when you wake in the morning, or read the book or news aloud.

-- Your reader relied on a wireless Internet connection so that it could receive information from any location.

Would you still read off paper?

Another key point about digital text is that it offers ways to present information that go way beyond what paper can accomplish. TheTech museum in San Jose, California has a wonderful section entitled the Future of Reading and something that caught my eye was the Speeder Reader This is an experiment in RSVP reading (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) where words are presented one at a time on a screen. Using RSVP some people can read 2000 words per minute, compared with most peoples reading rate that averages about 300 words per minute. Check this and the other experiments out at http://www.thetech.org/exhibits_events/traveling/center_edge/xerox/xfr-red/xfr_guide.html .

The electronic books and readers available now include the Rocket eBook Pro at http://www.rocketebook.com/enter.html and the SoftBook Reader at http://www.softbook.com/ . However these are merely early examples of the way that we will receive information in the future.

If you are involved in any industry that publishes information or news then it is obvious that some real heavy strategic thinking is required.

For all other businesses this ongoing publishing revolution will affect you in many ways that you havent thought of yet.

About the Author

Alex Garden is director of NetInsites, a leader in Internet strategy and Web design for small to medium size companies.

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