Home Mobile Reports of E-Book's Demise Still Premature


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Analysis: The market for e-books continues to grow slowly but surely.

Even though not everyone yet owns an Amazon Kindle or the whip-smart, PDF-savvy Sony Reader Digital Book, the e-book medium is alive and well.
Many "trade" e-books from large publishers originate from application files made in QuarkXPress or InDesign, converted via custom specs in Acrobat or other PDF authoring tools.

But with most of the world's published books marooned in paper format -- either created before the advent of desktop publishing or with the original PageMaker, Frame, or QuarkXPress files lost to fire, weather, or the sands of time -- paper-to-PDF that's also printable, searchable, and lightweight enough to be served on the web is still something of a technological holy grail.

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It involves more software trickeration than can be squeezed out of Acrobat, which often offers the "lightweight file, printable, browseable -- choose two" solution for long, scanned, image-heavy documents such as manuals, textbooks, illustrated histories or any of a number of other graphics-heavy volumes.

On that front, a sort-of new player, IoFlex, is getting attention right now thanks to several recent key deals and its bringing out from under wraps its long-in-development, enterprise-class content conversion and archiving tools that enable publishers to migrate content from paper to PDF.

Publishing consultant and frequent PDF conference presenter Michael Jahn says IoFlex -- a company he works with -- has been "flying below the radar" the last few years as the company gathered R&D data on improving its paper-to-PDF processing, especially on the graphics side.

Jahn doesn't think that e-book files, in the end, will grab the public's fancy the way the MP3 files have, courtesy of the iTunes/iPod combination. But electronic books and publications will eventually be the standard, just as the iPod is among MP3 players.

"At some point, it might be more legislative," Jahn says. "[Lawmakers] are going to say, 'Fifty cents for a newspaper? You guys are nuts, that ain't gonna cut it. It costs twice as much to recycle it. Sorry, we're not going to let you print newspapers.' Never mind global warming and carbon footprints. I just don't see sustainability when it comes to ink on paper."

IoFlex provides Acrobat plugins, applications, and servers to enable the creation of print-on-demand (POD) ready books for BiblioBazaar, a startup launched by the founders of the POD monolith BookSurge as their noncompete agreement expires with Amazon, which had purchased BookSurge in 2005. Other IoFlex customers include RRDonnelly, Integrated Book Technology, and LightningSource.

POD and e-books might seem to be completely separate animals, but in the end, they share a lot of the same stripes, at least when a book or document starts in paper form. Both need deskewing (making pages straight where a page scanned slightly off-kilter) and cleanup of noise and other junk that appears in the file as a byproduct of rapid scanning of thin paper. IoFlex's tools take on the task of deskewing and cleaning up pages automatically, recentering content as well as tuning up images for print or screen reading, according to the user's job specs.

Images in POD books, of course, need to be printable, and that's also the case for some e-books. On top of that, e-books produced from scans need optical character recognition (OCR), which, like basic deskewing, can be done in Acrobat and in less expensive off-the-shelf office suites from vendors such as ABBYY and Nuance.

Those products work for companies circulating internal documents electronically and building electronic archives of corporate knowledge. IoFlex, however, is aiming at commercial publishing clients who are building nimble content archives that can be output for print use or searchable on-screen browsing without losing the original scans, and with a minimum of intensive, page-by-page "by hand" cleanup and manipulation.

Saludos, GAby Menta

By Don Fluckinger