THE 2000 NORTHWEST BOOKFEST is still more than two months away. But I can already predict two of its most overhyped topics of discussion will be:
1. Falling stock prices for online booksellers, whether this portends doom for these dot-coms, how any such doom would affect small publishers’ inventory and debt situations, and whether any such doom would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
2. The much-hyped “eBook” craze, whether the electronic distribution of consumer literature is finally taking off, whether any such takeoff would threaten the power base of big publishing companies, and whether any such takeoff would provide an opportunity and/or a threat to independent “brick and mortar” bookstores.
I can safely state that at this point, the eBook and its various rival portable reading-pad electronic devices are novelties. The technology doesn’t appear to have seriously improved since the models I saw at last year’s Bookfest. The screens are still too hard to read in less-than-optimum light; there are still software incompatibilities among the various devices (and between them and regular computers); and they still cost too much.
Last month’s publicity stunt by the ever-hype-savvy Stephen King, in which he put pieces of a serialized horror novel (based on a leftover manuscript from 1982) online and invited those who downloaded it to pay shareware-esque fees, provided what mainstream media always seem to need in order to proclaim a new medium as “arrived”–a celebrity.
The story itself, thus far, isn’t much. But King and his associates have solved a lot of the distribution and formatting issues quite elegantly.
The story’s available in several formats, compatible with most computers, eBook-type devices, and Palm-type hand-held machines; but King’s site recommends Adobe’s Acrobat Reader format, which offers real page layout features for PCs and Macs (even though many potential “early adopters” of e-publishing are Macintosh true-believers, most eBook-esque software is not Mac-compatible); in a relatively quick-downloading form, and which lets you, the reader, increase the type size up to half an inch high without losing detail.
Of course, what you’re reading now is on-screen, Net-delivered “literary” content of a sort. Like many hundreds of other such efforts out there, this one has tried to pay the bills via advertising and “affiliate” programs with online merchants. So far, these have paid the bills, but just that.
If King can figure out how to make this pay, I’m certainly willing to listen. (More about this a little later.)
Meanwhile, digital and online text is indeed making inroads in areas outside “trade” bookselling. Computer manuals, technical-training documents, legal databases, professional reference works–lotsa stuff people have to read at work rather than for pleasure. Online posting of this data provides immediacy; CD-ROM publishing of it provides compact permanence.
I can easily see more home-market books of a factual-matter basis move toward digital formats (how-tos, learning guides, diet and investment manuals, and many of the other workhorse categories that make a major part of many bookstores’ balance sheets).
Even if reading-for-pleasure categories (fiction, art books, celebrity memoirs, etc.) principally remain the domain of physical printed documents (which they very well may), it will still behoove independent bookstores to figure out how to grab their piece of the e-lit action.
(Other views on today’s topic: Author Mark Mathabane believes electronic distribution “lets authors control their literary fate;” John Kelsey and Bruce Scheiner propose a “Street Performer Protocol” to fund Net-distributed works by audience donations; Random House gets into the e-act; so does Barnes & Noble.)
TOMORROW: Beyond the “No Logo” movement.
ELSEWHERE:
