Network: Bytes

BORDERS, THE second-largest bookseller in the United States, said last week that it will use print-on-demand technology to enable it to fight back against Internet book retailers. Borders plans to install the technology at its distribution facility in Tennessee. If trials are successful, the system could be rolled out as early as next year in its stores in the US and Europe.

The company acquired a 19.9 per cent stake for an undisclosed amount in Sprout, whose digital machines can print books on demand, using two laser printers, one to print the text, another to print full-colour covers. The result is bound using a paperback binder. The books are said to be as good as those from traditional printing technologies. The process takes about 15 minutes.

The $40,000 hardware takes up around 60 square feet of floor space, so smaller shops could be used for bookselling. By storing books digitally and printing them on request, distribution and storage costs are dramatically cut, and returns of unsold copies eliminated.

AOL HAS joined the companies investing in online digital music and given a further boost to the claims for respectability of the de facto standard MP3 format. In a stock deal worth $400m last week, AOL bought an Internet radio company, The Spinner Networks, and Nullsoft, the developer of MP3 software including Winamp, downloaded 1.2 million times each month.

AOL is playing catch-up in the market that has seen many new developments. Radio streaming and MP3 downloading and player software will be embedded into AOL's online services and also available to CompuServe, ICQ and Netcenter customers.

"Internet music is beginning to take off," an AOL spokesman said. "We aim to make it even easier for consumers to listen to Internet music and take it to a mass market."

ADOBE SYSTEMS said last week it is going to cut jobs and concentrate on Internet-related business, even though its last quarter figures showed its profit exceeding expectations. The company responsible for software such as Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator and PageMaker, plans to cut its workforce by 9 per cent (about 250 employees), many of whom are with its international operations unit based in Edinburgh.

"We have such a loyal franchise of graphics professionals who visit our website - it ranks among the top 50 consumer sites - we feel we could leverage more out of it,'' Bruce Chizen, executive vice president of products, said, citing direct Internet sales, services and new Web-based products as part of an "aggressive worldwide e-business initiative".

THE ANTI-TRUST trial brought against Microsoft over bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with Windows by 19 states and the US Department of Justice resumed in Washington last week and continued in the same vein from where it left off, with lawyers for each side questioning the credibility of the economists the other was using as witnesses.

By the end of the week, Microsoft had produced papers prepared by investment bankers in connection with AOL's $10.2bn acquisition of Netscape to show that it had not blocked distribution channels for Netscape's browser. They contradicted the testimony of Netscape's former president, James Barksdale. The figures showed that last autumn, Netscape Navigator was loaded on 22 per cent of retail computers and accounted for 24 per cent of the Web browsers distributed by Internet service providers.

Franklin Fisher, the government's economics expert, said: "I don't believe that, I don't believe they believe that, I don't believe you believe that," when shown a document that said 160 million copies of Navigator had been downloaded from the Net. Fisher said he thought that Netscape was installed on 6 per cent of computers, but also said he couldn't identify the percentage of Netscape browsers distributed by ISPs.

Fisher conceded that he did not necessarily believe that Microsoft had consolidated its alleged monopoly in operating system software until after the 24 August 1995 launch of Windows 95. This could be a key point in deciding whether Microsoft used illegal business practices, as conduct that is illegal for a monopolist would not violate anti-trust laws if carried out by a non-monopolist.