Traffic to eBookWeb.org has grown to more than 500,000 pageviews each month, with the "New Books" pages among the most popular on the site.

	See also:
•	2001 Was a Tough Read for E-Books
•	E-Books Out of Print Already?
•	Once-Dead Writers Site Returns
•	A Ticket to Fix Encryption Woes
•	Discover more Net Culture

Sanders, who has been reporting on the e-publishing industry since 1998, points out that even though it has been a quiet year for e-book news, there is a steady and growing demand for digital content online.

And some numbers bear out his assertion.

McGraw-Hill reports that its e-book sales are up 55 percent over this time last year.

Palm Digital Media sold nearly 180,000 titles in 2001.

PerfectBound sold more e-books in the first five months of 2002 than in all of 2001.

More than 5 million copies of Microsoft Reader have been distributed for use on desktop, notebook and Pocket PC systems.

Simon & Schuster saw double-digit growth in e-book sales from the first quarter in 2001 to the first quarter in 2002.

"We in the e-publishing industry are here to stay. It's just going to take some time to build the industry," Sanders says. "But building it we are. No stopping us."

EBookWeb's goal is to inform people about e-books, with a strong focus on educating the public, and to stimulate sales of digital content.

Another word for thesaurus: If you don't like the author's choice of words, look up alternatives.

The newest version of Mobipocket Reader 4.4 -- software for e-book technology on mobile platforms -- will include Franklin Electronic Publishers' thesaurus.

The new reader will offer several enhanced capabilities, including the instant lookup of selected words in Franklin's thesaurus. So if you don't think Hemingway should have used the world "sea," you can search for alternatives.

The new release also takes advantage of today's latest PDA enhancements, such as higher-resolution color screens and removable memory cards. Users will also have access to over 4,000 e-books from Franklin's or Mobipocket's world-class e-book libraries.

A Pro version will offer additional features allowing users to annotate or highlight selected text, and will include Franklin's electronic version of Merriam-Webster's Vest Pocket Dictionary.

Funny new math: What do cartoons and math have in common? A new encryption technology created by Jason R. Kauffman, a student at the University of Dayton.

Kauffman, a mechanical engineering major who is interested in both subjects, was inspired by a science fair project that used a scene from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He wanted to improve the computer-animation method that assigns numbers to body movements and then generates random numbers to initiate those actions, giving crowd scenes a lively, realistic appearance, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

While studying the random-number-generating process, Kauffman came up with a unique way to use random numbers to encrypt data.

"Since you don't know what any of the values are mathematically, (a hacker) can't solve it," said Robert E. Kauffman, who is a senior research chemist at Dayton and Jason Kauffman's father.

Together with the university, which is funding the patenting, father and son have formed a partnership.

John E. Leland, director of technology partnerships at the university, said he hopes to sell the technology to computer companies, banks, government agencies, and other organizations that could use a secure code.

M.J. Rose is the author of the new novel, Flesh Tones.