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 

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