WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:22.480 This is a book, an electronic book in the form of a ROM card. 00:22.480 --> 00:26.800 You read it by putting it in the back of one of these Franklin digital book system units 00:26.800 --> 00:29.540 and then you read the book on this handheld display. 00:29.540 --> 00:33.880 That's one of the many new forms of electronic publishing which is challenging the old-fashioned 00:33.880 --> 00:35.860 way of reading a book on paper. 00:35.860 --> 00:37.640 Would you read a book on an LCD screen? 00:37.640 --> 00:39.360 Well, lots of people are. 00:39.360 --> 00:47.840 Today we'll take a look at electronic books on this edition of the Computer Chronicles. 00:47.840 --> 01:03.900 Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by Intel, the world's leading manufacturer 01:03.900 --> 01:04.900 of microprocessors. 01:04.900 --> 01:08.020 Intel, the computer inside. 01:08.020 --> 01:13.340 Additional funding is provided by the Software Publishers Association, providers of educational 01:13.340 --> 01:15.700 materials to help manage software. 01:15.700 --> 01:21.540 Don't copy that floppy. 01:21.540 --> 01:22.820 Welcome to the Computer Chronicles. 01:22.820 --> 01:26.300 I'm Stuart Shiffey and with me this week is Bob Stein of the Voyager Company. 01:26.300 --> 01:29.220 And Bob, this is one example of an electronic publishing product. 01:29.220 --> 01:32.540 I'm not sure what category you'd put it in or what you'd call it, but it's called A Hard 01:32.540 --> 01:34.060 Day's Night and of course we know what that is. 01:34.060 --> 01:35.780 And show us the pieces that are inside this. 01:35.780 --> 01:36.780 Okay, sir. 01:36.780 --> 01:39.660 What we've done is we've taken the entire film of A Hard Day's Night and put it in Apple's 01:39.660 --> 01:41.300 QuickTime format onto a CD-ROM. 01:41.300 --> 01:42.540 So the whole movie's on the disc. 01:42.540 --> 01:43.540 The whole movie's on the disc. 01:43.540 --> 01:49.580 Plus, we've added a book-length text about the movie, profiles of the cast members, the 01:49.580 --> 01:50.580 crew list, etc. 01:50.580 --> 01:52.820 So show us the pieces here. 01:52.820 --> 01:53.820 Let's start. 01:53.820 --> 01:57.020 I'll show you a piece of the movie. 01:57.020 --> 02:00.860 The movie will start playing and here's a commentary about the movie that you can read 02:00.860 --> 02:01.860 along with the movie. 02:01.860 --> 02:06.620 Down here on the table of contents, let me go to the cast. 02:06.620 --> 02:07.620 I'll go to the grandfather. 02:07.620 --> 02:09.940 So we could look up something about any of the cast members. 02:09.940 --> 02:10.940 Right, here's Wilfrid Bramble. 02:10.940 --> 02:15.780 And this is a part of the movie we did. 02:15.780 --> 02:17.780 Let's try one of the songs. 02:17.780 --> 02:21.060 Let's go to Tell Me Why. 02:21.060 --> 02:25.500 So here's an introduction to the song and here's the song itself. 02:25.500 --> 02:26.500 What a stunning. 02:26.500 --> 02:32.460 It's chewed up, that part of the movie. 02:32.460 --> 02:35.060 So it's the movie, it's a CD, it's a book. 02:35.060 --> 02:36.060 Plus? 02:36.060 --> 02:37.060 It's all those things. 02:37.060 --> 02:39.580 We're experimenting with what these new genres are like. 02:39.580 --> 02:42.140 This was a really wonderful property to experiment with. 02:42.140 --> 02:45.580 All right, we're going to take a look at many of the aspects of electronic publishing today 02:45.580 --> 02:50.300 on different kinds of media, from floppies to CD-ROMs to online magazines. 02:50.300 --> 02:54.540 We'll also see the new authoring tools that let you turn your manuscript into an electronic 02:54.540 --> 02:55.540 book. 02:55.540 --> 02:59.620 One of the true innovators in this field of new media publishing is Rick Smolin. 02:59.620 --> 03:05.300 His new interactive book is called From Alice to Ocean. 03:05.300 --> 03:09.560 Smolin's book follows a young woman on her year-long journey across Australia. 03:09.560 --> 03:13.980 During the course of that year, Smolin shot over 18,000 photographs. 03:13.980 --> 03:18.620 He did an article for National Geographic, but they only used 31 pictures. 