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Technology

The eBook Technologies (ETI) team has developed core technologies and productized an electronic book platform that provides end-to-end content management and secure delivery of information over public networks to dedicated, award winning electronic reading devices. ETI licenses the eBook technology originally created by SoftBook Press and NuvoMedia and subsequently integrated and enhanced after both companies were acquired and merged into the Gemstar eBook Group Limited.

ETI technology is unmatched in the marketplace. Our flexible licensing program puts more than $40 million in technology investment and 75 man-years of engineering development at your service. The technology available for license includes intelligent reading device designs, firmware, content creation tools, content distribution and management technology, electronic bookstore and eCommerce implementations, and reading device inventory. ETI technology components support virtually all consumer and enterprise eBook business models.

eBook Technologies continues to innovate in the eBook space, contributing to new technology standards and advancing the state of the art in both device designs and content publication and delivery. ETI founders chaired IDPF working groups to develop new content standards for eBooks. eBook Technologies was the first to demonstrate a reading device-based implementation of these key new publication format standards designed to enable true eBook interoperability.

Patented areas of the eBook technology suite cover the unique designs, features and functions of the entire eBook publishing system. Intellectual property includes: the eBook system and features, cryptography, user interface elements, industrial design and manufacturing processes.

eBook Technologies works with major telecommunications providers, media and publishing giants, consumer electronics companies and booksellers to enable quick time-to-market and comprehensive eBook-based content distribution functionality for both enterprise and consumer environments. ETI can provide its technology partners with a full range of eBook device, content publication, and content distribution and e-commerce technologies for license:

eBook Devices

ETI offers hand-held electronic reading devices with ergonomics designed to deliver an immersive reading experience. The eBooks clearly depict both text and graphics and can be held comfortably in either hand. The eBook devices feature intuitive controls for familiar reading functions, including: turning pages, searching and researching definitions. The book metaphor is presented without computer-centric interactions throughout the user-interface, reinforcing the immersive quality of reading and replicating it uncompromisingly within the eBook reading experience.

At the IDPF Digital Book 2007 event ETI demonstrated a prototype eBook device with a 6” E-Ink display running the first device-based implementation of the new IDPF content standards. ETI is actively working with a broad range of cutting edge electronic paper technologies and can quickly bring fully functional privately branded E-Ink electronic paper devices to market in sizes ranging from 6” to the just announced 10” and larger sizes as well as electronic devices using more conventional screen technologies including LCD.

The software found in current ETI LCD based devices is the result of more than 9 years of refinement coming from the real-world experiences of more than 70,000 customers in both consumer and enterprise environments.

Device Display CPU Content Storage Communications
ETI-Proto SVGA (6” diagonal) E-Ink grayscale ARM9 32MB internal; SD external USB via PC
ETI-1 VGA (8.2” diagonal) color LCD ColdFire Compact Flash 56K Modem or Ethernet
ETI-2 Half-VGA (5.5” diagonal) grayscale LCD ARM7 8MB internal; SmartMedia external 33.6K Modem or USB via PC


For more details on the E-Ink-based prototype click here.



For an interactive tour of our LCD-based intelligent reading devices click here.

eBook Firmware

The licensable code base supports the newest IDPF content standards (OCF 1.0 and OPS/OPF 2.0). ETI announced and demonstrated the first device-based implementation of these standards at IDPF Digital Book 2007. OCF/OPS facilitates cross-Reading System content interchange as well as exceptional content presentational fidelity – from simple paginated text to complex highly formatted reflowable layouts – from trade press to textbooks to business documents to newspapers to database extracts.

Current eBook devices, and future compatible devices, run unified eBook Firmware that implements the electronic book reading and content presentation experience. The user interaction implemented in the firmware provides a bookshelf interface, a book reading interface and a book purchasing interface.

The “bookshelf interface” provides the environment in which the user's own content is managed. The “eBookshelf” is the window into local, device-resident, content.

The other portion of the “bookshelf interface” is the “Online Bookshelf.” The Online Bookshelf presents the list of all content that is available to the device. This content resides within the eBook Network on server running the ETI server software.

The “book reading interface” presents eBook content; it provides the interface with which the user interacts with the content – reads, marks up, searches. Like paper books, ETI eBook content is presented in paginated form for natural reading rather than being scrolled as on a computer. Each book can be viewed in a variety of font sizes. Capabilities exist to search for text, lookup word definitions in resident dictionaries, take notes on pages, and apply highlights within any eBookshelf resident book.

The “book purchasing interface” is available to consumer-marketed devices. Using the bookstore interface, consumers can purchase eBook content in one of two ways: via an eBook using its connection to the eBookstore, or online at the Web eBookstore via a PC. The “bookstore interface” provides the user access to the eBookstore from the device. An online connection (via modem, Ethernet, USB or wireless) to the eBookstore server allows the user to browse, search and purchase content. Even though the underlying technology uses standard Internet protocols, the user interface is such that no computer literacy is required to interact with the eBookstore.

