E-Publishing
Paul Hilts -- 5/8/00
Xerox, Microsoft In Co-Venture
Latest entrant in copyright protection field, ContentGuard will offer a number of services
Xerox Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have announced the launch of ContentGuard Inc., a privately held company to provide digital rights management systems for electronically distributed e-books, music and video. ContentGuard, originally a division of Xerox based on its DRM product of the same name, will become an independent company, headquartered in McLean, Va., with research operations in Palo Alto and El Segundo, Calif.
The new company marks another step in Microsoft's efforts to strategically position its technologies-particularly content security-as a new era of digital publishing and distribution just begins to take form. The newly structured ContentGuard venture will offer its business customers a suite of content security, management and e-commerce technologies along with the DRM software available in Microsoft's MS Reader, an e-book display application, as well as in future releases of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Rights Manager.
Ultimately CG products will enable publishers and retailers to manage and protect all manner of digitized content from books to sheet music to academic course packs. It allows publishers to digitally package, display and sell content in new ways, including full-text display, incremental previews and time-restricted displays.
Xerox will be the majority shareholder in CG and Microsoft will be a minority shareholder. Other investors will be named later. Michael Miron, who directed ContentGuard under Xerox, has been named CEO of the new standalone ContentGuard.
The board of directors includes Dick Brass, co-chairman, who will remain v-p of emerging technologies at Microsoft; John Manferdelli, senior researcher for software security at Microsoft; Barry Romeril, vice-chairman and CFO of Xerox; and Ranjit Singh, president and COO of ContentGuard, formerly senior v-p and general manager of Xerox Rights Management.
Steve Ballmer, president and CEO of Microsoft, said the new venture was another step in Microsoft's strategy to provide "easy-to-use solutions for protecting the rights of authors and publishers." Miron said the the new venture would draw on the resources of its parent firms and enable CG to "better compete as an Internet company, raising capital and forming partnerships."
The company will offer a number of products and services, mostly developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, that address the entire value chain in electronic publishing. Software products such as CG Publisher, CG Marketplace and CG Rights Server operate together by wrapping e-book content in a secure digital package that contains the e-book's licensing terms and then works through Microsoft Site Server and Adobe Systems's PDF Merchant to distribute the e-book through a commercial site.
Probably the most important service offered by ContentGuard is its electronic Publishing Clearing Service, offered in conjunction with the digital rights clearing company Reciprocal. With ePCS, publishers can provide ContentGuard and Reciprocal with a product in either digital or print form. CG and Reciprocal then prepare the document, distribute it, and clear rights and payments from that point on.
These products are made possible by CG's XrML (eXtensible rights Markup Language), a computer language that carries the terms of use for content that automates the e-commerce process.
Wizeup.com to Take Textbooks Digital
In another step toward the digitization of the education market, New York City-based startup Wizeup.com has been courting textbook publishers in the hope of making most undergraduate content digital or digital-ready.
Founder and CEO David Gray said he has already enhanced 50 titles with additional content, and hopes for 200 by year's end. His program equips both publishers and students to add multimedia content. This ranges from enabling students to create their own tables of contents to integrating sound and video to adding notes from professors in the form of Word and Excel documents. "We want interactive textbooks that are live products, not static," he said. Wizeup.com uses a proprietary format, rather than PDF files.
Gray's approach may sound reminiscent of what CD-ROM champions once said. But this is different, Gray and others say, because of technological improvements and greater audience receptivity.
Originally called Numina, Gray's company served the law market until recently, when he realized that most other kinds of content were adaptable to digital media. "About the only thing that d sn't work are anthologies," he said. The books Wizeup hopes to work with range from humanities to English to math to finance titles. The company just completed its third round of funding, for an undisclosed sum.
--Steven M. Zeitchik
Classics Go Online At Bartleby.com
Originally designed as a personal research experiment, Bartleby.com was launched in 1999 as a Web publishing venture offering free access to licensed and public-domain reference works as well as classic works of fiction, p try and quotations.
Bartleby.com was cofounded in New York City by John Kibbler, a former corporate attorney and now Bartleby.com's president; Steven H. van Leeuwen, Bartleby.com publisher, a former medical editor at Elsevier Science and a former Webmaster at Columbia University; and Rajesh Raichoudhury, Bartleby.com's chief technology officer, a cofounder of Yahoo! and longtime Internet technology developer.