03:18.620 --> 03:24.340 He then did this 224-page book, but he still had thousands of great pictures that hadn't 03:24.340 --> 03:25.340 been used. 03:25.340 --> 03:29.140 Have you ever read a book that you loved and when you turned the last page of the book, 03:29.140 --> 03:33.540 you had a feeling of sadness, suddenly as if part of your, this whole world that existed 03:33.540 --> 03:35.340 inside of your head was suddenly over? 03:35.340 --> 03:38.340 And I thought, wouldn't it be great if people fell in love with Robin and were impressed 03:38.340 --> 03:42.580 by her courage and moved by her relationship with the camels and with her dog. 03:42.580 --> 03:45.700 Suddenly you turn the last page of this book, From Alice to Ocean, and there are these two 03:45.700 --> 03:49.180 shiny CDs floating in the back of the book. 03:49.180 --> 03:52.100 And you're told that there are pictures on here you didn't get to see in the book, which 03:52.100 --> 03:54.940 is one of the real pleasures for me, is I got to put many more pictures into the CDs 03:54.940 --> 03:56.780 than I got into the book. 03:56.780 --> 04:00.700 And there's a whole other way, another path through the same story. 04:00.700 --> 04:03.640 One disc is a CD-ROM that runs on a Macintosh. 04:03.640 --> 04:08.700 The other disc is a collection of photos that can be viewed on a Kodak Photo CD player. 04:08.700 --> 04:14.020 The interactive discs are included with the $50 book at no extra charge, thanks to grants 04:14.020 --> 04:16.020 from Apple and Kodak. 04:16.020 --> 04:21.180 The Apple CD-ROM has an audio track so you can just listen to the audio on a normal music 04:21.180 --> 04:25.900 CD player, even if you don't have a CD-ROM drive for your computer. 04:25.900 --> 04:30.540 But if you can play the disc on your computer, you have complete control over what you see 04:30.540 --> 04:31.540 and hear. 04:31.540 --> 04:36.020 I was driving along for 200 or 300 miles in nothing but flat, barren landscape. 04:36.020 --> 04:41.140 Rick Smolin has taken an old story and given it new life by using the power of electronic 04:41.140 --> 04:42.300 publishing. 04:42.300 --> 04:46.100 One of the things that has amazed the publishing community is I took a story which was 15 years 04:46.100 --> 04:47.860 old, which was very well known. 04:47.860 --> 04:49.740 It was the cover of National Geographic. 04:49.740 --> 04:53.700 Robin had written a book called Tracks, which sold half a million copies around the world. 04:53.700 --> 04:57.900 And suddenly we came out with a whole brand new look at it, and much to everyone's amazement, 04:57.900 --> 05:01.740 people are treating it as if it's a brand new thing that they've never heard of before. 05:01.740 --> 05:06.060 So if you think of all the material that publishers are sitting on all over the world, every time 05:06.060 --> 05:10.940 National Geographic does a story, these photographers shoot hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film, 05:10.940 --> 05:13.140 and very little of it ever gets used. 05:13.140 --> 05:17.260 So people are realizing that there's an incredible wealth of material. 05:17.260 --> 05:19.700 For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Jonelle Patterson. 05:19.700 --> 05:25.660 For instance, go look for the Polar Explorer, Raoul Almond, in the volume A. If we point 05:25.660 --> 05:28.260 it, it's going out. 05:28.260 --> 05:33.340 You essentially pull down volume and there it is. 05:33.340 --> 05:36.100 There can be problems reading a book off a computer. 05:36.100 --> 05:37.500 Number one, you need a comfortable interface. 05:37.500 --> 05:42.180 And number two, if the medium is CD-ROM, you need to get around the slow access time inherent 05:42.180 --> 05:43.180 in an optical drive. 05:43.180 --> 05:47.780 Here to show us solutions to both of those problems and more are Liza Wyman of Broderbund 05:47.780 --> 05:50.300 and also back with us, Bob Stein of Voyager. 05:50.300 --> 05:54.460 Liza, this is a book called Arthur's Teacher Trouble, and it's what we normally call a 05:54.460 --> 05:55.460 book. 05:55.460 --> 05:57.820 It's got images and pictures and pieces of paper and so on. 05:57.820 --> 06:01.860 But you've taken this and turned it into this living book, this electronic book off a CD. 06:01.860 --> 06:06.220 And tell us what happens when you turn this book into a book we read on a computer. 06:06.220 --> 06:10.020 What we've done is added original music and animation and dialogue to expand the reading 06:10.020 --> 06:14.040 experience for children and provide them with an exploration environment so that they can 06:14.040 --> 06:15.460 explore within every page of the book. 06:15.460 --> 06:18.260 So it's not just the book turned into a computer, but a lot more. 06:18.260 --> 06:22.660 Yeah, and we ship the book with the CD-ROM so that after a child explores it electronically, 06:22.660 --> 06:23.660 they can go inside the story. 06:23.660 --> 06:26.580 All right, let's explore it electronically here and show us how you'd use it. 06:26.580 --> 06:29.860 Okay, well, Arthur's dancing here, but we've got two ways to go through the stories. 06:29.860 --> 06:31.700 The read-to-me mode is not interactive. 06:31.700 --> 06:32.700 That's for younger readers. 