|
|
|
|
|
|
www.downtownwriters.com
dgray@downtownwriters.com
by Douglas Gray
for the Downtown Writers
Network
Where will e-publishing take us? This series of articles will provide a survival guide for writers, beginning with an introduction to the technology that's currently being used. Other articles in the series will explain what writers need to know about e-publishing -- what its potentials are, what its pitfalls and dangers are, what to watch out for, and your rights as an author.
Back in the 1870s, novelist and humorist Mark Twain wrote a celebrity endorsement to the makers of a new device called the "Remington Typewriter." Twain was the first major author to use it as a professional tool, and he submitted the first typewritten manuscript of a novel, which turned out to be "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." The typewriter was new technology at the time, but within a few decades it replaced the fountain pen as the universal symbol of the writer's craft. The typewriter changed and dominated the world of writing for the next century.
If he were alive today, Twain -- instead of Stephen King -- would have been the first major author to publish an e-book. Last spring, King's novella "Riding the Bullet" sold almost a half million copies online in a little over two days, creating a sensation that was covered in the national media and that was watched closely by writers and publishing houses around the world.
E-publishing is here, and it's on the move. Even discounting all the hype about the e-publishing trend (and there's a great deal of hype out there), it's clear that e-books and other electronic revolutions will profoundly affect the publishing industry and the career of writing, in ways that will make the typewriter pale by comparison.
What You're Reading Right Now
What you're reading right now is one kind of e-publishing. This article was written on a computer for a web site. You're reading it online with a Netscape or Internet Explorer browser. So far, every bit of it has been electronic. Not a single piece of paper has been involved, and none will be unless you decide to hit the print button.
Internet e-publishing has been around for years in the form of ftp sites, web sites, e-mail, e-zines and online bulletin boards and newsletters. But e-publishing is attracting so much media attention today because it's moving into the field of book publishing, and that's the big news.
As long as e-publishing was confined primarily to the internet and other related media, publishing houses had less financial stake in the technology. Now that electronic books have entered the market, publishers have become deeply interested. Although this technology will compete with their traditional industry of printing physical books, it's also a way for them to extend their business and their profits.
As a writer, you should be interested, too. This technology will change the marketplace. It will change your job as a writer. It will change your relationship with publishers. And it may well change the very notion of what it means to publish and to be published. You don't need to be a book-writer for these changes to shake your world, either. Journalists, essayists, reviewers, technical writers, short story writers and poets -- you'll all find your relationships with your publishers, your audiences and even your way of working altered by e-publishing.
Several different technologies are currently driving the industry. E-publishing is a development in communications media. Like Gutenberg's printing press, e-publishing is about how documents are produced and distributed. Unlike Gutenberg's press, though, different types of electronic "presses" are developing simultaneously. All of them may find a particular niche in the electronic publishing world, though some are likely to prove less successful than others. Even so, if you want to delve into e-publishing, these are the products and software programs you need to know about.
E-Book Readers
Much of the press about e-publishing has focussed on the e-book. These electronic computerized books are called "dedicated reading devices." Several are already on the market -- including the Rocket eBook, the SoftBook Reader and the Glassbook. Others are on their way. With an e-book reader, users can download hundreds of pages of text into its memory for later reading. The readers are portable, lightweight and convenient, but even their manufacturers will privately admit that the reading experience is less than satisfactory. E-book technology has a long way to go before these devices can provide the visual satisfaction of a printed book. Right now it's on par with the old dot-matrix printers in the early days of pc's and Macs -- readable, but not aesthetically pleasing.
Like most other electronic devices, though, e-book reading devices will continue to evolve. The quality of the readout and the appearance of the text will improve with each new version. The industry will also find a solution to a second problem, compatibility. The early e-book readers are based on competing proprietary systems. A document prepared for SoftBook can't be read on a Rocket eBook, and vice-versa. As more types of devices appear on the market, the compatibility problem will be compounded, unless the major players can agree on a standard through initiatives such as the "Electronic Book Exchange" (EBX) and Open eBook (OEB).
