Most conversations about e-publishing these days consist of gloomy pronouncements or clichés, often both. No one's buying, no one's reading and no one's investing. Publishers once gung-ho about converting new titles have stopped talking about it; industry meetings that once toasted a glorious future now rue an overhyped past.
Yet for all the pessimism, an aura of inevitability still surrounds electronic reading. Why won't its day come, we wonder, when we already view so much text on a screen—a Salon article on our desktop, a CNN.com update on our laptop, a Vindigo listing on our palmtop? Digital distribution seems too convenient for readers, and too cost-effective for publishers, not to penetrate further. Somehow, through technological advancement, changes in reader attitude, authorial will or some other means, it seems likely that the public will one day get much of its literature via the screen.
The term literature is a loose one, for it may not be fiction that comes to dominate pixels. Information of all types might catch on, leaving print as the sole repository of fiction. Or the next Robinson Crusoe or Infinite Jest may indeed come out primarily for a screen, leaving only the curmudgeonly few to search out dusty paper copies.
To better handicap the issue, we divided electronic reading into four distinct and instructive categories, all the time keeping in mind the Big Question: "How fast will the world move to reading on a screen?" [The capital letters are more than symbolic. This story will form the basis of a related panel on October 8 in Frankfurt.]
We started with technology, long considered electronic reading's fly-in-the-ointment. Then we moved to specific sectors: travel, because few other areas have seemed as invulnerable to e-reading's problems or amenable to its benefits; education, the sector often at the forefront of cultural change, and which also happens to be one of the industry's most profitable areas; and fiction, the pillar on which so much of the trade business stands. We further split each into three timeframes: the past, essentially the last few years, a period of promise and potential; the present—who's still pushing and what their efforts have yielded; and, finally, the future—talking to some of the experts and coming up with our own speculation. You might find few big answers in here. But we hope you'll find evidence, and reason, to ask more big questions.
—Steven Zeitchik
TECHNOLOGY
Where It Was: A version of Genesis of e-books and reading devices might say that in the beginning there was Franklin Electronic Publishers and its Spelling Ace, a handheld, battery-powered device released in 1986 that allowed one to read a single pre-mounted dictionary displayed on its small screen. The Spelling Ace begat the Data Discman, a chunky device from Sony that used three-inch optical disks, which was followed in 1991 by Franklin's Digital Book System, an update that was more portable than the Discman and utilized interchangeable memory cartridges loaded with reference texts. More recently there was NuvoMedia, which in 1997 released the first version of the now-famous Rocket eBook, at about the same time that a company called SoftBook came out with its own reader. The late 1990s also brought the PDA, which, in addition to its data-recording functions, could also be used for downloading and reading digital text. There are now an estimated 12 million in circulation.
Where It Is: The marketplace right now is a digital Tower of Babel, crowded with e-book formats by Microsoft, Adobe, Palm Digital Media and Franklin Electronic Publishers (its own eBookMan and MobiPocket, a French format that runs on virtually any PDA operating system). And there are likely to be more: the hiebook, a Korean device that will be distributed in the U.S. by eBookAd.com this fall. Microsoft-compatible handhelds support MS-Reader, the company's reading software that features ClearType, the ballyhooed display program.
Where It's Going: Ask Joan Mullally, publisher of print and e-publisher Domhan Books, what it will take to attract consumers to reading on a screen and she'll tell you: "a multipurpose reading device, at a reasonable price." Yet, this seemingly simple goal has eluded tech manufacturers for years. It's impossible to tell whether reaching it is merely a matter of better cooperation or something trickier. One thing that certainly needs to be resolved is making DRM less restrictive. As Mullally said, "We need to protect content, but not protected so that the user can't get it—or so that it encourages people to try to hack into it."
—Calvin Reid
TRAVEL
Where It Was: Two years ago there were few categories that could match travel publishing's promise. At BookExpo America, marketing reps were besieged by tech firms hungry for conversion deals. Licensing was the watchword, as sites' need for content drove many to partnerships. Fodor's offered its content through Expedia; Hungry Minds' Frommer's gained exposure from Travelocity. Utopian notions of combining travel literature with the GPS guide system popped up throughout the travel industry. There was good reason for the optimism: Rough Guides had seen sales increase since it made all of its copy available on the Web several years earlier and Lonely Planet had made a serious investment in CitySync, its program to make information from various guidebooks available via palmtops.
