IMPRINTS No Jacket Required The SoftBook gives new meaning to light reading. by Taylor Antrim

LAP LIBRARY:It all began when Sachs was stuck on a 15-hour flight with not enough to read. Courtesy SoftBook Press THE DRIVE to SoftBook Press dampens my spirits. The glass and steel headquarters sit in the most anonymous stretch of Redwood City's silicon sprawl, where construction outpaces landscaping and the view is monochrome. But once I'm inside the office of Jim Sachs, CEO and co-founder, the mood brightens. Sachs, MS '79, designed electronic toys for 10 years before starting SoftBook in 1996, and some of the toys have found a home here. A trio of Jaminator guitars fills one corner, and Teddy Ruxpin -- possibly the bestselling talking bear of all time -- warms a shelf. A foot-high robot stands by the window, with a minifleet of radio-controlled cars parked nearby. It seems the room of a child who's learned to put his playthings away. Packaging sophisticated technology in the simplest way has been a theme of Sachs's career, from his work as a co-designer and patent holder of the original Macintosh mouse to his development of the SoftBook Reader for electronic publications. "Technologies that are made invisible to people, things that enhance people's lives without being in-your-face about it, are very, very interesting to me," he says. The SoftBook Reader seems to fit that description. It's a little slimmer, smaller and lighter than a typical laptop computer. It also has a lot fewer buttons. Lift its leather jacket and the 91