06:32.700 --> 06:37.540 And the let-me-play mode, that's what we'll look at now, allows children to explore within 06:37.540 --> 06:39.260 every page at their leisure. 06:39.260 --> 06:40.260 This is a story of Arthur. 06:40.260 --> 06:44.300 He's a third-grade aardvark, and he's been forced to represent his class in an all-school 06:44.300 --> 06:45.660 spell-a-thon. 06:45.660 --> 06:48.700 So it deals with a lot of the school-time stresses that children have to deal with. 06:48.700 --> 06:50.100 All right, what age group would this be for? 06:50.100 --> 06:51.100 Six to ten. 06:51.100 --> 06:52.100 Okay, let's take a look. 06:52.100 --> 06:54.100 Now we're in the first page. 06:54.100 --> 06:55.100 What's going to happen? 06:55.100 --> 06:56.100 The bell rang. 06:56.100 --> 06:57.100 Okay. 06:57.100 --> 06:58.100 The first day of school was over. 06:58.100 --> 06:59.100 You'll see an opening animation. 06:59.100 --> 07:02.580 Kids ran out of every classroom, everyone but one. 07:02.580 --> 07:06.100 So not only can the child read the book, but there's a reader built in who ought to read 07:06.100 --> 07:07.100 the words to the child. 07:07.100 --> 07:08.100 Here's the animation. 07:08.100 --> 07:14.100 Here, the students filed out slowly in alphabetical order. 07:14.100 --> 07:20.100 We all had teachers like that. 07:20.100 --> 07:25.100 And how many of these animations are in the book? 07:25.100 --> 07:26.100 There's 24 pages in this book. 07:26.100 --> 07:27.100 Said their teacher, Mr. Ratburn. 07:27.100 --> 07:28.100 And after the animation finishes... 07:28.100 --> 07:29.100 What can you do with, say, this page? 07:29.100 --> 07:30.100 Okay, well, every word's been recorded individually, so you could practice your reading. 07:30.100 --> 07:31.100 The bell rang. 07:31.100 --> 07:32.100 You could do rap. 07:32.100 --> 07:33.100 I clicked on this ball here, you'd hear the whole page read to you again. 07:33.100 --> 07:34.100 And then this page is filled with hidden buttons, and you never know quite what you're going 07:34.100 --> 07:35.100 to find. 07:35.100 --> 07:36.100 There's one. 07:36.100 --> 07:37.100 And there's two. 07:37.100 --> 07:38.100 And there's three. 07:38.100 --> 07:39.100 And there's four. 07:39.100 --> 07:40.100 And there's five. 07:40.100 --> 07:41.100 And there's six. 07:41.100 --> 07:42.100 And there's seven. 07:42.100 --> 07:43.100 And there's eight. 07:43.100 --> 07:44.100 And there's nine. 07:44.100 --> 07:45.100 And there's ten. 07:45.100 --> 07:46.100 And there's eleven. 07:46.100 --> 07:47.100 And there's twelve. 07:47.100 --> 07:50.100 And there's thirteen. 07:50.100 --> 07:54.100 We like to reward kids so that every time they explore something, something will happen. 07:54.100 --> 07:55.100 Okay. 07:55.100 --> 08:01.100 Even things that an adult might not choose to click on, but a kid would. 08:01.100 --> 08:05.100 So, again, it's a lot more than just the old-fashioned book. 08:05.100 --> 08:09.100 I mean, the child can really interact, play with the environment as if you were in that 08:09.100 --> 08:10.100 room. 08:10.100 --> 08:13.100 Yeah, and we've added extra dialogue, too, so children can go underneath the story and 08:13.100 --> 08:14.100 hear what the characters are thinking. 08:14.100 --> 08:17.100 We had fun today, didn't we? 08:17.100 --> 08:19.100 Yeah, Mr. Adler. 08:19.100 --> 08:21.100 And the kids? 08:21.100 --> 08:23.100 And you can hear what the kids are thinking. 08:23.100 --> 08:27.100 This is going to be a long year. 08:27.100 --> 08:30.100 And we all like to make fun of authority figures, so we put in a few surprises. 08:30.100 --> 08:33.100 Here's another one. 08:33.100 --> 08:36.100 And one more. 08:36.100 --> 08:38.100 All right. 08:38.100 --> 08:41.100 Now, quickly, if you could, you can do this in Spanish also. 08:41.100 --> 08:42.100 Yeah. 08:42.100 --> 08:44.100 Can you turn it into a Spanish version for us right now? 08:44.100 --> 08:45.100 Sure. 08:45.100 --> 08:48.100 We could go into Spanish by hitting the 2 on the keyboard here, and the page will reload 08:48.100 --> 08:49.100 in Spanish. 08:49.100 --> 08:52.100 And every word that you see, as well as every word that you hear, has been re-recorded with 08:52.100 --> 08:56.100 new actors and actresses to give the book the same feeling in either language. 08:56.100 --> 09:00.100 So it's totally bilingual in terms of the printed word and in terms of the spoken word. 09:00.100 --> 09:01.100 That's right. 09:01.100 --> 09:02.100 And this is it, huh? 09:02.100 --> 09:03.100 Mm-hmm. 09:03.100 --> 09:04.100 That's terrific. 09:04.100 --> 09:07.100 How much do these CDs cost? 09:07.100 --> 09:12.100 Well, you'll find that CD for $49.95 to $59.95, depending on where you go to buy it. 09:12.100 --> 09:14.100 All right, Bob, let's turn to Voyager and the books you have. 09:14.100 --> 09:15.100 Now, a couple of differences. 