Canada: Before the Kindle there was Softbook Reader – and Rocket eBook and Gemstar RCA eBook Reader

Canadian Aleksey Novicov Shares the Early History of eReaders

By Aleksey Novicov
Sept 22, 2024

The Softbook Reader

Martin Eberhard founded Nuvomedia with Mark Tarpenning and created the Rocket eBook.

James Sachs and Tom Pomeroy founded Virtual Press Inc., which became Softbook Press, and created the Softbook Reader. I had been advising Jim Sachs for a full year before he started Virtual Press, but didn’t join as a cofounder because I didn’t think it was possible without being a permanent resident. I joined as the fifth employee (as VP of Systems Development and Architect of the Experience) after a 3 month sojourn to India. It was while in India in 1995/96 I imagined much of the UI architecture of the Softbook Reader. James Sachs and I had been colleagues since we first met in 1984, and had both worked at David Kelley Design, which became IDEO.

Softbook Press and Nuvomedia were both acquired simultaneously by Gemstar TV Guide in 2000.

The Softbook Reader was a standalone device with built-in, free, dial-up access to the SoftBook Bookstore, and the user’s personal Softbook Library (sound familiar, you Kindle users!). It had direct download of reading content to the SoftBook Reader from the store at least five years before the very first Apple Music Store sold music with indirect download for the iPod in 2003. The Rocket eBook was a PC accessory, requiring books and other content to be purchased or downloaded to a PC, and then transferred over a serial connection to the Rocket eBook.

After the acquisition, Henry Yuen, CEO of Gemstar TV Guide, asked Martin and Mark to make the Rocket eBook function as a standalone reading device like the Softbook Reader. Martin was livid and said it couldn’t be done. But done it was, after which the two different products were then sold and marketed as the Gemstar RCA eBook Readers, REB1100 and the REB1200.

Martin and Marc left within a year of the sale of Nuvomedia to Gemstar TV Guide, with Martin saying he found it too challenging to work with Henry Yuen. Marc and Martin went on start Tesla Motors. My friend James Sachs died way too young from cancer in 2002.

David Kelley

I worked with David Kelley from 1984 – 1986. James Sachs had already left David Kelley Design by then. I met James Sachs in 1984 and we remained friends until his passing. We started collaborating on the Softbook in early 1985.

We hired IDEO to help us with the product and mechanical design of the first Softbook, and the initial UI design of the user experience. I later transferred the responsibilities of the UI design from IDEO to Rucker Design Group. Hal Rucker was an alum of IDEO, as both Jim Sachs and myself.

You’ll enjoy listening to David Kelley! Lots of great Silicon Valley historical anecdotes.

Ideo, an innovative design company – 60 Minutes Jan. 06, 2013

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How SoftBook Press Got Started
Stanford Seminar

Introduction
Thank you to Michael Rys for inviting SoftBook Press.
Thank you to all of you for attending and your interest in what we are doing.

How SoftBook Press Got Started

Almost 3 years ago we looked at the market and saw 2 things:

1. CONTENT CONSUMERS – With the advent of the Internet, people loved the ease with which they could get information, but couldn’t really immerse themselves into any content sitting in front of a computer.
2. CONTENT PROVIDERS – Publishers want to sell their content on the Internet, but are scared to death about piracy of their content.

Genesis of what we saw was to build an electronic book, a device that you could read electronic content on. So what does it look like?
Obviously, get rid of scrolling, use a page metaphor to traverse what you are reading.

So what about form factor:
• Could have designed special reading glasses.
• However, our design was driven by a recognition of how minds work.

• So we decided not to take a BIG paradigm jump initially, and design a device that was very book like:
  • Leather cover
  • Slim
  • Relatively light
  • 8-1/2 x 11 form factor
  • Not a PC!

I think we have succeeded in capturing the essence of what it is to read ink on paper on the SoftBook.
People really think of it as a book:
– “You mean to say that even with more books on here, that it doesn’t get any heavier”.
– “Your order form sums up the prices and adds the right tax, but you are missing the shipping charges.”

Sometimes however, there are users that are very locked into thinking that every time they seen an LCD display that its a computer.
“I can erase my annotations but I can’t erase the words.”

Design Process

Such a new application of technology, and a challenging one at that. After all, the competition is ink on paper, a fairly established technology, hard to beat.
Get it front of people, get their feedback.
Be sloppy.
Be stupid.

So that’s the device, what about the backend systems?
Much easier problem to solve because of pre-existing infrastructure of the Internet, and the use of the Web to distribute content electronically. Lots of available tools.
We looked at a number of platforms with which to implement all of our backend services on – and ended up drinking the Microsoft kool-aid.

Our first incarnation was a very monolithic design.
Driven by the idea that there is only 1 Bookstore, the size of Amazon

Content

So what’s the real product here? Think about it. It’s not the SoftBook. It’s not the Bookstore. The real product is content. We have a sign at the office to constantly remind ourselves of this. It’s the content, stupid!

CONTENT is the PRODUCT. Having only one Bookstore will throttle the amount of content available. We need an architecture that would eventually support multiple bookstores.

Our second revision of the backend systems architecture separated our system into two parts:

1. SoftBook Network Services
2. Bookstores

Now by having an ability to source multiple Bookstores, we break the bottleneck of only one Bookstore, one organization, responsible for providing all of the content.
Now you can have your own CS Bookstore, whether you host it or not.

