Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 4 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 4

by Karen S. Wiesner 

E-books and e-publishing have really advanced in the last three decades. When I first entered this arena in 1998, e-books were the ugly stepsister of "real books". Fast-forward thirty years, and it's a whole different world now than those early pioneering days in the industry. In the past three weeks, I posted previous sections of an article I wrote in 2003, when e-books and e-publishing still hadn't made much of an impact. Back then, universal acceptance of them always seemed out of reach. Reflecting on changes keeps history relevant. To that end, this week, I'm posting the final part. 

 

WHO CAME FIRST?

by Karen S. Wiesner

© 2003 as featured in ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2003 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Hard Shell Word Factory OOP

 

Another Brick in the Wall…

 

So where are we in e-publishing? The beginning? The middle? What does the future hold?

I asked some of the earliest e-publishers, given that they have such a long view of the medium, to share their thoughts:

Nancy McAllister of C&M Online Media, Inc.: "We had none of the tools years ago available in a practical way for multimedia and other enhancements. Publishers today are doing a wonderful job of using the technology. There is, however, sometimes to overuse a good thing and the book being published can suffer from too much technological attention.

"[What mass market publishers are doing with e-books] doesn’t look right yet. We’ll have to wait and see what the effect is of all that hype and motion on the core concept of online publishing. All we can do now is observe.

"E-publishing is here, not only for academic or informational books, but also for the general commercial publisher who is disciplined, knowledgeable, professionally expert, and patient."

Ray Hoy of The Fiction Works: "I think [the fact that many small press e-publishers are now offering print formats in the form of print-on-demand is] an evolutionary process. I think The Fiction Works is a rare bird because we produce audiobooks, e-books and paperbacks. Many of these little publishers will fall by the wayside. I’m sorry to say that is already beginning to happen.

"[The future of e-publishing is] going to be huge! Right now there’s very little money in e-publishing. We have the advantage of being able to live on our audiobook and paperback sales, so we can continue to pour money into e-book development. But believe me, the e-book business is going to be simply enormous. I think that’s about a year away, but when it starts to move, we’ll be ready and waiting."

Glenn Hauman of Bibliobytes: "I recently got my hands on some numbers from a publisher (not me) showing the sales of a book in hardcover and e-book formats. The hardcover sold in the 20,000 unit range. The e-book hadn’t sold 400. Not surprising to me—the e-book was priced at the same price point as the hardcover—in fact, it was a nickel higher. And being an e-book, there was no discount at the register, as there was for the hardcover. We are now looking at the long-term endurance run in this industry. The sprinters are dropping. The ones who are keeping their burn rates low are staying around for the long haul out of sheer cussedness. They survive the lean times because it’s always been lean times to them. But the big publisher that spends millions on payroll for its e-publishing venture and can’t crack a million in sales for 2000—well, it’s time to update the resume.

"E-publishing works, obviously. Whether or not e-publishing for books works is still up in the air, but for magazines it’s clearly more than arrived. I can’t think of a paper magazine that doesn’t have an online component anymore. I’m beginning to think mandatory licensing for texts may be coming down the pike, much the way radio does with music.

"I don’t think there is an answer which will allow the book industry to survive in anything even closely resembling its current form. And I think that’s why they can’t find a solution. Because most solutions leave them out of the game."

Bob Gunner of Cyber-Pulp Houston/USA: "I dream every day that I will eventually develop a profitable and acceptable way to get the words of writers to readers electronically. I know that having a user-friendly and inexpensive reader device available and manufactured by a company that supports the work of smaller e-publishers is the way to do it."

Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg: "The corporate structures have figured out they can make you buy new copies of the same movie over and over as they plan the obsolescence of format after format [U-Matic, Betamax, VHS, CD, DVD]. I think they will try to do the same thing with books...so they would not think it was a bad thing for such formats not to be used in the decades to come. I am afraid that the only [format] likely to survive the coming decade intact is HTML.

"[Mass market publishers] are like kids fighting in a sandbox, which is appropriate since their corporate ages do make them only kids in that respect, other than Microsoft. They haven’t even reached adolescence yet...while Project Gutenberg moved out of adolescence over 10 years ago. We have been doing Etexts for 30 years now, with no money, but they still argue if it is feasible. If we had all the money they have spent thinking about feasibility, we could have given away a trillion Etexts by now!!!

"There are currently about 16,000 free Etexts to download, and about 22% or 3500 of them are from Project Gutenberg. Ten years ago anyone would have been hard pressed to find more than 16 Etexts on the entire internet, and most, or all, of these would have been Project Gutenberg Etexts—today there are 16,000—1,000 times as many as a decade ago, and still growing at a fantastic rate—a rate, which if it is continued for only another decade will yield 16,000,000 Etexts and the like to download free via the internet. Ten years ago there were only a few million internet users to download these Etexts, today there are hundreds of millions.

"[Speculation on the future of e-publishing]: Big shake outs...some format takes over...then we see about planned obsolescence."

