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 --> 00:37.680 Would you read a book on an LCD screen? 00:37.680 --> 00:39.360 Well, lots of people are. 00:39.360 --> 00:59.700 Today, we'll take a look at electronic books on this edition of the Computer Chronicles. 00:59.700 --> 01:03.860 Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by Intel, the world's leading manufacturer 01:03.860 --> 01:05.220 of microprocessors. 01:05.220 --> 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 --> 01:15.900 materials to help manage software. 01:15.900 --> 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 Shafae 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 --> 01:39.020 Okay, Stuart, what we've done is we've taken the entire film of A Hard Day's Night and 01:39.020 --> 01:41.300 put it in Apple's QuickTime format onto a CD-ROM. 01:41.300 --> 01:42.500 So the whole movie's on the disc? 01:42.500 --> 01:43.500 The whole movie's on the disc. 01:43.500 --> 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 --> 01:54.820 I'll show you a piece of the movie. 01:54.820 --> 02:01.060 The movie will start playing and here's a commentary about the movie you can read along 02:01.060 --> 02:03.700 with the movie. 02:03.700 --> 02:06.580 Down here in the table of contents, let me go to the cast. 02:06.580 --> 02:07.580 I'll go to the grandfather. 02:07.580 --> 02:10.100 So we could look up something about any of the cast members. 02:10.100 --> 02:11.100 Right, here's Wilford Bramble. 02:11.100 --> 02:15.780 And this is a part of the movie he's in. 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 --> 02:25.540 So here's an introduction to the song and here's the song itself. 02:25.540 --> 02:32.460 What's funny is it's cued up that part of the movie. 02:32.460 --> 02:35.740 So it's the movie, it's a CD, it's a book, plus. 02:35.740 --> 02:36.740 It's all those things. 02:36.740 --> 02:39.540 We're experimenting with what these new genres are like. 02:39.540 --> 02:42.220 This was a really wonderful property to experiment with. 02:42.220 --> 02:45.600 Alright, we're going to take a look at many of the aspects of electronic publishing today 02:45.600 --> 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 --> 03:09.580 Smolin's book follows a young woman on her year-long journey across Australia. 03:09.580 --> 03:13.980 During the course of that year, Smolin shot over 18,000 photographs. 03:13.980 --> 03:18.600 He did an article for National Geographic, but they only used 31 pictures. 03:18.600 --> 03:24.320 He then did this 224-page book, but he still had thousands of great pictures that hadn't 03:24.320 --> 03:25.320 been used. 03:25.320 --> 03:29.300 Have you ever read a book that you loved and when you turned the last page of the book, 03:29.300 --> 03:31.300 you had a feeling of sadness? 03:31.300 --> 03:35.780 Suddenly as if this whole world that existed inside of your head was suddenly over. 03:35.780 --> 03:38.340 I thought, wouldn't it be great if people fell in love with Robin and were impressed 03:38.340 --> 03:42.560 by her courage and moved by her relationship with the camels and with their dog? 03:42.560 --> 03:45.700 Suddenly you turn the last page of this book, From Alice to Ocean, and there are these two 03:45.700 --> 03:49.300 shiny CDs floating in the back of the book. 03:49.300 --> 03:52.180 You're told that there are pictures on here you didn't get to see in the book, which is 03:52.180 --> 03:55.580 one of the real pleasures for me, is I got to put many more pictures onto the CDs than 03:55.580 --> 03:56.900 I got into the book. 03:56.900 --> 04:00.700 It's a whole other way, another path through the same story. 04:00.700 --> 04:03.620 One disc is a CD-ROM that runs on a Macintosh. 04:03.620 --> 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 And 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 --> 04:36.060 You're driving along for 200 or 300 miles in nothing but flat, barren landscape. 04:36.060 --> 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 --> 04:46.060 One of the things that has amazed the publishing community is I took a story which was 15 years 04:46.060 --> 04:47.860 old, which was very well known. 04:47.860 --> 04:49.700 It was the cover of National Geographic. 04:49.700 --> 04:53.660 Robin had written a book called Tracks, which sold half a million copies around the world. 