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Text File | 1994-03-28 | 4KB | 78 lines

Electronic Publishing Said Hitting the Mainstream


BOSTON (Reuter) - Electronic publishing, a technology that promises to
save time and costs while producing documents that match the quality
of traditional press print, is overcoming technical hurdles and
entering the mainstream, analysts say.

"There is a movement from print to electronic distribution. It was
speculated about in the past, but this is the year electronic
publishing is becoming real for most publishers," said Jonathan
Seybold, founder of Seybold Publishers and an expert on electronic
publishing.

Seybold puts the potential U.S. market for professional publishing,
including newspapers, at $6 billion a year.

"There are trillions of pages produced each year," he said. Currently,
when those documents are converted to electronic type, they are
usually sent over a network line-by-line, a cumbersome method that
limits the quality and variety of graphics and type fonts.

But in a breakthrough that may help advance the art of electronic
publishing, software companies have developed ways to move documents
in a page-by-page format. That allows for  more accurate reproductions
of visual art and for use of a far wider range of typefaces.

Adobe Systems Inc. has dominated the software field with Acrobat, a
program introduced last year. Multex Systems Inc. announced this week
it will use Acrobat to distribute complex investment research
documents to six major brokerages, including Paine Webber and Smith
Barney Shearson.

"Brokerage firms can save millions of dollars a year by using
electronic methods to distribute research documents in real-time to
branch offices and clients," Multex Vice President Jim Tousignant said
at a Seybold electronic publishing conference in Boston. The event
ends Friday.

Meanwhile, WordPerfect Corp. introduced a competitor to Acrobat,
code-named Envoy, that the company says takes less room to store on a
computer and has more features.

Seybold estimated the market for products such as Acrobat and Envoy at
$50 million to $100 million within two years.

Envoy, no relation to the Motorola Inc. hand-held computer launched
recently, lets users of Apple Computer Inc. and IBM-compatible
personal computers look at, change, annotate and print electronic
documents created by other users.

An 80-page financial report with charts and text could be
electronically annotated by various users across the country instead
of being copied and mailed to users. Acrobat does not allow
annotation, but a future version will, Seybold said.

"The breadth of potential of electronic publishing is enormous," said
Donald Emery, vice president of WordPerfect's electronic publishing
group. Envoy could comprise 10 percent of company revenues in one or
two years, he said. The company plans to market the product this year
under a different name.

The moves toward electronic publishing may also get a boost from the
fast-paced mergers in the industry, which are putting graphics, word
processing and networking software under the same roof. The
convergence could speed up the development of products that combine
graphics, text and communications.

Adobe and WordPerfect are part of a recent software industry
consolidation.

Networking company Novell Inc. on Monday announced plans to purchase
WordPerfect for $1.4 billion in stock. Privately held WordPerfect said
it had $700 million in revenues in 1993.

Last week, Adobe announced it would acquire electronic publishing firm
Aldus Corp. in a stock swap worth an estimated $515 million.