John Galuszka of Serendipity Systems: "With the exception of Martin Eberhard, the designer of the Rocket eBook, most of the mass market publishers’ efforts and related hardware devices are coming from the marketing departments, not the editorial and/or engineering departments. What we have are mostly conventional books copied onto e-devices. We are not seeing manuscripts being written to take advantage of the features of the digital devices. Furthermore, they are pricing e-books as if they were hardcover books. $25 for an e-book file of a bestseller conventional novel? E-publishers don’t have to chop down forests for paper, buy ink by the barrel, or even have to have warehouses and deal with remainders. E-books should be as cheap or cheaper than paperbacks. High prices are alienating our potential customers. Despite all the media hype, a viable market for electronic books does not yet exist. No one is making money with this. We consider it to be a good year when we break even.

"We need better, less expensive, and open-system hardware, and we need lots of it. We were going in that direction with the Rocket eBook. Prices of the device were slowly dropping, memory upgrades were available, and best of all, it was very easy to publish works for the Rocket eBook. If they could have gotten the price under $100 and, for example, put a student’s textbooks into a package, this thing would have sold millions. Instead, Gemstar killed it and substituted a more expensive, closed-system device, the REB1100, with severely limited publishing opportunities.

"On the software side, we are not seeing writers who are adept at taking advantage of the features offered by electronic publishing. Almost everything I see could exist on paper as easily as in electronic form. Where are the Generation-X innovators? We had a brief period of new genre development in the late 1980s. I hope we will have a new wave soon. However, those writers should not be so dazzled by the digital glitz that they lose sight of the fact that they must have a tight plot with believable characters. The media may be digitally interactive hypertext, but we are really still telling stories around the campfire with lurking, mysterious shapes flitting about in the shadows beyond the light’s edge."

 

My thanks to the following e-publishers who contributed to this article:

 

Bob Gunner of Cyber-Pulp Houston/USA, John Cullen of Clocktower Books, Diane Greco of Eastgate Systems, Inc., Ray Hoy of The Fiction Works, Marilyn Nesbitt of DiskUs Publishing, Lorna Tedder of Spilled Candy Books, Stephen Ellerin of The Great American Publishing Society (GR.AM.P.S.), Glenn Hauman of BiblioBytes, Nancy McAllister of C & M Online Media, Inc., Sunny Ross of Mystic-Ink Publishing, John Galuszka of Serendipity Systems, Mary Ann Heathman of LionHearted Publishing, Inc. and Michael S. Hart of Project Gutenberg.

 

Special and a hundred-fold thanks to Jamie Engle for forwarding me almost two years’ worth of archives of eBC’s ePub Market Update.

 

Sources used in this article:

 

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 1999 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Petals of Life OOP

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2000 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Avid Press, LLC OOP

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2002 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Avid Press, LLC OOP

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2003 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Hard Shell Word Factory OOP

eBC’s E-Pub Market Update™, April 10, 1999; eBC’s E-Pub Market Update™, September 13, 1999 Volume 1, Issue No. 8; eBC’s E-Pub Market Update™, November 5, 1999 Volume 1, No. 11; eBC’s E-Pub Market Update™, November 9, 1999 Volume 1, No. 11; eBC’s E-Pub Market Update™, December 08, 1999 Volume 1, No. 16; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, February 20, 2001 Volume 3, No. 02; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, April 5, 2001 Volume 3, No. 03; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, January 19, 2000 Volume 1, No. 19; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, February 20, 2001 Volume 3, No. 02; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, May 22, 2000 Volume 1, No. 26; eBC’s ePUB MARKET UPDATE™, September 20, 2000 Volume 2, No. 07

"The digital future is now: Pocket Books to release KNOCKDOWN in e-Book and on-demand formats prior to publication," July 19, 1999

"STEPHEN KING AND SIMON & SCHUSTER TO PUBLISH NEW STORY EXCLUSIVELY ON EBOOK," New York, March 8, 2000

The Plant Income/Expense Report Through 12/31/00

Books@Random Divisional Information, September 2000

Discover Modern Library eBooks, 2000

AtRandom, About Us, 2000

"TEXTERITY ENTERS INTO eBOOK CONVERSION AGREEMENT WITH PENGUIN PUTNAM," Southborough, MA, and New York, NY, November 15, 2000

"PENGUIN PUTNAM, LIGHTNING SOURCE ENTER INTO STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

Lightning to Provide Digital Fulfillment Services, Ensuring Secure E-Book Delivery," Nashville, TN, and New York, NY, August 22, 2000

"Women.com Networks and Harlequin Launch Site for Romantics," SAN MATEO, Calif., February 14, 2000

"SIMON & SCHUSTER TO PUBLISH FIRST FULL SEASON OF eBOOKS Fall 2000 List Highlights Original and Simultaneous ePublications from Major Authors and Franchises," August 23, 2000

"SIMON & SCHUSTER TO PUBLISH ALL-NEW STAR TREK® NOVELS IN eBOOK ONLY," New York, August 8, 2000

"THOMAS NELSON, INC. BECOMES FIRST CHRISTIAN PUBLISHER TO LAUNCH MAJOR E-BOOK PUBLISHING PROGRAM," October 6, 2000

"Holtzbrinck, Lightning Source Create Global Digital Content Alliance Digital Fulfillment Company to Provide Full Range of Services to Publisher Worldwide," New York, NY, and La Vergne, TN, August 3, 2000

"About iPublish," 2001

"E-Publishing: Threat, Phantom or Menace?" by Glenn Hauman, The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Winter 1999

