Travis Neighbor Ward

First published in Departures magazine, January/February 1999.

Copyright 1999 Travis Neighbor Ward.

Two New Electronic Devices May Revolutionize the Acts of Reading and Writing.

By Travis Neighbor Ward

I am an editor and author for one simple reason: I love reading and writing. I adore lying on my couch, legs crossed, one arm tucked behind my head, the other hand holding a brand-new paperback that still smells like ink. I relish sitting at my desk with a fresh ream of paper and a newly sharpened pencil, watching those first graphite marks hit the page. Pencils and books: These are the tools of my trade. I know what to expect of them, I know I can rely on them: They never have to be booted up; they never shut down unexpectedly or run out of memory. To me they are essential. This may soon change.

A revolution is occurring in the technology of reading and writing. The e-shot that will be heard round the world has been fired in the form of two new products destined to make paperbacks and pencils as antiquated as those 12-inch records sitting in my closet: the Rocket eBook -- the first electronic book ever-which allows you to store and carry up to 10 books at once in a single, relatively small device; and its fraternal twin, the CrossPad XP, a memo-sized portable digital notepad that records handwriting (even scrawls), translates them into digital form, uploads them to your PC, and if you wish, converts them into typed text-all at the touch of a button.
Unlike other "cool" gadgets that merit attention simply because they're new, these two deserve recognition because they're good-so good I may end up locking my favorite books in a vault, along with a dozen boxes of Ticonderoga pencils-a late20th-century literary time capsule.

At the official launch of NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook, poet laureate Robert Pinsky sang its praises loudly. "This is historic!" he exclaimed, and he was right. Rocket eBook will change not only the way we read but the entire publishing industry. With eBook there are no more folios or quartos, no illustrated dust jackets. As Stephen Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & Noble, one of two outside investors in NuvoMedia, says, "Thanks to eBook, there will be more books published than ever before, self-publishing will flourish, and no book will ever be declared out of print again." If, in fact, eBook is as successful as its advocates hope and chances are it will be; Microsoft and Sharp have just entered the picture-it will undoubtedly become the Internet's best friend before long.

Rocket eBook consists of a plastic shell (7.5 x 5 x 1.5 inches) that frames a 5.5 x 3.5-inch black and white LCD display. You acquire books or magazines by purchasing them from an on-line bookstore such as amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com, using the bookstore's software to download titles to your PC. There they are stored in the Rocket Librarian, the program that comes with Rocket eBook and is designed to "shelve" a virtually limitless number of titles. By placing Rocket eBook in a plastic "cradle" that attaches to your PC via a serial cable, you can download up to 4,000 pages, or 10 books, at a time to its four-megabyte memory. If, while on the road, you want to substitute a book in eBook's memory for another that you already own, you can download the title again from the same on-line bookstore at no extra cost. And it's all so fast: It took me just 75 seconds to download War of the Worlds, a 173K file, to my PC, and another 40 seconds to load it into eBook.

That's not to say I'd choose eBook over a print book for living-room reading: Although eBook's LCD display is softer on the eye than a PC monitor, you're still reading a screen. But then, Martin F. Eberhard, CEO of NuvoMedia, wouldn't choose eBook for that scenario either. As he puts it, "Rocket eBook is the ideal way to read in less than ideal conditions." In bed at night, or on a plane during the movie, eBook, with its built-in backlight, can't be beat. Riggio found this out the hard way: "I held it out in the aisle on my last flight and was nearly attacked by all the passengers asking what it was and where they could buy it."

Then there are the high-tech bells and whistles designed to help simulate the normal reading experience-or customize and enhance it. The left side of eBook, where the nickel-metal hydride batteries are stored, is almost cylindrical, to imitate the rolled spine of a paperback with the cover folded back. (Batteries last about 20 hours with the backlight on, 33 with it off they recharge in 90 minutes.) You turn pages using a pair of oval-shaped arrow buttons, but eBook doesn't scroll down as a wordprocessing program does; it jumps to the top of the next page-as your eye would.
"We experimented with having Rocket eBook fade from page to page," Eberhard explains, "but readers weren't satisfied. That's why we chose this method. It follows your natural eye movement."

The creators of eBook purposefully kept it simple and easy to use, but there are options galore. An on-screen button changes the page orientation for horizontal or vertical reading, left- or right-handed use. A menu lets you jump to the first or the last page of a text, search for specific words, set bookmarks, highlight text (with the stowable stylus), and add notes using an on-screen keyboard (suitable only for brief annotations). Before you download a text to eBook, you can change its font on your PC; once the text is in eBook, you can adjust it from regular to large print. Most incredible of all, you can touch a word on the screen and its definitions pop up.

I have just two complaints about eBook. The major one: At 1.38 pounds, eBook is much heavier than the average 250-page paperback, which weighs between eight and 10 ounces. Moreover, the weight is unevenly distributed because the battery is stored in the spine. That makes eBook tiring to hold upright. One solution is to cross your legs and prop eBook against your knee, which I did find comfortable. In a plane or on a train, Eberhard suggests changing the page orientation to horizontal and resting the cylindrical end on the tray table. "On the beach," he says, "I just prop it right in the sand."

Eberhard also points out that eBook is smaller and lighter than the average hardcover (I weighed a 370-page and a 440 page hardcover, and they were 1.58 and 1.73 pounds, respectively) and that its 10book carrying capacity makes it ideal for traveling. "There are two things I do often-read and travel," he says. "I like to use my commuting time to catch up on the latest science fiction novels. Unfortunately, they look like this." He opens his briefcase and pulls out a four-inch-thick hardcover. "I'm tired of lugging hardcovers around. But I don't want to wait until the paperback editions come out."