The technological fixes are likely to happen, but whether e-book devices catch on will be up to consumers. For pleasure reading, those of us who have spent our lives cherishing the physical book may find the transition too hard. On the other hand, when the goal is practicality rather than comfort, e-books have clear advantages over physical texts.
With them, college students will be able to download all their texts for an entire term into one portable device, much more economically than buying individual textbooks. A technician in a field can carry all of his or her technical manuals in a single instrument that weighs only a few pounds. Travelers can tote guidebooks to dozens of different cities and countries in their backpacks.
In the short run, the market for e-books will favor reference texts. But it's too early to predict where this technology will lead. A future generation may eventually adopt some kind of e-book reader as their primary reading tool. If this happens, to them our notion of buying and collecting individually printed books will seem as oddly quaint as a penny-farthing bicycle.
E-Publishing on Your Computer: Hypertext and PDF
You don't really need a "dedicated reading device" to read or publish an e-book, though. In fact, your pc or Mac will serve just as well with either an HTML internet browser or Adobe PDF software. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the scripting language that serves the web. Essentially, it gives instructions to your Netscape or Explorer browser about format and layout of web sites. PDF is the acronym for Portable Document Format from Adobe. It's the standard tool for reading and printing documents from a variety of formats with an "Acrobat Reader," a software program you can download for free.
One advantage of HTML and PDF e-publishing over e-book devices is that users don't need new equipment; they can read the document on the same computer they used to download it. Another is that they can print a copy of the document, which isn't possible to do with e-books. The disadvantage is that neither the computer nor the printed document is as convenient to use as the e-book device, even though the quality of the print is significantly better with each.
Hypertext / HTML
Books have been published on the internet for years. The "Project Gutenberg" electronic archive, for example, offers thousands of classic titles in the public domain for downloading as text documents. Other online resources, including Bibliomania and a number of universities, have made hypertext versions of classic literature available in HTML format. Hypertext is extraordinarily flexible and interactive. With HTML, an author can enhance any document with illustrations, animation, audio files, and hyperlinks to supporting documentation such as glossaries, footnotes and internet sites.
Its interactivity makes HTML an ideal format for textbooks, white papers, instruction manuals or any sort of training document. It's also produced an intriguing new literary genre, alternately called "hyperfiction" and "cybertext." Using hypertext, fiction writers are not only creating multimedia documents with sound and animation, but are dismantling the traditional linear story line.
Hypertext novels and short stories defy the entire Aristotelian notions of beginning, middle and end. Instead of leading readers from page one to page two, hyperfiction lets them experience the story in alternative sequences through hyperlinks to various facets of the tale they can select at random. The reader can delve more deeply into any character, episode or subplot of the novel that particularly interests them, or even revisit scenes and re-live them from alternate points of view. Potentially, every reader's experience of a hyperfiction book or short story is unique because of the choices he or she made during the reading.
Whether hyperfiction turns out to be a lasting literary form or a passing fad, hypertext itself is a robust publication tool with extremely practical applications. In fact, most of the plans for a standard e-book protocol are based on HTML and a related markup language called XML ("Extensible Markup Language"). XML is a topic to itself, another publishing industry revolution that you can learn more about in a future article in this series.
Far from being replaced by new e-publishing technology, markup languages like HTML will become even more necessary than they are today . Software companies offer a host of HTML authoring programs (some especially designed for writers), and other excellent ones are available for free download. Any writer who is interested in e-publishing needs one of these programs, but should invest the time in learning the basics of HTML.
Adobe PDF
Any writer who is serious about e-publishing needs to know about PDF. Adobe's PDF software generates duplicates of almost any kind of electronic document for viewing and printing with an Adobe Acrobat Reader. Besides providing a near-universal tool for easy document exchange, PDF preserves the appearance of the original publication, whatever kind of word processing or layout program was used to format it. Its universality and layout capabilities make PDF another excellent e-publishing tool, especially for e-books.