The core underlying technology on which the higher level application functionality runs is implemented in a highly portable code base. Supported environments include – embedded OSes including various versions of embedded Linux and commercial RTOSes (e.g. Nucleus), desktop OSes including Windows, Mac OS X and various versions of Linux.

The ETI firmware supports flexible/customizable user interfaces with interactions driven by external buttons, sliders, and/or various touch-screen technologies (e.g. resistive, inductive). The elegant and simple device UI is typically touch-screen-driven using a collection of drop-down menus and trays to present the required tables, forms and windows. The book metaphor allows the user to interact without computer-centric skills such as “tap, hold and drag.”

Content Tools

eBook content is created using the IDPF's “Open Publication Structure” (OPS), an industry standard XML-based markup format that ETI personnel pioneered. ETI content tools include support for the newest standards for the interoperability of eBook publication, transmission and consumption including:

  • OCF 1.0 — OEBPS Container Format which defines the wrapper for encapsulating and transporting the multiple elements that constitute an eBook in a single file
  • OPS 2.0 — Open Publication Structure which describes how eBook content should be represented such that it can be optimally rendered regardless of target Reading System. It also includes a new publication packaging format (OPF) which describes the organization of the components and metadata that make up an eBook publication
eBook Publisher is the content creation and preview tool employed by the ETI publishing system. eBook Publisher supports multiple source document types including OPS, HTML, Text, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, various images formats. Using eBook Publisher, enterprises, publishers and third-party conversion houses convert books, training materials, periodicals, and other documents into eBook Editions, eBook titles that can be read on ETI reading devices. eBook Publisher runs on Windows and Macintosh desktop systems.

eBook Publisher provides the mechanism and management infrastructure to combine all components of an electronic publication (markup files, images, styling information and metadata) into an eBook. Further, it provides WYSIWYG preview capabilities for all screen sizes and zoom states supported by ETI reading devices.

Auto Publisher is the server-side portion of the publishing tools. Auto Publisher processes OPS files prior to delivery to target reading devices. This operation may include pagination (for optimal device reading performance), compression and encryption. Auto Publisher is also capable of processing text, raw OPS and Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files into device-specific eBooks titles. This latter capability is used for Personal Content, allowing users to upload various source formats to a Web server and subsequently download “their” personal titles for reading on their device(s).

Network Architecture

The eBook Network architecture consists of three major components. The first component, called eBook Network Services, is a centralized system providing registration, authentication and content database services. eBook Network Services creates a private and secure environment for groups of eBooks to operate. Licensees may elect to have Network Services deployed on ETI managed servers. The second component, called the eBookstore, provides, in the consumer market, popular and current reading material to the eBook community. Content purchased by an eBook user from the eBookstore is delivered to the eBook customer’s Online Bookshelf.

The third component is the eBook Express Manager. This application allows enterprise customers to centrally manage the delivery, access, audit, and updating of enterprise content for groups of eBook users.

The eBook Network infrastructure is designed as a scalable system that is able to support any number of content producers, whether they are other bookstores or enterprise applications. This infrastructure leverages existing standard Internet protocols such as HTTP, TCP/IP, SSL and PPP.

Communications

All communications between eBook devices and either ETI or licensee-resident servers are layered on top of standard Internet protocols. Specifically the following protocols are employed: IP, TCP, DNS, DHCP, HTTP. HTTP is generally transmitted on the standard port 80, however proxy servers are also supported.

Device designs can support a wide variety of communications options including modem, USB, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, various WWAN technologies. High-speed communication in current devices is performed over Ethernet or USB connections. The ETI-1 has an on-board 10baseT RJ45 Ethernet connection. Both DHCP and manual IP configurations are supported. The ETI-2 and prototype E-Ink device have an on-board USB-slave connection. The devices do not communicate directly with the connected PC or Macintosh; the eBook device simply “proxies through” the desktop or laptop computer. This allows the device to piggyback on whatever higher speed WAN or LAN connections are available, but still communicate directly with the ETI or a licensee's servers. Licensees may choose to firewall-block external access to internal eBook servers.

Cryptography

All exchanges of sensitive data between an eBook device and the server are communicated over secure sessions. In order to securely exchange a session key (for the establishment of a secure session) and to allow each side to verify the other's authenticity, a shared secret key is maintained (Device Shared Secret – DSS). The shared secret is generated at manufacturing time for each eBook device. The shared secrets were uploaded to ETI from the manufacturer via secure FTP connections for the ETI-1 eBook devices. ETI-2 and subsequent devices securely upload their shared secret to the server during registration. Regardless of method, after the shared secret is established between eBook and server, the cryptography used for secure data exchange and content storage identical for all ETI and compatible eBook devices.

Content

ETI has existing relationships with major publishers that can enable its licensees seeking to enter the consumer market to gain access to ten's of thousands of existing fiction and non-fiction titles — more first run, major trade press titles are flowing into the ETI repositories on a daily basis.

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