The minor drawback is eBook's ability to reproduce only simple black-and-white line drawings, not photos or color graphics. "Charts and graphs will show up on eBook if they're not large and not done in gray scales," says Gayle Treadwell, marketing director of Harvard Business Press. Publishers may get around the problem by converting existing colors to crosshatches or to patterns. And who knows-someday there may even be an eCoffeetableBook.

Treadwell feels that it's just a matter of time before eBook becomes commonplace. "We already provide downloadable, electronic versions of business articles on our Web site but didn't feel folks were ready to read books off their PCs. You want a book to be portable. Until now the quality of electronic books wasn't good enough. Rocket eBook solves both those problems. And it provides instant availability, which means our readers can buy our books from anywhere in the world. I think eventually quite a few fiction readers will migrate over to eBook." Then I hear what sounds like a wistful sigh. "Although," she adds, "there is something tied up in owning and holding a book."

From a functional standpoint the CrossPad XP is almost the inverse of the Rocket eBook. It also allows you to store, organize, and upload to your PC up to 80 pages at a time of your own handwritten notes and sketches, and even converts them into typed text. But, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, CrossPad XP must be laboriously trained to act human-and even after training it has some serious flaws.

CrossPad XP is the new "extra portable" memo-pad-sized version of the CrossPad, the first portable digital notebook released in '98 by the Cross Pen Computing Group. It consists of a hard plastic back just large enough to hold a standard 6 x 9-inch bound tablet (the original CrossPad holds an 8.5 x 11-inch pad) and the CrossWriter II, a digital pen with a radio frequency transmitter hidden in its front end. The pen records notes in physical and digital ink simultaneously, so that your scribbles appear on the pad and are recorded digitally in CrossPad's one megabyte of flash ROM memory. To upload notes to a PC, connect the two using a serial cable and give the command. In a few seconds, the IBM Ink Manager software that comes with the pad displays your notes-drawings included-in your own handwriting in a "notebook" on your PC monitor.

I found CrossPad XP easy to use. Six recessed buttons along the bottom half of the pad control commands such as "keyword," which enables you to circle a word and later search for it in the text; "page change," which allows you to move forward or backward one page at a time; and "bookmark," which allows you to set digital dog-ears. Confirmation is signaled on a small LCD display, and the digital pen can be stored in a compartment at the top of the pad. There is also a storage space for replacement ink cartridges, each of which prints 80 pages.

CrossPad XP's weight, one and a half pounds without tablet, is its main drawback. Moreover, the CrossWriter pen, with a AAAA battery in its barrel, weighs 0.08 ounces, which is considerably heavier than a regular ballpoint pen (0.02 ounces). That may sound negligible, but it is significant when writing for long periods of time.

I also encountered a technical obstacle the first time I attached CrossPad XP to my PC. Ink Manager said I needed one megabyte of free disk space, though I had 3.53 gigabytes available. After 20 minutes of troubleshooting with Cross' toll-free technical support line, the technician concluded the error was in my hard disk. He instructed me to do a "scandisk," which he said would automatically fix the problem and take about 30 minutes. One hour later, the computer still caught in the scanning process, I gave up in frustration and resorted to rebooting. Problem solved.

But the biggest problem I experienced was training Ink Manager to recognize my handwriting, which is done by copying sentences from the program's training manual, then telling Ink Manager which ones it interpreted correctly. According to IBM, you must spend 45 minutes on the first training session and 30 minutes on the second. I made the mistake of breezing through the sentences in 10 minutes. As a result, my handwriting was messy, and Ink Manager understood only 79 percent of my marks. I then went back and repeated the session, this time completing it at the suggested pace. The difference was significant-Ink Manager correctly converted 91 percent of my scribbles.

But even then Ink Manager had difficulty recognizing uppercase letters, punctuation, and numbers. For example, it interpreted "near-perfect" as "near-per feet" and "95%" as "5%." It also botched simple words, converting "the" into "ice." When I tell this to Brian Mullins, director of marketing for Cross Pen Computing Group, he's not surprised. "We're not emphasizing text recognition right now," he says. "I'm not a neat writer, so I never get better than seventy percent recognition. If you aren't a fast typist it's still saving you seventy percent of the time you'd normally spend typing in text. But it'll probably be years before it's totally efficient."

In addition, as he admits, "Ink Manager has no formatting at all." This means it doesn't include paragraph indenting or tab stops, and that converted text appears in a narrow column on the screen. In order to obtain a standard width, you have to copy the text into a word-processing program and then reformat it, which is a time-consuming process.

By now some of these problems should have been corrected. I tested Ink Manager version 1.0, but Cross tells me that models will be shipping with an improved version, 1.5 (unavailable at presstime). Version 1.5 will also include several new features: "thumbnail view," which lets you look at 18 pages at a time and move them by dropping and dragging; a 160K "viewer" file, which allows you to send Ink Manager files as attachments to e-mail, "so that you can share your notes with anybody," according to Mullins; and the ability to save Ink Manager files in JPEG, TIFF, Bitmap, or PostScript formats.

Overall, if you are looking to preserve your scrawls and scribbles digitally, CrossPad XP is a dream come true. As Mullins puts it, "It's great for computer-literate people who still like writing with pen on paper, who want to compose things in longhand first, then later reorganize or retype them on a PC. And it's exciting for other people to get files written with the CrossPad because they know they're getting first-pass material." Still, for serious typing, I'd stick to my laptop.

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