Kibbler told PW that Bartleby.com's primary market is high school and college students, reference librarians and educators and casual browsers. The site's revenues are generated by advertising and online book sales through its relationship with Amazon.com and Alibris.com.
Kibbler said that the site has been attracting more than six million page views, or 800,000 to one million viewers, per month, and the firm is aggressively working to "fill out our content categories" by adding 2,500 pages a week. All of its online titles are fully searchable. And while the site licenses several current reference works, such as The American Heritage Dictionary, the firm gets most of its material from the public domain, digitizing, editing and updating classics and out-of-print reference titles and reformatting them for the Web. Currently the site offers Rogets II: The New Thesaurus, Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, and The Columbia Encyclopedia among many others. The site also offers access to the works of such classic authors as W.E.B. Dubois, Albert Einstein and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as p try and fiction.
The firm expects to add personalization tools and online community functions later in the year, and Kibbler said that the company is evolving from "an online resource into e-commerce." And in addition to online access, he said, Bartleby.com is in negotiations to expand into e-book offerings. The firm is also looking to form alliances with print-on-demand publishers "as a potential for new revenue streams."
Although there appears to be some overlap with Project Guttenberg (E-publishing, Apr. 3), Kibbler differentiated his company by noting its focus on reference works and the care taken in digitally repackaging classic titles. "And we're committed to free access," said Kibbler. "Our content is perfect for underfunded libraries and schools. We intend to build an interactive consumer, teacher and student community online."
--Calvin Reid
EB.Com Offers Wireless Access
Britannica.com, the online division of Encyclopaedia Britannica, is introducing Britannica Traveler, a wireless Web-clipping application for the Palm VII handheld unit. The new application is free and downloadable from www.palm.net or www.britannica.com.
Britannica Traveler provides access to the 45-million-word Encyclopaedia Britannica, allowing Palm VII users to read the entire text of the encyclopedia through a wireless connection to the Britannica.com Web server. The suggested retail price of the Palm VII is $499. The monthly fee for the wireless service is $9.99.
Peter Meyerhoff, executive producer for Britannica.com, said, "We are always alert to the latest and greatest in gadgets. We have been looking at wireless and handheld platforms for a long time, and when we saw the Palm VII, we saw what could be done with wireless technology."
Along with access to the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, Meyerhoff noted, the Britannica Traveler g s even further. Among the features of the Britannica.com application is "Get Local," which uses the geographical positioning capabilities of the Palm VII. Using a wireless signal, the device identifies the zip code it is located in and gives the Palm VII user immediate access to Britannica.com's local information, including movie and theater schedules, historical facts, weather updates and local news.
Don Yannias, chief executive officer of Britannica.com Inc., said that while the Britannica Traveler is EB's first wireless initiative, the company "intends to be a major player in this growing area."
--Sam Weller
E-book Award Criteria Set
The inaugural e-book awards, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall (News, Oct. 18, 1999), is beginning to take shape. Late last month, the International eBook Award Foundation (IeBAF), which has been established to administer the awards, announced submission criteria.
According to the guidelines, eligible e-books must have been published, or firmly scheduled for publication, between January 1, 1999. and October 31, 2000. E-book entries must be published in the Open eBook standard and/or published in Glassbook, Rocket eBook, Softbook or Microsoft Reader formats. Titles must be nominated by publishers and each publisher may submit up to 10 works. Publishers must publish 20 or more different authors (in any format) during the course of the award year to be eligible to submit nominations. All award monies will be given to the e-book authors.
Submissions will be accepted from now through August 1. The winners will be announced October 20, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, in a ceremony at the Frankfurt Opera House. Applicants must submit their nominations at www.iebaf.org and send one hard copy of the work, along with a printed copy of the submission, to IeBAF, 825 Eighth Ave., Suite 2100, New York, N.Y. 10019.
The top prize of $100,000 will be given for the best original title that was published in e-book format prior to or simultaneously to print editions. Prizes of $10,000 each will be given to original fiction and nonfiction titles, and there will be $10,000 prizes for fiction and nonfiction titles originally published in print and converted to e-books. Another $10,000 award will be given for technical achievement.
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