This is a book, an electronic book in the form of a ROM card.
You read it by putting it in the back of one of these Franklin digital book system units
and then you read the book on this handheld display.
That's one of the many new forms of electronic publishing which is challenging the old-fashioned
way of reading a book on paper.
Would you read a book on an LCD screen?
Well, lots of people are.
Today, we'll take a look at electronic books on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by Intel, the world's leading manufacturer
of microprocessors.
Intel, the computer inside.
Additional funding is provided by the Software Publishers Association, providers of educational
materials to help manage software.
Don't copy that floppy.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
I'm Stuart Shafae and with me this week is Bob Stein of the Voyager Company.
And Bob, this is one example of an electronic publishing product.
I'm not sure what category you'd put it in or what you'd call it, but it's called A Hard
Day's Night and of course we know what that is.
And show us the pieces that are inside this.
Okay, Stuart, what we've done is we've taken the entire film of A Hard Day's Night and
put it in Apple's QuickTime format onto a CD-ROM.
So the whole movie's on the disc?
The whole movie's on the disc.
Plus, we've added a book-length text about the movie, profiles of the cast members, the
crew list, etc.
So show us the pieces here.
Let's start.
I'll show you a piece of the movie.
The movie will start playing and here's a commentary about the movie you can read along
with the movie.
Down here in the table of contents, let me go to the cast.
I'll go to the grandfather.
So we could look up something about any of the cast members.
Right, here's Wilford Bramble.
And this is a part of the movie he's in.
Let's try one of the songs.
Let's go to Tell Me Why.
So here's an introduction to the song and here's the song itself.
What's funny is it's cued up that part of the movie.
So it's the movie, it's a CD, it's a book, plus.
It's all those things.
We're experimenting with what these new genres are like.
This was a really wonderful property to experiment with.
Alright, we're going to take a look at many of the aspects of electronic publishing today
on different kinds of media from floppies to CD-ROMs to online magazines.
We'll also see the new authoring tools that let you turn your manuscript into an electronic
book.
One of the true innovators in this field of new media publishing is Rick Smolin.
His new interactive book is called From Alice to Ocean.
Smolin's book follows a young woman on her year-long journey across Australia.
During the course of that year, Smolin shot over 18,000 photographs.
He did an article for National Geographic, but they only used 31 pictures.
He then did this 224-page book, but he still had thousands of great pictures that hadn't
been used.
Have you ever read a book that you loved and when you turned the last page of the book,
you had a feeling of sadness?
Suddenly as if this whole world that existed inside of your head was suddenly over.
I thought, wouldn't it be great if people fell in love with Robin and were impressed
by her courage and moved by her relationship with the camels and with their dog?
Suddenly you turn the last page of this book, From Alice to Ocean, and there are these two
shiny CDs floating in the back of the book.
You're told that there are pictures on here you didn't get to see in the book, which is
one of the real pleasures for me, is I got to put many more pictures onto the CDs than
I got into the book.
It's a whole other way, another path through the same story.
One disc is a CD-ROM that runs on a Macintosh.
The other disc is a collection of photos that can be viewed on a Kodak Photo CD player.
The interactive discs are included with the $50 book at no extra charge, thanks to grants
from Apple and Kodak.
The Apple CD-ROM has an audio track so you can just listen to the audio on a normal music
CD player, even if you don't have a CD-ROM drive for your computer.
And if you can play the disc on your computer, you have complete control over what you see
and hear.
You're driving along for 200 or 300 miles in nothing but flat, barren landscape.
Rick Smolin has taken an old story and given it new life by using the power of electronic
publishing.
One of the things that has amazed the publishing community is I took a story which was 15 years
old, which was very well known.
It was the cover of National Geographic.
Robin had written a book called Tracks, which sold half a million copies around the world.
And suddenly we came out with a whole brand new look at it, and much to everyone's amazement,
people are treating it as if it's a brand new thing that they've never heard of before.