Online publishing services have begun marketing books and booklets in Adobe PDF. Fatbrain.com, which specializes in business and technology titles, is pioneering this electronic book market with its "MightyWords" division of digital titles. MightyWords lets authors upload their digital manuscripts for storage as PDF documents -- and at a great price of merely $1 a month.
Authors advertise their work on the MightyWords site, with a description of their book or booklet and a price. When their work sells, MightyWords receives a 50% cut on sales. The remaining 50% are the author's royalties -- a significantly higher royalty than any conventional publisher can offer. This is one area among many where electronic publishing clearly works to the advantage of writers. Another advantage: MightyWords welcomes articles and booklets of 10 to 100 pages that traditional presses wouldn't consider publishing.
PDF will continue as the format of choice for publishers like MightyWords, and it seems likely to have a future on e-book readers. Glassbook is already selling a dedicated reader that display PDF documents. Unlike hypertext, PDF is a proprietary format, and the software needed to generate documents in it is expensive.
Print On Demand
"Print On Demand" merges e-publishing with conventional print publication in a remarkable fashion. With this technology, an electronic manuscript can be printed in runs from one copy to several thousand copies. Fatbrain offers customers print-on-demand copies of most of its business and technology titles. But the current major player in print-on-demand is iUniverse.
iUniverse publishes physical books instead of e-books, but it does this by accepting electronic manuscripts from authors and storing them for later print-on-demand publication. Any book that iUniverse accepts is made available through bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble, and through online bookstores like amazon.com. The book also receives an ISBN number and a listing in Books in Print. Their current charges range from $99 for basic services up to several hundred dollars for more customized ones.
Though the print-on-demand technology is still in its infancy, it has potential to change publishing in significant ways. If it succeeds, it will do away with most publishers' warehouses and revolutionize distribution. It will cut the waste of printing unwanted books and keep unsold books from winding up in landfills. It will eliminate the need for any book ever to be out-of-print. It will could allow even major publishing houses to gamble on unknown writers and experimental books that may never sell more than a few thousand copies. (More on this last point in a moment.)
Online Publishing
Though it's only a decade old, online publishing is the grandaddy of e-publishing. It's not only getting older; it's getting better. Generally, the internet no place for entire books, unless it's a classic work at Project Gutenberg. But it's an ideal place for freelance writers to publish shorter works. It's already home to thousands of online publications, from e-zines to newsletters and web sites devoted to hundreds of different topics. More of them appear every day, and each of them needs content.
The internet is a voracious communications medium. Web sites and e-zines demand a constant stream of fresh information to lure new visitors in and to keep old visitors coming back for more. Freelance writers who've concentrated exclusively on print media may be astonished at the number of unpublicized opportunities for publishing on the internet.
For the most part, traditional magazines and newspapers will pay more for a piece than an e-zine or a web site. On the internet, you may only get a byline and an e-mail from the webmaster. But for that article on the Samurai love songs you've never been able to place, a byline on the internet is another item for your resume.
Beginning writers, especially, should consider the internet publishing market, not only for exposure but also as a career investment. Though it's still something of a poor relation in the publishing world, in a few years writing for the internet will be as respectable a career as writing for traditional print media.
Publishing Economics
It's tempting to predict the electronic revolution in publishing media will create a better world for writers, a future of greater opportunities and higher wages for the work that we do. But that would be unrealistic. The hype about e-publishing says that this is the greatest media revolution since Gutenberg, destined to liberate writers from market constraints by offering a host of publishing options that they can control without interference. That would be nice to believe. But the issues at stake are economic ones, and economic realities about the publishing industry should ground some of these fantasies.
E-publishing is about the means of production and distribution of a product, both of which are the domain of publishers rather than of writers. Hence, publishers have the most to win or to lose in this electronic revolution.
