Microsoft manuals to be available online

It was announced this week that Ibooks.com of Austin, Tex. will convert hundreds of Microsoft Press books to digital format for distribution over the Internet. This is the best use of electronic publishing today. Especially because computer books tend to be thick, heavy, and expensive. Not to mention they go out of print sometimes before the ink is dry. This project is aimed at computer programmers and professionals who might be in remote locations and find they need access to a manual they didn't bring along with them.

On the awards front, a new children's e-book category has been added to the International eBook Award. It will debut at the Bologna Book Fair in 2002. Foundation chairman Alberto Vitale commented: "Children and education are vital parts of the future of e-books. Today's computer-literate generation will embrace this new medium and make the e-book format mainstream." No mention of the value of the award but expect it to be at least $10,000 maybe more.

Random House announced this week that it will be releasing a hundred titles from its Modern Library collection as electronic books. The really good news is that most of the titles will be in the five dollar range. That's around 75% off the paper price. Random will offer them through non-retail online sites as well as the conventional online bookstores in an attempt to give them wider distribution. Some sites where they will be available are http://www.bookreporter.com, http://www.shakespeare.com, http://www.authorlink.com and http://www.pemberly.com. A couple of the new offering are Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

London ePublisher Online Originals (http://www.onlineoriginals.com) will be releasing a series of five electronic only stories by Fredrick Forsyth this week. The first story, The Veteran, a tale of crime and courtroom intrigue in contemporary London, costs $2.99 US and is currently available only in Microsoft Reader format. PDF and Glassbook editions are expected to be available soon.

The project came as an indirect result of King's venture into serialization of "The Plant". It seems Forsyth had a few ideas for stories but didn't want to expand them into novels. His agent suggested that he follow King's method and sell them individually on the Internet. Further installments are set to be released every three weeks over the next three months, after which the entire set, titled Quintet, will be published as a single eBook. Forsyth says he is open to the possibility of publishing a future full-length novel electronically, depending on the success of this latest project.

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