So if you think of all the material that publishers are sitting on all over the world, every time
National Geographic does a story, these photographers shoot hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film,
and very little of it ever gets used.
So people are realizing that there's an incredible wealth of material.
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Joanelle Patterson.
For instance, go look for the Polar Explorer, Raoul Amundsen, it's in the volume A. So we
point at it and click, and it's going out.
You essentially pull down volume A.
There it is.
There can be problems reading a book off a computer.
Number one, you need a comfortable interface.
And number two, if the medium is CD-ROM, you need to get around the slow access time inherent
in an optical drive.
Here to show us solutions to both of those problems and more are Liza Wyman of Broderbund
and also back with us Bob Stein of Voyager.
Liza, this is a book called Arthur's Teacher Trouble, and it's what we normally call a
book.
It's got words and pictures and pieces of paper and so on.
But you've taken this and turned it into this living book, this electronic book off a CD.
And tell us what happens when you turn this book into a book we read on a computer.
What we've done is added original music and animation and dialogue to expand the reading
experience for children and provide them with an exploration environment so that they can
explore within every page of the book.
So it's not just the book turned into the computer, but a lot more.
Yeah, and we ship the book with the CD-ROM so that after a child explores it electronically,
they can go inside the story.
Let's explore it electronically here and show us how you'd use it.
Okay, well Arthur's dancing here, but we've got two ways to go through the stories.
The read to me mode is not interactive.
That's for younger readers.
And the let me play mode, that's what we'll look at now, allows children to explore within
every page at their leisure.
This is the story of Arthur.
He's a third grade aardvark, and he's been forced to represent his class in an all-school
spell-a-thon.
So it deals with a lot of the school time stresses that children have to deal with.
What age group would this be for?
Six to ten.
Okay, let's take a look.
Now we're in the first page.
What's going to happen?
The bell rang.
The first day of school was over.
You'll see an opening animation.
Kids ran out of every classroom.
Everyone but Ruth.
So not only can the child read the book, but there's a reader built in that can read the
words to the child.
After the students filed out slowly, in alphabetical order.
We've all had teachers like that.
And how many of these animations are in the book?
We'll see you tomorrow.
There's 24 pages in this book.
Said their teacher, Mr. Ratburn.
And after the animation finishes...
Okay, so what can you do with, say, this page?
Okay, well, every word's been recorded individually, so you can practice your reading.
The bell rang.
You can do rap.
B-b-b-b-bell.
If I clicked on this ball here, you'd hear the whole page read to you again.
And then this page is filled with hidden buttons, and you never know quite what you're going
to find.
There's one.
We like to reward kids so that every time they explore something, something will happen.
Okay.
Even things that an adult might not choose to click on, but a kid would.
So, again, it's a lot more than just the old-fashioned book.
I mean, the child can really interact, play with the environment as if you were in that
room.
Yeah, and we've added extra dialogue, too, so children can go underneath the story and
hear what the characters are thinking.
We had fun today, didn't we?
Yes, Mr. Ratburn.
And the kids?
And you can hear what the kids are thinking.
This is going to be a long year.
And we all like to make fun of authority figures, so we put in a few surprises.
Here's another one.
Whoa.
And one more.
All right, now, quickly, if you could, you can do this in Spanish also.
Would you just turn it into a Spanish version for us right now?
Sure.
We could go into Spanish by hitting the two on the keyboard here, and the page will reload
in Spanish, and every word that you see as well as every word that you hear has been
re-recorded with new actors and actresses to give the book the same feeling in either
language.
So it's totally bilingual in terms of the printed word and in terms of the spoken word.
That's right.
And this is it, huh?
Mm-hmm.
That's terrific.
How much do these CDs cost?
Well, you'll find that CD for $49.95 to $59.95, depending on where you go to buy it.
All right, Bob, let's turn to Voyager and the books you have.
