from the New York Times
June 6, 1997
Digital Nation
By JASON CHERVOKAS & TOM WATSON Bio
Electronic Publishing Alters
Very Definition of the Book
W hen Amazon.Com -- the avatar of online booksellers -- set up
display spaces at the American Booksellers Association Book Expo
show in Chicago last week, many folks in the book business took it
as the harbinger of a new era. The Chicago show is traditionally
where publishers show their wares for sellers, not the other way
around.
[INLINE]
From Pulpless.Com
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But in the button-down world of the book business, times have
changed dramatically. Once frightened by the prospect of hawking
books online, publishers are now embracing the Net for retail and
marketing purposes. Offering a book online was once thought to
threaten traditional relationships with retailers and to lead to
mass piracy. Now publishers have even begun offering fans advance
chapters of blockbuster titles over the Net.
But away from the headline-grabbing clash of titans -- Amazon.Com
vs. Barnes & Noble -- a quieter but more radical brand of Internet
booksellers has gone to work. Blurring the lines between publisher,
packager and seller, these companies offer digitized versions of
publications --everything from science fiction novels to textbooks
to cook books -- in plain text, portable document format or
hypertext markup language (HTML).
Some of the books are licensed from big publishers. Some are
published electronically for the first time. Some of these
electronic publishers are making available work that has long been
unavailable. And, perhaps most radically, some of these new
electronic publishers and booksellers are offering consumers the
opportunity to create their own books -- picking several chapters
from one cookbook, linking them to several chapters from another
cookbook from an entirely different publisher, and paying piecemeal
for a downloadable, custom-created cookbook that need be printed
only if the consumer chooses to print it.
It's the kind of publication-on-demand system that the book
industry has been mulling for years, one in which publishers either
shift the cost of printing to the consumer or only pay for printing
at the time of sale. And it's a trend that could change the nature
of how we define the word "book." Either way, it certainly gives
new meaning to the phrase "out of print."
"We are literally building a new distribution channel from
scratch," said Glenn Hauman, founder of BiblioBytes, a New
Jersey-based company that has been offering downloadable books
since 1993. Where Hauman has been most successful has been in
niches that cross over most closely with the demographic profile of
the Internet surfer -- science fiction in particular.
In fact, BiblioBytes recently brought back into availability The
Glass Teat, the sci-fi cult writer Harlan Ellison's musings on the
impact of television on American culture. Hauman's electronic
reprint found an audience in part because there is an active Usenet
fan discussion group devoted to Ellison's work.
[INLINE]
From BookAisle
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"Every lifestyle, every niche with a Usenet group seems like it has
a corresponding book," said Steve Potash, president of OverDrive
Systems Inc., a Cleveland-based company that packages electronic
books and offers electronic editions of books for sale through its
six-month-old BookAisle site.
The fragmenting, and increasing niche focus, of the publishing
industry has actually played into the hands of the electronic book
packager/publisher/seller, Potash said. While the Net can be a
useful marketing tool to sell Tom Clancy or John Grisham titles, it
can also be a viable distribution platform for making niche books
profitable by reducing the cost of production and promotion.
BookAisle offers titles from big publishers like McGraw Hill, but
it also allows small publishers and authors the ability to sell
books in formats like Adobe Acrobat's PDF or even the Web's HTML.
"If someone wants to put out a book title they can upload an HTML
edition at almost no cost," Potash said.
But both Potash and Hauman -- and other pioneers like J. Neil
Schulman, who sells his own books and other titles through his
Pulpless.Com -- realize they're still in the extremely early days
of the book's radical electronic evolution. And there are major
hurdles to be leaped if printless text publishing is going to move
from protozoan to pachyderm.
Take Hauman's BiblioBytes for example. Business has been a struggle
for his small, homegrown, undercapitalized company. Hauman
negotiates a straight, old-fashioned rights acquisition for an
electronic edition of the book. The rights acquisition is
complicated by the fact that often no one owns the kind of rights
Hauman is interested in acquiring.
Then either he or the publisher has to do the equivalent of a
prepress design job from a hard copy of the book or from computer
desktop publishing files. For books that only exist in print form,
scanning and optical character recognition software help, but books
still need to be proofread and packaged for one or more electronic
system.
It sounds like reinventing the wheel, and in some ways it is. But
by shifting production, publication, distribution and marketing of
books online, these pioneers are shifting the economics of the book
business. With lower costs, the number of books that authors or
publishers need to sell to make money is relatively low.
Further, paperless publishers can offer services to publishers,
authors and customers that traditional publishers and retailers
can't provide. For example, BiblioBytes will soon offer authors
password-protected access to online royalty statements calculated
in real time every time BiblioBytes sells a book.
OverDrive will soon offer an interactive version of John Wiley &
Sons' CPA examination training books. Accountants in training will
be able to quiz themselves and get answers in real time. OverDrive
is also already offering "componentized" books. Right now,
educators can buy parts of different books and educational
resources when they're assembling course materials from certain
publishers.
OverDrive's Potash looks forward to a day when consumers can
assemble their own books, buying component parts from different
books from various publishers at the price of a few dollars per
component.
If all this sounds like a radical reinvention of the book and a
grave challenge to the old-fashioned publishing house model, it is.
And while computer hobbyists have shown a willingness to buy titles
and download them from the Net, it remains to be seen whether a
broad consumer base will want to download books and print them.
On the other hand, a decade ago few publishers would have been
willing to admit that any kind of electronic online publishing and
sales would ever become a mainstay of the book business.
"I had these exact same conversations 10 years ago with legal
publishers," Potash laughs. " 'If I put that book on diskette it
will affect my print sales,' they said. Now they have the books in
any form they can. They just see it as additional bottom-line
revenue."
Jason Chervokas & Tom Watson at [log in to unmask] welcome your
comments and suggestions.
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Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
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