The MS EBook Reader and WordRMR
I installed and tested MSReader, Microsoft's EBook reader utility, when it first came out a few years ago. I never used it much, because I don't like sitting in front of a PC reading text off the screen. The other reason I didn't use it, of course, is that there wasn't much content available for it back then. All changed now. I've had my Thinkpad X41 Convertible for about two weeks, and I've been doing what was once unthinkable: Sitting on my big comfy leather chair with the X41 and reading ebooks for hours at a time.
Wow. Whoda thunkit?
Part of the new comfort of ebook reading is certainly due to the fact that you can position a tablet any way you like, and microadjust both its angle and distance from your eyes. (This is tough to do with a 20" CRT, or even one of the new 21" Samsung LCD displays.) But I think the greater part of the improvement lies in the rendering of the text on the X41's LCD display. Microsoft developed a font technology called ClearType with precisely that in mind: Rendering fonts legibly on low-resolution display media like CRTs and LCDs. Adobe's PDF files, by contrast, were designed to be print images, rendered at offset press resolution, which hovers between 1000 and 1500 DPI. Cleartype works as advertised, and MSReader's text rendering is about as comfortable as any I've ever seen on a non-print display. MSReader's other trick is that it works a little like a Web browser: You can specify font size, and it will reflow the text in the selected font size. The text glyphs are therefore not inescapably too small. If they're smaller than you find comfortable, just crank up the type size. This reflowing makes merging text and images or diagrams problematic (and page number references useless) but for books consisting of text alone it works very well.
In watching Usenet and the file-sharing networks for pirated copies of Paraglyph books, I began to notice something in the past six months: The number of obviously pirated works in MSReader's .lit format exploded. Clearly something had gotten out there that made creating .lit files trivial, and last week I went looking for it. What I found was WordRMR, a free utility offered by...Microsoft. WordRMR is a plug-in for MS Word, versions 2000 and later. It adds a button to your toolbar, and clicking the button brings up a dialog for specifying a .lit ebook from the current Word document. Click OK on the dialog, and WordRMR creates the ebook in seconds. Very little time, less effort, and zero cost.
So anything you can get into a Word document can quickly become an ebook. The FineReader Sprint OCR utility that I've used for five years now can scan pages directly to Word files. Back in 2000 I scanned and laboriously re-laid out a rare 19th century history of the Old Catholic movement. It was a huge amount of work, involving InDesign templates, headers, footers, fonts, and all sorts of related stuff. I got a handsome PDF for my trouble (and learning how to lay out nice-looking books was part of the exercise) but these days, almost none of that is necessary if you just want an ebook version of some all-text print volume.
This is what's making the Right Men in the big NY publishing houses half-nuts: Print books are getting easier to "rip" all the time. If you're not too fussy about the inevitable OCR "typos", you can rip a print book on a scanner and have a .lit file in a day. If you have a sheet-feeding scanner, even less. And unlike DVDs or even music CDs, there's very little you can do to a paper book to make it resistant to ripping. This is going to make the next five years in ebooks interesting: Small presses willing to take risks will step out in front of the paralyzed big boys and create a new book publishing business model-we don't know what quite yet-and the balance of power in print book publishing will be forever changed.