04:53.660 --> 04:57.860 And suddenly we came out with a whole brand new look at it, and much to everyone's amazement, 04:57.860 --> 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 --> 05:06.100 So if you think of all the material that publishers are sitting on all over the world, every time 05:06.100 --> 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 Joanelle Patterson. 05:19.700 --> 05:25.420 For instance, go look for the Polar Explorer, Raoul Amundsen, it's in the volume A. So we 05:25.420 --> 05:27.060 point at it and click, and it's going out. 05:27.060 --> 05:28.060 You essentially pull down volume A. 05:28.060 --> 05:33.340 There it is. 05:33.340 --> 05:36.100 There can be problems reading a book off a computer. 05:36.100 --> 05:37.820 Number one, you need a comfortable interface. 05:37.820 --> 05:42.220 And number two, if the medium is CD-ROM, you need to get around the slow access time inherent 05:42.220 --> 05:43.220 in an optical drive. 05:43.220 --> 05:47.820 Here to show us solutions to both of those problems and more are Liza Wyman of Broderbund 05:47.820 --> 05:50.380 and also back with us Bob Stein of Voyager. 05:50.380 --> 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 words 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 --> 06:15.420 explore within every page of the book. 06:15.420 --> 06:18.220 So it's not just the book turned into the computer, but a lot more. 06:18.220 --> 06:22.660 Yeah, and we ship the book with the CD-ROM so that after a child explores it electronically, 06:22.660 --> 06:24.380 they can go inside the story. 06:24.380 --> 06:26.580 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 --> 06:31.740 The read to me mode is not interactive. 06:31.740 --> 06:32.740 That's for younger readers. 06:32.740 --> 06:37.580 And the let me play mode, that's what we'll look at now, allows children to explore within 06:37.580 --> 06:39.280 every page at their leisure. 06:39.280 --> 06:40.280 This is the story of Arthur. 06:40.280 --> 06:44.340 He's a third grade aardvark, and he's been forced to represent his class in an all-school 06:44.340 --> 06:45.700 spell-a-thon. 06:45.700 --> 06:49.100 So it deals with a lot of the school time stresses that children have to deal with. 06:49.100 --> 06:50.100 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 --> 06:53.100 Now we're in the first page. 06:53.100 --> 06:54.100 What's going to happen? 06:54.100 --> 06:55.100 The bell rang. 06:55.100 --> 06:59.100 The first day of school was over. 06:59.100 --> 07:00.100 You'll see an opening animation. 07:00.100 --> 07:01.940 Kids ran out of every classroom. 07:01.940 --> 07:02.940 Everyone but Ruth. 07:02.940 --> 07:06.300 So not only can the child read the book, but there's a reader built in that can read the 07:06.300 --> 07:10.020 words to the child. 07:10.020 --> 07:14.540 After the students filed out slowly, in alphabetical order. 07:14.540 --> 07:23.220 We've all had teachers like that. 07:23.220 --> 07:24.220 And how many of these animations are in the book? 07:24.220 --> 07:25.220 We'll see you tomorrow. 07:25.220 --> 07:26.820 There's 24 pages in this book. 07:26.820 --> 07:29.300 Said their teacher, Mr. Ratburn. 07:29.300 --> 07:30.300 And after the animation finishes... 07:30.300 --> 07:31.660 Okay, so what can you do with, say, this page? 07:31.660 --> 07:35.220 Okay, well, every word's been recorded individually, so you can practice your reading. 07:35.220 --> 07:37.140 The bell rang. 07:37.140 --> 07:38.140 You can do rap. 07:38.140 --> 07:39.140 B-b-b-b-bell. 07:39.140 --> 07:42.060 If I clicked on this ball here, you'd hear the whole page read to you again. 07:42.060 --> 07:45.100 And then this page is filled with hidden buttons, and you never know quite what you're going 07:45.100 --> 07:46.100 to find. 07:46.100 --> 07:47.100 There's one. 07:47.100 --> 07:55.100 We like to reward kids so that every time they explore something, something will happen. 07:55.100 --> 07:56.100 Okay. 07:56.100 --> 08:01.900 Even things that an adult might not choose to click on, but a kid would. 08:01.900 --> 08:05.380 So, again, it's a lot more than just the old-fashioned book. 08:05.380 --> 08:08.820 I mean, the child can really interact, play with the environment as if you were in that 08:08.820 --> 08:09.820 room. 08:09.820 --> 08:12.940 Yeah, and we've added extra dialogue, too, so children can go underneath the story and 08:12.940 --> 08:14.420 hear what the characters are thinking. 