Now, a couple of differences.
You have sort of standard best-selling adult books here, which you've turned into computer
books, and you're doing floppies here.
You don't have to have a CD, right?
That's right.
We have books like The Complete Stories of Isaac Asimov, Autobiography of Malcolm X,
and the latest book about Richard Feynman, Genius, and it comes on a floppy disk formatted
for the Macintosh PowerBook, and we've worked very hard to make it look like a book and
act like a book.
All right, you also have the authoring toolkit for your expanded books.
Just explain that briefly, Bob.
Right.
We made a tool that all you have to understand really is the Macintosh pull-down menu structure
that lets authors, publishers, teachers, professors, students put books, put text into the expanded
book format.
So I have my text.
I have that.
I turn it into one of your kinds of books.
Right.
And you can do it in hours.
All right, let's take a look.
Now, you've got another one up here, the Picture of Dorian Gray, and show us what this expanded
book looks like, what the advantages are.
We go into the book, and it's formatted for the PowerBook, which is why it's cut off at
the bottom here.
And let's go into the beginning of the book, and this is what text looks like circa 1993.
Right, so at the moment, it looks like a book.
Right.
And you can do all things you expect to be able to do with a book.
You can place your cursor in the margin and just type notes if you want.
You can write your little notes.
Right.
You can, if you like to mark text vertically, you can do that.
You can select text and make it either underlined or bold if you like to do that.
You can mark the corner of a page by turning it down the way you normally can.
One thing you can't do with a regular book is you can actually find out all the pages
you have marked, and you can go to them that way.
We're able to have large text that comes free with this.
The most exciting stuff, though, is what you can do in terms of searching and navigating
through the book.
Right.
So I'm going to do something like youth, which is an important issue in this book.
And on the fly, the book is going to go and build a list for me of all occurrences of
the word youth, and it's going to put it for me in a list over here.
And let me get rid of this for you.
That did that pretty fast.
Yeah, and you can just click through these, and it'll go and find each occurrence for
you.
Or we can, for any word in the book, you can hold the mouse down on it, and you can get
the first reference, the previous reference, the next reference, the last reference, all
occurrences, which is what we did here, are all in context, which instead of giving us
just a list of page numbers, it's going to go through and actually give us a list with
two or three words on each side, showing us the context that the word appears in.
So here we see the burden of beauty, personal beauty, real beauty, everything but beauty.
So it's not just a book.
It's really a research tool, in a way, if you're working with a book.
It can be that, right.
And so it's real nice.
You can close these up this way.
We've got the, we can go to chapters this way.
Let me go to one chapter in particular.
This is the first in our Modern Library series, and we asked Bennett Cerf's son, Christopher,
to write a little story about the history of the Modern Library, because I knew that
he had a tape of his father talking about the day that he actually bought the Modern
Library.
And you have that in here?
And we've included that here, so you can get to hear Bennett Cerf talking about the day
he bought it.
I bought the Modern Library in 1925.
I'd been a liberal artist.
So again, it's a lot more than traditional old-fashioned photography.
Yes, it is.
Do you have any graphics or pictures you have in these books?
No, in general, we've represented the book as they were.
But you do have audio in there.
Yes, in this case.
But I don't know, things like, I've seen your Jurassic Park, and you do have some graphics
in there.
Oh, sure.
I mean, it's possible to put graphics in, and things with the toolkits made it very
easy to put in quick-time movies and audio quotes and pictures and sounds, et cetera.
And how many of the titles do you have out in this format?
We have 30 out in this format, but now there are hundreds of people all over the world
producing this format.
Well, using something like your toolkit.
Yes, using our toolkit to produce books.
All right.
Bob Liza, thank you very much.
Some electronic publishing ends up on magnetic or optical media, as we've seen, that you
buy or load into your computer.
But there's another form of electronic publishing that exists only as files on an online service.
These new media journals are called zines.
