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/