Books Take Electronic Turn--Alex Hamilton
At the recent book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, it was announced that there would be a $100,000 prize for the best new e-book. Quite a tidy sum—and especially nice odds for authors, given the dearth of books published only in electronic format.
Yet, with only 80,000 viewers/readers currently in consumers' hands, e-books are currently struggling to gain acceptance. Not only are there few viewers, but the existing technologies have a long way to go to challenge printed books in terms of quality, navigation and ease of use. Screens are small and the displays, which are based on projected light, are not easy to read for any length of time. Adding to the challenge, there are several different presentation formats vying for supremacy.
So, does that mean we should write off e-books? No. Frankly, while we will look back on the first generation of e-books with the same sort of nostalgia reserved for 8-track audio tapes, they serve as an important wake-up call for the prepress arena.
However hokey the current technologies and formats, they are the forerunner of what will prove more worthy challengers to ink on paper: electronic paper and electronic ink.
There are several groups working on these technologies, including efforts at Xerox PARC and MIT's Media Lab. e-paper consists of a film-like substrate that has the ability to render pixels according to the amount of voltage applied. As currently developed, the electronic signal is applied by an external "printer" device to the e-paper film. However, it is not hard to imagine an integrated unit that is no thicker than a book and can download and display information from the Web.
Inside e-consumables
Electronic inks are conceptually similar. With this technology, the ink carrier contains capsules with dyes and pigments, which are then printed between a pair of electrodes. Depending on the charge (positive or negative), the pixels are turned on or off to render the image. One of the interesting things about electronic inks is that it can be applied to a wide variety of substrates using screen printing equipment.
These technologies are pretty far along—electronic ink has already made its public debut, while Xerox and 3M are working to develop e-paper products for general release. While both technologies are now limited to monochrome output, developers are tackling the issue of color.
With electronic paper, it is possible to have matrixes of contrasting colors to render images in color. As with e-paper, the developers are now working on developing capsules that contain red, green and blue hues to render color images.
Advancing from prototypes to mass-market manufacturing will require significantly more work. However, it is likely that electronic papers and inks will be making their way to the public within the next five years.
Both have the potential to drastically alter multiple segments of the printing industry. As for e-paper, textbooks are the obvious application, because this technology would enable students to pull up relevant subject matter on a slim tablet rather than drag around huge backpacks.
Newspapers are another category that are ripe for this technology. Not only do they have a short life-span, this would enable publishers to virtually eliminate the incremental cost of production and distribution, as subscribers could either be beamed or download customized versions of their daily newspaper. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see other types of print media that would be equally well presented on e-paper.
Book Beneficiaries
While this technology should have press manufacturers thinking about their long-term prospects, it presents a huge opportunity for prepress specialists. The ability to manage, manipulate and format digital content is going to be the most critical issue for publishers that want to distribute content this way. And guess who knows how to do this best?
Further, even today there is a significant amount of work that comes in to book printers as camera-ready copy. Worse, when you add in the AAs and other changes and revisions that are made prior to going to plate and on-press, there is considerable discrepancy between what the publisher has in its manuscript archives and what is on the shelves at thousands of book stores.
Whereas this is not critical in paper-based publishing, it becomes so when the output medium is variable. Here data integrity between the print and electronic formats takes on considerable importance. This is where digital prepress specialists can add value.
First, there will be a huge demand for scanning and accurate OCR of legacy books, just so that existing books and information can be distributed electronically. This is no mean feat, as the ability to scan and convert thousands of page bitmaps into the correct text requires more than OmniPage Pro. Another challenge is the ability to convert halftones back into a contone format that can be printed or rendered on e-paper at an acceptable quality level.
The glue to hold all the different book components together will fuel a major demand for database services, as well as for those with composition engines that enable the rapid reassembly of the parts back into new publications that are tailored to fit the output medium and format.
And, while some may hold XML out as the savior for doing all of this seamlessly and automatically, that is asking a little too much for the stepchild of SGML. Although XML has a number of valuable features, it comes up short in the area of formatting, as it lacks essential tools such as the ability to kern type. XML will certainly have a role in future workflows, but probably as a scripting language that integrates different applications into a workflow.
Another issue is that, while scripting and composition engines will be able to do much of the heavy lifting, publishers will still need help in tweaking the copy to produce a high-quality product. Understanding of and expertise in type, page geometry and color will continue to play a big role in making books readable.
And while I think that printed books will continue to enjoy widespread acceptance for a long time, those that are primarily informational, rather than entertainment oriented, will soon begin the migration to e-paper.
—Alex Hamilton
About the Author
Alex Hamilton, a former technical editor with Printing Impressions, is president of Computers & Communications Consulting, which specializes in digital technologies for printing and publishing. He can be reached at (215) 247-3461 or by e-mail at alexh@candcc.com.
