The Future of Electronic Publishing
UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is:
"Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages
excluding covers."
The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change
all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place
in the last few months. Time Warner's iPublish and MightyWords
(partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the last in a string of
resounding failures which cast in doubt the business model
underlying digital content. Everything seemed to have gone
wrong: the dot.coms dot bombed, venture capital dried up,
competing standards fractured an already fragile marketplace,
the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky and awkward, the
software unwieldy, the e-books badly written or already in the
public domain.
Terrified by the inexorable process of disintermediation (the
establishment of direct contact between author and readers,
excluding publishers and bookstores) and by the ease with which
digital content can be replicated - publishers resorted to
draconian copyright protection measures (euphemistically known
as "digital rights management"). This further alienated the few
potential readers left. The opposite model of "viral" or "buzz"
marketing (by encouraging the dissemination of free copies of
the promoted book) was only marginally more successful.
Moreover, e-publishing's delivery platform, the Internet, has
been transformed beyond recognition since March 2000.
>From an open, somewhat anarchic, web of networked computers - it
has evolved into a territorial, commercial, corporate extension
of "brick and mortar" giants, subject to government regulation.
It is less friendly towards independent (small) publishers, the
backbone of e-publishing. Increasingly, it is expropriated by
publishing and media behemoths. It is treated as a medium for
cross promotion, supply chain management, and customer relations
management. It offers only some minor synergies with
non-cyberspace, real world, franchises and media properties. The
likes of Disney and Bertelsmann have swung a full circle from
considering the Internet to be the next big thing in New Media
delivery - to frantic efforts to contain the red ink it oozed
all over their otherwise impeccable balance sheets.
But were the now silent pundits right all the same? Is the
future of publishing (and other media industries) inextricably
intertwined with the Internet?
The answer depends on whether an old habit dies hard. Internet
surfers are used to free content. They are very reluctant to pay
for information (with precious few exceptions, like the "Wall
Street Journal"'s electronic edition). Moreover, the Internet,
with 3 billion pages listed in the Google search engine (and
another 15 billion in "invisible" databases), provides many free
substitutes to every information product, no matter how
superior. Web based media companies (such as Salon and
Britannica.com) have been experimenting with payment and pricing
models. But this is besides the point. Whether in the form of
subscription (Britannica), pay per view (Questia), pay to print
(Fathom), sample and pay to buy the physical product (RealRead),
or micropayments (Amazon) - the public refuses to cough up.
Moreover, the advertising-subsidized free content Web site has
died together with Web advertising. Geocities - a community of
free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! - is
now selectively shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a
certain level of traffic) to convince their owners to revert to
a monthly hosting fee model. With Lycos in trouble in Europe,
Tripod may well follow suit shortly. Earlier this year,
Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of discussion lists).
Suite101 has stopped paying its editors (content authors)
effective January 15th. About.com fired hundreds of category
editors. With the ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed is the
only content aggregator which tries to buck the trend by relying
(partly) on advertising revenue.
Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie with its
ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers
actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e-books
(i.e., the lending of e-books to multiple patrons). But,
libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community
centres. They are also dominant promoters of new knowledge
technologies. They are already the largest buyers of e-books.
Together with schools and other educational institutions,
libraries can serve as decisive socialization agents and
introduce generations of pupils, students, and readers to the
possibilities and riches of e-publishing. Government use of
e-books (e.g., by the military) may have the same beneficial
effect.
As standards converge (Adobe's Portable Document Format and
Microsoft's MS Reader LIT format are likely to be the winners),
as hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous (within
multi-purpose devices or as standalone higher quality units), as
content becomes more attractive (already many new titles are
published in both print and electronic formats), as more
versatile information taxonomies (like the Digital Object
Identifier) are introduced, as the Internet becomes more
gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan - e-publishing is
likely to recover and flourish.
This renaissance will probably be aided by the gradual decline
of print magazines and by a strengthening movement for free open
source scholarly publishing. The publishing of periodical
content and academic research (including, gradually, peer
reviewed research) may be already shifting to the Web.
Non-fiction and textbooks will follow. Alternative models of
pricing are already in evidence (author pays to publish, author
pays to obtain peer review, publisher pays to publish, buy a
physical product and gain access to enhanced online content, and
so on). Web site rating agencies will help to discriminate
between the credible and the in-credible. Publishing is moving -
albeit kicking and screaming - online.