Yes, the major publishers have glossy promotional sites as part of their marketing mix and certainly there is widespread recognition that the Web is going to have an increasing impact on their business models, if for no other reason than competition for leisure time. But not much attention has been paid to the ways in which the new medium might augment the reading experience per se, or how that in turn might drive future sales.

Pulp to Plastic

This is now beginning to change, as book publishers rethink the Web and try to tap its potential in the complementary areas of access and delivery. Conventional wisdom has long held that computers are not suitable for extended reading—screen-based text strains the eyes, and cannot deliver the portability and tactile comfort of bound volumes. To overcome this long-standing obstacle, smaller digital devices are being introduced this fall to woo a new generation of readers. The notable contenders are the Rocket eBook from NuvoMedia and the SoftBook Company's SoftBook, both of which have been designed for reading comfort and easy access to titles old and new via the Web. (Editor's Note: both have been acquired by Gemstar.) Each of these new devices is roughly the size of a chunky paperback, and each is backed by major publishing houses. Both promote ample storage (permitting you to cart a library of personal favorites around), along with easy online access—in SoftBook's case, without need of a personal computer at all.

Another new approach aims to use the Web as a sort of virtual bookstore, where one can browse at leisure and then purchase electronically formatted books for consumption offline. Online Originals, a London- and Bordeaux-based publisher of titles available only online, is an interesting example.

The company has published over 30 titles so far, in formats designed for reading on a desktop or notebook computer or on 3Com's Palm handhelds. Each title costs approximately $7 U.S., with the author receiving 50% of the proceeds. Fiction, children's works and a fairly wide variety of non-fiction are available.

What's new here, of course, is not the availability of online texts (Project Gutenberg has a long head start in this regard) but the idea of commercial book-length publishing via the Web. Online Originals wants to play the role of a Random House or Simon & Schuster, while NuvoMedia and SoftBook are content to provide new delivery devices for existing publishers—a somewhat less ambitious undertaking, in our view.

Original But Uneven

Online Originals is off to a promising if somewhat uneven start. Quality varies widely, both in terms of the works themselves and their actual presentation. (But then, isn't this true of every publishing house?) For example, the free sampler title for October, X-VDA, is fairly well-written but frequently silly (and faintly racist, to boot). On the other hand, Online Originals has had titles favorably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement; one of them, Patricia le Roy's The Angels of Russia, was even nominated for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

When you order a book from Online Originals, you receive your "copy" by e-mail, in Adobe Acrobat format. Acrobat/PDF is in many ways ideal for publishing, since it can precisely replicate printed material while also offering the advantages—hyperlinks, search capability, etc.—of an electronic format. However, Online Originals does not employ Acrobat to full advantage. Although the company does produce a cover and a copyright page for each of its titles, it does not provide a table of contents or links to chapter headings. What's more, we find that reading a book-length PDF file on a full-size computer monitor quickly becomes tiring—even with Acrobat's crisp type, this just doesn't seem a natural way to read. The format works surprisingly well on a PowerBook, though, since portability comes into play and the screen size and proportions are closer to those of a "real" book, particularly when Acrobat's "thumbnail" option is used to narrow the reading area. Scrolling takes some getting used to, but one quickly becomes accustomed to it.

We'll report on the Palm version (and the Rocket eBook and SoftBook formats) in due course, but our hunch is none of these options will prove to be an immediate hit. Reading is a process that's too fundamental and too entrenched to change so radically overnight, and digital technology will no more replace books than it will replace newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless, we do feel there is a digital future in store for book publishing. It will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the developments outlined here represent a promising start.

(Reviewed October 27, 1998)