Features Editing and Using Electronic in the Sciences: A New Frontier

Olga Kuchment On the Iliad, one can write directly on the tially tedious process. “Depending on the screen with a stylus or type by using the , it can take 5 to10 minutes or many As a scientist and a science writer in stylus and a virtual keyboard. hours,” says Charles Backus, director of the training, I typically carry a bag filled with One or two weeks after ordering the Texas A&M University Press. crumpled journal articles and a laptop for e-book readers, I received them and started MIT Press was one of the first publishers reading the articles I have yet to print out. looking for electronic reading material. I to start producing electronic books. “We Adding pounds to the weight of my bag are began by displaying the documents stored had a very forward-looking director and several carefully wrapped books. Although on my computer. Both readers connect production director in the 1990s, and we many scientific journals publish electronic to my computer through a USB port and began archiving printers’ ,” says Gita editions and have digitized archives, until act like removable disk drives to which Manaktala, marketing director of MIT recently it has been much harder to find I can save documents. The Iliad also has Press. “A lot of other publishers were not electronic versions of scientific books. ports for a USB drive (see photo) and an doing that at that time.” If a publisher does That is rapidly changing. Science and SD card, from which it can display docu- not have the PDF of a book it would like technology book publishers are making ments in a number of formats, including to produce digitally, the book will need to strong efforts to digitize their book collec- Adobe PDF, the format of many electronic be scanned, and this requires a large time tions. New devices for storing and reading books. The Kindle can display only a few investment. electronic books, called e-book readers, file formats, and PDF is not one of them. For instance, the University of California are as lightweight and portable as a small One can use free software to convert PDF Press had not been archiving PDF files paperback, function for days on a battery files to Kindle-supported formats, but the when it started to publish electronic books. without needing to recharge, and do not file conversion can lead to changes in Rather, it was approached by the digital- cause more eyestrain than newsprint. formatting—as can be seen in the photo book distributor NetLibrary, which offered Those advances in content and technol- on the next page. to scan printed books for free. The distribu- ogy raise various questions: Just what is an When I exhausted the readable con- tor used an inexpensive scanning method, electronic book? What is it like to use such tents of my computer, I downloaded free known as destructive scanning, in which a book? What can such a book become? previews of electronic books from the binding is cut off the book and the Am I ready to trade the heavy books in my and free books from the sheaf of loose is fed into a bag for an e-book reader? online library. The Kindle comes with a scanner. “We would send them piles of To explore those questions, I tried two free and fast wireless Internet connection, books for destructive scanning,” recalls e-book readers and talked to several pub- which allows one to browse the Internet Eric van Rijn, assistant marketing director lishers of scientific books. and to download electronic books without at the University of California Press. The new e-book readers are supposed to a computer. The resulting hundreds of files ended eliminate the eyestrain that comes from Many electronic books are simply digital up in the University of California Digital reading from a computer screen for long recreations of the print version, derived Library e-book division, eScholarship periods. To see for myself, I ordered, on from a PDF file similar to one that book Editions. “It was pretty ugly and need- a trial basis, an for $360 publishers send to the . But some ed a lot of hand cleanup,” recalls Kirk and the iRex Iliad Book Edition for $599. I things may need to be changed to make Hastings, publishing-systems architect chose them because they both let the user a printer’s PDF usable as a digital book. at the University of California Digital save quotations from electronic books and Without special care, for instance, the page Library. “I hired a guy, and he worked for a write comments, which mark the text just numbers of a PDF will not match the page year on this. Probably, we should have sent as permanently as notes in the margins of a numbers in the table of contents, because the books to conversion firms.” printed book. On the Kindle, one can type the pages in front matter will be counted Many scientific publishers have in recent notes by using a small attached keyboard. with those in the main text. In addition, years made commitments to produce more chapter and subchapter headings need to electronic books. Springer—which identi- Ol g a Ku c h m e n t , who received a PhD in be specially encoded to allow searching fies itself as the world’s largest publisher of chemistry from the University of California, and indexing. Some of that can be done books on science, technology, and medi- Berkeley, last year, recently completed a by automatic scripts, but sometimes the cine—offers more than 30,000 electronic Science Editor internship. cleanup must be done by hand in a poten- books and adds about 3,000 to its collec-

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A printed issue of Science Editor as compared with the issue’s pre-production PDF file displayed on the IRex Iliad and the Amazon Kindle. The photo shows some of the difficulties of viewing a PDF file on these e-book readers: decreased font size on the Iliad (although one can magnify portions of the page) and formatting problems on the Kindle. tion every year. Elsevier ScienceDirect causes either the black or the gray flakes to readers’ images are static, like the images on now has more than 4,800 electronic books rise to the top of the sphere. The screens paper, and require ambient light to be seen. available online, spanning 18 scientific dis- flashes dark for a fraction of a second as the Because E-Ink requires electricity only to ciplines, and plans to make 80% of its book globes “reset” before the next page appears. change the image, the devices consume holdings available electronically by 2012. According to the E-Ink Corporation, E-Ink battery power by page turns, not hours or Many academic presses are collaborating can be used to print on a sheet as thin, days. Technically, that means that one with electronic-book distributors, such as light, and flexible as paper, although it can use e-book readers on airplanes during ebrary, and some are distributing electronic is slightly more challenging to print the takeoff and landing as long as no pages are versions of their books themselves. electric circuits that convey signals to each turned. When the airplane is at cruising “We are seeing a shift now,” says Trevor pixel. A screen covered with E-Ink reflects altitude, the battery lasts long enough for a C Lipscombe, editor-in-chief of Johns and absorbs light just as a printed sheet of user to read thousands of pages—enough to Hopkins University Press. “With the paper does. last through an overseas flight. appearance of Kindle and , But can reading on a mechanical device Lipscombe would like all books from there is a growing interest in reading books be as pleasant as reading from crisp off-white Johns Hopkins University Press to be made in an electronic format.” paper in a beautifully bound book? Not available electronically. “We are distribu- The Sony Reader is similar to the Kindle yet—the light-gray background of my two tors of information—that’s why we exist,” and the Iliad, and all three use a technology e-book readers offers a reading experience Lipscombe says. Currently, about 1,000 called E-Ink. On the readers I tested, black similar to reading a newspaper—but maybe books from the Press are available electron- words and images appear on a velvety-gray soon. According to the E-Ink Corporation, ically—one-third of the publisher’s print background that resembles the screen of whiter backgrounds and higher-resolution collection. an Etch-A-Sketch. The letters and back- screens are being developed. Digitized books often convey informa- ground are composed of thousands of pix- But the screens of the new readers do tion in ways that that print books typically els, tiny globes containing microscopic have two benefits over computer screens: cannot. They can allow readers instantly flakes of gray and black paint in liquid. The They do not emit light, and they do not to look up words or phrases from a book in two colors of flakes respond differently to refresh unless a page is turned; thus, they a dictionary or encyclopedia or to search an electric charge. When I advance a page, avoid two factors that contribute to eye- through many books for a particular quota- each globe receives an electric signal that strain when reading on a computer. The tion. “Take a 19th-century novel: it has

