The electronic book, called SoftBook, is a leather-bound, one-inch thick, 8.5-by-11 inch receptacle that can hold as much as 100,000 pages of text, pictures, and graphics downloaded from the company's SoftBook Network, according to James Sachs, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBook Press. SoftBook has a screen that displays one "page" at a time, as opposed to displaying continuous text via scrolling, and it is back-lit for easy viewing, Sachs said.

"An end-user with a SoftBook will have greater access, greater selection than ever before," Sachs said. "There will be no such thing as out-of-print."

The SoftBook contains a built-in 33.6Kbps modem that, when plugged into a standard phone jack, automatically connects to the SoftBook Network, Sachs said. Users can browse the network and purchase and download their selections at 100 pages per minute, he said. Offline, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack provides SoftBook users with as much as five hours of viewing and can be recharged in one hour, he said.

Currently, the SoftBook Network contains hundreds of best sellers, which are priced lower than their hard-copy counterparts, and thousands of articles from newspapers and periodicals, Sachs said. In addition, the company is actively working with publishers to gain electronic access to their titles, he said. So far, Simon & Schuster and Random House have signed up, among others, and many more are anticipated, including publishers whose books are not in English, he said.

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SoftBook's proprietary encryption technology, which received a patent just last week, makes the deal attractive to publishers who want to sell electronic versions of their books but are concerned that the book will be copied and spread across the Internet, Sachs said.

"SoftBook provides a means for the publisher to sell safely and get paid for it," Sachs said. "Publishers are interested to sell their information any way they can [and] this gives them tremendous virtual sales with no manufacturing costs."

Most people may find the 2.9-pound SoftBook too heavy to hold overhead and read lying down, but it does easily rest on a lap in bed or comfortably fit in cramped places, such as on airplanes, according to Sachs. Moreover, the text's font size can be changed so that readers need not hold the book right up to their face, he said.

SoftBook also lets readers interact with and alter the text without permanently changing it. Readers can click on a word to get its definition from a built-in dictionary, search the text for specific words or phrases, or depress a button to electronically "flip" through the pages, Sachs said. Readers can also highlight text, make notes on the screen, and bookmark pages, and all changes are automatically saved when the book's cover is closed. If users "throw out" a book by erasing it from their SoftBook, the title, along with any changes, is stored on the reader's personal book shelf on SoftBook's servers and can be downloaded again at any time, he said.

The company's strategy for the product includes selling its proprietary technology to manufacturers who intend to make electronic books of their own. For example, another company may choose to market a waterproof electronic book, Sachs said.

"The market is going to be very, very big and will be bigger than one manufacturer can handle, eventually," Sachs said.

However, a large chunk of the company's business, at least initially, will be selling SoftBook to corporations, educational institutions, law offices, and other entities whose employees or affiliates regularly must read a large volume of internal company information, Sachs said.

SoftBook will be available next month for $299 if a user commits to $20 per month of purchases, and other pricing packages are also available, according to Sachs.

"Our objective is not to replace books," Sachs said. "Just as video tapes have expanded the market for viewing movies, electronic books are going to expand the market for books."

SoftBook Press Inc., in Menlo Park, Calif., can be reached at (650) 463-1800 or http://www.softbook.com.

Rebecca Sykes is a Boston correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.