"E-Publishing: The Drawing of the Long Knives in which we discuss the problems with locking up imaginary things," by Glenn Hauman, The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Summer 2001

"E-Publishing: Freebooting Rebooting in which we discuss press deadlines, precognition, piracy, plunder and profitability," by Glenn Hauman, The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Fall 2000

"HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PROJECT GUTENBERG," © August 1992

 

For those who believed in this medium right from the beginning, you were ahead of your time, and kudos for your fortitude and contribution to making history! It's a new day. Look how far we've come. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Our Personal Monkeysphere

You've probably come across the concept of Dunbar's number even if you're not familiar with the name of it. (I wasn't until recently.):

Dunbar's Number

It's a proposed relationship between the size of a primate's neocortex and the number of individuals "with whom one can maintain stable social relationships -- relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person." In other words, the size of the primate brain controls the maximum number of community members whom you can really "know." For human beings, this number is estimated at about 150. I first came across this concept in an article originally called "The Law of Monkey." Unfortunately, that formerly clean, plain-text essay is now available only (as far as I could find) as a headache-inducing, badly formatted page on the Cracked website:

What Is the Monkeysphere?

The author begins with the example of a pet monkey. How many pet monkeys could you accumulate before they became, as he puts it, just a faceless "sea of monkey" whose separate members you couldn't care about as individuals? "We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. . . .Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters."

This attitude doesn't make us sociopathic or in any sense evil. According to the Dunbar's Number hypothesis, it arises from an inescapable limitation of our brains. It explains the reason for the phenomenon described in the quotation at the top of the page: "One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."

The author of the essay imagines the reader protesting, "So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!" No, it's not, at least not in the emotional sense we care about people we know well. One of my idols, C. S. Lewis, writes somewhere that the modern world's global news media constantly inundate us with disasters we can't do much of anything about. Our brains aren't designed to cope with that flood of information about the plights of strangers. (And he was writing long before satellite news services and the internet.) As a Christian author, he didn't view this limitation as rephrehensible, just as a fact. We have a duty to help other people as far as our personal situations allow, not to shoulder the burdens of the entire world single-handedly.

Of course, as rational rather than purely instinctual beings, we do often manage to rise above that limitation and care about people we don't know, in an intellectual even if not an emotional way. Virtues, including concern for others, consist of choices, not the vagaries of feelings that ebb and flow. While emotion may generate the ignition spark, deliberate choice provides the fuel for the long haul. I feel sad for the people in Gaza and Ukraine. But it's rationality, not emotion, that keeps me donating to Episcopal Relief and Development. Religious and charitable organizations, however, often try to augment this rational awareness with emotional appeals. From the earliest years of the Christian movement, as demonstrated in Paul's epistles, the church taught members to think of fellow believers as sisters and brothers. Charities, rather than restricting their messages to generalizations about refugees, starving children, homeless people, or abused animals, also send us pictures of cute, sad-eyed kids, puppies, and kittens.

Pictures alone, though, don't make the strongest impact. Whether in electronic or snail-mail solicitations, they're usually accompanied by stories. Messages from charities introduce us to real, particular families, children, and animals. Stories, whether factual or fictional, build empathy. Think of what UNCLE TOM'S CABIN did for the anti-slavery cause, BLACK BEAUTY for animal welfare, or Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE for food safety. The power of stories to generate empathy makes them vital to the life of the human species.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Time's Worth

What's your time worth?

Would a chance at $3,000 be worth twenty minutes? That is, assuming that you are a published author and your book is alleged to have been infringed by "Anthropic" to "train AI".

The big caveat is that the works that are included in the settlement might not be all--or the same-- works that are shown on The Atlantic website. 

Here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/

Whether or not The Atlantic gives you hope, or outrage, or any other emotion, it might be worth your while to fill out the Bartz et al v Anthropic form. 

Here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

Ideally, you will want your ISBNs, but you can fill out the form without them. If your rights have reverted, you might want to mention that. In my case, I always retained my e-rights and my paperback publisher breached them.

SFWA reports that, subject to Court approval, the terms of the settlement might include

• Anthropic will pay the Class at least $1.5 billion dollars, plus interest. 

• With around 500,000 works in the Class, this amounts to an estimated gross recovery of $3,000 per Class Work. 

• Anthropic will destroy the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets after the expiration of any litigation preservation or other court orders.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 3 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 3

by Karen S. Wiesner 

E-books and e-publishing have really advanced in the last three decades. When I first entered this arena in 1998, e-books were the ugly stepsister of "real books". Fast-forward thirty years, and it's a whole different world now than those early pioneering days in the industry. In the past two weeks, I posted the first sections of an article I wrote in 2003, when e-books and e-publishing still hadn't made much of an impact. Back then, universal acceptance of them always seemed out of reach. Reflecting on changes keeps history relevant. To that end, this week, I'm posting Part 2.

 

WHO CAME FIRST?

by Karen S. Wiesner

© 2003 as featured in ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2003 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Hard Shell Word Factory OOP

 

Electronic Publishing Timeline

 

The following timeline will begin with the first known e-publisher and take us through three decades of electronic publishing history. While the public at large dates e-publishing as beginning in the late 1990s, the reality is much different and much, much more fascinating:

*mass market publisher

 

1971

Project Gutenberg began.

