A message from Wade Roush
Editor in chief, eBookWeb.org
Former managing editor, eBookNet.com
Dear Friends of eBookNet,
We're back!
The shutdown of eBookNet.com on April 2 didn't dampen our
enthusiasm about the future of electronic books and electronic
publishing -- indeed, it only clarified the fact that the eBook
community needs an independent home on the Web.
In the eight weeks since the shutdown, Glenn Sanders and I have
been working hard to line up support for such a next-generation
eBook site. And now we're pleased to announce that on July 4, we
will launch eBookWeb (http://www.ebookweb.org), a central source
for news and information on all aspects of electronic publishing
and a community center for eBook enthusiasts and industry
professionals.
We've already published an introductory page at
http://www.ebookweb.org where you can read the latest daily eBook
news briefs, subscribe to our weekly email newsletter, and (as a
special bonus!) read my inside account of eBookNet's demise.
Come July 4, the full site will offer a familiar mix of content,
including the following sections:
o News (eBook Technology, Writing & Publishing, E-Content,
Company Index)
o Opinion (Columns by the Site Editors and other eBook Experts)
o Resources (Hardware & Software Guides, eBook Reviews, FAQs,
eBook Links)
o Community (Message Boards, Events, Member Pages/Profiles, and
more)
We couldn't have returned to our work of growing the eBook
community without the support of our founding sponsors, the
Rolltronics Corporation of Menlo Park, Calif. and The E Book
Company of Vancouver, British Columbia. These companies are the
first contributors to a new non-profit organization called the
Electronic Publishing Resource Center (EPRC), which is dedicated
to exploring and promoting all forms of e-media, including
electronic publishing and other applications of advanced
information displays. EPRC will invite companies throughout the
eBook publishing, hardware, and software industries to become
co-sponsors of eBookWeb.
In the meantime, we're busy constructing and publicizing the
site. That's where you come in! We need your help to:
1) Get the news out about eBookWeb. Please tell everyone you know
to mark their calendars for our July 4 launch.
2) Fill up the site with great content. If you have a news tip, a
press release, or an idea for an article or a regular column,
please write to me, Wade Roush, at wade@ebookweb.org.
3) Make sure we have enough financial support to succeed. If you
or your company are interested in becoming an eBookWeb sponsor
(it's tax deductible!), please contact Glenn Sanders at
4) Make eBookWeb a thriving community. Bookmark our introductory
page, then come back on or after July 4 to become a member of the
site, add your voice to our message boards, check out our
resource library, etc.
Thanks. We've missed all of you these past two months, and we're
looking forward to renewing and expanding the eBookNet community
at our new address. See you online!
Wade Roush
Editor in chief, eBookWeb.org
Former managing editor, eBookNet.com
If you're new to electronic publishing, the best place to start might well have been http://www.eBookNet.com. However, as Wade Roush relates above, the old eBookNet was shut down and that link is dead.
Here are some samples
of what it eBookNet covered.
Successor to Rocket eBook Will Cost About $300, New
York Times Reports
In a report published in the New York Times on Wednesday
and subsequently confirmed by eBookNet, journalist David Kirkpatrick reveals
that the new RCA REB1100 eBook reading device will have a suggested retail price
of $300, about $40 higher than that of its predecessor, the Rocket eBook Pro.
That price is "unlikely to speed the adoption of electronic books by the
mass market," Kirkpatrick suggests, but an RCA spokesman says cheaper
prices may be on the way.
Using Microsoft Reader
Eric Walusis, one of eBookNet's business columnists,
recently took the new Windows version of Microsoft Reader for a test drive. He
calls the software's handling and performance "quite impressive."
While he found the program to be a bit slow at some tasks, he says it's "a
very good first effort" overall. "If you're ready for eBooks, but want
to wait a while for portable hardware...give Reader a try," he recommends.
Other interesting links follow. However electronic
publishing is a moving target: I can't guarantee that every URL will still be in
the same place, nor that the content will be up to date.
My publisher is at www.e-reads.com
The Readers' Online Guide to E-Books is at www.runningriver.com
Other links are
www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/10-13ebooks.htm
www.microsoft.com'presspas/press/1999/Oct99/MondadoriPR.htm
gives details of the Microsoft Reader.
See an article by Jacob Weisbert at www.slate.com/Browser/99-05-07/Browser.asp
www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0208/6303106a.htm
www.cnet.com/Content/Gadgets/Techno/Ebooks/index.html asks 'Are you ready to read a book onscreen?'
www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/odonnell/980706od.htm has an impartial article reflecting diverse opinions of eBooks.
www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/15490.html
www.talewins.com/Browzer/index.htm
Electronic book exchange - a working party developing copyright protection and distribution specification http://www.ebxwg.org/
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Taken from E-Access Bulletin - Issue 9, 2000
BATTLE IS JOINED FOR E-BOOKS STANDARD
Software giants Microsoft and Adobe Systems have made new
moves in their battle to create a dominant standard
for 'e-books' - digitised book software and hardware.
