Turning a New Page for the Environment : Increasing numbers of palm-size ‘electronic books’ are becoming available on CD-ROM disks.

Dr. Ed Vodak of Ventura practices good environmental medicine--good for his patients and good for the forests. He provides well researched medical advice but doesn’t require lots of thick reference books--which take trees to make--to keep current. He has “electronic books,” part of a new trend.

“I do consulting work in Latin America and take along my Merck Manual and my PDR,” he explained. The first book he mentioned is the most widely used medical reference in the world and the second, the Physician’s Desk Reference, provides the latest annual details on all the drugs being prescribed. He reads them on a little screen like a pocket calculator.

About 10% of U.S. doctors carry palm-size electronic versions of these leading reference works, normally totaling 4,000 pages, in the pockets of their white coats. The rest of the profession bought more than a million recent copies of the printed versions--for their offices--inadvertently consuming acres of forest.

Vodak uses a $200 device made by Franklin Electronic Publishers. Any doctor, or a health-conscious consumer, can insert into it a domino-sized cartridge containing a Merck Manual, a Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, etc. There are 9 million of these hand-held reading gizmos in use.

I learned about this, and other examples of treeless book manufacturing at the recent American Booksellers Assn. convention in Los Angeles. The hot topic was “electronic publishing.” Several technologies are available besides the portable Franklin products, most involving home computers--the CD-ROM type where you get stills and movies with your sound and text.

Eight million Americans have CD-ROM equipment, according to Bernie Roth, Executive Director of the association, who expects this figure will double in three years because most home computers sold from now on will have the new technology built in.

At the convention I saw a plain old book being brandished about, its 300,000-copy print order said to require three metric tons of paper--hundreds of trees. It was being brandished by someone promoting compact discs of reference works. Customers can get 600 times more info in a digitized version than in a book. Plus bells and whistles. Franklin has something that displays and speaks Spanish and English in translation from your open palm.

This week the bestseller-type book went electronic. Ed Elrod at the Ventura Bookshop now offers “The John Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House” both the 700-page book edition and the Sony Electronic Publishing Co.’s CD-ROM electronic edition. The latter contains the original book plus 2,000 more diary pages along with 700 photos and 45 minutes of candid homemade movie footage shot by the former White House chief of staff who died last fall. A lap-crushing data heap if you were to get it in the traditional form--but just a plastic wafer in its electronic incarnation--for about $70.

Elrod jumped at the chance to stock the electronic version because he just returned from Europe, having traveled there on an ABA grant. There, he saw that the Europeans were generally ahead of American booksellers in this publishing trend.

It seems one of Ed Elrod’s customers may, by coincidence, have provided something of a final word on this connection between electronic publishing and environmentalism. As our intrepid local bookseller recalls the incident: “When I asked this person if he wanted a paper bag for the book he’d bought, he said to me: “Here we’re standing in the largest tree cemetery in town and you’re asking me if I want a bag ?”

Details

* FYI: For electronic (no paper) reference works such as The Merck Manual, Physician’s Desk Register, and talking foreign language dictionaries, from $29 to $599, call Franklin Electronic Publishers (800) 762-5382. CD-ROM players, starting at $200 are available at local Teltron and Sears, Roebuck & Co. stores along with a selection of encyclopedia in CD-ROM format. Also check with your local software store. Some may carry “CD-ROMS in Print” the most comprehensive annual listing (900 pages on paper) at $99. Published on a single CD-ROM it’s $49. Otherwise, call the publisher, Mecklermedia, (203) 226-6976.