Exbiblio™ brings the rich interactions you have on a daily basis with Web pages on the Internet — such as saving and sharing what you read, linking to expanded content or related information or learning about or purchasing products — to any paper document wherever you are. Exbiblio is a transformative company that not only develops innovative technology but also drives environmental stewardship — a model of sustainable capitalism for the 21st century.
Other companies have attempted to bridge the gap between the paper and digital worlds. The Exbiblio approach has one key difference: no changes to the printing or publishing of documents need to be made for all of the above rich features to become possible — right now. The world has changed dramatically in the past ten years. The majority of paper documents now exist in electronic form. They may be publicly accessible on the Web or on a corporate intranet or an individual PC, but they are available in the digital world. In cases where the documents are not accessible, they could be made so for a fee or with appropriate rights management. This means that a reader, instead of using an optical scanning process to create an imperfect, digital copy of a paper document, can now use optical scanning to find the corresponding digital version of the document. Once you can link a paper document to its digital version, the paper you hold is transformed into a physical Web page.
The question then becomes, "How much of a paper document do you need to 'capture' in order to identify the digital version of it unambiguously?" The answer is quite remarkable. In most cases, instead of scanning and processing every page of a document, you only need to capture about six words. In short, any snippet of already-existing text in a document becomes an identifying barcode. Because the capture involves only a small amount of text, it identifies both the document and a location within that document. This can all be accomplished with an optical capture device that fits in the palm of your hand and connects wirelessly to the Internet. Selecting the snippet of text with the device becomes the equivalent of clicking on it with a mouse. In this way, Exbiblio brings to the world of books, newspapers, magazines and other printed materials the dynamic, interactive capabilities we all have come to expect from a Web page.