Originally published by
eBookNet

MICROSOFT READER AND ADOBE PDF MERCHANT GO HEAD TO HEAD

by Danny O. Snow and Wade Roush

Web Buy and PDF Merchant software from Adobe Systems rolled out early in 2000, promising secure delivery of online content across a wide range of hardware and software platforms. Meanwhile, industry watchers are closely following the introduction of the new PocketPC devices and Microsoft Reader, designed to make electronic content almost universally available to the reading public.

On March 14, Simon & Schuster released Stephen King's electronic-only novella Riding the Bullet, and received orders for more than 400,000 copies within 24 hours. As the first electronic-only bestseller, the book marked a watershed in the history of publishing. Yet within 48 hours of its release, pirated copies of King's story began to surface on the Internet, raising new questions about how to prevent eBook piracy.

In this climate of upheaval, we've compiled the following comparison of new products from Microsoft and Adobe.

Any fair comparison of these products must reflect that Adobe Web Buy and PDF Merchant are already publicly available, while the full version of Microsoft Reader with ClearType has yet to be released. For this reason, the amount of information available about the MS Reader is less detailed. It will be possible to make a more meaningful comparison when Microsoft Reader is available (in "mid-2000," according to Microsoft). EBN readers are encouraged to weigh these factors before drawing conclusions about either product.

In order to present a balanced view of both products, EBN interviewed senior representatives from both companies in April, 2000. Jeff Ramos, director of marketing for ebooks, responded for Microsoft. Mark Heisten, former PR manager of ePaper Solutions, and Rebecca Michals, senior PR manager of ePaper Solutions, responded for Adobe.

Below, we list each company's responses to a series of questions from eBookNet managing editor Wade Rouch, and guest columnist Danny O. Snow, co-author of a new book about the latest publishing technologies titled U-Publish.com (ISBN 1-58500-733-1), available in both electronic and printed form. Additional notes have been added in a few places where the writers felt that additional commentary might help put the comments of those interviewed in better context.

What are the technical requirements for your product?

Adobe: There are different requirements for Web Buy & PDF Merchant, depending on the product and features used:

Acrobat Reader with Web Buy and Acrobat with Web Buy, Version 4.05 or higher of either product on the Windows or Macintosh platforms

For File locking and key distribution:

Windows NT®, Intel® i486, Pentium® based, or Pentium Pro based personal computer;

Microsoft® Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5, running Microsoft IIS 4.0

128 MB of RAM (recommended)

40 MB of available hard-disk space

CD-ROM drive

For Key distribution only:

UNIX ®

Sun Solaris 2.6 running Netscape Enterprise Server 3.63 or later

Microsoft: Microsoft Reader will operate on desktop and laptop computers running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows NT, as well as on the next generation of Pocket PC devices powered by Windows, using the CE kernel. It will also be supported in the future on purpose-built book reading devices. There are three primary components of Microsoft Reader:

The client software with ClearType, which delivers a paper-like reading experience on-screen

Tools for the creation and/or conversion of content to Reader format

Distribution software that includes digital rights management support as well as industrial-strength distribution capabilities.

How is copyright protection achieved?

Adobe: PDF Merchant encrypts PDF files and allows the encrypter and seller to control permissions for printing, copying, and annotating documents to fit their business model. When content is sold to a customer, the seller has several easy-to-set options for locking content to a user's CPU ID, user ID, local hard disk, or portable media.

We license our encryption technology from RSA technology, which provides the highest level of encryption available for worldwide use. To further enhance security, we leverage industry-leading certificate authentication from GTE Cybertrust.

Microsoft: We will be talking about our digital rights management technologies in the near future. We recognize the importance of digital rights management to owners of content and have invested heavily to develop a system with which we believe they will be supportive. We are quite confident that our solution in this area will find wide scale adoption by authors, publishers and retailers.

Note from eBookNet: Since this interview was conducted, Microsoft and Xerox jointly announced the formation of ContentGuard Inc., which will market digital rights management system based on the Extensible Markup Language. Microsoft has taken a minority stake in the spinoff company (formerly the Xerox Rights Management Group) and says it will integrate ContentGuard technology into Microsoft Reader as well as many of the company's other tools for authoring, distributing, and viewing content.

