NEW YORK -- Could the new TabletPC be the form factor that finally ushers in wider acceptance of e-books? It's raising hopes among digital publishing and media executives who gathered here at a TabletPC digital publishing conference.

"Publishers are excited about it," said Nick Bogaty, executive director of the Open eBook Forum, an interoperability standards consortium that organized the one-day conference.

"This will jump-start things, and it will certainly jump-start a lot of the e-book activity that two years ago was supplied by venture capital money," Bogaty said. After the dot-com bubble burst, many venture investors and publishers pulled back on their electronic publishing ventures.

Neil Budde, outgoing publisher of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition (WSJ.com), said he found the TabletPC easier on the eyes. "What I find exciting about this is that it's a device that people will start using to read and take with them. It's almost like you need a format for reading."

He also noted interesting elements of page orientation on the tablets that are more comfortable for reading books, compared to a scrolling orientation used with Web publishing.

John Frederiksen, product manager for Microsoft's eReading Group, told the audience to keep the faith about e-books and their expected growth. He's also upbeat about them because he's optimistic about the potential of TabletPCs.

"When I look at different markets, I see it taking off in North America as a laptop replacement and a mobile device. I don't think it's going to require a huge resurgence of the overall PC market for the tablet device to do well. The people I've shown it to look at it and say they could use it to replace their notebook. I think it's going to do very well."

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Frederiksen said he agreed with oft-quoted remarks of his boss, Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates, who reckons that e-book technologies are at the beginning of a five to 10-year adoption cycle.

"The trick is making electronic information as handy as paper," said Bert Keely, an architect with Microsoft's TabletPC team. "The TabletPC is really just one snapshot on a continuum of making personal computers fit into life better. One detail of that is for the screen reading experience to be as clean as paper," he said. "I think TabletPC is a leap forward in that regard."

Front End, Back End Challenges

During a panel discussion about e-book publishing on the TabletPC, Bob Bolick, vice president and director of new business development at publishing house McGraw-Hill, called integrating e-books in the back office "the untold nightmare and story" in the industry.

On the back end of the publishing process, for example, e-books are not integrated with publishers' warehouses or systems for tracking sales and royalties. And on the front-end, the costs of converting legacy systems for the current variety of digital e-book formats are painful for publishers too, he said.

"Many authors think we can just reinvent (Web browsers) for their (electronic) books, or that we can come up with a new GUI (graphical user interface)," for their e-book, he added.

Other e-publishing executives agreed that much of their day-to-day work entails designing for different e-book formats, such as Palm's Computing platform, Adobe's PDF Books, Gemstar's e-book reader, and of course, Microsoft's e-Reader format with its TabletPC operating system.

But for the most part, said Kelly Leonard, executive director of eBook publishing for AOL Time Warner's book group, the greatest challenges for her group are to eliminate redundancies that plague the e-book publishing process. If, for example, an electronic publishing group can get file formats converted into XML (define) (which helps standardize data use) before they go to print, "we don't have to have a Word document from an author then converted into an Open eBook file that is then converted into the five different (e-book) formats that we publish."

Open eBook Forum's Bogaty said the industry is making progress in working towards interoperability of different file formats for e-books. But a lot of work remains, he added, such as digital rights management technology, interactive file formats and XML adoption that would help standardize how data files are used in different publishing platforms.

Still, for all the problems facing the e-book segment, which by most accounts represents about one-tenth of 1 percent of the entire publishing industry, many of the 300 or more attendees sensed greater acceptance of the electronic book format.

New research by Allied Business Intelligence (ABI), meanwhile, projects the TabletPC alone will add another $1 billion in market value to the Internet Appliance computing category this year. Overall, it pegs the market value for the IA market to grow to $32 billion by 2007.

"As vendors try to re-position products to complement PCs in the home rather than replace them, their acceptance and use will catch on," noted Laraine Tunick, ABI analyst. "However, the Tablet PC will also have to fend off advances being made by personal digital assistants (PDA) as devices with mobile and wireless functionalities proliferate."

Sponsors of the Tablet PC Digital Publishing Conference included Microsoft Corporation, The New York University Center For Publishing, Fujitsu, Adobe Systems, OverDrive, and Palm Digital Media.