09:15.100 --> 09:20.100 You have sort of standard best-selling adult books here, which you've turned into computer 09:20.100 --> 09:22.100 books, and you're doing floppies here. 09:22.100 --> 09:23.100 You don't have to have a CD, right? 09:23.100 --> 09:24.100 That's right. 09:24.100 --> 09:28.100 We have books like The Other Complete Stories of Isaac Asimov, Autobiography of Malcolm 09:28.100 --> 09:32.100 X, and the latest book about Richard Feynman, Genius, and it comes on a floppy disk formatted 09:32.100 --> 09:34.100 for the Macintosh PowerBook. 09:34.100 --> 09:37.100 And we've worked very hard to make it look like a book and act like a book. 09:37.100 --> 09:40.100 All right, you also have the authoring toolkit for your expanded books. 09:40.100 --> 09:41.100 Just explain that briefly, Bob. 09:41.100 --> 09:42.100 Right. 09:42.100 --> 09:46.100 We made a tool that, all you have to understand, really, is the Macintosh pull-down menu structure 09:46.100 --> 09:51.100 that lets authors, publishers, teachers, professors, students put books, put text into the expanded 09:51.100 --> 09:52.100 book format. 09:52.100 --> 09:53.100 So I have my text. 09:53.100 --> 09:54.100 I have that. 09:54.100 --> 09:55.100 I turn it into one of your kinds of books. 09:55.100 --> 09:56.100 Right, and you can do it in hours. 09:56.100 --> 09:57.100 All right, let's take a look. 09:57.100 --> 10:00.100 Now, you've got another one up here, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and show us what this expanded 10:00.100 --> 10:03.100 book looks like, what the advantages are. 10:03.100 --> 10:08.100 We go into the book, and it's formatted for the PowerBook, which is why it's cut off at 10:08.100 --> 10:09.100 the bottom here. 10:09.100 --> 10:12.100 And let's go into the beginning of the book. 10:12.100 --> 10:15.100 And this is what text looks like, circa 1993. 10:15.100 --> 10:17.100 Right, so at the moment, it looks like a book. 10:17.100 --> 10:18.100 Right. 10:18.100 --> 10:20.100 And you can do all the things you expect to be able to do with a book. 10:20.100 --> 10:23.100 You can place your cursor in the margin and just type notes if you want. 10:23.100 --> 10:24.100 You can write little notes. 10:24.100 --> 10:25.100 Right. 10:25.100 --> 10:28.100 You can, if you like, to mark text vertically, you can do that. 10:28.100 --> 10:35.100 You can select text and make it either underlined or bold, if you like to do that. 10:35.100 --> 10:40.100 You can mark the corner of a page by turning it down the way you normally can. 10:40.100 --> 10:44.100 One thing you can't do with a regular book is you can actually find out all the pages 10:44.100 --> 10:47.100 you have marked and can go to them that way. 10:47.100 --> 10:50.100 You're able to have large text. 10:50.100 --> 10:52.100 It's free with this. 10:52.100 --> 10:55.100 The most exciting stuff, though, is what you can do in terms of searching and navigating 10:55.100 --> 10:56.100 through the book. 10:56.100 --> 10:57.100 Right. 10:57.100 --> 11:01.100 So, for example, I'm going to look at a concept like youth, which is an important issue in 11:01.100 --> 11:02.100 this book. 11:02.100 --> 11:06.100 And on the fly, the book is going to go and build a list for me of all occurrences of 11:06.100 --> 11:07.100 the word youth. 11:07.100 --> 11:10.100 And it's going to put it for me in a list over here. 11:10.100 --> 11:13.100 And let me get rid of this for you. 11:13.100 --> 11:14.100 That's pretty fast. 11:14.100 --> 11:18.100 Yeah, and you can just click through these, and it'll go and find each occurrence for 11:18.100 --> 11:19.100 you. 11:19.100 --> 11:23.100 Or we can, for any word in the book, you can hold the mouse down on it, and you can get 11:23.100 --> 11:27.100 the first reference, the previous reference, the next reference, the last reference, all 11:27.100 --> 11:31.100 occurrences, which is what we did here, are all in context, which instead of giving us 11:31.100 --> 11:35.100 just a list of page numbers, it's going to go through and actually give us a list with 11:35.100 --> 11:39.100 two or three words on each side, showing us the context that the word appears in. 11:39.100 --> 11:44.100 So here we see the burden of beauty, personal beauty, real beauty, everything but beauty. 11:44.100 --> 11:45.100 So it's not just the book. 11:45.100 --> 11:47.100 It's really a research tool, in a way, if you're working on the book. 11:47.100 --> 11:48.100 It can be that, right. 11:48.100 --> 11:49.100 And so it's real nice. 11:49.100 --> 11:51.100 You can close these up this way. 11:51.100 --> 11:54.100 We've got the – we can go to chapters this way. 11:54.100 --> 11:57.100 Let me go to one chapter in particular. 