08:14.420 --> 08:17.420 We had fun today, didn't we? 08:17.420 --> 08:19.860 Yes, Mr. Ratburn. 08:19.860 --> 08:20.860 And the kids? 08:20.860 --> 08:23.580 And you can hear what the kids are thinking. 08:23.580 --> 08:27.540 This is going to be a long year. 08:27.540 --> 08:32.980 And we all like to make fun of authority figures, so we put in a few surprises. 08:32.980 --> 08:33.980 Here's another one. 08:33.980 --> 08:34.980 Whoa. 08:34.980 --> 08:35.980 And one more. 08:35.980 --> 08:41.700 All right, now, quickly, if you could, you can do this in Spanish also. 08:41.700 --> 08:44.140 Would you just turn it into a Spanish version for us right now? 08:44.140 --> 08:45.140 Sure. 08:45.140 --> 08:47.940 We could go into Spanish by hitting the two on the keyboard here, and the page will reload 08:47.940 --> 08:51.500 in Spanish, and every word that you see as well as every word that you hear has been 08:51.500 --> 08:55.940 re-recorded with new actors and actresses to give the book the same feeling in either 08:55.940 --> 08:56.940 language. 08:56.940 --> 09:00.220 So it's totally bilingual in terms of the printed word and in terms of the spoken word. 09:00.220 --> 09:01.220 That's right. 09:01.220 --> 09:02.220 And this is it, huh? 09:02.220 --> 09:03.220 Mm-hmm. 09:03.220 --> 09:04.220 That's terrific. 09:04.220 --> 09:06.900 How much do these CDs cost? 09:06.900 --> 09:11.900 Well, you'll find that CD for $49.95 to $59.95, depending on where you go to buy it. 09:11.900 --> 09:14.140 All right, Bob, let's turn to Voyager and the books you have. 09:14.140 --> 09:15.260 Now, a couple of differences. 09:15.260 --> 09:20.340 You have sort of standard best-selling adult books here, which you've turned into computer 09:20.340 --> 09:22.140 books, and you're doing floppies here. 09:22.140 --> 09:23.500 You don't have to have a CD, right? 09:23.500 --> 09:24.500 That's right. 09:24.500 --> 09:28.620 We have books like The Complete Stories of Isaac Asimov, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 09:28.620 --> 09:32.540 and the latest book about Richard Feynman, Genius, and it comes on a floppy disk formatted 09:32.540 --> 09:36.580 for the Macintosh PowerBook, and we've worked very hard to make it look like a book and 09:36.580 --> 09:37.580 act like a book. 09:37.580 --> 09:40.260 All right, you also have the authoring toolkit for your expanded books. 09:40.260 --> 09:41.340 Just explain that briefly, Bob. 09:41.340 --> 09:42.340 Right. 09:42.340 --> 09:46.380 We made a tool that all you have to understand really is the Macintosh pull-down menu structure 09:46.380 --> 09:51.980 that lets authors, publishers, teachers, professors, students put books, put text into the expanded 09:51.980 --> 09:52.980 book format. 09:52.980 --> 09:53.980 So I have my text. 09:53.980 --> 09:54.980 I have that. 09:54.980 --> 09:55.980 I turn it into one of your kinds of books. 09:55.980 --> 09:56.980 Right. 09:56.980 --> 09:57.980 And you can do it in hours. 09:57.980 --> 09:58.980 All right, let's take a look. 09:58.980 --> 10:00.260 Now, you've got another one up here, the Picture of Dorian Gray, and show us what this expanded 10:00.260 --> 10:02.300 book looks like, what the advantages are. 10:02.300 --> 10:08.220 We go into the book, and it's formatted for the PowerBook, which is why it's cut off at 10:08.220 --> 10:09.220 the bottom here. 10:09.220 --> 10:15.140 And let's go into the beginning of the book, and this is what text looks like circa 1993. 10:15.140 --> 10:17.460 Right, so at the moment, it looks like a book. 10:17.460 --> 10:18.460 Right. 10:18.460 --> 10:20.660 And you can do all things you expect to be able to do with a book. 10:20.660 --> 10:23.300 You can place your cursor in the margin and just type notes if you want. 10:23.300 --> 10:24.300 You can write your little notes. 10:24.300 --> 10:25.300 Right. 10:25.300 --> 10:29.100 You can, if you like to mark text vertically, you can do that. 10:29.100 --> 10:36.020 You can select text and make it either underlined or bold if you like to do that. 10:36.020 --> 10:40.300 You can mark the corner of a page by turning it down the way you normally can. 10:40.300 --> 10:43.940 One thing you can't do with a regular book is you can actually find out all the pages 10:43.940 --> 10:48.140 you have marked, and you can go to them that way. 10:48.140 --> 10:51.740 We're able to have large text that comes free with this. 10:51.740 --> 10:55.540 The most exciting stuff, though, is what you can do in terms of searching and navigating 10:55.540 --> 10:56.540 through the book. 10:56.540 --> 10:57.540 Right. 