Jared Poore publishes his zine called Fact Sheet 5 Electric on a computer conferencing
system called The Well.
Fact Sheet 5 is a sort of reader's digest of other zines, and it covers a wide range
of subjects from art to technology.
Why are zines so popular with writers?
Poore says one reason is you don't have to deal with an editor rewriting your copy, and
your stories are available the instant they're written.
One of the main advantages of publishing electronically is it is very inexpensive to produce.
Paper is expensive.
It is consuming of both time and money to produce.
The converse of that, unfortunately, is electronic publications are expensive to consume since
you need technology or access to technology to acquire them, whereas anyone who can read
can read a paper publication.
Roger Krocker is a journalism teacher who also publishes a zine on The Well.
His zine deals with the subject of desktop publishing.
Krocker says there are other advantages to electronic publishing.
There's no question that as things exist today that you get very high quality graphics and
text in a print medium, and you do not get those in an electronic medium.
However, you get some things in the electronic medium that you can't get in the print medium.
For example, we're here at the Whole Earth Review, and they published their catalog on
a CD-ROM four or five years ago, and that includes sound clips from various bands.
How do you do that in a print newspaper?
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Joanell Patterson.
Electronic books can be more than just high-tech implementations of the printed version.
Some of the new media publishing titles let you get access to information that just can't
be represented in printed form alone.
Here to show us some examples are Paul Worthington, editor with Multimedia World, also with us
Fred Jones, the CEO of eBook.
Paul, we've seen several examples so far of electronic publishing, but what are the main
advantages?
What are the tradeoffs?
I mean, it's more expensive, it's more complicated than just picking up the book.
What do we get for the electronic version of a book?
You get a lot of convenience that you just can't get out of a heavy text.
An example here, I've got the Mayo Clinic Health Book.
It's a best-selling book for people who are curious about their health, want to look up
a symptom or something.
But you're not going to carry that around with you?
But you can carry the CD or use this at home.
It's got all the information in that book, plus animations and different things which
clearly explain health topics that you can't do in text.
All right, so it's more convenient in terms of size and what it has in it.
How about in terms of the ability to find information?
If I had the Mayo Clinic book, for example, I'm stuck with their index, right, or their
table of contents.
What are the advantages from a searching point of view?
Well, you fortunately have the computer to do the search for you.
It can go through keywords, through topics, and rather than you flipping through the pages
and dying before you find out what your disease is, it'll come up for you quickly.
All right, show me with, you have something called Cinemania as an example up here of
an electronic book.
What is it and show us how that would work.
Cinemania is an example of, they've got three different textbooks on film on one CD, but
they've also got stills from the pictures and something you can't do in any book whatsoever,
which is sound clips.
So you get an idea of how the text is.
So what I said was true.
There's no difference between the sexes.
So it's obviously better than we could get out of just the book.
We can hear clips, we can see those nice photos.
All right, let's talk about the search engine part of this.
Suppose I want to go in and look up Woody Allen films.
That's what I'm interested in.
How do I do that?
I'd say we've got a number of different filters here.
You can choose from the type of movie, the rating for the movie, the director, even like
how many stars the film had and whether it won an award or anything.
Okay, so I want Woody Allen.
And boom, there's all the Woody Allen movies.
Suppose you go back to that rating thing and I don't want the bad movies that got one star.
I want just say three or four star Woody Allen movies.
Fortunately, most of his movies were pretty good, but you can see as you click on the
star field there, the list here gets a little bit shorter at a time.
It's on Annie Hall.
What happens when we pull a particular movie up?
Well, the best thing is not only do you get the information on Annie Hall, the film, you
get the full cast of the film, the crew, the notes on the film from the different books.
And the best thing about it being on a computer is it's all searchable.
You get the nice color still also.
If I want to see more about what Diane Keaton did in this film, I just click on her name
and it shows me a bio of her works, her relationships, her different movies that she's made.