One economic reality always to consider: publishing is an expensive business. Book, newspaper and magazine production requires staggering amounts of raw materials; plants full of presses and elaborate machinery operated and maintained by staffs of technicians and workers; warehouses and transportation facilities; staffs of editors and distributors and salespeople and marketers and accountants and artists and researchers; office buildings, parking lots and human resource expenses.
E-publishing will probably lower some of those expenses, especially for raw materials and warehousing. If print-on-demand technology works, books need only be printed when they are wanted. No wasted paper, no wasted space. E-books already eliminate the need for paper and shipping expenses: the book is simply downloaded over a phone line.
But other business expenses will remain unchanged. However the books are being produced, the process will still require equipment that has to be operated, repaired and constantly upgraded. Editors, sales staff, marketers, layout and design artists, managers and the rest of the staff will still need to be paid. In most publishing houses, the future will look a great deal like the present.
Some Other Realities
Optimists predict that the lower costs involved in electronic publishing will permit publishers to greatly expand their list of titles, to include mid-list writers and works that they can't afford to handle now. This will likely happen, to some extent. But a reduction in some production costs through e-publishing probably won't turn publishers into benevolent foundations dedicated to creating a 21st century literary renaissance. Publishing houses will still concentrate their efforts on products that will generate the highest sales -- serious titles by well-known and promising writers, along with celebrity scandals, dieting books, and potboilers. The publisher's business is in selling books.
Further, the changeover to new e-publishing technologies will require massive capital investments by publishers, which in turn will create a greater demand for return profits. Most of the major publishing houses have already begun investing in their own electronic future. Random House, for example, is digitizing all of its 20,000+ titles. Major players like these did not become major by merely responding to developments in the industry, but by anticipating them and controlling them. Their strategy will be to maintain their dominance in the print media while extending their empires into electronics media.
One possible scenario has publishers maintaining a status quo in their print divisions -- continuing to publish books with potential for large sales -- while becoming risk-takers in e-publishing, creating mid-list and even fringe divisions to publish works for audiences they have never reached before. This is one plausible development; whether or not it comes to pass will depend on how the reading public of the future decides to use e-books and other electronic publications.
Some Good News, and Some Dangers
The past decade has seen major corporate mergers in all communications and entertainment industries, including publishing. Today, the print industry is dominated by a few giant corporations, a situation that certainly doesn't favor writers. But new technologies tend to create market opportunities and new companies to serve them, which may counterbalance this consolidation trend. E-publishing will probably make industry more diverse than it is today. Innovations tend to level the playing field, at least initially, enabling smaller companies to compete one-on-one with the corporate giants, and occasionally win. New publishers will emerge to challenge the established ones on turf that doesn't even exist yet, and each time that happens it will be good news for writers.
How bright, then, is the future for writers? On balance, e-publishing will definitely benefit us, meaning that it will offer more advantages than liabilities (though there will be a share of those). From the internet to the e-book, writers have already acquired options for distributing their work and new markets that weren't available even a decade ago. With more options comes more autonomy for writers, and more competition for their words. The heralded "Information Economy" may even someday create a bidding war for writers who've proven themselves in the new media.
E-publishing technology has also given writers tools for self-publishing their work with a small capital investment. The software for producing e-books is widely available, and some of it is free to download. The software to format print-on-demand texts is expensive, but less costly than ordering an initial run of 500 books that may never sell. Self-publishing is another option that writers now have easier access to. But there is a real danger of its being misused and flooding the market with millions of pulp e-books that should never have been published.
There are other dangers, as well. The legal rights of writers also aren't as clear in e-publishing as they are in conventional print media (where they're often still murky enough). Copyright infringement is rampant on the internet. The electronic copyright safeguards that have been designed for e-books are largely untested. And, as always, charlatans are devising new ways to trick and defraud writers in the electronic world, just as they always have in the print world.
Despite these perils, writers have a right to feel cautiously optimistic about the electronic future. Will e-publishing result in a paradigm shift? Probably not, but opportunities will be good for writers who remain alert to the changes, open to the possibilities, and cautious about believing too many promises.