 

"1970s"

Bob Gunner starts his first publishing company, originally called Mind-Eye ePublishing, but became aware that another e-publisher using the name (Mind’s Eye Fiction, started by Ken Jenks).

 

1986

Serendipity Systems Started in 1986.

 

1987

Eastgate Systems, Inc. Founded in 1982; first hypertext fiction published in 1987.

SoftServ Began in December 1987. SoftServ is now defunct, but publisher, J. Neil Schulman began Pulpless.com in 1996.

 

1993

BiblioBytes Founded in January 1993.

 

1994

C&M Online Media/Boson Books Online since January 1994.

The Fiction Works Established in 1994.

Great American Publishing Society {GR.AM.P.S.} Founded in 1975; first fully-electronic book-on-CD came in 1994.

 

1995

Crowsnest Books Founded in 1995.

Peak Interactive Books, Incorporated Founded in 1995.

DiskUs Publishing Started as a desktop publishing company that sold works on disks; web presence started in early 1997 and they sold their first e-book in early 1998.

 

1996

Clocktower Books Offered e-books as a free promotional venture in May 1996; offered e-books for sale December 1999.

Alexandria Digital Literature Founded in July 1996.

New Concepts Publishing Founded in August 1996 and went online in October 1996.

Hard Shell Word Factory Started in November 1996; Mary Z. Wolf bought the company at the end of 1997.

*Fodor’s Travel Publications (a division of Random House, Inc. In 1996, Fodor’s was launched onto the World Wide Web with Fodors.com, a proprietary website offering up-to-date travel information in a unique interactive format.

Antelope Publishing Started in 1996.

Virtual Publications Launched in 1996.

 

1997

Nitelinks, Inc. Incorporated in June 1997.

Electron Press Founded in mid-November 1997 and went live in the fall of that year with its first books.

Denlinger’s Publishers Ltd. A traditional publishing company since 1926, their "Emerging Technologies Department" opened in 1997.

Disc-Us Books, Inc. Founded in 1997 and opened for business in November 1998.

*Thomas Nelson Inc. Began Electronic Publishing Division in CD-ROM format in 1997.

 

1998

Private Ice Publications Founded in February 1998.

Twilight Times Books Established May 1, 1998.

MountainView Publishing Company Founded in July 1998. Merged with Treble Heart Books in 2001.

LionHearted Publishing, Inc. Founded in 1994; website went up in 1996; started publishing titles digitally in mid-1998. By mid-2000 published all titles in both formats (paper and digital).

E-dition Started its operation in August 1998.

Awe-Struck E-Books, Inc. Began in November 1998.

GLB Publishers Founded in 1990; began e-publishing in 1998.

DLSIJ Press Established in 1998.

ebooksonthe.net Founded in 1998.

Adams-Blake Publishing Been publishing books since 1990 and been in the software business since 1998.

Sirius Publications^TM Founded in 1998.

Spilled Candy Books In business since June 1995; started published e-books in 1998.

Editio-Books Founded in 1998; Qvadis Corporation acquired Editio-Books in January 2000.

 

1999

Avid Press, LLC Opened for submissions in May 1999 from website; released first titles in October 1999.

Booklocker.com Founded in the spring of 1999; Angela Adair-Hoy purchased the company from the original owner in September 1999.

*Simon and Schuster Released Stephen King’s novel BAG OF BONES in both print and electronic formats in April 1999.

*Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Announced July 19, 1999 it would release an e-book and print-on-demand edition of one of their titles prior to hardcover publication.

LTDBooks Opened for submissions in August 1999; for sales December 1999.

Renaissance E Books Went online in September 1999.

*Simon and Schuster September 15, 1999 marked the launch of a new publishing imprint called ibooks, which published simultaneously in print and online.

*Oxford University Press Announced in December 1999 that it would offer a selection of their books digitally over the internet through netLibrary (TM). netLibrary used its proprietary technologies to create and manage e-book versions of Oxford University Press academic and reference titles.

Jacobyte Books Been in the electronic publishing business since late 1999.

Book-On-Disc.Com Founded in 1999.

Athina Publishing Founded in 1999.

HyperTech Media, Inc. Founded and incorporated in 1995 as an educational software development; became an e-book publisher in 1999.

Lone Wolf Publications Founded in 1999.

SMC Publishing Began in 1999.

Wellness Institute, Inc./Selfhelpbooks.com The Wellness Institute, Inc. was founded in 1976; Selfhelpbooks.com started in 1999.

 

2000

E-Pub2000 Founded January 1, 2000.

London Circle Publishing Founded January 2000.

Intellectua.com, LLC Formed in January 2000.

Mushroom eBooks Founded in January 2000.

ElectricStory.com Fully incorporated in February 2000.

Atlantic Bridge Publishing Founded in February 2000.

*Harlequin Enterprises Limited On February 14, 2000, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, the world’s leading publisher of romance fiction, and Women.com Networks, the premier website for women, announced the launch of eHarlequin.com which features the "Interactive Novel," which encourages visitors to read one chapter of a romance novel and vote on which way the story should go. The author then writes the next chapter according to popular vote.

*Scribner and Philtrum Press (Stephen King’s press) and electronically published through Simon & Schuster Online Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet appeared exclusively as an e-book on March 14^th, 2000.

