The drive to SoftBook Press dampens my spirits. The glass and steel headquarters sit in the most anonymous stretch of Redwood City's silicon sprawl, where construction outpaces landscaping and the view is monochrome.
But once I'm inside the office of Jim Sachs, CEO and co-founder, the mood brightens. Sachs, MS '79, designed electronic toys for 10 years before starting SoftBook in 1996, and some of the toys have found a home here. A trio of Jaminator guitars fills one corner, and Teddy Ruxpin -- possibly the bestselling talking bear of all time -- warms a shelf. A foot-high robot stands by the window, with a minifleet of radio-controlled cars parked nearby. It seems the room of a child who's learned to put his playthings away.
Packaging sophisticated technology in the simplest way has been a theme of Sachs's career, from his work as a co-designer and patent holder of the original Macintosh mouse to his development of the SoftBook Reader for electronic publications. "Technologies that are made invisible to people, things that enhance people's lives without being in-your-face about it, are very, very interesting to me," he says.
The SoftBook Reader seems to fit that description. It's a little slimmer, smaller and lighter than a typical laptop computer. It also has a lot fewer buttons. Lift its leather jacket and the 9½-inch screen lights up, sending you to your personal online "bookshelf," where you store anything from the New York Times to Stephen King's latest bestseller. The device has an 85,000-page capacity and a built-in modem; you connect it to a phone line to get new issues or titles. The operation is intuitive and seductive, a surprise for even the most skeptical technophobe.
When Sachs came to Stanford as a master's student in mechanical engineering in 1977, the development of microprocessors had just begun. He and several other students, including David Kelley, MS '78, began the department's smart product division, dedicated to combining mechanical and electronic design.
After graduation, Sachs, Kelley and a few others started Hovey-Kelley Design, a product-design consulting firm. One of their first clients was Steve Jobs, who wanted an "alternative input device" for his new operating system, the Macintosh. "We thought Steve Jobs was on drugs to think that the main input for a computer system of the future was going to be a mouse," says Sachs. "'The masses are going to use them,' Jobs told us." The biggest challenge was keeping costs down: Jobs wanted a $10 device. "For whatever exorbitant consulting rate he was paying us at the time, we thought, we'll do whatever he wants." An early prototype, bulky and housed in translucent plastic, sits in Sachs's office.
The inspiration for the SoftBook Reader came on a flight to Hong Kong in 1995. Bad planning left him without reading material with 12 hours to go. "I remember thinking, boy, I have all this stuff on my computer at home that I could use right now to read," he says, "and I wondered why there wasn't some kind of electronic reading device." He built a model out of sprinkler tube and acrylic sheeting. Four years later, SoftBook Press had developed a first-generation e-book reader.
At the start, Sachs had a business market in mind. "American business spends millions of dollars a year printing paper and shipping it around the country and hoping it ends up in the right place and stays secure," Sachs says. Paperless publishing, as SoftBook terms it, allows these companies to disseminate up-to-date information without the expense and inconvenience of paper changing hands.
Right now, the SoftBook Reader's relatively large size and hefty price tag ($599) limits it mostly to these business customers. Gemstar International Group, which bought SoftBook and its competitor NuvoMedia early this year, has sold "tens of thousands" of readers to this market. But a sales rep who receives product literature updates through a reader could also download the new John Grisham for his plane ride home. It's this idea -- that novels, too, can be read electronically -- that has caught the public's attention. Some see the SoftBook Reader or NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook or the new Microsoft Reader as a menace to libraries, books, paper you can feel between your fingers.
I tested a SoftBook Reader and found it nifty, if inessential, a grown-up version of the kid stuff Sachs keeps around. Reading on a screen, even one propped comfortably in your lap, inspires a hurried pace, one best suited for newspapers and magazines. It seems to me that moving them to electronic form has an irresistible appeal. No finger-staining newsprint; no outdated glossies piling up beneath the coffee table. But, to me, the loss of a bookshelf full of familiar spines is unappealing.
Don't worry, he says. "No one in the industry is even attempting to replace paper books with electronic books," he says. "I love reading books, and I will read paper books for a long, long time. In the future, every book will be published electronically, and only some of them will be good enough or affordable enough to allow printing on paper. Of course, people who have e-books will have more access to reading material than people who don't. But it's not a question of replacement, for a long, long time."
At the moment, there are about 2,000 titles available in electronic format, from magazines to literary classics. Writers such as Frank McCourt, Jon Krakauer and King have embraced the idea of e-publishing, and cloth bestsellers can be downloaded for around $15 to $20. Paperbacks cost $5 to $10 in electronic format.
The coming generation of SoftBook Readers will be improved. Ethernet capability will speed up download time (a novel will take from seconds to a minute or two). There will be a color screen and a longer-lasting battery -- currently it runs up to five hours between charges.
I took the device camping one weekend and found the backlit screen a boon for late-night reading. In the woods outside, my tent must have glowed with a futuristic light, an anachronism that would suit Jim Sachs, the guy with both a state-of-the-art Macintosh and a Teddy Ruxpin, the CEO who might just have the most toys in Silicon Valley.
Taylor Antrim, '96, is senior editor at Wine & Spirits in San Francisco.