SoftBook Network Services
SoftBook Demo

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See: The Rocket eBook – Martin Eberhard’s presentation to the International Publisher’s Association in Buenos Aires May 3, 2000

See: eBook – A Gemstar Technology Management presentation to Amazon in 2003, over 4 years BEFORE the launch of the very first Kindle in January 2007. Gemstar consolidated the two largest eBook players.

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Gemstar Acquires NuvoMedia, Inc. and SoftBook Press, Inc.

Information Today
Volume 17, Number 3 • March 2000

Gemstar International Group, Ltd. has announced the acquisition of two leading e-book companies, NuvoMedia, Inc. of Mountain View, California, maker of the Rocket eBook (http://www.rocket-ebook.com), and SoftBook Press, Inc. (http://www.softbook.com) of Menlo Park, California, maker of the SoftBook Reader. Gemstar developed and licenses the VCR Plus+ system, offers electronic programming guide information, and is the new owner of TV Guide. Gemstar plans to launch a massive consumer-awareness campaign later this year for the introduction of NuvoMedia’s and SoftBook Press’ new products, and for establishing the electronic reading device as a staple consumer product.
“Gemstar’s goal has always been to make technology consumer friendly. We are excited to offer consumers yet another convenience associated with the latest technology and information revolution,” said Henry C. Yuen, chairman and CEO of Gemstar. “Next to watching television, reading is America’s favorite pastime. We believe that Gemstar, NuvoMedia, and SoftBook collectively will be in a good position to provide the best technology, broadest distribution, and the most consumer-friendly devices….

“We intend to work hard to bring forward the time frame predicted by Steve Levy in his January 4, 2000 Newsweek article (entitled ‘It’s Time to Turn the Last Page’) that within 20 years, 90 percent of reading materials will be distributed on electronic media,” Yuen said.

“The key to electronic publishing is the issue of content security,” said Martin Eberhard, CEO and co-founder of NuvoMedia. “NuvoMedia and SoftBook have both created patented secure distribution and reading systems to ensure that publishers and authors will not have their works pirated. The fact that best-selling authors such as Stephen King, Arthur Golden, and Frank McCourt agree to electronically distribute their works on our systems is strong testimony to the confidence in our proprietary electronic-rights-management systems.

“Our combined technologies will further broaden our content-distribution capabilities and make our systems attractive for secured distribution of digital music, another rapidly growing electronic-content market in need of a solution. We believe that our devices will also serve as the means by which music publishers will release their major titles electronically as the book publishers are doing today.”

James Sachs, CEO and co-founder of SoftBook Press, said: “Gemstar, NuvoMedia, and SoftBook all believe that electronic books are the future of reading and content distribution, whether it is a bestseller novel, magazine, newspaper, or a business document. E-books have the potential to change the lives of students, professionals, and businessmen as well as recreational readers, and can significantly improve the efficiency of organizations which regularly handle large amounts of information. The combination of SoftBook Press with Gemstar and NuvoMedia will catapult the e-book category from a novelty to a necessity and help realize the vision that we outlined at the inception of the first e-book—to make it a ubiquitous reading device.”

NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press currently have content-distribution agreements and copyright-protection distribution systems in place with virtually every major publisher in the U.S., including Simon and Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, St. Martin’s Press, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan Publishing, Doubleday, Ballantine, Fireside, and many more. In addition, NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press have relationships with many leading U.S. newspaper and periodical publishers, including Bloomberg News, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Money, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, and the Washington Post.

According to the announcement, the Rocket eBook and SoftBook Reader have won numerous design and systems awards. Both companies have been leaders in the Open eBook initiative, an open standard that provides publishers with a single specification for the preparation of electronic publications for electronic reading devices. On November 9, 1999, NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press developed a draft of an “Open eBook (OEB) File Format” specification. Designed to enhance the Open eBook Publication Structure 1.0, the OEB File Format specifies how multiple files of a digital publication can be combined into the single file necessary for electronic delivery. The proposal will result in a standardized, common PC file format.

NuvoMedia was founded in 1997. The Rocket eBook, launched in 1998, is a 22-ounce, paperback-size, hand-held electronic reading device with a 4.5 x 3-inch LCD backlit touch-sensitive screen capable of holding up to 55,000 pages of text and graphics, with a battery life of up to 40 hours of continuous usage. NuvoMedia specializes in providing trade titles for the consumer electronic book market. Using the Rocket eBook system, readers can purchase and download over 3,000 titles from the Web.

SoftBook Press was founded in 1996. In 1998, it launched the SoftBook Reader, a 2.9-pound magazine-size, hand-held electronic reading device with an 8 x 6-inch touch-sensitive screen capable of storing up to 85,000 pages of text and grayscale graphics, a battery life of 5 hours’ continuous reading, and a built-in modem and Ethernet allowing it to download books, newspapers, and other magazines without the need for a personal computer. It offers a large viewing area and built-in connectivity to distribute magazines and newspapers as well as more than 1,700 book titles from a long list of publishers.

Senior management at both NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press has entered into long-term employment agreements with Gemstar, and there are no plans for any reduction in workforce because of the business and technology development needs in this business sector.

Source: https://cityfarmer.info/canada-before-the-kindle-there-was-softbook-reader-and-rocket-ebook-and-gemstar-rca-ebook-reader/