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Wired for Success

The Internet & New Media
By Akosua Kathryn Albritton
Ebooks
Do you notice people reading from their Pocket PC devices-they look like sophisticated Gameboys?  Depending on the part of New York you are in, Pocket PCs are either everywhere-on the subway, in the park, at the laundry or at the outdoor bistro-or nowhere.  What people are doing is “e-Reading” their “e-Books”.  The words found in a hard or soft cover book are digitally converted to bits and bytes so that consumers can download them into the Pocket PC from the Internet.  They take up little memory space so a consumer may have dozens of titles in her purse.  Talk about a revolution on top of a revolution: First, e-Commerce facilitates purchasing over the Internet by securing sales transactions and now, books and images are securely transmitted from producer to consumer over the Internet.  Do engineers and marketers ever rest their inventive minds?
The issue of key importance is copyright protection.  How do you stop people from distributing free copies of the book or reselling the book or making modifications of the text?  E-Books are encrypted before transmission and the purchaser has software that proves their identity and reassembles the bits into readable form.  The purchaser won’t be able to make a copy of the e-Book and give to another person because the sale was made to a particular consumer to be downloaded into a particular device.  Similar PDF or “Read-Only”, the buyer won’t be able to modify the eBook.
E-Books are an emerging industry.  In three years, the International Ebook Association was formed to oversee its development.  Microsoft is emerging as the leader of the pack.  Microsoft developed Microsoft Digital Asset Server or “DAS.”  DAS copyright protects, does content key storage, authenticates the consumer and ensures the privacy of the consumer during the transmission.  A consumer needs only download and activate MS Reader.  Microsoft explains that activation is a registration process that identifies your computer as yours alone.  It is required to purchase and read digitally secured MS Reader e-Book titles.
Starting in 2000, corporations like Palm, MobiPocket and Microsoft advanced on the technology of PDF to e-Books.  Back then; the focus was on the Pocket PC.  People loved it and in 2000, 4 million copies of MS Reader alone were distributed.  In 2003, registered and activated MS Reader owners may read an eBook across platforms, meaning read on Microsoft Tablet, PC, laptop, or a Pocket PC device.  To make this happen, Microsoft did its usual partnering with smaller firms that specialize in one of the following areas: digital conversion and imaging, content management, hosting, storage or print-on-demand, copyright protection and encrypted distribution of eBooks.  This sounds technical but in a nutshell, it’s the proverbial “no ticket- no laundry” concept.
E-Books present, a great opportunity for writers to sell direct to the consumer.  It’s possible to write your manuscript, convert it and post it to your Website or to a publisher’s Web-site.  The writer must still do meticulous proofing, editing and learn online marketing techniques.  To get details on how to crack the e-Book field, visit ebooksnbytes.com, ebooks123.com, ebookmagic4U.com or Microsoft.com/reader.  To see the numerous titles that are available as e-Books visit xdrive.com, nextag.com, emedia-traders.com, fictionwise.com, netlibrary.com or Amazon.com.
Question and Answer
Q: When using my color ink cartridge, I don’t get the color I selected.  For example, I may select brown, but what prints out is orange.  What do I have to do get the color that I want?
A: This to may indicate that you’ve used all of one color in the color ink cartridge.  The spectrum of colors is made from three basic colors: red, blue and yellow.  The color ink cartridge is larger than the black ink cartridge because it holds three chambers for these three colors.  If in past printing you’ve used a color that relied heavily on one color to produce the desired color, that chamber within the color ink cartridge is consumed.  If you have an ink monitor, it will not show the individual ink levels within the color ink cartridge.  Rather, it gives the total fluid left in that cartridge.  Using your example of selecting brown but getting orange, this probably indicates that you’ve consumed much of your blue.  You need red, yellow and blue to make brown.  Red and yellow make orange.
Have a technical question, visited a great Web-site or know of a technology breakthrough?  e-mail me at akos_a@juno.com

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