As an ever-increasing variety of digital publishing companies with incompatible e-book formats compete for market share, a company with a narrow vision just might have a chance. Japanese-backed Internet start-up RealRead is looking to carve out a niche as an online hosting service for "book samples" that allow users to view true-to-life representations of two-page spreads from books.
Unlike e-book publishers or digital libraries, such as netLibrary or ebrary, RealRead doesn't produce e-books. Instead, RealRead has developed a simple Web-based program that displays a reproduction of a book's content—including table of contents, pictures, graphics and text—and allows the user to "flip" through pages by clicking on hot buttons in an effort to reproduce the experience of browsing through a book in a bookstore.
RealRead v-p for sales John Conti, formerly of Ballantine and Contentville.com, told PW, "What we're trying to do is establish a new standard for looking at books that is the same as the old standard. We're just showing the book itself—what it actually looks like. Publishers do a great job of designing and typesetting their product and we see no reason to alter that."
Conti described the company's business plan as being similar to those of companies such as Liquid Audio and Real Networks, which provide downloadable audio samples of songs that are available at online music stores.
In practice, the book sample created by RealRead is a small program (a Java Applet) that runs on a Web page, showing a two-page spread; as pages are clicked through, the screen image animates the action of flipping a page.
While it appears that the software is fully capable of functioning as an online e-book reader, Conti declared, "We only want to do this one thing: establish a way for people to sample books on the Web. We're really not focused on e-books."
Initially, Conti said, the company is looking to produce samples for publishers targeting the library market, where it is often difficult to get catalogues or review copies directly into the hands of the appropriate buyer. And as always, the potential exists to produce full online book catalogues for publishers. Thus far, the company has convinced at least one major publisher to do a test and has a lead with a large textbook publisher.