11:57.100 --> 12:02.100 This is the first in our Modern Library series, and we asked Bennett Cerf's son, Christopher, 12:02.100 --> 12:05.100 to write a little story about the history of the Modern Library, because I knew that 12:05.100 --> 12:09.100 he had a tape of his father talking about the day that he actually bought the Modern 12:09.100 --> 12:10.100 Library. 12:10.100 --> 12:11.100 And you have that here? 12:11.100 --> 12:13.100 And we've included that here, so you can get to hear Bennett Cerf talking about the 12:13.100 --> 12:14.100 day he bought it. 12:14.100 --> 12:16.100 I bought the Modern Library in 1925. 12:16.100 --> 12:18.100 I'd been a librarian for a number of years. 12:18.100 --> 12:20.100 I think it's a lot more than you, 1925. 12:20.100 --> 12:21.100 Yes, it is. 12:21.100 --> 12:22.100 Are there any graphics or pictures you have in these books? 12:22.100 --> 12:23.100 No. 12:23.100 --> 12:24.100 In general, we've represented the book as they were. 12:24.100 --> 12:25.100 But you do have audio in there. 12:25.100 --> 12:26.100 Yeah, in this case. 12:26.100 --> 12:30.100 But I know things like – I've seen your Jurassic Park, and you do have some graphics 12:30.100 --> 12:31.100 in there. 12:31.100 --> 12:32.100 Oh, sure. 12:32.100 --> 12:34.100 I mean, it's possible to put graphics in, and things with the toolkits made it very 12:34.100 --> 12:39.100 easy to put in quick-time movies and audio quotes and pictures and sounds, et cetera. 12:39.100 --> 12:41.100 And how many of the titles do you have out now in this format? 12:41.100 --> 12:44.100 We have 30 out in this format, but now there are hundreds of people all over the world 12:44.100 --> 12:45.100 producing this format. 12:45.100 --> 12:46.100 Well, using something like your toolkit. 12:46.100 --> 12:48.100 Yeah, using our toolkit to produce books. 12:48.100 --> 12:49.100 All right. 12:49.100 --> 12:50.100 Well, Lisa, thank you very much. 12:50.100 --> 12:54.100 Some electronic publishing ends up on magnetic or optical media, as we've seen, that you 12:54.100 --> 12:56.100 buy or load into your computer. 12:56.100 --> 13:01.100 But there's another form of electronic publishing that exists only as files on an online service. 13:01.100 --> 13:05.100 These new media journals are called zines. 13:05.100 --> 13:11.100 Jared Poore publishes his zine called Fact Sheet 5 Electric on a computer conferencing 13:11.100 --> 13:13.100 system called The Well. 13:13.100 --> 13:18.100 Fact Sheet 5 is a sort of reader's digest of other zines, and it covers a wide range 13:18.100 --> 13:20.100 of subjects from art to technology. 13:20.100 --> 13:23.100 Why are zines so popular with writers? 13:23.100 --> 13:28.100 Poore says one reason is you don't have to deal with an editor rewriting your copy, and 13:28.100 --> 13:31.100 your stories are available the instant they're written. 13:31.100 --> 13:39.100 One of the main advantages of publishing electronically is it is very inexpensive to produce. 13:39.100 --> 13:42.100 Paper is expensive. 13:42.100 --> 13:47.100 It is consuming of both time and money to produce. 13:47.100 --> 13:53.100 The converse of that, unfortunately, is electronic publications are expensive to consume since 13:53.100 --> 13:59.100 you need technology or access to technology to acquire them, whereas anyone who can read 13:59.100 --> 14:02.100 can read a paper publication. 14:02.100 --> 14:07.100 Roger Krocker is a journalism teacher who also publishes a zine on The Well. 14:07.100 --> 14:10.100 His zine deals with the subject of desktop publishing. 14:10.100 --> 14:14.100 Krocker says there are other advantages to electronic publishing. 14:14.100 --> 14:21.100 There's no question that as things exist today that you get very high quality graphics and 14:21.100 --> 14:25.100 text in a print medium, and you do not get those in an electronic medium. 14:25.100 --> 14:29.100 However, you get some things in the electronic medium that you can't get in the print medium. 14:29.100 --> 14:34.100 For example, we're here at the Whole Earth Review, and they published their catalog on 14:34.100 --> 14:41.100 a CD-ROM four or five years ago, and that includes sound clips from various bands. 14:41.100 --> 14:43.100 How do you do that in a print newspaper? 14:43.100 --> 14:46.100 For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Jonel Patterson. 14:46.100 --> 14:59.100 Music 14:59.100 --> 15:03.100 Electronic books can be more than just high-tech implementations of the printed version. 15:03.100 --> 15:07.100 Some of the new media publishing titles let you get access to information that just can't 15:07.100 --> 15:09.100 be represented in printed form alone. 