XC Publishing Started in May 2000.

Fictionwise, Inc. Founded in June 2000.

Southern Charm Press Founded in June 2000.

*Modern Library eBooks (a division of Random House) In July 2000, Random House proudly announced the establishment of Modern Library eBooks.

Electric eBook Publishing Started in July 2000.

*Penguin Putnam Inc. On August 8, 2000, Simon & Schuster announced the Pocket Books division launch of a brand new Star Trek series to be published exclusively in electronic format. On August 23, 2000, Simon & Schuster announced its first full season of original e-books, to be published beginning Fall 2000. The list, featuring titles from every Simon & Schuster book publishing division, would be complemented by an ever-growing selection of simultaneous electronic publications for regularly scheduled paper-and-ink titles, as well as continuous electronic updating of previously published books.

On August 22, 2000, Penguin Putnam Inc. and Lightning Source Inc. SM announced the creation of a strategic alliance. Under terms of the agreement, Lightning Source would help Penguin digitize its vast content offerings, helping ensure the secure delivery of its current and future e-book titles, and providing consumers with greater access to its frontlist and backlist titles.

Leaping Dog Press Opened its doors in the Fall of 2000.

*Holtzbrinck Publishers On August 3, 2000, Lightning Source Inc. announced an alliance with Holtzbrinck Publishers, the U.S. publishing group which includes St. Martin’s Press; Picador; Tor; Forge; Henry Holt; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux to become Holtzbrinck’s primary provider of a comprehensive suite of digital fulfillment services, including "on demand" printing and secure e-book delivery. In addition, Holtzbrinck’s worldwide publishers such as Pan Macmillan and Palgrave participated in this alliance.

*McGraw-Hill Primis Custom Publishing, a unit of McGraw-Hill Education On September 13, 2000, McGraw-Hill Primis Custom Publishing announced a new Primis Online tool that enables professors to design their own e-books from the largest digitized textbook database in the world.

*Penguin Putnam Inc. On November 15, 2000, Texterity, Inc., a leading provider of e-book and e-publishing services, and Penguin Putnam Inc., a leading U.S. trade book publisher, announced the signing of an e-book conversion agreement. Under the agreement, Penguin Putnam would convert existing author’s works from PDF format into e-book and XML formats using Texterity’s fully automated TextCafe service.

*Thomas Nelson, Inc. Launched a comprehensive e-book publishing program on November 15, 2000.

eKIDna eBooks {from The eKIDna Library} Began in late 2000.

Fairgo E-Books Formed in 2000 as a part of Half of Eight Pty. Ltd., a company founded in 1995.

Writer’s Exchange E-Publishing Founded in 2000.

Zander eBooks Founded in 2000.

Next week, I'll post the article's conclusion and wrap up my retrospective on how far this industry has come in only three decades. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog 

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Fevre Dream

A science-fiction explanation for vampire biology. Richly detailed historical fiction set in the antebellum South. A bond of friendship developing between members of two different species. Exploration, through dramatic action and character growth, of philosophical issues surrounding good versus evil and human versus nonhuman. FEVRE DREAM (1982), by George R. R. Martin, has it all.

Yes, THAT George Martin. FEVRE DREAM is one of my all-time favorite "vampire as naturally evolved species" novels. Set in the heyday of the Mississippi steamboats, this story centers on Joshua, a vampire who, orphaned in childhood during the French Reign of Terror, grows up believing himself an aberrant human being. Eventually he realizes that he is neither human nor supernatural (religious symbols have no effect on him), but a member of a species that combines features of the legendary werewolf and vampire. He has been taught the superiority of his family over ordinary people, and he knows he must avoid daylight, but the "red thirst" -- the monthly need for blood -- comes upon him only at the age of twenty, adolescence for his kind. Having always considered himself "superior," he now decides that instead he is "something unnatural, a beast, a soulless monster." Aside from vulnerability to sunlight, Joshua leads a more or less normal life except for a few nights each month. At those times his uncontrollable bloodlust drives him to kill human victims, despite his best intentions. By the time he eventually finds members of his own species, his remorse compels him to seek an alternative to killing. He invents a potion that substitutes for blood, freeing himself and his followers from the "red thirst" or "fever" (hence the name of his steamboat, Fevre Dream). Joshua's rivals of his own kind want to continue ruthless exploitation of their prey rather than living at peace with humanity.

In addition to an early example of a "good vampire-evil vampire" conflict, FEVRE DREAM is a fascinating historical novel about the Mississippi in the mid-19th century. Joshua purchases the Fevre Dream as a refuge for himself and his few allies, and he hires steamboat veteran Abner Marsh as the riverboat's captain. Abner provides the viewpoint through which we learn about vampires. As he grows from horror at Joshua's nature to understanding that vampires, like human beings, are individuals with both good and evil traits, he serves as a representative of the reader who gradually discovers the same truths along with him. One thing I love about this novel is the depth of the relationship between the human and nonhuman heroes as they grope their way toward mutual understanding. One of my favorite lines in all of vampire fiction: When Joshua remarks that his kind have never before revealed the truth about themselves to one of the human "cattle" they feed on, Abner counters, "Well, I never lissened to no vampire before neither, so we're even. Go on. This here bull is lissenin'."