10:57.540 --> 11:02.180 So I'm going to do something like youth, which is an important issue in this book. 11:02.180 --> 11:06.140 And on the fly, the book is going to go and build a list for me of all occurrences of 11:06.140 --> 11:10.620 the word youth, and it's going to put it for me in a list over here. 11:10.620 --> 11:12.780 And let me get rid of this for you. 11:12.780 --> 11:14.460 That did that pretty fast. 11:14.460 --> 11:18.180 Yeah, and you can just click through these, and it'll go and find each occurrence for 11:18.180 --> 11:19.940 you. 11:19.940 --> 11:23.660 Or we can, for any word in the book, you can hold the mouse down on it, and you can get 11:23.660 --> 11:27.660 the first reference, the previous reference, the next reference, the last reference, all 11:27.660 --> 11:31.940 occurrences, which is what we did here, are all in context, which instead of giving us 11:31.940 --> 11:35.380 just a list of page numbers, it's going to go through and actually give us a list with 11:35.380 --> 11:39.860 two or three words on each side, showing us the context that the word appears in. 11:39.860 --> 11:45.060 So here we see the burden of beauty, personal beauty, real beauty, everything but beauty. 11:45.060 --> 11:46.060 So it's not just a book. 11:46.060 --> 11:47.740 It's really a research tool, in a way, if you're working with a book. 11:47.740 --> 11:48.740 It can be that, right. 11:48.740 --> 11:49.740 And so it's real nice. 11:49.740 --> 11:51.900 You can close these up this way. 11:51.900 --> 11:54.740 We've got the, we can go to chapters this way. 11:54.740 --> 11:58.180 Let me go to one chapter in particular. 11:58.180 --> 12:02.340 This is the first in our Modern Library series, and we asked Bennett Cerf's son, Christopher, 12:02.340 --> 12:05.780 to write a little story about the history of the Modern Library, because I knew that 12:05.780 --> 12:08.860 he had a tape of his father talking about the day that he actually bought the Modern 12:08.860 --> 12:09.860 Library. 12:09.860 --> 12:10.860 And you have that in here? 12:10.860 --> 12:13.860 And we've included that here, so you can get to hear Bennett Cerf talking about the day 12:13.860 --> 12:14.860 he bought it. 12:14.860 --> 12:15.860 I bought the Modern Library in 1925. 12:15.860 --> 12:16.860 I'd been a liberal artist. 12:16.860 --> 12:19.860 So again, it's a lot more than traditional old-fashioned photography. 12:19.860 --> 12:20.860 Yes, it is. 12:20.860 --> 12:22.580 Do you have any graphics or pictures you have in these books? 12:22.580 --> 12:25.180 No, in general, we've represented the book as they were. 12:25.180 --> 12:26.180 But you do have audio in there. 12:26.180 --> 12:27.180 Yes, in this case. 12:27.180 --> 12:30.620 But I don't know, things like, I've seen your Jurassic Park, and you do have some graphics 12:30.620 --> 12:31.620 in there. 12:31.620 --> 12:32.620 Oh, sure. 12:32.620 --> 12:34.220 I mean, it's possible to put graphics in, and things with the toolkits made it very 12:34.220 --> 12:39.340 easy to put in quick-time movies and audio quotes and pictures and sounds, et cetera. 12:39.340 --> 12:41.140 And how many of the titles do you have out in this format? 12:41.140 --> 12:44.500 We have 30 out in this format, but now there are hundreds of people all over the world 12:44.500 --> 12:45.500 producing this format. 12:45.500 --> 12:46.500 Well, using something like your toolkit. 12:46.500 --> 12:48.300 Yes, using our toolkit to produce books. 12:48.300 --> 12:49.300 All right. 12:49.300 --> 12:50.560 Bob Liza, thank you very much. 12:50.560 --> 12:54.460 Some electronic publishing ends up on magnetic or optical media, as we've seen, that you 12:54.460 --> 12:56.100 buy or load into your computer. 12:56.100 --> 13:01.540 But there's another form of electronic publishing that exists only as files on an online service. 13:01.540 --> 13:05.620 These new media journals are called zines. 