15:09.100 --> 15:14.100 Here to show us some examples are Paul Worthington, editor with Multimedia World, also with us 15:14.100 --> 15:16.100 Fred Jones, the CEO of eBook. 15:16.100 --> 15:20.100 Paul, we've seen several examples so far of electronic publishing, but what are the main 15:20.100 --> 15:21.100 advantages? 15:21.100 --> 15:22.100 What are the trade-offs? 15:22.100 --> 15:24.100 I mean, it's more expensive, it's more complicated than just picking up the book. 15:24.100 --> 15:27.100 What do we get for the electronic version of a book? 15:27.100 --> 15:30.100 You get a lot of convenience that you just can't get out of a heavy text. 15:30.100 --> 15:32.100 An example here, I've got the Mayo Clinic Health Book. 15:32.100 --> 15:35.100 It's a best-selling book for people who are curious about their health, want to look up 15:35.100 --> 15:36.100 a symptom or something. 15:36.100 --> 15:37.100 But you're not going to carry that around with you? 15:37.100 --> 15:39.100 But you can carry the CD or use this at home. 15:39.100 --> 15:42.100 It's got all the information in that book, plus animations and different things which 15:42.100 --> 15:45.100 clearly explain health topics that you can't do in text. 15:45.100 --> 15:48.100 All right, so it's more convenient in terms of size and what it has in it. 15:48.100 --> 15:50.100 How about in terms of the ability to find information? 15:50.100 --> 15:54.100 If I had the Mayo Clinic book, for example, I'm stuck with their index, right, or their 15:54.100 --> 15:55.100 table of contents. 15:55.100 --> 15:57.100 What are the advantages from a searching point of view? 15:57.100 --> 16:00.100 Well, you'll fortunately have a computer to do the search for you. 16:00.100 --> 16:03.100 It can go through keywords, through topics, and rather than you flipping through the pages 16:03.100 --> 16:06.100 and dying before you find out what your disease is, it'll come up for you quickly. 16:06.100 --> 16:10.100 All right, show me with, you have something called Cinemania as an example up here of 16:10.100 --> 16:11.100 an electronic book. 16:11.100 --> 16:12.100 What is it and show us how that would work. 16:12.100 --> 16:17.100 Cinemania is an example of, they've got three different textbooks on film on one CD, but 16:17.100 --> 16:21.100 they've also got stills from the pictures and something you can't do in any book whatsoever, 16:21.100 --> 16:22.100 which is sound clips. 16:22.100 --> 16:23.100 So you get an idea of how the effort's going. 16:23.100 --> 16:24.100 So what I said was true. 16:24.100 --> 16:26.100 There's no difference between the sexes. 16:26.100 --> 16:28.100 So it's obviously better than we could get out of just the book. 16:28.100 --> 16:30.100 We can hear clips, we can see those nice photos. 16:30.100 --> 16:32.100 All right, let's talk about the search engine part of this. 16:32.100 --> 16:35.100 Suppose I want to go in and look up Woody Allen films. 16:35.100 --> 16:36.100 That's what I'm interested in. 16:36.100 --> 16:37.100 How would I do that? 16:37.100 --> 16:39.100 So we've got a number of different filters here. 16:39.100 --> 16:43.100 You can choose from the type of movie, the rating for the movie, the director, even like 16:43.100 --> 16:46.100 how many stars the film had and whether it won an award or anything. 16:46.100 --> 16:51.100 Okay, so I want Woody Allen, and boom, there's all the Woody Allen movies. 16:51.100 --> 16:54.100 Suppose you go back to that rating thing, and I don't want the bad movies that got one star. 16:54.100 --> 16:56.100 I want just, say, three or four star Woody Allen movies. 16:56.100 --> 17:00.100 Fortunately, most of his movies were pretty good, but you can see as you click on the star 17:00.100 --> 17:03.100 field there, the list here gets a little bit shorter at a time. 17:03.100 --> 17:05.100 It's on Annie Hall. 17:05.100 --> 17:08.100 What happens when we pull a particular movie up? 17:08.100 --> 17:11.100 Well, the best thing is not only do you get the information on Annie Hall, the film, 17:11.100 --> 17:16.100 you get the full cast of the film, the crew, the notes on the film from the different books, 17:16.100 --> 17:20.100 and the best thing about it being on a computer is it's all searchable. 17:20.100 --> 17:22.100 You get a nice color still also. 17:22.100 --> 17:25.100 But I want to see more about what Diane Keaton did in this film. 17:25.100 --> 17:31.100 I just click on her name, and it shows me a bio of her works, her relationships, 17:31.100 --> 17:33.100 her different movies that she's made. 17:33.100 --> 17:35.100 We can go down the train and see all the films that she's made. 17:35.100 --> 17:39.100 So, again, hypertext-like, you can just sort of snake around and just follow whatever you happen to be interested in. 17:39.100 --> 17:44.100 As well as the search speed, you get more information than you would if you're just looking something up in the regular book form. 17:44.100 --> 17:46.100 All right, Fred, let's turn to you now in e-book. 17:46.100 --> 17:48.100 What approach are you taking to electronic publishing? 