As Joshua explains to Abner, "In English, your kind might call me vampire, werewolf, witch, warlock, sorcerer, demon, ghoul...I do not like those names. I am none of them...We have no name for ourselves." In effect, his people depend for their identity on the distorted perceptions of the human prey they call "cattle." Growing up with the mistaken belief that he's human, unlike others of his kind Joshua feels guilt over killing. This emotion goads him into creating his potion and seeking a way to live without preying on human victims. The fact that his friendship with Abner is vitally important to his new way of life is demonstrated by the book's epilogue, long after the riverboat captain's death. Joshua places an elaborate tombstone on Marsh's grave and visits the site regularly for decades thereafter.

Like many "good guy vampire" novels, FEVRE DREAM uses its vampire species to present a fresh perspective on real-world racial differences and prejudices. In contrast to the difference between human and vampire, culturally imposed distinctions among human beings appear trivial. Joshua comments on the exclusion and destruction of human beings by their own kind in the name of superstition and prejudice: "I have seen your race burn old women because they were suspected of being one of us, and here in New Orleans I have witnessed the way you enslave your own kind, whip them and sell them like animals simply because of the darkness of their skin. The black people are closer to you, more kin, than ever my kind can be. You can even get children on their women, while no such interbreeding is possible between night and day." Also as in many books with similar themes, the evils committed by our kind against other people make the bloodlust of vampires seem relatively mild. Joshua highlights the horrors of war and the crimes of such notorious villains as Vlad Tepes and the woman who "whipped her maids and bled them...and rubbed the blood into her skin to preserve her beauty" -- a clear reference to Elisabeth Bathory. Most vampires, on the other hand, kill only to get blood necessary to their survival. Human criminals such as Countess Bathory commit murder because of "an evil nature," a far worse sin than acting under a biological "compulsion." There's hope for us, though. Joshua's detached view of humanity enables him to recognize the "enlightened" members of the human race, "men of science and learning" who offer the potential for acceptance and cooperation between the two species.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

$750 per pirated book?

Back in March, I posted a link to help authors to discover whether or not their works had been pirated by various AI-developing folks.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Two of mine showed up, but one had its title horribly mangled.

Now, I have a link to a lawyer (class action) to share. This one is against Anthropic.

https://www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-author-contact/

The SWFA states:

"If you have friends or colleagues who are not part of SFWA and may be impacted by this lawsuit, we encourage you to share this website with them:https://www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-author-contact/

The sooner they get in contact, the better.

If you are receiving this email, you will also be receiving information about the lawsuit from Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP in the following weeks. We encourage you to follow up. 

After the settlement is finalized, we will update you on the full details. "

I thought that I saw somewhere that the class action suit might be worth $750 per book illegally exploited, but I cannot be sure where I saw that.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 2 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Who Came First? {Astounding Advances in Electronic Publishing}, Part 2

by Karen S. Wiesner 

E-books and e-publishing have really advanced in the last three decades. When I first entered this arena in 1998, e-books were the ugly stepsister of "real books". Fast-forward thirty years, and it's a whole different world now than those early pioneering days in the industry. Last week, I posted the first part of an article I wrote in 2003, when e-books and e-publishing still hadn't made much of an impact. Back then, universal acceptance of them always seemed out of reach. Reflecting on changes keeps history relevant. To that end, this week, I'm posting Part 2.

 

WHO CAME FIRST?

by Karen S. Wiesner

© 2003 as featured in ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The Definitive Guide, 2003 Edition by Karen S. Wiesner, published by Hard Shell Word Factory OOP

 

In the Beginning…

 

The question "Who were the first electronic publishers?" can never be answered with any real degree of accuracy, although I’ve attempted to shed as much light as possible on this mystery with this essay. The foremost reason it would be impossible to pinpoint such a thing is because, while several e-publishers have been around for a long time and continue to do business to this day (though perhaps not publishing e-books any longer), there could conceivably be hundreds of e-publishers who originated with the advent of the computer in the 1940s that have either gone out of business or the owners died themselves. (Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg says: "I only ever heard of one Etext from the 40s…some religious thing.") Because we can’t include these defunct or deceased e-publishers, we can’t pinpoint true accuracies.

Also, how can you ever pinpoint a "first" when all aspects of the publishing industry are based on growth—building on what was already there?

Multiplying the confusion, you might ask what the definition of an ’electronic publisher’ is. It could mean a company that publishes original e-books (like Hard Shell or New Concepts). Or it could mean a content provider—basically, someone who secures the rights to works out of print and converts them to e-books (like Project Gutenberg or Alexandria Digital Literature). An e-publisher could also be one who puts out e-zines, newsletters, or publishes articles, etc. online and so on. For purposes of this essay, I focus only on e-book publishers that publish original electronic novels or novellas, as well as those that publish out of print titles/re-prints of novels and/or novellas.

In addition to these things, complexities arise when you take into account that, of late, e-publishing is becoming more like traditional publishing and traditional publishing is becoming more like electronic publishing. As the heroine in the futuristic thriller The Terminator said, "A person could go crazy thinking about this."