13:05.620 --> 13:11.180 Jared Poore publishes his zine called Fact Sheet 5 Electric on a computer conferencing 13:11.180 --> 13:13.380 system called The Well. 13:13.380 --> 13:18.020 Fact Sheet 5 is a sort of reader's digest of other zines, and it covers a wide range 13:18.020 --> 13:20.840 of subjects from art to technology. 13:20.840 --> 13:23.660 Why are zines so popular with writers? 13:23.660 --> 13:28.300 Poore says one reason is you don't have to deal with an editor rewriting your copy, and 13:28.300 --> 13:31.820 your stories are available the instant they're written. 13:31.820 --> 13:40.180 One of the main advantages of publishing electronically is it is very inexpensive to produce. 13:40.180 --> 13:42.040 Paper is expensive. 13:42.040 --> 13:47.660 It is consuming of both time and money to produce. 13:47.660 --> 13:53.300 The converse of that, unfortunately, is electronic publications are expensive to consume since 13:53.300 --> 13:59.780 you need technology or access to technology to acquire them, whereas anyone who can read 13:59.780 --> 14:02.620 can read a paper publication. 14:02.620 --> 14:07.740 Roger Krocker is a journalism teacher who also publishes a zine on The Well. 14:07.740 --> 14:11.100 His zine deals with the subject of desktop publishing. 14:11.100 --> 14:15.380 Krocker says there are other advantages to electronic publishing. 14:15.380 --> 14:21.420 There's no question that as things exist today that you get very high quality graphics and 14:21.420 --> 14:25.500 text in a print medium, and you do not get those in an electronic medium. 14:25.500 --> 14:29.500 However, you get some things in the electronic medium that you can't get in the print medium. 14:29.500 --> 14:34.820 For example, we're here at the Whole Earth Review, and they published their catalog on 14:34.820 --> 14:41.300 a CD-ROM four or five years ago, and that includes sound clips from various bands. 14:41.300 --> 14:43.100 How do you do that in a print newspaper? 14:43.100 --> 14:59.340 For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Joanell Patterson. 14:59.340 --> 15:03.180 Electronic books can be more than just high-tech implementations of the printed version. 15:03.180 --> 15:07.260 Some of the new media publishing titles let you get access to information that just can't 15:07.260 --> 15:09.660 be represented in printed form alone. 15:09.660 --> 15:13.980 Here to show us some examples are Paul Worthington, editor with Multimedia World, also with us 15:13.980 --> 15:16.020 Fred Jones, the CEO of eBook. 15:16.020 --> 15:20.860 Paul, we've seen several examples so far of electronic publishing, but what are the main 15:20.860 --> 15:21.860 advantages? 15:21.860 --> 15:22.860 What are the tradeoffs? 15:22.860 --> 15:24.780 I mean, it's more expensive, it's more complicated than just picking up the book. 15:24.780 --> 15:27.220 What do we get for the electronic version of a book? 15:27.220 --> 15:30.380 You get a lot of convenience that you just can't get out of a heavy text. 15:30.380 --> 15:32.460 An example here, I've got the Mayo Clinic Health Book. 15:32.460 --> 15:35.220 It's a best-selling book for people who are curious about their health, want to look up 15:35.220 --> 15:36.220 a symptom or something. 15:36.220 --> 15:37.620 But you're not going to carry that around with you? 15:37.620 --> 15:39.660 But you can carry the CD or use this at home. 15:39.660 --> 15:42.900 It's got all the information in that book, plus animations and different things which 15:42.900 --> 15:45.460 clearly explain health topics that you can't do in text. 15:45.460 --> 15:48.700 All right, so it's more convenient in terms of size and what it has in it. 15:48.700 --> 15:50.820 How about in terms of the ability to find information? 15:50.820 --> 15:54.260 If I had the Mayo Clinic book, for example, I'm stuck with their index, right, or their 15:54.260 --> 15:55.580 table of contents. 15:55.580 --> 15:57.620 What are the advantages from a searching point of view? 15:57.620 --> 16:00.180 Well, you fortunately have the computer to do the search for you. 16:00.180 --> 16:03.900 It can go through keywords, through topics, and rather than you flipping through the pages 16:03.900 --> 16:07.180 and dying before you find out what your disease is, it'll come up for you quickly. 