17:48.100 --> 17:51.100 What are the features you're trying to put into your electronic books? 17:51.100 --> 17:53.100 Well, let me show you one of our books. 17:53.100 --> 18:00.100 This is The White Horse Child by Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning science fiction author Greg Baer. 18:00.100 --> 18:05.100 We have a series of elements to the story, of multimedia elements to the electronic book, 18:05.100 --> 18:09.100 starting with an interview with the author himself. 18:09.100 --> 18:11.100 This is a series of questions. 18:11.100 --> 18:20.100 For example, how was The White Horse Child written, which you can click on and get a digital movie response of the author answering the question. 18:20.100 --> 18:23.100 That's great. 18:23.100 --> 18:26.100 One of the things you always want to do is talk to the author, and you actually do it here. 18:26.100 --> 18:27.100 Absolutely. 18:27.100 --> 18:30.100 There's a whole series of questions that you can deal with there. 18:30.100 --> 18:35.100 We also have an animation gallery and a learning guide in the story as well. 18:35.100 --> 18:37.100 But the main thing is the story. 18:37.100 --> 18:47.100 The story, which I'm going to go to the search engine and go to a particular page in the story that has some elements on it I want to show. 18:47.100 --> 18:59.100 This particular story takes place in a very dry and ordinary world for the young boy that's the protagonist. 18:59.100 --> 19:06.100 And he encounters a mystical couple who explain and teach him how to have an imagination and how to tell stories. 19:06.100 --> 19:16.100 So while he's in his ordinary life, we have black and white words on the screen reinforced by icons that allow you to listen to them. 19:16.100 --> 19:18.100 We can actually get the whole book read to us also. 19:18.100 --> 19:19.100 Absolutely. 19:19.100 --> 19:21.100 What's the film clip icon? 19:21.100 --> 19:31.100 The film clip icon takes you out into his world of imagination and actually shows you a colorful animation of the story that he's learning to tell from the mystical couple in it. 19:31.100 --> 19:38.100 So he transcends from one part of the story in black and white to this color imagination, kind of like the Wizard of Oz. 19:38.100 --> 19:40.100 What other features are in here? 19:40.100 --> 19:51.100 We also have the ability as the story's been read to a child to look at hot spots that bring up definitions of difficult words. 19:51.100 --> 19:55.100 So you've got a word that a reader doesn't understand, boom, you click on it and you get the definition. 19:55.100 --> 19:56.100 Correct. 19:56.100 --> 20:07.100 This is one particular way to do electronic books designed for older children where as opposed to Arthur's Teacher's Trouble where it's for pre-readers or early readers. 20:07.100 --> 20:16.100 This is for children who are much older, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 years old, who are learning to read in sentences and paragraphs and concepts. 20:16.100 --> 20:19.100 And this is designed specifically to reinforce that kind of activity. 20:19.100 --> 20:20.100 All right. 20:20.100 --> 20:22.100 You have one other e-book you're going to show us on impressionism. 20:22.100 --> 20:24.100 Now what new features does that bring to the book? 20:24.100 --> 20:28.100 Well, this is text oriented and that is picture oriented. 20:28.100 --> 20:34.100 So the whole user interface and the way it operates focuses on pictures rather than text. 20:34.100 --> 20:42.100 So we have a series of slide trays is one of the ways you can access it or you can access it by data cards. 20:42.100 --> 20:54.100 In this case, we've pulled up paintings of Mary Cassatt and we can click on one of the little icons and bring up a larger version of the image. 20:54.100 --> 21:08.100 Linked to that larger image is a series of buttons across the top that allows us to look at the data about the image, where it's hanging, what size it is and what date it is. 21:08.100 --> 21:24.100 A biography of the artist, which can be scrolled, read, cut and pasted or used in a book report for a kid in school and additional details of the art, details a closer look of the art itself. 21:24.100 --> 21:26.100 We also have an interesting feature. 