-Caveat Lector-
>From www.sfbg.com/lit/may99/index.html
The Electronic Library
Well-designed Web sites and high-tech gadgets may make e-
fiction a reality
By Jeremy Russell
<Picture>IN AN AGE in which everyone agrees that the
Internet is the future, it's hard to understand why no
major book publisher has yet begun to publish fiction
online in any serious way and why no critical acclaim has
fallen on any novel published exclusively in electronic
format.
Conceivably there are any number of benefits to a yet-to-be-
invented body of e-literature. Imagine what the winding
works of Julio Cortazar or William Burroughs might have
been like had they been written in the age of hyperlinked
text. And, useful to the academic writer, an electronic
format allows for the seamless incorporation of endless
footnotes, taking the reader in any number of directions.
Illustrated works could be expanded to include animation
and film -- a boon for the biographical study. Music, too,
used previously only in such obscure instances as Ursula K.
Le Guin's saga Coming Home, could become an integral part
of the reading experience. There's no reason why novels of
the future couldn't feature mood-setting soundtracks.
More sites for readers
Boondock Books www.boondockbooks.com
Diskus Publishing www.diskuspublishing.com
Domhan Books www.domhanbooks.com
Dreams Unlimited www.dreams-unlimited.com
Hard Shell Word Factory www.hardshell.com
Indigo Publishing www.booktrain.com/indigo
LionHearted Publishing Inc. www.lionhearted.com
MountainView Publishing www.whidbey.com/mountainview
New Concepts Publishing www.newconceptspublishing.com
Online Originals www.onlineoriginals.com
Petals of Life Publishing www.petalsoflife.com
The Reading Edge www.thereadingedge.com
Electronic publishing is in fact quite utopian. There is the potential for reducing
the use of paper and paper costs, thereby lowering book prices and expanding the book
market to include the kinds of regional and niche w
orks that struggle to get national distribution. Book hunting could be expedited with
the aid of a search engine. And the apartment-dwelling book lover's well-stocked
library need take up only as much room as a laptop.
E-publishing also offers the benefit of increased interactivity. There is limitless
space for a reader's annotations. If the font of an e-published book is too small, it
can be enlarged with the click of a button. And if
you sometimes find yourself reading a paperback with pencil in hand, circling typos,
electronic publishing means the ultimate satisfaction of actually entering your own
corrections.
If you are seduced by these benefits, you're in luck. Many e-publishers have sprung
up, advertising themselves as the best means for up-and-coming talent to reach an
audience. The selections of e-fiction are growing but r
emain limited by a lack of clear copyright laws and contract protections for writers
pursuing online publication. Still, some companies have recruited tough or desperate
writers, making their books available in four basic
formats -- computer download from the Internet, disk or CD, e-book download, and
print-on-demand.
Surf to stories
Computer download is the most purely electronic and, not coincidentally, most widely
available mode of accessing e-fiction, but for some customers it may be nice to have
the novel somewhere other than on the hard drive, w
hich makes the floppy format the second most popular. Download and disk files are
available in HTML, TXT, PDF, and a few other formats. Some e-publishers are trying to
make special reader programs, similar to the Adobe Ac
robat Reader, specifically for the books that they sell. One e-publisher, Sansip
(www.sansip.com), plans to have a reader ready this month. The Sansip reader will be
available free with the purchase of a book and will fea
ture, interestingly enough, "the capability to display the time required to finish
reading a work."
Sansip, with its straightforward, elegantly simple site, offers a variety of genres.
Editor Don Wynn, speaking enthusiastically of a mystery series -- now six novels deep
-- set in the fictional town of Dot, N.D., notes t
hat "the Dot novels are in a genre that we are calling erotic thrillers because they
address adult themes." Along with erotic thrillers, Sansip has quite a large library
of books -- all for under $10 each. It should be no
ted that some of the titles are in the public domain, as is the case with many
e-publishers; works by classic authors such as Edith Wharton or Henry James, offered
by Sansip for a price, may be available free from univers
ity archives.