16:07.180 --> 16:10.620 All right, show me with, you have something called Cinemania as an example up here of 16:10.620 --> 16:11.620 an electronic book. 16:11.620 --> 16:12.940 What is it and show us how that would work. 16:12.940 --> 16:17.900 Cinemania is an example of, they've got three different textbooks on film on one CD, but 16:17.900 --> 16:21.380 they've also got stills from the pictures and something you can't do in any book whatsoever, 16:21.380 --> 16:22.380 which is sound clips. 16:22.380 --> 16:23.380 So you get an idea of how the text is. 16:23.380 --> 16:24.380 So what I said was true. 16:24.380 --> 16:27.060 There's no difference between the sexes. 16:27.060 --> 16:29.140 So it's obviously better than we could get out of just the book. 16:29.140 --> 16:30.860 We can hear clips, we can see those nice photos. 16:30.860 --> 16:33.420 All right, let's talk about the search engine part of this. 16:33.420 --> 16:35.860 Suppose I want to go in and look up Woody Allen films. 16:35.860 --> 16:36.860 That's what I'm interested in. 16:36.860 --> 16:37.860 How do I do that? 16:37.860 --> 16:39.660 I'd say we've got a number of different filters here. 16:39.660 --> 16:43.900 You can choose from the type of movie, the rating for the movie, the director, even like 16:43.900 --> 16:46.660 how many stars the film had and whether it won an award or anything. 16:46.660 --> 16:49.660 Okay, so I want Woody Allen. 16:49.660 --> 16:51.900 And boom, there's all the Woody Allen movies. 16:51.900 --> 16:54.820 Suppose you go back to that rating thing and I don't want the bad movies that got one star. 16:54.820 --> 16:57.100 I want just say three or four star Woody Allen movies. 16:57.100 --> 17:00.860 Fortunately, most of his movies were pretty good, but you can see as you click on the 17:00.860 --> 17:05.460 star field there, the list here gets a little bit shorter at a time. 17:05.460 --> 17:06.460 It's on Annie Hall. 17:06.460 --> 17:08.380 What happens when we pull a particular movie up? 17:08.380 --> 17:12.020 Well, the best thing is not only do you get the information on Annie Hall, the film, you 17:12.020 --> 17:17.940 get the full cast of the film, the crew, the notes on the film from the different books. 17:17.940 --> 17:20.900 And the best thing about it being on a computer is it's all searchable. 17:20.900 --> 17:23.100 You get the nice color still also. 17:23.100 --> 17:28.100 If I want to see more about what Diane Keaton did in this film, I just click on her name 17:28.100 --> 17:32.980 and it shows me a bio of her works, her relationships, her different movies that she's made. 17:32.980 --> 17:35.340 We can go down the train and see all the films that Annie Keaton made. 17:35.340 --> 17:36.500 It's hypertext-like. 17:36.500 --> 17:39.260 You can just sort of snake around and just follow whatever you happen to be interested 17:39.260 --> 17:40.260 in. 17:40.260 --> 17:42.260 As well as the search speed, you get more information than you would if you were just 17:42.260 --> 17:44.300 looking something up in the regular book form. 17:44.300 --> 17:45.300 Yeah. 17:45.300 --> 17:46.780 All right, Fred, let's turn to you now in e-book. 17:46.780 --> 17:49.020 What approach are you taking to electronic publishing? 17:49.020 --> 17:52.020 What are the features you're trying to put into your electronic books? 17:52.020 --> 17:53.400 Let me show you one of our books. 17:53.400 --> 17:59.380 This is The White Horse Child by Hugo and Nebula Awards-winning science fiction author 17:59.380 --> 18:01.100 Greg Baer. 18:01.100 --> 18:06.260 We have a series of elements to the story, of multimedia elements to the electronic book, 18:06.260 --> 18:10.580 starting with an interview with the author himself. 18:10.580 --> 18:11.940 This is a series of questions. 18:11.940 --> 18:16.160 For example, how was The White Horse Child written, which you can click on and get a 18:16.160 --> 18:18.980 digital movie response of the author answering the question. 18:18.980 --> 18:21.980 The White Horse Child was written in 1976, I believe. 18:21.980 --> 18:22.980 That's great. 18:22.980 --> 18:26.100 One of the things you always want to do is talk to the author and you actually do it 18:26.100 --> 18:27.100 here. 18:27.100 --> 18:28.100 Absolutely. 18:28.100 --> 18:30.020 There's a whole series of questions that you can deal with there. 18:30.020 --> 18:35.020 We also have an animation gallery and a learning guide in the story as well. 18:35.020 --> 18:37.200 But the main thing is the story. 