Microsoft has announced a partnership with leading online
bookshop Amazon.com to create a customised version of its Microsoft Reader
e-book software, allowing Internet users to buy and download e-books from the
bookshop. The deal was announced at:
http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/2000/Aug00/AmazonPR.asp
Amazon does not actually sell e-books yet, although it
plans to in the near future. However Barnes and Noble (http://www.barnesandnoble.com),
another major online bookshop, is leading the way in this field and already
offers e-books for purchase and download in three different formats:
MicrosoftReader, Glassbook (http://www.glassbook.com)
and Rocket eBook (http://www.rocket-ebook.com/).
Microsoft hopes to overtake the other two formats by dint
of its general market dominance with Windows PCs. Rocket eBook is a proprietary
system, produced by 1997 start-up company NuvoMedia, while Glassbook has
recently been acquired by Adobe Systems, as part of its bid to rival Microsoft
by enhancing its own e-book system based on its Portable Document Format (pdf)software.
Glassbook's latest software (and indeed Microsoft Reader
as well) includes text-to-speech capabilities, text annotation and highlighting
with electronic sticky notes, searching and text enhancement facilities that are
intended to make content easier to read. See:
http://www.glassbook.com/news/pr082800.htm
The e-books market is new but potentially lucrative.
E-books have obvious advantages for blind and visually impaired people, as they
can usually be readily converted into speech or Braille, but they are predicted
to increase in popularity across a range of users as e-book readers become more
portable and offer quick, mobile access to large libraries of books.
==============================================================================
Taken from E-Access Bulletin - Issue 9, 2000
DIGITAL BOOKS AND OTHER TEXTS
One of the ways in which the Internet is proving a
liberating resource for
blind and visually impaired people is as a repository of
electronic texts.
For the first time, a wide range of books, newspapers,
journals, periodicals
and articles are available online, 24-hours a day, to be
accessed at the
reader's convenience.
Combined with email services and computer disks or CD-ROMs
with digitised texts sent through the post, the
result - thanks to special access software like
text-to-speech - is access for the first time by blind people to the information they want, when they want it. No more waiting for
others to transcribe it to Braille or read it
aloud: no more restriction to the information, or
extracts from the information, that others arbitrarily decide is of most interest.
The vast majority of digital texts available online are in
ASCII (plain
text) format, and can thus be read by any computer whether
PC or Mac, DOS or Windows. The following is a
round-up of digitised plain text resources on the
Internet and in other media.
PROJECT GUTENBERG
The awesome Gutenberg project is a volunteer-driven
initiative to transcribe copyright-free books into
digital format. Gutenberg has already made about 2,500
texts available for free online including classic works of literature.
The books are entered onto a database in 'plain vanilla
ASCII' - the
plainest of plain text formats, with for example italics,
underlines and
bolds all represented by capital letters.
Project Gutenberg has the goal of turning two million
conventional books (mostly titles already out of
copyright) into electronic texts freely
available on the internet. The site includes several easy
ways of finding a book: by title, author, subject
or even by other details including language, version
or author's birth-date. Once you have located a title, it can be
downloaded onto your computer to read offline at your
leisure.
Visit the site at http://www.gutenberg.net/
and click on "E-Text Listings"
to obtain a full listing of all titles available, or
"search" to search on
any of the criteria mentioned above. This site, however,
was not designed with visual impairment in mind and
some people may not find it easy to read or
screen-reader-friendly.
NATIONAL LIBRARY FOR THE BLIND
The NLB site, designed for easy access by those with a
visual-impairment and found at www.nlbuk.org, is a good source
of electronic texts and contains
some valuable areas such as 'Where can I get ideas about
new books to read?'
and 'The Fiction Cafe (Books for young people)'.
THE INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY
Visit http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/ for
another very useful resource of electronic texts arranged in 10 easy-to-browse
categories including languages, natural sciences and mathematics, the arts and
literature and rhetoric. Although the site is not written with visual impairment
in mind, no frames or side-menus mean that it is quite accessible.
THE ONLINE BOOKS PAGE
This site at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html
is an index of more than 12,000 English works which are available free of charge
and as full texts on the Internet. The service is part of the Digital Library
Project of the University of Pennsylvania.
THE TALKING NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION OF THE UK
The TNAUK site at http://www.tnauk.org.uk/
offers access to more than 200 titles on tape, disk, e-mail or downloadable from
their website, for a subscription charge of 20 UK Pounds a year. Texts available
include daily newspapers and weekly magazines, as well as other monthly and
quarterly publications. A full listing of all their publications in all formats
is available on the website or by telephone on 01435 866102. Their website has
black on grey text that may cause problems in reading for some, and contains
formatting that is not fully accessible although there is a link to a text-only
version. The direct address of the "text only" version is http://www.tnauk.org.uk/TextSite/Introduction.htm
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Subject: E-reads titles in Follett ebookstore launch
Among the growing number of online distributors carrying e-reads titles
is the just-launched efollets.com which has some 19 pages of e-reads books for sale on this site. e-reads has over 1300 titles in production and intends to put them out in every viable format.
Just click on Click on this URL, then go to Shop by Publisher and see 19 pages of books published by e-reads! (Including Ama.)
http://shop.efollett.com/htmlroot/globalefollett/general/passthru.html