We can go down the train and see all the films that Annie Keaton made.
It's hypertext-like.
You can just sort of snake around and just follow whatever you happen to be interested
in.
As well as the search speed, you get more information than you would if you were just
looking something up in the regular book form.
Yeah.
All right, Fred, let's turn to you now in e-book.
What approach are you taking to electronic publishing?
What are the features you're trying to put into your electronic books?
Let me show you one of our books.
This is The White Horse Child by Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning science fiction author
Greg Baer.
We have a series of elements to the story, of multimedia elements to the electronic book,
starting with an interview with the author himself.
This is a series of questions.
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.
The White Horse Child was written in 1976, I believe.
That's great.
One of the things you always want to do is talk to the author and you actually do it
here.
Absolutely.
There's a whole series of questions that you can deal with there.
We also have an animation gallery and a learning guide in the story as well.
But the main thing is the story.
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.
This particular story takes place in a very dry and ordinary world for the young boy that's
the protagonist.
He encounters a mystical couple who explain and teach him how to have an imagination and
how to tell stories.
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 the author.
We can actually get the whole book read to us also.
Absolutely.
What's the film clip icon?
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.
So he transcends from one part of the story in black and white to this color imagination,
kind of like the Wizard of Oz.
What other features are in here?
We also have the ability as the stories have been read to a child to look at hot spots
that bring up definitions of difficult words.
So you've got a word that the reader doesn't understand, boom, you click on it and you
get the definition.
Correct.
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, 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.
And this is designed specifically to reinforce that kind of activity.
All right, you have one other e-book you're going to show us on impressionism.
Now, what new features does that bring to it?
This is text-oriented and that is picture-oriented.
So the whole user interface and the way it operates focuses on pictures rather than text.
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.
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.
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.
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, so the detail is a closer look of the art itself.
We also have an interesting feature.
It allows us to, 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, kind of to set the mood while you look at
the paintings.
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.
So this is one of a series of art history titles that integrate together for the Electronic
Library of Art.
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?
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?
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.
Well, that's what we've seen today.
Thanks very much to both of you.
That's our look at electronic publishing.
Stay tuned now for this week's computer news on Random Access.
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.
It's a combination cell phone, fax machine, email terminal, and pen pad.
Base price is $1,999.
Computers are changing the global trading business.
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.
The new system was developed by AT&T and is called NIMEX.
Atari has announced plans for its new Jaguar dedicated computer game system.
Jaguar will use a 64-bit processor and offer 16 million colors, 3D images, and interactive
multimedia.
The units will be manufactured by IBM.
Atari says retail price will be $200 compared to an expected $700 price tag on its main
competitor, the new 3DO system.
Time now for this week's software review from Paul Schindler of Windows Magazine, provided
courtesy of CMP Publications.
Today we're going to look at an exciting and challenging game for the Macintosh called
Pararena.
Now, this game was once shareware, and now it's commercial, and it's hot.
The opening screen is this Japanese-style cartoon.
Pararena is basically rollerball in zero gravity.
You can select your league, start low.
Select your opponent, they're all tough.
Choose whether you want to play against the computer, an opponent, or someone else in
the network.
Yes, now you can bring AppleTalk to its knees by playing a game across the office.
Instant replay is an option.
We'll let the computer play itself.
This game is very difficult to play.
The mouse just nudges you in a particular direction.
You press space to stop.
If you go off the edge, you disappear.
Pararena comes from Cassidy and Green in Salinas, California.
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Paul Schindler.
A company called Ergonomics has announced a new keyboard designed to reduce repetitive
strain injuries.
It features angled key rows, a wrist rest, built-in trackball, and a newly designed circular
pod for cursor control and function keys.
First there was the Miracle Piano, but now Ibis Solutions has announced the next step
in music teaching software.
Soloist, a software program that uses pitch recognition technology to teach you how to
play an instrument.
The software requires a sound...