21:26.100 --> 21:42.100 Since this is impressionism, it allows us to select impressionist music to play in the background and this is playing on the Sound Blaster Wave MIDI card so that you hear a very good example of impressionist music in the background. 21:42.100 --> 21:45.100 Kind of to set the mood while you look at the paintings. 21:45.100 --> 21:59.100 We can go to an additional painting and look at two at once so you can as an art student compare multiple pictures together and have essentially a gallery of paintings going on the screen at the same time. 21:59.100 --> 22:09.100 So this is one of a series of art history titles that integrate together for the Electronic Library of Art. 22:09.100 --> 22:16.100 I just want to ask you in closing, Paul, from your point of view here as a kind of journalist looking at this stuff, how serious is the electronic publishing? 22:16.100 --> 22:22.100 Is this kind of a toy, a gimmick for people with a lot of money or is this really the way we're going to be dealing with information in the future? 22:22.100 --> 22:37.100 I think in the last couple of years it's evolved from being a gimmick to something that's a new media and you can't say where it's going, but we have people who are adding to what we have in text and it can turn into something completely different, a whole new way of telling stories, a whole new way of entertaining and educating ourselves. 22:37.100 --> 22:39.100 That's great what we've seen today. Thanks very much to both of you. 22:39.100 --> 22:44.100 That's our look at electronic publishing. Stay tuned now for this week's computer news on Random Access. 22:44.100 --> 23:01.100 Music 23:01.100 --> 23:10.100 In the Random Access file this week, the first real PDA product is on the market. AT&T has announced the availability of its EO 440 personal communicator. 23:10.100 --> 23:18.100 It's a combination cell phone, fax machine, email terminal and pen pad. Base price is $1,999. 23:18.100 --> 23:20.100 Computers are changing the global trading business. 23:20.100 --> 23:31.100 The New York Mercantile Exchange has announced the first ever 24-hour market accessible worldwide by computer terminal for virtually instantaneous transactions around the clock. 23:31.100 --> 23:35.100 The new system was developed by AT&T and is called 9X. 23:35.100 --> 23:39.100 Atari has announced plans for its new Jaguar dedicated computer game system. 23:39.100 --> 23:47.100 Jaguar will use a 64-bit processor and offer 16 million colors, 3D images and interactive multimedia. 23:47.100 --> 23:50.100 The units will be manufactured by IBM. 23:50.100 --> 23:58.100 Atari says retail price will be $200 compared to an expected $700 price tag on its main competitor, the new 3DO system. 23:58.100 --> 24:06.100 Time now for this week's software review from Paul Schindler of Windows Magazine, provided courtesy of CMP Publications. 24:06.100 --> 24:11.100 Today we're going to look at an exciting and challenging game for the Macintosh called Pair Arena. 24:11.100 --> 24:16.100 Now this game was once shareware and now it's commercial and it's hot. 24:16.100 --> 24:19.100 The opening screen is this Japanese-style cartoon. 24:19.100 --> 24:22.100 Pair Arena is basically rollerball in zero gravity. 24:22.100 --> 24:24.100 You can select your league, start low. 24:24.100 --> 24:27.100 Select your opponent, they're all tough. 24:27.100 --> 24:31.100 Choose whether you want to play against the computer, an opponent or someone else in the network. 24:31.100 --> 24:36.100 Yes, now you can bring AppleTalk to its knees by playing a game across the office. 24:36.100 --> 24:38.100 Instant replay is an option. 24:38.100 --> 24:40.100 We'll let the computer play itself. 24:40.100 --> 24:50.100 Ladies and gentlemen, Pair Arena! 24:58.100 --> 25:00.100 This game is very difficult to play. 25:00.100 --> 25:03.100 The mouse just nudges you in a particular direction. 25:03.100 --> 25:05.100 You press space to stop. 25:05.100 --> 25:07.100 If you go off the edge, you disappear. 25:07.100 --> 25:10.100 Pair Arena comes from Cassidy & Green in Salinas, California. 25:10.100 --> 25:13.100 For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Paul Schindler. 25:13.100 --> 25:20.100 A company called Ergonomics has announced a new keyboard designed to reduce repetitive strain injuries. 25:20.100 --> 25:28.100 It features angled key rows, a wrist rest, built-in trackball, and a newly designed circular pod for cursor control and function keys. 25:28.100 --> 25:35.100 First there was the Miracle Piano, but now Ibis Solutions has announced the next step in music teaching software. 25:35.100 --> 25:41.100 Soloist, a software program that uses pitch recognition technology to teach you how to play an instrument. 25:41.100 --> 26:05.100 The software requires a sound engineer.