18:37.200 --> 18:44.420 The story, which I'm going to go to the search engine and go to a particular page in the 18:44.420 --> 18:47.740 story that has some elements on it I want to show. 18:47.740 --> 18:58.260 This particular story takes place in a very dry and ordinary world for the young boy that's 18:58.260 --> 18:59.940 the protagonist. 18:59.940 --> 19:05.060 He encounters a mystical couple who explain and teach him how to have an imagination and 19:05.060 --> 19:06.660 how to tell stories. 19:06.660 --> 19:13.260 So while he's in his ordinary life, we have black and white words on the screen reinforced 19:13.260 --> 19:16.140 by icons that allow you to listen to the author. 19:16.140 --> 19:18.140 We can actually get the whole book read to us also. 19:18.140 --> 19:19.140 Absolutely. 19:19.140 --> 19:20.660 What's the film clip icon? 19:20.660 --> 19:25.020 The film clip icon takes you out into his world of imagination and actually shows you 19:25.020 --> 19:30.900 a colorful animation of the story that he's learning to tell from the mystical couple 19:30.900 --> 19:31.900 in it. 19:31.900 --> 19:36.820 So he transcends from one part of the story in black and white to this color imagination, 19:36.820 --> 19:38.700 kind of like the Wizard of Oz. 19:38.700 --> 19:40.660 What other features are in here? 19:40.660 --> 19:49.260 We also have the ability as the stories have been read to a child to look at hot spots 19:49.260 --> 19:51.260 that bring up definitions of difficult words. 19:51.260 --> 19:54.180 So you've got a word that the reader doesn't understand, boom, you click on it and you 19:54.180 --> 19:55.180 get the definition. 19:55.180 --> 19:56.180 Correct. 19:56.180 --> 20:01.580 This is one particular way to do electronic books designed for older children, where as 20:01.580 --> 20:07.500 opposed to Arthur's Teacher's Trouble, where it's for pre-readers or early readers, this 20:07.500 --> 20:13.580 is for children who are much older, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 years old, who are learning to read 20:13.580 --> 20:16.660 in sentences and paragraphs and concepts. 20:16.660 --> 20:19.620 And this is designed specifically to reinforce that kind of activity. 20:19.620 --> 20:22.580 All right, you have one other e-book you're going to show us on impressionism. 20:22.580 --> 20:25.500 Now, what new features does that bring to it? 20:25.500 --> 20:28.380 This is text-oriented and that is picture-oriented. 20:28.380 --> 20:34.460 So the whole user interface and the way it operates focuses on pictures rather than text. 20:34.460 --> 20:40.860 So we have a series of slide trays is one of the ways you can access it, or you can 20:40.860 --> 20:42.580 access it by data cards. 20:42.580 --> 20:49.420 In this case, we've pulled up paintings of Mary Cassatt, and we can click on one of the 20:49.420 --> 20:54.820 little icons and bring up a larger version of the image. 20:54.820 --> 21:01.180 Linked to that larger image is a series of buttons across the top that allows us to look 21:01.180 --> 21:08.260 at the data about the image, where it's hanging, what size it is, and what date it is. 21:08.260 --> 21:15.700 A biography of the artist, which can be scrolled, read, cut and pasted, or used in a book report 21:15.700 --> 21:18.780 for a kid in school. 21:18.780 --> 21:24.740 And additional details of the art, so the detail is a closer look of the art itself. 21:24.740 --> 21:26.420 We also have an interesting feature. 21:26.420 --> 21:32.620 It allows us to, since this is impressionism, it allows us to select impressionist music 21:32.620 --> 21:33.620 to play in the background. 21:33.620 --> 21:40.460 And this is playing on the Sound Blaster Wave MIDI card, so that you hear a very good example 21:40.460 --> 21:44.020 of impressionist music in the background, kind of to set the mood while you look at 21:44.020 --> 21:45.460 the paintings. 21:45.460 --> 21:49.380 We can go to an additional painting and look at two at once. 21:49.380 --> 21:56.020 So you can, as an art student, compare multiple pictures together and have essentially a gallery 21:56.020 --> 22:00.140 of paintings going on the screen at the same time. 22:00.140 --> 22:07.700 So this is one of a series of art history titles that integrate together for the Electronic 22:07.700 --> 22:08.700 Library of Art. 22:08.700 --> 22:12.480 I just want to ask you in closing, Paul, from your point of view here as a kind of journalist 22:12.480 --> 22:15.820 looking at this stuff, how serious is the electronic publishing? 