Electronic Publishing Arrives

Book and software publishers are getting to know (and like) each other.

Defining a strategy to navigate through the rapidly unfolding world of electronic publishing is becoming a vital consideration for publishers of books and software alike. As was widely reported in the mainstream European press, this was the year the Frankfurt Buchmesse “went electronic.” A touch of hyperbole perhaps — the bulk of activities there were still re, soundingly centered around familiar cellulose,based media but nonetheless this year, for the first time, part of one of the exhibition buildings was dedicated to electronic publishing. This was seen by even casual observers as a significant development.

While the term electronic publishing is regularly used in conjunction with desktop publishing, it is largely coming to mean the distribution of data in electronic form. Initially, this has been primarily material which is also offered in book form, but increasingly this data has been compiled for multiple uses and sometimes solely for electronic distribution. With the proliferation of the PC, electronic publishing presents some tremendous opportunities, but also poses some real challenges. Traditionally, software companies have been accustomed to selling functionality (ie, programs) and know very little about marketing content. Publishers have been in the opposite boat. Now, of course, this situation is changing, and the electronic publishing world in evidence at Frankfurt can be roughly divided into two camps: traditional publishers taking their first steps into the domain of electronic media (not all of whom had separate stands in the electronic pavilion) and software houses – both small and large – which publish electronic materials themselves or offer services to publishers.

Meet TA Electronic Publishing
One young enterprise — less than a year old — offers both services and end-user products. At its booth in the elec- tronic publishing pavilion of the Frankfurt fair, TA Elec- tronic Publishing (N&�uml;rnberg, Germany) was displayingboth its own line of multilingual reference tools that run under Windows as well as a series of DM60 (US$25) electronic dictionaries aimed at the home market that it developed for German publisher Rossipaul. TA EP offers its software as modules; users can pick and choose materials to suit their needs in what the company calls “the Lego block approach.” It is also positioned as open-ended, meaning that in theory you don’t have to buy your dictionaries and so forth only from T A Electronic Publishing. But for now, it is the only company offering lexical Lego in this format. ”The days of standalone terminology or dictionary packages are numbered,” TA EP’s Gerhard Heyer believes. ”People want simultaneous access to a whole range of online resources — not just one at a time.” Heyer admits that this is not a radical new idea, but rather it reflects a basic tenet of computer science; that of separating programs and data. He calls it the “record-player principle,” namely a common user interface which every- one knows and interchangeable parts.
    It is an admittedly appealing philosophy. Most compan- ies bundle their own retrieval software with electronic publishing products, and this is usually incompatible with other packages. TA is not the first company to try to solve this problem. Textware, a Danish company which has produced a variety of electronic dictionaries for Scandinavian languages, has offered such a platform with its Bookcase for several years. The Linguatech software has been adopted by a variety of publishers, although it has never been marketed as a standard platform. While it is too early to say whether the TA Electronic Publishing software could ever become an industry standard, the company is nevertheless decidedly on the right path. TA Electronic Publishing’s current offerings include both the entry-level TransDic Series and a more extensive OfficeDic line. These include a number of trilingual dictionaries (both general purpose and trade-finance-law vocabulary), a German thesaurus, and terminology lists. The company offers several additional modules for manipulating lexicons, learning vocabulary, and batch translations. With the Windows-based retrieval platform installed, a user can have seven reference works active at the same time and switch back and forth between them. The TA EP software has morphology analysis in its lookup routines, a small but useful feature long overdue in competing products, such as the Linguatech software. TA EP does not compile its own wordlists but acquires these materials from third parties, most notably Otto Verlag (Thun, Switzerland) and ICOS, a company founded by Wolf Paprotté, a professor at the University of M&�uml;nster. Paprotté has long been interested in corpus-based linguistics and has acquired vast amounts of text in German, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and other languages. His group at M&�uml;nster took part in the ESPRIT MULTILEX project and is one of the associate participants of MULTEXT, a new LRE II project (see page five). The lexical materials which ICOS licenses to TA EP are derived from corpus texts.

TA Electronic Publishing targets the mainstream business and home market with these packages and they are priced accordingly. Heyer’s mantra is a simple one: mass-market and cheap. He believes that the starting point for develop- ing the market for computer-aided writing tools is naturally enough to be found in what Heyer calls the “paper industries” of today. “These are translating, technical writing, and publishing,” he says. “We need to be offering language tools that enhance productivity. It’s no use being solely technology-driven.”
    As its name suggests, TA Electronic Publishing was formerly part of Triumph Adler; it was established as an independent entity in July of this year in a management buy-out by TA EP’s two directors, Gerhard Heyer and Klemens Waldir. As Heyer explains, during the 1980s, Triumph Adler was one of the research centers of the Olivetti group. “Here, like in other places, there was good research, but it was not well integrated within the rest of the concern,” says Heyer. “It was a typical situation. We developed interesting prototypes, but did not deliver products. Or, if we did produce products, they weren’t marketable.” The same could be said for Siemens, Philips, Nixdorf, and others. While a company like Triumph Adler could boast long experience — and substantial success — in retail marketing, it was less adept at exploiting new technologies. “In the domain of linguistic software, such companies have faltered because of a lack of experience in selling content,” Heyer points out. “They are not used to selling data. They are used to selling machines.” In any event, the ten golden years of the computer industry are behind us, Heyer adds matter-of-factly; for researchers in these companies, it is now a question of sink or swim.

In its previous incarnation, TA Electronic Publishing was one of the two coordinators of MULTILEX, an ESPRIT project which encompassed the definition and construction of multilingual, multi,purpose lexical database. MULTILEX provided a useful foundation upon which to build; the group’s lexicons are coded in a derivative of the MULTILEX specification. The TA EP group is also the prime contractor of the ESPRIT Translator’s Workbench (TWB) project, which has spanned two ESPRIT generations. This coming spring should finally see the launch of a series of TWB, compliant software modules from TA Electronic Publishing, SNI, and Cap debis. Some kind of distinctive name will have to be found for these packages because Stuttgart developer Trados has already pre-empted the name trans’ lator’s workbench for its computer,aided translation package. Not unfairly: Trados got its software to the market first.
    The first few months of the metamorphosis from the research wing of an international concern to an under, capitalized SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise in Euro-speak) is not an easy one. “First you sign your life away,” says Heyer sardonically, “then you get a revolver to shoot yourself in the head if anything goes wrong.” Governments won’t fund small companies at the drop of a hat, banks don’t like taking big risks, and venture capital is virtually non-existent — Europe is not a happy place for entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, the company is in a relatively good position. While TA EP was keen to profile its retail packages at the Frankfurt fair, Heyer acknowledges that the bulk of the company’s business lies in providing electronic publishing services to other companies. Moreover, the company expects to attract a major German distributor to handle European product distribution in the near future, thereby freeing it to concentrate on development and services. While it may lack the extensive linguistic resources of established linguistic software suppliers like Houghton Mifflin, Soft-Art , and Circle Noetic Services, TA Electronic Publishing does have long experience in the NLP field — and vision. Current electronic publishing products have, by and large, not exploited NLP techniques, and there is sure to be an explosion when publishers’ data finally meets the software world’s linguistic technology.

TA Electronic Publishing, Führter Straße 212, D-90429 N¨rnberg, Germany; Tel: +49 911 32 42910, Fax: +49 911 3242919