Nevertheless, it is a fact that electronic publishing was happening in the 1970s, in what some of us will find fascinatingly "primitive" ways.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. "In the overall point-of-view, you could say I invented e-publishing," Michael states. He decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. Ironically, Michael points out, "Instead of embracing the possibilities, governments around the world have extended and re-extended copyrights to keep the vast majority of information off the internet." The philosophy Project Gutenberg was based on was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely...what Michael termed "Replicator Technology"—once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer. In fact, Project Gutenberg is available on several satellites, as well as various versions of the metal disks being sent into space. Shannon Lucid also took one of Project Gutenberg’s CDs on her record stay aboard Mir. Says Michael of the beginning of Project Gutenberg: "Once I realized what could be done with the internet, that it could be the start of the "Neo-Industrial Revolution," that it was, in essence, a very primitive combination of the Star Trek communicators, transporters and replicators, I just had to keep on providing an example of "Unlimited Distribution."

"When I entered this, there were only about 100 people on the entire internet. The dot-coms didn’t really come along until 20-25 years later... The first other Etext collection I heard of was the Oxford Text Archive, but they only believed in "Limited Distribution" of the most elitist manner, as you might well imagine. Our first Etexts we made so long ago that THEY WERE ALL IN CAPS, since computers didn’t do lowercase yet, and with a limited supply of punctuation marks."

In the ’70s, Bob Gunner (Cyber-Pulp Houston/USA ePublishing) published "fan-zines" for comic book collectors as a hobby. He was also the SYSOP for the local BBS called "The Comic Crypt" and used a Commodore 64 OS and a bunch of daisy-linked disk drives. Additionally, he’d been writing his own horror/fantasy stories and wanted a way to distribute his work to readers. To that end, Bob began creating ASCII Text files and distributing them originally from his BBS, and then, when America Online and Prodigy were introduced, through their member downloads library. When Mosaic-based (or graphic) web browsing became popular, he moved his operations to a local internet provider service and built a homepage for the company.

Serendipity Systems was started in 1986 by John Galuszka to promote the, then esoteric, idea of electronic books. John says, "Keep in mind that computers typically had 64K of memory, ran at 4.77MHz, and had floppy drives of 160K capacity; most monitors displayed 80 characters by 24 lines of text, graphics were rare, and color was very expensive. Hardware limitations were a critical factor. For example, when I couldn’t find interactive hypertext fiction, I designed one, only to discover that the hardware (1985) could not support such a large and complicated program."

Galuszka created and sold an electronic book display program called PC-BOOK in 1990. It created a stand-alone book program—press the PG DN key and the next screen of text appeared. This program, written in Turbo Pascal, featured numbered pages and also a bookmark so that the reader could keep track of where he was in the book. Other early e-publishers distributed their work in the form of word processor files, or generic ASCII (a la Project Gutenberg) files which required a word processor to display. Serendipity Systems decided to concentrate on publishing and let others do the programming.

By the early 1990s, like-minded enthusiasts gathered at Genie’s Digital Roundtable, and/or were members of the Digital Publishing Association (DPA) founded by Dr. Ron Albright. Galuszka was a member of the Board of Directors of the DPA. In 1992, the world of electronic publishing numbered a few hundred planet-wide pioneers. By the time GEnie folded, the internet was becoming popular, and "Windows" was replacing "DOS." Enthusiasts abandoned GEnie for "The Net." The DOS-based e-books in Serendipity System’s growing collection were converted to Windows-compatible editions, then morphed into HTML documents for the internet.

When asked about other early pioneers in the e-publishing field, John points out the following: "Ted Husted’s DOS program IRIS may have been the first commercially available electronic book publishing program (1989; shareware; $8.00). Our program PC-BOOK was available in 1990, but at that time Husted and I did not know of each other. Husted also published several books using his program. Husted later created the DART program (shareware; $24.00) which had expanded multi-media features. Both programs also worked with 'text reader' programs, so that vision-impaired readers could access the books.

"Shortly thereafter, others began doing the same thing: programming electronic book engines and publishing books. There may have been as many as a dozen different e-book engines available by the early 1990s.

"Jeff Napier published a variety of non-fiction works with his programs.

"Charles Wiedermann offered a number of titles and programs.

"Rod Wilmot created a hypertext poem, "Everglade," and authored the hypertext ORPHEUS program."

When Eastgate Systems was founded in 1982, it was publishing/producing mostly computer games and small software goodies like Fontina (which organizes long font lists spatially). In 1987, Eastgate published its first hypertext fiction: Afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. The story was originally published on floppy disk and packaged in a printed vinyl casing. Eastgate editor Diane Greco says of that sentimentally archaic offering, "Very incunabular—I bet that original packaging is worth some money now!"

J. Neil Schulman began distributing books via computer media in December 1987 via SoftServ. The short answer as to why he turned to e-publishing: "…because traditional publishing always placed the interests of the author dead last. Everyone else in the bookselling pipeline—editors, artists, marketing people, sales representatives, typesetters, printers, shipping clerks and bookstore clerks—made enough off an author’s book to be able to support their families and make regular payments on their cars and mortgages. Except for a small number of anointed 'bestselling' authors, all the others were being marginalized and suffering financial catastrophes… As an author, I decided this was a bad thing and started looking into ways of getting past the existing publishing industry." Schulman’s latest venture is Pulpless.com, began in 1996.