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Latin quotations and French quotations,” content as a print book does,” Backus says. same money or less you would subscribe Lipscombe says; or take a modern scientific Gaining electronic rights for illustrations to a library,” Manaktala says. One year’s work. Many e-book readers contain digital is less of a problem for large publishers, subscription costs $125. The books are dictionaries; some can connect to online such as Springer and Elsevier, that have not available for downloading, but the dictionaries and encyclopedias. These in-house art departments and so already press would like to work with a partner e-book readers let users instantly look up hold the rights to many of the images in to develop a downloadable option for an phrases that they are not familiar with or their books. e-book reader. track works’ references. To try to prevent the illegal reproduction New, improved e-book readers are Readers and authors constitute a big part of electronic books, “we’ve explored all constantly being announced. By the time of what is driving publishers to issue elec- kinds of encrypting possibilities,” Hastings this article appears, there will be e-book tronic books. Many researchers want their says. But “in some way, you could get that readers with screens that can be controlled books to have the increased visibility and PDF.” Publishers have evidence that people by the touch of a finger and have much improved that come with electronic do print books from the PDF, Hastings says. higher refresh rates. Within 2 years, we are publication. “Often, our authors ask for Students find ways to share files of digital likely to see commercially available readers their work to exist in an electronic format. . with flexible screens that can show colors People who write scholarly work want to But publishers are undeterred. They are and play videos. All now exist in proto- disseminate their ideas. There is not the exploring how a digital book can allow type. same expectation for making money from them to present information and yet recoup In the end, I decided to return both the the work,” says Manaktala of MIT Press. costs. “The whole idea of an e-book is Kindle and the Iliad. I wanted to be able The readers’ push for electronic books changing,” Davies says. “We are exploring, to browse the Internet on the Iliad, and comes from “what many people perceive with the Texas Digital Library, whether we the sluggish refreshing made it difficult to as an outrageous increase in pricing” of can put data online. The e-book becomes write quickly on the screen. The Kindle’s printed science books, Backus says. The a multifaceted resource.” need to convert PDF files interfered with increase is “justified in some ways, but it Texas A&M University Press recently downloading and reading of many scien- also stretches the limits of what is finan- published the book Small Animal Neurology tific books and articles. cially viable,” Backus says. on DVD. The book includes videos of In a few years, e-book readers may allow “Printing and binding account for less animals with neurological problems. It users to read and write with the same ease than 20% of the cost of publishing a book,” also contains interactive tutorials on such as on paper and to browse the Internet and Backus says. An electronic publication techniques as magnetic resonance imaging watch videos as easily as on a computer incurs the same acquisition, permissions, and shows students “what are artifacts and screen. I decided to wait for the future marketing, and royalty fees as a printed what are not”, Davies says. This approach models. For now, my bag remains laden one. is applicable to many academic fields. with articles, laptop, and printed books. Although authors are often eager to Some electronic books from Texas A&M see their work published electronically, University Press offer videos and full-color Note added in production: Kindle 2 replaced illustrators are likely to feel differently. illustrations, and some offer the ability the original Kindle on 24 February 2009. Illustrators are often concerned that their to rotate objects by 360o. Those func- The two differ in appearance, but judging work will be reproduced illegally and are tions require that the books be read on a from Amazon’s description of Kindle 2, the reluctant to grant electronic rights to it. computer and not on an e-book reader. observations made in this article remain “Scientific books are highly illustrated, Only black and white E-Ink is available, applicable. and it’s a challenge to get rights to the although color E-Ink is being developed. illustrations,” says Shannon Davies, senior Moreover, a typical E-Ink screen can show editor of natural sciences at Texas A&M only about two images per second, whereas University Press. “The concept of grant- a typical computer screen can show more ing e-rights has been with us for only 10 than 60. Moving images therefore tend to to 12 years. At first, rights holders didn’t blur when seen on E-Ink devices. The low grant e-rights, fearing that anyone could E-Ink refresh rate can also make browsing reproduce the material, and they would the Internet a chore. have no control.” Texas A&M University Some electronic books can be viewed Press has managed to overcome that dif- only online. MIT Press has recently devel- ficulty in part by reducing the quality of oped CISnet, an online computer and the digital images to discourage unwanted information science library. “The idea is reproduction. “Some e-books, ironically, that if you are someone who may buy may not have as much visual or proprietary one or two MIT titles per year, for the

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