From the Print Media to the Internet by Marie Lebert (mobile ebook reader .TXT) 📕

3.3. Digital Books

When he buys through an on-line bookstore, the customer can almost instantly select, order and pay for the books he is interested in. The only delay is the shipping of the books to his house, which can take anywhere from one week to much longer.

The problem of delay - as well as the problem of weight - should be solved soon with digital books - or eBooks. A digital book is a book-sized electronic reader that can store many texts at once. Some pioneer companies have created digital books which will be available in 1999 - such as the Rocket eBook (created by NuvoMedia), the Everybook (EB) (created by Everybook), the SoftBook (created by SoftBook Press) and the Millennium EBook (created by Librius.com).

Rocket eBook was set up by NuvoMedia, Palo Alto, California, founded in 1997, and is dedicated to becoming *the* electronic book distribution solution by providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users to publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and efficiently over the Web. Investors of NuvoMedia are Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the PC or the Macintosh is made through the RocketEbook Cradle, which provides external power through a wall transformer, and connects to the PC with a serial cable.

Everybook is "a living library in a single book". The Everybook (EB)'s mass electronic storage is one removable disk cartridge which can hold 80-100 college textbooks, or 500 to 1,000 novels. The EB uses a hidden modem to dial into the Everybook Store, where it is possible to browse, purchase, and receive entire publications, including cover art. Books, magazines, menus, sheet music all appear as they would in their printed form.

Softbook Press is creating SoftBook®, along with the SoftBook Network™, an Internet-based content delivery service, which provided a completely paperless reading system. Professionals and students can easily, quickly and securely download a wide selection of corporate documents, books, and periodicals using its built-in Internet connection. Unlike a computer, the SoftBook is ergonomically designed for reading long documents and books. Its publishing partners are Random House and Simon & Schuster.

Librius is a full-service, e-commerce company. It delivers digital copies of books to consumers via the Internet from its World Bookstore. The digital books are stored and read by the consumer in a small, low-cost reading device, called the Millennium EBook. Librius customers can obtain everything that they need to become "digital readers" directly from the Librius Web site, including EBook devices, thousands of book titles, and full customer support.

Digital books will not replace books, at least not in the very near future. They will be a new support for publishers to deliver the books through the Internet and for readers to store many texts in one digital support to be taken with everywhere.

In our technological society, some people are attached to books whatever happens, like Robert Downs who wrote in Books in My Life: "My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."

For some other people, being convinced about how much can be brought by electronic texts doesn't prevent them from loving books. In an article published in the Swiss magazine Informatique-Informations of February 1996, Pierre Perroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic texts represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culture dissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These texts are "a good complement to the paper book, which remains irreplaceable when what we are talking about is reading".

Pierre Perroud is convinced of the necessity to be kept closely informed of the technological developments to adapt print media and education. Nevertheless the book remains "a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it against our bodies, we look at it with admiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; its fragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water and fire, but it has the power to shelter man's thoughts from Time."

[In this chapter:]

[4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories / 4.2. Do Authors Still Need Publishers? / 4.3. Electronic Publishing]

4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories

A number of publishers chose to put the full text of some of their titles on the Web. There was no drop in the sales of these publications - on the contrary, sales increased.

The National Academy Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports issued by the Academy and by the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The NAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, presenting the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy.

The NAP Reading Room offers more than a thousand entire books, free for reading, from the first page to the last, and available in a variety of versions, including scanned pages in image format, hypertext HTML books, and as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

The MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is dedicated to science and technology. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books a year and over 40 journals, and is a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science, with a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new technologies.

In the Project Gutenberg's Newsletter of October 1997, Michael Hart wrote:

"As university publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering scholarly documents on-line, some early innovators are finding that making a monograph available electronically can boost sales of hard copies. The National Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its books on-line, and is finding that the electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy monographs - often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great advertising', says the Press's director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar results: 'For each of our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our sales. The plain fact is that no one is going to sit there and read a whole book on-line. And it costs money and time to download it'."

Some sites maintain a directory of publishers, for example, Publishing Companies
Online and Publishers' Catalogues.

Publishing Companies Online is the WWW Virtual Library list of publishing companies, classified in the following categories: academic publishers; computer book publishers; scientific, technical, medical (STM) publishers; electronic publishing companies; on-line publishing projects; and other commercial publishers.