Like PDF Merchant, ContentGuard's Extensible rights Markup Language (XrML) will allow a document's author, publisher, distributor, or seller to secure it against piracy, track its movements, and force users to pay before using it. Xerox has published an example explaining how this process might work for an electronic book.

At a press conference announcing ContentGuard's launch, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said "If we do this right, it will have benefits for everybody -- rights holders, business, the publishing industry, and consumers." However, he added that "Not all of these technologies will be available the day ContentGuard launches. It will take our engineers a while to get them integrated."

Microsoft has also recently announced relationships with R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. and with Barnes & Noble (both the .com and brick-and-mortar companies). Both RRD and B&N have substantial interests in protecting the intellectual property of authors and publishers, and have likely been coordinating their plans for distributing Microsoft Reader documents around the introduction of XrML.

How does MS Reader compare with Adobe's Web Buy and PDF Merchant?

Adobe: One of the largest obvious differences ... is that the Adobe digital rights management solution is shipping today and tens of millions of potential customers already use Acrobat or Acrobat Reader and can easily and securely purchase content.

Adobe's solution is also cross platform and cross device -- today it operates in the Macintosh and Windows environments on the devices that most of us are already using -- i.e. your desktop or notebook computer.

Adobe PDF is the de facto standard for the print/publishing industries and most content today is available in PDF (or PostScript) or easily convertible to PDF. Therefore, our solution is designed to work well with existing workflows with only minimum incremental effort.

Our strategy is based on partnerships with others in the commerce chain that provide a wide variety of industry standard solutions. [We] believe that the only way to get a Microsoft solution is to work directly with them.

Any other solution is based on technology that is not yet commercially available or tested and this creates a great risk in terms of the reliability of the proposed solution, the time market needed to implement a new solution as well as the risk that customers will not adopt it. Acrobat and PDF have been around since the early ‘90s and there is no question that they work and are widely used.

Microsoft: PDF is a great solution where you need to ensure that a document will faithfully reproduce when printed to a fixed page size. In the future, though, one of the key consumer benefits of eBooks will be the ability of content to dynamically re-flow across multiple devices -- allowing consumers to move their eBooks from their laptop to the Pocket PC and then back again, as just one example. Or from a purpose-built reading device to a PC. This was one of the factors which collectively drove the formation of the Open eBook Authoring Group and the Open eBook Publication Specification, which has been adopted by a very broad cross-section of the eBook community, including Microsoft, Nuvomedia and Softbook. Microsoft Reader has been designed to facilitate that kind of "re-flow" across the broadest possible range of devices. We believe that flexibility, coupled with Microsoft's digital rights management solutions, will be a very compelling customer proposition.

Note from eBookNet: From the two companies' marketing statements, it is difficult to discern major differences in the functions provided PDF Merchant/Web Buy and Microsoft Reader with ContentGuard, except that Adobe's system is specialized for PDF documents while Microsoft has said that Reader will be compatible with any document packaged using the Open eBook (OEB) format. The share of the eBook market ultimately won by each product may depend less on the technology itself than on the partnerships and licensing agreements each company is forming with organizations in the publishing and bookselling businesses.

When do you anticipate that your products will be in widespread use?

Adobe: Most of the customers that we have publicly announced are either etailers or service providers that are integrating PDF Merchant in their ecommerce solutions. We are working closely with several publishers and will be announcing specifics as they become available.

Microsoft: Pocket PCs containing the Reader will become available this spring. A Windows and NT version will be available in mid-summer along with the opening of the barnesandnoble.com eBookstore.

Note from eBookNet: Since these interviews were conducted, Microsoft's delivery projection for MS Reader has been revised to "summer." On April 19, Microsoft and three major consumer electronics manufacturers (Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Casio) announced the availability of new palm-size PCs running Microsoft's PocketPC operating system. A version of Microsoft Reader comes preinstalled on these devices, but eBookNet has been unable to determine whether this version includes copyright protection functions. Fewer than three dozen book titles are currently available for Reader, and all are public-domain works that do not require encryption for copyright protection.

What are the differences between Microsoft's ClearType and Adobe's CoolType?