Another publisher offering as many downloads and an even more elegant Web design --
the best that I saw -- was Mind's Eye (tale.com). The Web site was well constructed,
intuitive, accessible, and featured a well-developed
pay-per-view system. Visitors read the first half of any Mind's Eye story, and the
last half is withheld pending payment. Prices are very low: 16˘ for short stories, 60˘
for novellas, and a mere $3 for novels.
Although Mind's Eye has a very wide selection -- 116 titles -- most of the works it
offers are short fiction. I could find only one novel, Unto the Last Generation, by
Tom Easton. It was billed as a "a cautionary novel se
t after the collapse of both the Earth's ecology and its human civilization"; I read
enough of the first half to know I wasn't going to buy the rest.
Mind's Eye editor in chief Ken Jenks has put together an excellent cache of short
genre fiction, everything from sci-fi to something called "urban." According to Jenks,
Mind's Eye received about 1,000 visitors a day in 19
98; about 90 percent read a story and about 1 in 20 paid for the ending. That's an
average of 45 purchases a day, which makes Mind's Eye fairly popular. Jenks told me,
however, that the best-selling titles are all short s
tories by known science fiction authors. "The best-sellers are all reprints from print
magazines," he noted. According to Jenks, the real e-publishing money is in reprints.
"Contrary to industry expectations, subsidiary r
ights seem to be worth more than first rights," he said.
Palmtop lit
The great disadvantage to getting your books from e-publishers like Sansip and Mind's
Eye is that there isn't a hard copy unless you print one yourself, and if you do,
you're left with something you're not going to slip i
n your pocket to read on BART or relax with in a hot bath. Ordering a novel on disk
has the same disadvantage, as well as a waiting period while the disk is mailed to
you. If you don't print these books, you're guaranteed
eyestrain, a crick in your back, and a sore mouse finger. To combat problems like
these, two companies released the world's first "e-books" late last year with much
ballyhoo and the support of several large publishers.
An e-book, whether the Rocket eBook or the Librius model, is essentially a palmtop
computer that stores books. The ads invite you to keep your e-book with you at all
times so that wherever you go you'll have "a small libr
ary." The current versions can hold about 10 books, but presumably later versions will
have larger memory capabilities. Unfortunately, the hefty $500 price tag of these
specialized computers, combined with the fact that o
nly books offered in a specific format can be downloaded, drains these toys of the
utopian aspect of e-publishing. Books for e-books are no cheaper than their print
counterparts, and the selection is limited. In fact, the
re is only one advantage over other electronic media: portability.
The selection, though, may increase. Sansip's Don Wynn told me his company is planning
to make its works available as downloads for e-books, but he didn't say when. Fiction
Works (www.fictionworks.com), a publisher of aud
io and online books, says its books are already available for download onto e-books.
Fiction Works books, available in more than 20 genres, are cheaper than print books --
$5.95 for fiction titles and $9.95 for nonfiction
, business titles. Fiction Works also offers a book club deal: buy one, get one for
half price.
Demanding publishers
For people interested in e-published novels but not impressed by a book they have to
print themselves or read on the computer or e-book screen, there is a fourth option.
Print-on-demand publishing is not really a new conc
ept, nor strictly an e-publishing model, but the Web has breathed new life into its
potential. A print-on-demand e-publisher prints the book you order and mails you a
copy. Of course, this does away with all of the advant
ages of electronic publishing: you don't get it immediately, you can't alter it if you
want, and you have to annotate it the old-fashioned way -- with a pencil.
The worst thing about print-on-demand is that, unlike many of the other e-publishing
enterprises, it seems to lend itself to exploitative ventures such as
BuyBooksontheweb.com. "GET PUBLISHED NOW!!" BuyBooks ads scream of
f the page of Writer's Journal magazine, preying on writers' vulnerability. BuyBooks
offers "no books to buy, no rejection letters, no cranky editors." Such ventures do
have an attractive way of cutting out the middlepers
on, but it seems all too likely that they are exploiting the literary dreams of the
constantly growing population of unpublished writers desperate to break into "print"
any way they can.
