I am the founder of ESBN.ORG. Some of my previous start-ups include: GetVocal.com, MayWeHelp.com, and PizzaOnline.com.

While trying to determine which format of an e-book to purchase online, my wife (Beth) came up with a brilliant idea to combine or compile an e-book and a reader on a memory stick that could be attached to your keychain. She called this idea a BookFob (http:// www.esbn.org/bookfob/). Being a developer, I built this application for her to market. To ensure that no one could copy this e-book and freely distribute copies on the Internet, I needed to create a unique identifier that could be associated with the serial number of the memory stick to “lock” the media to the memory stick. The e-book is basically non-functional without the specific memory stick that the unique id is coded to run.

BookFob’s unique id turned out to be the ESBN. After further research, I determined this problem was not unique to BookFob. ISBN seems to handle this problem well in the brick and mortar world but it does not work in the online world where you need unique ids for each copy of the digital media rather than one for only the title. The ESBN.ORG site was designed to be the next generation ISBN.ORG solution. After the site was built, word seemed to spread quickly about the potential uses for ESBNs. These additional uses now include copyright registration, digital ownership assignment and reassignment, and even digital media encryption keys.

We are currently working with Writely and ZohoWriter to embed ESBN functionality into their online word processing solutions. We have FireFox Extensions and Widgets/Gadgets also in the works.

For more information on ESBNs, please direct your browser to http:// www.esbn.org/esbn/faqs.asp.