22:15.820 --> 22:19.380 Is this kind of a toy, a gimmick for people with a lot of money, or is this really the 22:19.380 --> 22:21.380 way we're going to be dealing with information in the future? 22:21.380 --> 22:25.780 I think in the last couple of years it's evolved from being a gimmick to something that's a 22:25.780 --> 22:26.780 new media. 22:26.780 --> 22:30.260 And you can't say where it's going, but we have people who are adding to what we have 22:30.260 --> 22:34.500 in text and it can turn into something completely different, a whole new way of telling stories, 22:34.500 --> 22:36.580 a whole new way of entertaining and educating ourselves. 22:36.580 --> 22:37.940 Well, that's what we've seen today. 22:37.940 --> 22:39.220 Thanks very much to both of you. 22:39.220 --> 22:40.820 That's our look at electronic publishing. 22:40.820 --> 23:01.220 Stay tuned now for this week's computer news on Random Access. 23:01.220 --> 23:05.460 In the Random Access file this week, the first real PDA product is on the market. 23:05.460 --> 23:10.340 AT&T has announced the availability of its EO 440 personal communicator. 23:10.340 --> 23:14.900 It's a combination cell phone, fax machine, email terminal, and pen pad. 23:14.900 --> 23:18.500 Base price is $1,999. 23:18.500 --> 23:20.860 Computers are changing the global trading business. 23:20.860 --> 23:26.400 The New York Mercantile Exchange has announced the first ever 24-hour market accessible worldwide 23:26.400 --> 23:31.340 by computer terminal for virtually instantaneous transactions around the clock. 23:31.340 --> 23:35.380 The new system was developed by AT&T and is called NIMEX. 23:35.380 --> 23:39.820 Atari has announced plans for its new Jaguar dedicated computer game system. 23:39.820 --> 23:46.020 Jaguar will use a 64-bit processor and offer 16 million colors, 3D images, and interactive 23:46.020 --> 23:47.380 multimedia. 23:47.380 --> 23:49.980 The units will be manufactured by IBM. 23:49.980 --> 23:55.980 Atari says retail price will be $200 compared to an expected $700 price tag on its main 23:55.980 --> 23:58.860 competitor, the new 3DO system. 23:58.860 --> 24:03.220 Time now for this week's software review from Paul Schindler of Windows Magazine, provided 24:03.220 --> 24:06.500 courtesy of CMP Publications. 24:06.500 --> 24:10.660 Today we're going to look at an exciting and challenging game for the Macintosh called 24:10.660 --> 24:11.660 Pararena. 24:11.660 --> 24:16.140 Now, this game was once shareware, and now it's commercial, and it's hot. 24:16.140 --> 24:19.060 The opening screen is this Japanese-style cartoon. 24:19.060 --> 24:22.140 Pararena is basically rollerball in zero gravity. 24:22.140 --> 24:24.720 You can select your league, start low. 24:24.720 --> 24:26.820 Select your opponent, they're all tough. 24:26.820 --> 24:30.580 Choose whether you want to play against the computer, an opponent, or someone else in 24:30.580 --> 24:31.580 the network. 24:31.580 --> 24:36.660 Yes, now you can bring AppleTalk to its knees by playing a game across the office. 24:36.660 --> 24:38.380 Instant replay is an option. 24:38.380 --> 24:58.740 We'll let the computer play itself. 24:58.740 --> 25:00.840 This game is very difficult to play. 25:00.840 --> 25:03.600 The mouse just nudges you in a particular direction. 25:03.600 --> 25:04.860 You press space to stop. 25:04.860 --> 25:07.260 If you go off the edge, you disappear. 25:07.260 --> 25:10.420 Pararena comes from Cassidy and Green in Salinas, California. 25:10.420 --> 25:13.780 For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Paul Schindler. 25:13.780 --> 25:18.420 A company called Ergonomics has announced a new keyboard designed to reduce repetitive 25:18.420 --> 25:19.900 strain injuries. 25:19.900 --> 25:24.880 It features angled key rows, a wrist rest, built-in trackball, and a newly designed circular 25:24.880 --> 25:28.500 pod for cursor control and function keys. 25:28.500 --> 25:33.020 First there was the Miracle Piano, but now Ibis Solutions has announced the next step 25:33.020 --> 25:35.060 in music teaching software. 25:35.060 --> 25:39.580 Soloist, a software program that uses pitch recognition technology to teach you how to 25:39.580 --> 25:40.820 play an instrument. 25:40.820 --> 26:01.220 The software requires a sound...