Making E-Books Easier on the Eyes
On a cloudy spring afternoon two years ago, Bill Hill was tracking an elk near a bend in the Skykomish River, about an hour northeast of Seattle. Crawling along the sandy banks on his hands and knees, he struggled to make out a hoof print in the light brown dirt.
“I was forced to do this interpretation of the print and it was slowing me down and requiring lots of effort,” said the burly 51-year-old Scotsman, a researcher at Microsoft Corp. “I instantly realized that’s what is going on with the computer screen.”
Preventing eye strain and throbbing headaches caused by toiling too long in front of a computer screen is Hill’s obsession. Hill found similarities between the two missions, ones that could help alleviate the suffering of millions of computer users.
The result of this improbable convergence of nature and technology is a new display technology invented by Microsoft called ClearType. It is designed to make the computer screen look like a page in a book, with letters having the same clarity and resolution as they do on paper. Microsoft is seeking several U.S. patents for the technology.
The software giant is not the only company entering this market. Adobe Systems Inc. is positioning its Acrobat software for on-screen reading, recently announcing it has improved display resolution with a technology it calls CoolType.
Microsoft’s innovation, coupled with its deep pockets, could help turn the floundering e-book industry into a growing and profitable enterprise, industry executives believe. Momentum in the e-book industry has been building slowly over the last two years. More than 70 technology companies, publishing houses and other organizations recently signed the Open eBook standard that creates a universal software format for all e-books.
“For the first time, we have the confluence of technology and content that can make e-books into a marketing success,” said Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of Time-Warner Trade Publishing. “I’d say over the next five years, e-books are going to carve out a significant niche in the market.”
Such statements have been made before, but the technology has never measured up to the hype. Industry analysts, who agree that the e-book market is growing, remain skeptical about its chances to reach a mainstream audience.
So far, the only two U.S. makers of e-book reading devices--Nuvo Media and SoftBook Press--have sold just 20,000 copies of their respective Rocket eBooks or SoftBooks.
In five years, New York-based research firm Jupiter Communications predicts, the numbers will increase to about 6.5 million e-book reading devices, creating potential download revenue of about $127 million, said Seamus McAteer, director of Internet strategy for Jupiter.
“There is an addressable market here,” McAteer said, “but it will take a while.”
For the e-book industry to be viable, companies still must develop longer-lasting batteries, resolve publishers’ concerns about protecting intellectual property, digitize the content and design better dedicated electronic reading devices, said Victor Votsch, research director for GartnerGroup.
“It’s a good thing that Microsoft is behind the latest effort because it can afford to lose money,” Votsch said. “It’s going to be a long haul to get profitable products.”
Indeed, even the company’s competitors say that the ClearType technology is a significant breakthrough that could re-energize the industry as it attempts to widen its appeal.
“The ClearType technology represents one of the primary keys that will allow our industry to unlock the door to making eBooks real and readable,” said Martin Eberhard, chief executive of Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuvo Media.
On paper, readers instantly recognize the shapes of words subconsciously because of the high resolution, the typography and the spacing of characters.
“But because of the low resolution and poor spacing on the computer screen, we’re not instantly recognizing the word,” Hill said. “We’re looking at a shape and we have to analyze or process it before we then recognize the shape and read meaning into it.”
Hill’s insight into the psychology of reading and how people recognize patterns was instrumental in reshaping the debate at Microsoft over how to improve on-screen reading, company officials say. Armed with Hill’s new knowledge, co-workers Bert Keely and Greg Hitchcock then devised a way to manipulate the pixels on the display screens with a new set of algorithms that Hitchcock wrote into the software code. A pixel--short for picture element--is a little square that can be seen when a graphics image is enlarged. The more pixels in an image, the better its resolution.
By dividing the pixels into even smaller units, the researchers improved font display resolutions by as much as 300%.
Microsoft plans to incorporate the ClearType technology into a new software program called Microsoft Reader, which is designed for a home or laptop computer. The Reader will be available as a separate program for its Windows operating system and will be on the shelves by June. The company will give away the software program in an attempt to stimulate the market for more electronic reading devices and for more copies of the Reader.
Dick Brass, Microsoft’s vice president of e-book initiatives, estimates that the Reader will create an additional 10 million e-book customers.
