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T A B L E__T A L K The Freudian send: Discuss your most embarrassing e-mail sends in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The long bust? By Andrew Leonard With the collapse of stock prices, Silicon Valley hype also takes a fall (09/01/98) The saint of free software By Andrew Leonard Maverick Richard Stallman keeps the faith -- and gives Bill Gates the finger (08/31/98) Just the facts, RAM By Christopher Ott Do computers in the classroom promote a conservative vision of education? (08/28/98) iMac: iLove it or iHate it By Janelle Brown and Scott Rosenberg Is Apple's new blue bombshell a hit or a dud? A debate (08/27/98) Why kids don't need computers By Andrew Leonard Don't feel guilty about not buying your toddler a Pentium, a new book argues (08/26/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

Look ma, no ink! The technology industry tries to invent a better book. Will publishers bite? - - - - - - - - - BY JANELLE BROWN Marcus Colombano, director of marketing at NuvoMedia, has an impressive array of digital accessories spread before him on the table. His laptop sluggishly pulls up a Web page; his PalmPilot chortles and bleeps as it exchanges digital business cards with mine; his cell phone sits at the ready by his side. Add to that array a fourth, less familiar device: the RocketBook. The size of a paperback novel, the RocketBook is yet another computing product that NuvoMedia hopes to convince us all to add to our briefcases and backpacks. The RocketBook, Marcus tells me, will eliminate the need to tote around a bag full of paperbacks, periodicals and reference texts. Instead, we'll just download all our reading needs into this handy reading tablet. Four such electronic "books" are expected to come on the market in the next year: the RocketBook, the SoftBook, the Everybook and the Librius Millennium Reader. Ranging from $200 to $1,500, each of these products is a variation on the concept of a portable reading tablet that will hold multiple books and periodicals, all retrieved from the Internet or a proprietary network of some kind. These products, their producers say, are the future of the book -- RocketBook, in a moment of high hubris on its Web site, even equates its product with the invention of papyrus and the debut of the Gutenberg press. "Death-of-the-book" hype may be a hoary tradition in the high-tech world, but today's publishing industry does have a desperate need for some new thinking. Books are appallingly expensive to print, inventory, store and ship. That means new titles must sell well or vanish. Because a few monolithic, profit-focused companies are controlling the publishing industry, critics claim, we are seeing fewer and fewer fringe books and new authors -- and even established authors who sell respectably but not spectacularly (the so-called midlist) are having a tough time staying in print. Enter technology, whose tentacles of change are finally infiltrating the glacial and technophobic publishing industry. The electronic reading tablet is not the only innovation being championed. There are also print-on-demand technologies, "digital ink" projects and Net distribution systems that send books in either Adobe Acrobat (PDF) or PalmPilot formats. If the publishing industry allows itself to be revolutionized, the world may see an unfathomably vast cornucopia of texts, all digitized and archivable, awaiting only paper, plastic or pixels to come to life. N E X T_ P A G E .|. What's the problem with old-fashioned books, anyway? - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY ALAIN PILON