Maintained by Peter Scott of Northern Lights Internet Solutions Ltd. in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada), Publishers' Catalogues has a very practical geographical index.

4.2. Do Authors Still Need Publishers?

The Internet has considerably reinforced the relations between the authors and their readers. In fact, do authors still need publishers? Thanks to the Web, a writer can now post his work, sell it or discuss with his/her readers without any intermediary.

Murray Suid is a free-lance writer of books (How to be President of the U.S.A.,
Moviemaking Illustrated, etc.), multimedia products (Oval Office, The Writing
Trek), and screenplays (Now, Moving to Mars). He is also vice president of
Monday Morning Books, an educational publishing company located in Palo Alto,
California. He replied to my questions in his e-mail of September 7, 1998:

ML: "How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?"

MS: "For one thing, the Internet serves other print media. […] My recently published book, The Kids' How to Do (Almost) Everything Guide, would probably not have been done prior to the invention of e-mail because it would have cost too much in money/time to locate the experts. So the Internet is a powerful research tool for writers of books, articles, etc.

Also, in a time of great change, many 'facts' don't stay factual for long. In other words, many books go quickly out of date. But if a book can be web extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next edition ever came out.

Also, in terms of marketing, the Web seems crucial, especially for small publishers that can't afford to place ads in major magazines and on the radio. Although large companies continue to have an advantage, in Cyberspace small publishers can put up very competitive marketing efforts.

We think that paper books will be around for a while, because using them is habitual. Many readers like the feel of paper, and the 'heft' of a book held in the hands or carried in a purse or backpack. I haven't yet used a digital book, and I think I might prefer one - because of ease of search, because of color, because of sound, etc. Obviously, multimedia 'books' can be easily downloaded from the Web, and such books probably will dominate publishing in the future. Not yet though."

ML: "What did the Internet bring to your professional and personal life?"

MS: "Professionally, the Internet has become my major research tool, largely - but not entirely - replacing the traditional library and even replacing person-to-person research. Now, instead of phoning people or interviewing them face to face, I do it via e-mail.

Because of speed, it has also enabled me to collaborate with people at a distance, particularly on screenplays. (I've worked with two producers in Germany.)

Also, digital correspondence is so easy to store and organize, I find that I have easy access to information exchanged this way. Thus, e-mailing facilitates keeping track of ideas and materials.

As for personal uses, the Internet has increased my correspondence dramatically. Like most people, I find that e-mail works better than snail mail. My geographic range of correspondents has also increased - extending mainly to Europe. In the old days, I hardly ever did transatlantic pen-palling.

I also find that e-mailing is so easy, I am able to find more time to assist other writers with their work - a kind of a virtual writing group. This isn't merely altruistic. I gain a lot when I give feedback. But before the Internet, doing so was more of an effort."

ML: "How do you see see your future life - professional and personal - in connection with the Internet?"

MS: "I'm not very state-of-the-art so I'm not sure. I would like to have direct access to text - digitally read books in the Library of Congress, for example, just as now I can read back issues of many newspapers. Currently, while I can find out about books on-line, I need to get the books into my hands to use them. I would rather access them on-line and copy sections that I need for my work, whereas today I either have to photocopy relevant pages, or scan them in, etc.

I expect that soon I will use the Internet for video telephoning, and that will be a happy development.

I do not know if I will publish 'books' on the Web - as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop multimedia learning materials, and it's a form of teaching that I like a lot - blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and - when possible - interactivity)."

Esther Dyson is the president and owner of EDventure Holdings, a company focused on emerging information technology worldwide, and on the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe. The company produces the annual PC Forum and High-Tech Forum conferences. Since 1982 she has been the editor of Release 1.0, a monthly information newsletter which is considered the computer industry's most intellectual letter.

In 1997, her first book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age was published at the same time by several publishers in the world (Broadway in the United States, Viking/Penguin in the United Kingdom, Droemer Knaur in Germany, Shueisha in Japan, etc.). In this book, she explores the impact and implications of cyberspace: its effect on our daily lives, the responsibilities that come with our new powers, and the global issues the Internet creates. She also addresses the fundamental conflicts in the spread of digital communication: conflicts between personal privacy and society's interest in openness; between security and freedom; between commerce and community. At the same