“What we have today are the first acceptable products for reading books and long documents on computer screens,” Brass said. “And they’ll only get better.”
The company also plans to incorporate the Reader into its new hand-held device called the pocket PC, which is slated to roll out in April.
Producing readable screen fonts have stymied researchers for more than a decade. It has been considered one of the “classic” problems that have blocked wide-scale adoption of electronic books--equally as important as reducing weight and improving the user interfaces of e-reading devices, said Andries van Dam, professor of computer science at Brown University and a member of Microsoft Research Advisory Board.
Solving the problem demanded a different perspective--a nontechnical examination of why people struggle to read on computer screens.
Enter the irrepressible Hill. The 51-year-old sees the transition from reading on paper to reading on the screen in grander social and personal terms.
Reading changed Hill’s life and helped him escape the Glasgow slums of the city’s East End. His home on 20 acres in the foothills east of Microsoft’s Redmond campus has four rooms stuffed with nothing but books--tens of thousands of titles ranging from archaic biographies on dead typographers to faded and yellowed paperback thrillers.
Except for some obsessive work habits that have him crisscrossing the country evangelizing the Reader, or putting in long hours at the office, the burly Hill hardly fits the image of a young computer geek fresh out of an Ivy League school that Microsoft loves to hire.
He is the only male employee who wears a kilt to the office. On many days, his normal attire is shorts, army boots and six-inch hunting knife he wears clipped to the side of his belt--a reminder of his passion for animal tracking and hiking. On special occasions, he will paint his face blue in homage to the fierce warriors who once kicked the Romans out of his homeland.
In another atypical Microsoftie move, Hill quit Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh after one year to begin a career in journalism that spanned 18 years. His interest in computers took root in the early 1980s, when he began writing freelance articles about emerging personal computer technology.
He later worked in Scotland for Seattle-based Aldus Corp., which produced the first professional desktop publishing application, called PageMaker. In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus and Microsoft approached Hill about running the company’s typography group.
For Hill, finding out why people push the print button after reading five paragraphs on the computer screen has been his personal holy crusade. He realized that to fix the problem of reading on-screen, his group at Microsoft must first understand what occurs in the brain when people read.
After months of research, Hill concluded that reading is both a conscious and a subconscious process. While reading, the mind subconsciously recognizes words as patterns, freeing up the conscious mind to read the text for meaning. Elements such as the shape and thickness of the characters, the spacing between characters and the way they appear on the page help this process by making words recognizable as patterns on a subconscious level.
Unlike the skeptics, Hill believes the public’s widespread adoption of e-books could improve society.
It could make books more accessible to more people. It could make books more affordable and more convenient to buy, he said--although that is not the case with e-books today. It could even save some trees.
Readers will be able to store a whole library of books on a single device the size of a paperback book. They’ll be able to search for more information or look up words while they read. And they’ll be able to download any book they want from the Internet, any time they want it, Hill said.
“The electronic book,” he said, “is going to change every area of life you can think about where reading goes on.”
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From Paper to Paperless
Developments leading up to the electronic book:
* 1455: Johannes Gutenberg develops a printing press with movable type.
* 1570: Abraham Ortelius produces the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
* 1720: English poet Alexander Pope earns a fortune for his translation of “The Iliad.”
* 1840: Wood pulp paper is produced commercially for the first time.
* 1883: Tolbert Lanston creates the first mechanical typesetting machine, called monotype.
* 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term “hypertext.” Later he writes about his utopian project Xanadu in which all the works of the world are permanently stored in a universally accessible repository.
* 1965: Media prophet Marshall McLuhan predicts the coming effect and potential profit of the merging of electronics and books.
* 1968: Alan Kay creates a cardboard model of the Dynabook, a computer with a million-pixel screen.
* 1981: The Random House Electronic Thesaurus becomes the world’s first commercially available “electronic book.”
* 1986: Franklin Electronic Publishers embeds an electronic dictionary in a hand-held device, producing the first portable eBook.
* 1991: Sony’s Data Discman is designed to display CD-ROM books on a 3.5-inch screen.
* 1995: Amazon.com begins selling print books on the Internet.
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Sources: Los Angeles Times research, Microsoft