Adobe: Here is another one of those areas where it is hard to comment because Microsoft has not begun shipping ClearType and our information is limited. The general approach behind the solutions is fairly similar in that they both take advantage of sub-pixel addressing on color LCD screens. My understanding is that Microsoft is focusing primarily on the Windows CE platform and that their technology only works within the Microsoft Reader, and with a limited set (6) of TrueType fonts. In most cases, the author of the document will not be able to use the typeface she originally intended, and readers of content will similarly be restricted by not being able to take advantage of the tens of thousands of typefaces available.

Adobe CoolType is platform and device independent and will work with all of Adobe's applications regardless of font type (TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, Type 3, etc., etc.). Authors can retain control over the look and feel of the documents and not be restricted in their choice of operating system. Adobe has 18 years of rendering type to screen and print and the algorithms we have implemented provide the highest quality reading experience commercially possible today.

Given that, it is important to note that an improved reading experience, while very important, is only one key factor. Adobe believes that availability of content from a variety of sources that can be easily read on a variety of devices is much more critical to providing the best consumer experience possible.

Microsoft: [We] do not have technical information on CoolType, but understand it to be remarkably similar to ClearType in principle.

Note from eBookNet: Neither Microsoft nor Adobe invented subpixel rendering, which was first applied to computer monitors by Apple II programmers in the late 1970s. (See Gibson Research Corporations excellent Subpixel Rendering Web site.) The basic technology is in the public domain. eBookNet's belief is that ClearType and CoolType are essentially equivalent technologies that deliver more or less equal improvements in readability on color LCD screens.

What kind of eBooks can readers expect to find available for these systems? Will any of them be free?

Adobe’s PDF is currently the most widely used format for distribution of eBooks worldwide. As mentioned above, Adobe stated that it is "working closely with several publishers and will be announcing specifics as they become available."

Microsoft is currently distributing 29 public-domain titles for Microsoft Reader on a CD-ROM accompanying the new PocketPC devices. Microsoft also stated that a wide variety of content will be available from barnesandnoble.com and other providers.

EBN’s projection is that a large amount of content for the MS Reader will become available through third-party content conversion service providers. This model can be contrasted with a system in which content creators (primarily writers and publishers) release their work directly to the public. The availability of free content is likely to depend the provider and its business model.

Is your system suited for extended reading on a handheld device?

Adobe: One of the nice things about PDF is that you don't need a dedicated device to read PDF files - any personal or desktop computer running the Macintosh, UNIX, or Windows operating system will do! This is extremely important to most consumers as it means that they do not need to buy (or carry) an additional device to participate in the eBook revolution.

Some of the dedicated devices that are being built are quite nice and I am sure that some consumers will purchase them. Several alternative device manufacturers are implementing PDF solutions such as Everybook, and last month Adobe announced plans to bring PDF to the Windows CE platform, and in conjunction with Palm Computing to the Palm platform. In January, we made a PDF Viewer available for Java. Adobe also publicly announced and showed our plans to enable reflowing of PDF documents to better support different size screens or windows.

There will be additional device manufacturers announcing their support going forward.

Microsoft: The cornerstone of our strategy for the Pocket PC is to give users the power to read whatever they want, wherever they want. If the market wants a device purposed exclusively for reading eBooks, that's what we'll give them; if they want a device that offers a broad range of other applications and capabilities, we can offer that, too. The real power of Microsoft Reader with ClearType is that content providers will immediately be able to address the 150 million PCs that are currently in use worldwide via the MS Reader. That's a huge increase over the current market for dedicated reading devices, and we feel it represents a significant growth element in the emerging eBook market.

About the Writers

Wade Roush is the managing editor of eBookNet.

Danny O. Snow is a graduate of Harvard in English and American Literature and Language. He has published more than 100 articles in newspapers and magazines across the nation. Snow has been widely quoted about new publishing technologies by news media across the nation, including The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Denver Post, Arizona Tribune, Associated Press, United Press International, Talk America Radio, and many others. He is also co-author of a new book titled "U-Publish.com," (ISBN 1-58500-733-1) written in collaboration with Dan Poynter. The book is available in both printed and electronic form from a website named for the title of the book: www.u-publish.com.

All rights reverted to the writer on publication;
Article now copyrighted © by Danny O. Snow