BiblioBytes was founded in January 1993 by Glenn Hauman (dubbed a "young Turk of publishing" in the New York Observer and "a Silicon Alley veteran" by Crain’s, was a founding board member of WWWAC and a consultant for Simon & Schuster Interactive and Ballantine as well as a co-founder of Hell Kitchen’s Systems), Todd Masco and Andrew Bressen with the purpose of selling electronic publications over the internet. As they began to prepare books, they came to the realization that nobody was preparing a way to conduct commerce over the ’Net in time to meet their scheduled launch date, so they also began to pursue the creation of a financial exchange system for the internet. They conducted their first giveaway in August 1993 in collaboration with Ace Books and conducted their first sales in July of 1994. Their web page went up in October of 1994. Their business model is based on the philosophy of allowing readers to read a book free with ads, or without ads for a price. BiblioBytes obtains rights to place books on the Web, and sponsors buy ad space inside the online book. BiblioBytes prepares the book for publication on the Web and the advertisers are charged for each banner displayed on the pages for that book. BiblioBytes shares this advertising revenue with the author. Their first offerings came as 800K floppy disks. Glenn remembers some of the early publishers in electronic books were: "Laura Fillmore of the Online Book Store (now Open Book Systems (OBS), began published in 1992); Brad Templeton at Clarinet (now ClariNet Communications, began publishing in 1989); Voyager, J. Neil Schulman at SoftServ (distributed books via computer media starting December 1987) and Pulpless.com (began in 1996) and, the grandpappy of all of us, Michael Hart at Project Gutenberg (began in 1971)."

Nancy McAllister, of C&M Online Media, Inc., has had a long history in print publishing and also in multimedia, e.g. film, filmstrips, slides, microfilm—sound and images and text working together. She began online publishing on the internet in 1990 as the managing editor of a peer-reviewed journal in the humanities. In January 1994, she began to acquire books to publish on the WWW. Nancy says, "I wanted to see how print publishing would move to the internet. What skills were valuable and what new skills would have to be learned." Other than for academic publishing, informational exchange, self-publishers and vanity publishers, Nancy knew of no other e-publishers at that time. "Publishing online is, even minimally as a self-publisher or vanity publisher, labor intensive. It is also somewhat expensive. And in those days, ISPs were very unreliable and domain names were not common. After the third ISP crash, a publisher might give up. Also, books were sold without benefit of credit card capabilities. Shareware or modified shareware was the only way to sell, and most people didn’t pay for what they 'bought'. It was nearly impossible, too, to protect intellectual property in any satisfactory way. Encryption was either nonexistent or too soft. At that time, the government didn’t allow the use of tough encryption codes."

Ray Hoy had been a professional editor and writer for 40 years, so starting his own publishing company seemed like a natural thing to do. He established The Fiction Works in 1994 with the idea of producing strictly audiobooks (full theatrical productions, no less). As to why he turned to e-publishing, Ray says "Author Patricia White was responsible for getting me into the electronic publishing business, so I’m going to blame her. The third or fourth audiobook that we released was Patricia’s fantasy yarn, THE SEVENTY-NINTH PRINCE. Pat called me after she received her author copies and asked me if I’d given any thought to producing e-books. Frankly I hadn’t, as I was busy with the audiobooks. I thought about it later that night and realized how easy it would be to get into e-publishing, since I already had a pretty good selection of scripts. So, I jumped into the e-book business with both feet, and it has been a wild ride ever since." It didn’t take Ray long to figure out that publishing e-books was anything but easy. They followed the evolutionary trail along with every other e-publisher, by presenting their books in text format, then RTF, then HTML, then Adobe Acrobat, then on and on. "Until one file format proves superior, producing e-books will continue to be your basic publishing nightmare," Ray says. "It’s expensive enough to pay for readers, editors and artists, but then the real costs come into play when it comes time to convert the scripts to the various file formats needed." Currently, The Fiction Works publishes their books in text, HTML, Adobe Acrobat, PalmOS, and XML file formats.

The Great American Publishing Society (GR.AM.P.S.) was founded in 1975. According to Stephen Ellerin, publisher, "Although we began using desktop computers to create paper-based (conventionally-bound) books in 1981, our first fully-electronic book-on-CD came in 1994."

Marilyn Nesbitt, CEO of DiskUs Publishing, says, "I had a desktop publishing business called DiskUs Publishing that I opened in 1995 and we sold booklets, CDs and works on disks. I didn’t call these e-books but that’s what they were. (I just didn’t realize at the time that there were actual things called e-books) when I got my business license for DiskUs which was back in 1995. We put an author’s book on a computer disk for them and also made them a bound book of their work (spiral and then later VeloBind). We sold these in our shop for them. Then we expanded and started a web presence in early 1997 where we had e-books that could be downloaded for free while we were reading submissions and we sold our first e-book in early 1998."

Other small press electronic publishing companies became to emerge more rapidly toward the latter half of the 1990s. In 1999, mass market publishers began to take notice of this growing trend and dipped their own toes in the constantly churning waters known as electronic publishing with strategies that wouldn’t really allow them to fail as they experimented, as we’ve seen and will continue to see throughout the timeline, provided next.

 

Next week, I'll post the timeline. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog 

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/