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EBT Press Releases International AnnouncementsAsahi Shinbun Will Publish "Online Top Ten News" on the Web in Japanese
PROVIDENCE, RI, Feb. 16, 1996 -- Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. (EBT), the premier international supplier of integrated CD/Web publishing solutions, today announced that Asahi Shinbun, the leading newspaper in Japan, will use EBT's DynaText and DynaWeb online publishing software in an experimental program aimed at publishing Japanese language news articles on CD and the World-Wide Web.
Asahi Shinbun, which has an average daily circulation of 8.25 million (4.5 times larger than the Wall Street Journal), is participating in the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) fiber-optics network "Multimedia Cooperative Communication Experiment." As part of the experiment, Asahi Shinbun is using EBT's DynaText Professional Publishing System to create electronic versions of Japanese-language articles for subsequent distribution on CD-ROM. Asahi Shinbun also plans to implement EBT's DynaWeb server software, to enable real-time publishing of the Japanese "Online Top 10 News" via the World-Wide Web.
"It is extremely satisfying to see Japan's explosive growth in the adoption of SGML and online publishing solutions extend to a major newspaper such as Asahi Shinbun," said Morihiro Kinjo, General Manager of EBT KK, EBT's Japanese subsidiary in Tokyo. "Asahi Shinbun is demonstrating its vision and leadership by adopting a standards-based approach to online news publishing."
Asahi Shinbun's experimental publishing system is connected to the existing online news gathering system, "ANDES." News articles are downloaded from ANDES every 6 hours and converted from plain text into SGML format. DynaText electronic publications containing the news stories are automatically built from this SGML source. Currently, more than 30MBs of news articles are within DynaText collections.
The DynaText collections will be installed on Asahi Shinbun's experimental Web server, which will utilize EBT's DynaWeb server software. When a Web end-user attempts to access the news articles, DynaWeb will convert them from SGML-based collections into HTML (HyperText Markup Language) "on-the-fly," enabling the articles to be viewed and searched by any HTML Web browser.
Asahi Shinbun chose EBT primarily because the DynaText/DynaWeb publishing process enables them to develop highly searchable electronic publications, for delivery on both CD-ROM and the Web, from a single SGML source. Another important consideration was that EBT's underlying multi-byte technology supports a variety of Asian languages, including Japanese.
Storing information in the stable SGML format and converting to HTML as requests are made to a DynaWeb server, provides both publishers and end-users with distinct advantages. EBT's SGML-based approach provides publishers with the foundation for an effective standards-based archival strategy. EBT's online publishing process enables newspaper publishers to generate different views (e.g. views by newspaper section, physical region, or demographic edition) of a single, SGML-based source of content.
This shields publishers from the time and expense of maintaining many small HTML files. Advantages to the end-user include access (via DynaWeb) to DynaText's rich, SGML-based searching capabilities for performing advanced searches not supported by HTML. DynaWeb also generates an interactive table of contents also enables end-users to navigate to a manageable chunk of information for downloading.
EBT products are supplied to Asahi Shinbun by Gakken Co. Ltd., an EBT distributor in Japan. EBT KK was recently established in Tokyo to tap into the burgeoning online publishing marketplace in Japan. In addition to Asahi Shinbun, EBT KK currently supports customers and distributors in this region such as Canon, Fujitsu Ltd., NEC, Novell Japan Ltd., NTT, SunSoft Japan, TOYO, and Toshiba Advanced Systems.
EBT's underlying multi-byte technology is capable of handling a variety of Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The forthcoming DynaText version 3.0, due at the end of the first quarter in 1996, is a Unicode-based, multi-byte-enabled internationalized application that will enable EBT to maintain and ship a single version of DynaText to the entire world market. DynaText is currently the only SGML-based publishing system capable of handling the full range of multi-lingual documents.
EBT's publishing tools provide professional publishers with a standards-based solution for the next-generation of integrated CD/Web publishing. EBT, a founding member of SGML Open and the MIT World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), develops and markets a product suite engineered from the ground up around standards such as SGML. EBT's cross-platform software tools enable customers to manage and publish information to CD-ROM, World-Wide Web, LAN, and print from a single, standards-based source. EBT information can be accessed on the Web at http://www.ebt.com. EBT is privately held and headquartered in Providence, RI, USA.
Contact:
EBT (info@ebt.com)
(401) 421-9550
DynaText, DynaWeb and EBT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. All other company, product or service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective holders.