Where It Is: The ubiquity of travel sites continues to mean unusual level of exposure for travel publishers. And although investments have dried up, travel publishers still show heavy interest in e-reading experiments. In the spring, Avalon (publisher of Moon Guides and other travel books) launched a co-branded line with GeoDiscovery, a tech firm that allows Avalon to bundle outdoor-guide content with GPS technology. The season also brought a phenomenon right out of 1999—an e-book startup, Hadami.com, which brings together the work of freelance travel writers and also sells e-editions of published guides. Of the larger companies, Rough Guides has been quiet recently, but Lonely Planet continues to add cities to its palmtop database. (The house currently has 20.) "It's moving at about the speed I always thought it would, but much more slowly than the industry did," said Eric Kettunen, LP's general manager. "There are problems a lot of us didn't anticipate. If you're taking your book content and turning it into one large database, a real cultural shift has to happen. Not all of your employees are going to be comfortable with that."
Where It's Going: The enormous effort to turn all travel reading into electronic reading has been reined in. But that may make the publishers' task even harder. Smart publishers will need to learn the difference between what people are and aren't willing to read online, and then act on it. "There's still a big opportunity for electronic presentation of travel material," said Cliff Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information. "But I have a feeling you may see this stuff bifurcate. You may see elaborate travel guides in digital form that are meant to be viewed before you go, and then lighter-weight stuff that's textual or directory-oriented put on Palms or e-book readers." The growing penetration of computers in foreign countries could also help travel lit move into the electronic.
—Steven Zeitchik
EDUCATION
Where It Was: E-publishing was jumped on early by education publishers with the advent of CD-ROMs, which they quickly bundled with many textbook titles. Some of the first digital e-book programs developed in the late '90s were supported by universities, such as Project Gutenberg at the University of Virginia, Columbia University's Bartleby program. Even NetLibrary, the first commercial e-book distributor, incubated at the University of Colorado. Meanwhile, online companies such as wizeup.com scrambled to sign up books from traditional publishers. In 2000, Vital Source Technologies put four years of a dental school's textbooks and curriculum on a single DVD. Universities have poured resources online and created innovative projects for distance learning, such as the Fathom consortium, and the online-only University of Phoenix.
Where It Is: Many top publishers, such as McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Thomson and John Wiley have exported some textbooks and reference works to the Web and added multimedia functionality, including assessment tools, such as instant quizzes. Many of the college textbook publishers have tested the e-book waters, particularly in the hard sciences, such as engineering and technology. Wiley, for example, published several e-books for the higher education market and plans to do at least 20 more in the coming year.
Where It's Going: Will education publishers be willing to transform all their material into a digital medium if it will undercut sales of traditional paper books? Yes, but only if a viable business model emerges. Lynch believes that e-publishing is forcing the "reconceptualization" of the textbook and that reading these titles electronically will differ from the usual "linear" approach. Having more content available might even lead to a more interdisciplinary experience. "Working digitally, students look at a lot of other things that they may not have otherwise considered," said Michael Hays, a v-p and group publisher at McGraw-Hill.
—Edward Nawotka
FICTION
Where It Was: Storytelling has had a conflicted relationship with technology since the days when the Internet was still called ARPAnet. Some say fiction and digits will just never get along, that a tradition measured in millennia won't be changed by something that's been around a few years. Others say bytes can help break out new authors and new forms of interactive storytelling. Just when skepticism gained currency, along came Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, a download-only bestseller. Then came King's less-popular story "The Plant," and the collective thinking wobbled back the other way.
Where It Is: Electronic fiction these days seems like a study in extremes. You can succeed if you're very large (like King) or really small, but the midlist fiction writer has barely made a dent. In a similar vein, electronic reading has become very popular with genre and mass-culture material like romance and sci-fi on one hand, and with obscure literary stories on the other. But a complicated tale that has mass appeal? That's a little trickier. Sites like Fictionwise and the digital efforts of horror novelist Douglas Clegg continue trying to build that bridge, or at least throw a few stones onto the foundation. Some hold out hope for rich-media stories, which could borrow elements from graphic novels, movies and video games.
Where It's Going: Part of the reason the debate has blazed on is a fundamental disagreement about what digital storytelling is supposed to do. Should it replicate as accurately as possible the book-reading experience, or create a whole new one? Right now, it looks like unless there's a compelling reason for fiction readers—generally an obstinate lot when it comes to technology—to switch, they won't. This would probably come in the form of either a new kind of story or just a plain-new-story particular to the electronic medium. Until this happens, we probably won't see these questions move beyond the theoretical.
—Steven Zeitchik
