Amidst e-book gloom, one firm hangs on

However, a local e-book company is hanging on and has just clinched a deal it hopes will keep its digital pages turning.

The firm, E-Book Systems, has signed a distribution agreement with Japanese broadband giant Softbank, which will publish titles in Japan using E-Book's Digital Flip platform.

E-Book Systems makes software that helps users author and display on-screen text, images and multimedia in a flip-through method similar to book-reading.

Instead of trying to copy paper, the platform allows for audio and video and is designed to be viewed on PCs, not handheld devices.

However, competing formats are many and pack daunting advantages, as many defunct e-book companies have discovered.

Some, like the Web browser-based hypertext, are free. Others, such as Microsoft's Word and eBook and Adobe's PDF and Reader require commercial software to create. All are entrenched and believed to have helped make the proprietary book reader file formats of the late '90s go under.

In September this year, online bookseller Barnes&Noble.com discontinued sales of e-books. Customers using Microsoft's eBook reader have until Dec. 9 to access downloads purchased from the store, while Adobe Reader customers have 90 days to retrieve any outstanding files.

Robert Leathern, director and senior analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings said in a previous report that e-books "for a long time have been something that people have said will lead to a spike in adoption, but the technology hasn't really been there yet."

The significant nail in the e-book coffin, many believe, was struck when popular author Stephen King's serialized, downloadable e-book was aborted after a few chapters.

"It caused the whole industry to take a step back," said E-Book System's chief executive Richard Wan.

"There is no incentive for the consumer to pay for static replica of a real book. Had King put in things you can't get from a bookshop, like multimedia, it could have been different," said Wan of King's attempt.

Today, the 70-strong Singapore company is yet to become profitable, but it hopes to turn a corner through the Softbank deal, said Wan.

In December, the Japanese content giant will release 20 children's titles on E-Book System's platform. The e-books will feature heavy embedding of audio and video, which is the key to success for e-publishers, he said.

E-book reader devices were once lauded as the answer to a problem that wasn't really much of a problem to begin with, said Wan. Paper books are light, don't need batteries and a volume published in the last 200 years has a better resolution than an LCD screen.

Dedicated hardware such as the Rocket eBook and Softbook have mostly faded away after making a splash four years ago. While Wan still monitors the hardware front, looking at promising technologies such as e-ink, his firm is adopting a cautious approach.

But that doesn't mean that there won't be any hardware at all: Later this year, the firm will unveil a device that reads images off a digital camera storage card, automatically formatting into a photo album format for viewing on a television.

News.com's Evan Hansen contributed to this report.