A few weeks ago there appeared in my mail a review copy of a wonderful little book, Nicholas in Trouble, by Renee Goscinny and Jean Jacques Sempe (a New Yorker cover artist). It is published by Phaedon (978-0-7148-4813-6).  It caught my attention immediately with a tastefully stamped cloth cover, without jacket, featuring a foil-stamped and embossed vignette in color of a little school boy, quaintly illustrated, with a smile of inner anticipation, on his way somewhere with a briefcase in hand and searchlight pointing the way.

Before I proceed I must urge upon you to go to what is one of the most ingenious, entertaining and—if you or your children start playing one of the games—potentially absorbing web sites I have seen  (http://www.phaidon.com/nicholas).

Since reviewing books is not my assignment for ForeWord, I rarely get review copies, and when I do, I generally send a cordial thank you note and direct the originator to our editorial offices in Traverse City, Michigan, some 780 miles from my home-office in the Hudson Valley, which is 40 miles south of Albany, NY.

As you may have surmised from my opening paragraph literary merit is not what first caught my eye—but bookmaking did—and that led me inside to read through a series of charming and cleverly line-illustrated stories about a French schoolboy who is known as the “Dennis-the-Menace of France,” and whose “adventures and travails of a cheeky and charming little French boy,” were first told over forty years ago. This volume is the fifth and final book of the series translated into English by Anthea Bell.

Visiting the imaginative and interactive web site, complete with animation, get acquainted click-throughs to all the characters, interactive games, downloads, a blog and contact opportunities, also reminded me of how the reach of a book—whether fiction or non-fiction—has been broadened from the limits of our own imaginations and from a dialog between reader and author to  come alive in multiple media, formats and customized applications.

The applications and the potentials are almost dizzying in their siren calls and challenges as well as in their practical and entertaining benefits. I saw this in full force at the three day O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference at the Javitz Center in September. More than 6,500 people—many from abroad—showed up at this event which is primarily focused on the technologies and supply chain of web services, but has also expanded into marketing tracks that should be of great interest to book publishers who are still cautiously exploring the digital universe as more than a marketing tool—but also as a content extension.

Tim O’Reilly, founder and president of O’Reilly Media, is a far-sighted thinker and intellectual innovator, who has developed and advanced the concepts and applications of Web 2.0 which he defines as using the Internet as a platform, information businesses using software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence and user-generated content. It is worth a trip to his web site (http://tim.oreilly.com/) to read his 2005 Web 2.0 article and his 2006 Open Business interview.

There is probably no media industry equal to book publishing that rests on foundations more resistant by their nature to what is taking place in the market place of ideas, communication, information and entertainment. The whole idea of user-generated content runs counter the concept of packaged intellectual property. Yet, we are moving rapidly towards interactive forms of publishing and repurposing original content.

The strong Creative Commons movement (creativecommons.org) and the foundational support for Google’s Book Search project by major library systems provide some of the evidence of challenges to the rigid barriers to accessing intellectual property. The recent benchmark agreement between Google and the AAP and Authors Guild points the way to striking a balance between compensation for intellectual effort and broadening access and application of intellectual property.

While no one is ready to admit they are making any significant money on e-book publishing (outside of the reference and journal market), the success of e-ink and its application in the Kindle and Sony readers and the emergence of the e-Book as a basic format along side the hard bound and paperback editions of books is putting more and more content out there in forms that can be re-purposed into anthologies, mashups, downloads, demand printing drivers for the Expresso Machine’s on site book production utility—and all the customized customer driven applications that will flow from these formats and media

Ultimately, however, all of these new forms of the “book” will simply amplify the reading experience and blend it more seamlessly with interactive and multiple media experiences

The web site for Nicholas in Trouble is a reminder that the distinctive charm and story-telling that an author and illustrator bring to a work are at base what makes all else possible—and the Phaedon web site is only a slice of what is possible in our new Web 2.0 world.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

The annual one day conference on May 14 of the International Digital Book Forum (IDPF), provided evidence that the latest innovations and experiments in e-book publishing, marketing and distribution have permanence in the market and in the support of new technologies. They are here to stay and on the way.

Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and President of IDPF, opened this year's session as he has every year, with a confident forecast that industry efforts to develop an open and common eBook platform standard would pay off for everyone. This year, he was able to announce the successful release of the standards last year, and the introduction of the common XML file extension of ".epub" for reflowable books and publications.

These standards for digitally "packaging" and providing meta data and tagging content, have been accompanied by breakthroughs in publishing strategies, digital search, browsing tools (look inside, widgets), and most critically, portable reader technology.

The Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and iRex Iliad have replaced backlighting, and use the reflective e-Ink screen that simulates the page turning and reading experience on paper, while providing the search, bookmarking, highlighting, and variable type size features of digital technology. Moreover, e-Ink only uses power when the page is changed, and not when the new page has come to rest. And the most user-friendly bump to the market—soon to be copied by other devices—is the Kindle function that provides a one click effortless wireless download of any book out of its browsable catalog.

The Google book search program—with more than one million books on line and growing, and Windows Alive's archive—are providing point and click opportunities for readers to go from their browse to the publisher to order the book—in print or in electronic version. Not to mention Amazon's ahead of the pack point and click, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Borders,, et al.

Publishers are beginning to innovate in their e-Book offerings. Witness Harlequin's launch of two short subject romance series (Spice) and Random House's free give away of an e-Book (Suze Orman) that stimulated a new spike in print sales. Service providers such as Overdrive, Ingram Digital (including MyiLibrary and Vital Source) and Libre Digital, are providing publishers with large-scale digital e-Book and audio archiving, distribution and re-purposing services to broaden consumer choices.

Quietly working in the trenches, the all volunteer IDPF standards committee headed by eBook veteran Garth Conboy, President of eBook Technologies, designed and put through a meticulous process of review and release in the past three years for the three container and platform standards now being adopted by publishers and device manufacturers. They laid the groundwork for interoperability of e-books in this promising new marketplace. (If you are into technology, go to http://idpf.org/specs.htm for a summary description as well as for detail on the OCF (Open Container Format), OPS (Open Publishing Structure) and OPS (Open Packaging Format) standards).

This means that the publisher will need to produce only one format (xml based), from which various applications can be converted and distributed. To the extent that device distributors accommodate the platform standards, and publishers relax their content protection barriers—the reader will be able to make one purchase and use their e-book in multiple ways in an after-market environment.

Of course this will raise a new set of identification and numbering problems. Most publishers now provide a separate ISBN for each ebook plantform for the same title (mobipocket, windows, Sony, iRex, Kindle). By publishing one open eBook formatted .epub version, the publisher can get by with one isbn and will no longer need to track the various other platform versions serviced by their distributors. So, it will fall to the distributors to create distinguishing product numbers in order, in turn, to account for their different offerings, (There is no escape!).

The continued ubiquity of the book as a reading device has distracted our attention from the breakthrough in electronic readers and books for the general public. Slow in coming, authors, publishers, distributors and retailers have remained complaisant—worried more about the decline in book readers than the uptick in electronic readers.

Well, the electronic reader—in both senses of the word—has leapfrogged out of the early adopter stage into a growing mainstream of device-equipped business travelers, immersive readers, college students, professional field workers and audio book/multimedia users (both Kindle and Sony have audio capability).

After writing about e-Book developments for the past ten years, I have acquired my first readers: a Sony and a Kindle, and I am getting used to using them. For my most recent five day trip to Chicago, I down-loaded on my Kindle in about a minute, for $9.95, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which took up no more space than a 5x7 notebook and rested in my palms with the comfort of a trade paperback

I still like to go to bed with a printed book – especially a paperback—that I can grab, flex, and earmark—my current victim is The Kite Runner—but on a flight and in a hotel room where I don’t have to take up space with the bulk of a printed book, I have to confess, I've been hooked.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large