A wanna-be author sends in for a submission packet that details the BuyBooks
agreement: a nonrefundable $299-a-work fee, an additional 30 cents a page, additional
charges for any formatting by the company and a fee of $60
every six months for "maintenance." A 300-page novel would cost more than $500 to
place with BuyBooks for one year. For this money BuyBooks offers no editorial services
and takes no responsibility for the content. And do
es the writer then get to take home all of the proceeds for his or her book? No. The
contract offers only a minimum royalty of 20 percent.
Despite BuyBooksontheweb.com's exploitative practices, it seems to have a selection of
interesting works. I say "seems to have" because its Web site precludes browsing. If
you want to look for books, you have to perform a
search. Since searching is useful only when you know what you're looking for, the
site was definitely not set up for the ease of the shopper -- which tells you
something about where it's getting its money. Through random
selection I managed to find some interesting titles. ... And They Called Us Nancys,
for instance, is a fictionalized biography of Capt. John C. Lester, the founder of the
original Ku Klux Klan. The blurb informs us that
Lester is the author's great-great-uncle.
BuyBooks' books look nice in the photographs -- not professional, but nice. At $10 to
$20 a pop, they're expensive compared with other online presses, but at least at
BuyBooks the author retains ownership of his or her wo
rk. I've read about print-on-demand operations that offer to keep a book in print
indefinitely, retaining the copyright. At first this seems like a sound offer, but
when the author beats the odds and becomes famous, guess
who owns his or her early work?
These sorts of ventures remind us that, sadly, the Internet is only newly colonized,
still in its Wild West period, and there aren't a lot of rules or protections.
Contracts with writers vary from e-publisher to e-publish
er, ranging from the highly detailed, ultraserious, legal sounding to the chirpy and
vague. There is little protection against plagiarism; not only some of the legal but
all of the physical barriers for text duplication a
re nonexistent. Readers may have greater access to books, assuming they own a
computer, but it's bootleggers who have all the advantages.
The Association of Authors' Representatives, a trade association for literary agents,
warns that authors face a "triple threat" from online publication. It points to a
computer culture that challenges the very need for co
pyrights and to a substantial group of libraries and schools that, with their tight
budgets and altruistic goals, would like to see a broad definition of fair use.
Finally, and most threatening, it notes that print publis
hers who run Web sites on the side don't like to admit that they are actually
publishing a work twice when they put it in print and online. The National Writers'
Union (NWU) noted this same problem when it released guidel
ines to its members in 1998 recommending that Web publications be regarded separately
and that cyberspace be viewed as a distinct geographic region. "Writers need to know
that the Web is in the process of becoming a mass-
market medium, and the Web value of many stories may be much greater than the print
value, if not today, then very possibly a year or two from now," NWU president
Jonathan Tasini says. Despite this prediction and an ongoi
ng NWU lawsuit to bring these issues to a conclusion, Web rights remain vague and
e-profits relatively tiny.
These problems are only exacerbated by the fact that there are dozens of e-publishers
on the Net, some more and some less professional. Helping to cut down on the
confusion, the Association of Electronic Publishers (AEP)
(members.tripod.com/BestBooksCom/AEP/aep.html) has begun to offer representation to
e-publishers. AEP guarantees that its members have been in business for at least a
year and that the writers are paid royalties of at lea
st 20 percent and are not charged any fees for publication, including the cost of
copyright. AEP reviews its members' contracts and demands that authors retain sole
copyright of their material after the expiration of the
contract. No AEP member is allowed to hold electronic rights indefinitely. But of the
sites that I've reviewed above, only Fiction Works is among AEP's 10 or so members.
There are more e-publishers out there that are not
yet members of AEP. Many more.
While an encyclopedia or a dictionary is vastly superior in electronic format, as are
the entire works of Shakespeare for a graduate student, for now e-literature doesn't
have many advantages for those reading for pleasur
e. Many of us skim nonfiction for facts, and the computer can only speed that up, and
search capabilities help us with research, but when I read fiction I still prefer to
curl up with a paperback and my pencil, safe in th
e knowledge that the author was exploited no more than usual.
ILLUSTRATION: AMY SUE LOEFFLER
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