The e-book’s day finally appears to be dawning, due to technology improvements, societal shifts and market developments. Today’s major e-book proponents will not give up easily, because they see long-term value in the technology and it fits well with their businesses. Quiet progress will lead to eventual success—and perhaps a dominant position—for the e-book in certain segments. One day, paper-based books will be in the minority, but the full transition could take 25 years. (Raskino et al. 2008, 2)
This Gartner Group assessment, written in late 2008, reflects a growing consensus that e-books are finally coming of age. Compared with much current e-book hoopla, the statement is almost somber in its realistic assessment of where e-books are and where they are heading. According to the Association of American Publishers, domestic net e-books sales reached $19.1 million in December 2009, a 119 percent jump for the month. Year-end sales for 2009 reached 169.5 million, a 176.6 percent increase from 2008 (Association of American Publishers 2009). Additionally, a recent Time magazine article highlights growing competition in the e-book reader market. As evidence of the market’s growth, its author points to Kindle sales of approximately 1.7 million units since the reader’s release in 2007 as well as Forester Research’s prediction that e-book reader sales would hit 3 million by December 2009 and double to 6 million by 2010 (Rose 2009). The release of Apple’s long-awaited iPad, with accompanying iBookstore and iBooks app, adds even more competition, with over 300,000 devices sold on the first day (PR Newswire 2010). These impressive statistics, the high-profile debate over the Google settlement, and recent popular interest in e-books are signs that they have become part of the public zeitgeist.
Yet e-books have taken decades to evolve; Gartner’s “quiet progress” is an apt description. Long before Amazon began selling books, before Google began scanning orphaned texts, and before publishers began to “embrace” (in the same way one dances with a porcupine) e-books, thousands of e-books were available to be read and downloaded for free on the Internet. These e-book libraries were the creation of a relatively small but influential e-book community. This community developed core philosophies concerning the preservation of digital e-books, experimented with digitization processes, and learned to cope with accelerating technological change.
In discussing e-books on the Internet, it would be easy to juxtapose the efforts of the early e-book community with the recent so-called crass commercialization of e-books. In this scenario, e-book enthusiasts, academics, and librarians play the Jimmy Stewart role while aggregators, publishers, and distributors play the heavy, perhaps Mr. Potter. The Jimmy Stewart role is a populist role, representing the notion that e-books should be available for free on the Internet in DRM-free format. Mr. Potter is a capitalist, interested in facilitating the discovery of e-books, but only so they can be purchased or accessed through the local library (which pays a premium price for the e-book). Fortunately, the situation is not black and white. The early efforts and the recent commercialization do not have to be in opposition to each other. One is not necessarily better for readers and e-books than the other.
This chapter provides a history of e-books on the Internet and examines the evolution of different philosophical approaches to e-books. It also touches on the future of Internet e-books, from both commercial and creative perspectives. This history is admittedly selective and colloquial, with a few sites serving to illustrate a progression of ideas.
Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. (Bush 1945)
With these words, Vannevar Bush settled into his argument for a machine—which he called the Memex—that would imitate the human thought process by facilitating nonlinear searching of multimedia resources. Bush’s article is celebrated as the first postulation of the idea of hypertext. One could argue that the Internet is the realization of Bush’s machine for multimedia searching.
The first Internet e-book was created in 1971. The project, aptly dubbed Project Gutenberg, was the brainchild of Michael S. Hart. Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois, founded Gutenberg on the premise of replicator technology. As Hart put it, “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” (Hart 1992). Hart accurately predicted the Internet’s power as a syndication tool. Today the phenomenon is well documented, proven every time a music file is downloaded or a new viral video appears on YouTube.
Hart chose the Declaration of Independence as the first document to digitize. Once the document was typed, Hart told his colleagues how to access the file, or sending the 5 kB file to everyone would have crashed the system; six people downloaded the file. Hart had proven his underlying premise. The Gutenberg library was built slowly. In August 1989, Project Gutenberg added its tenth book, the King James Bible. In January 1994, Project Gutenberg celebrated its one hundredth book by publishing the complete works of William Shakespeare. In October 2003, with the addition of the Magna Carta, Gutenberg reached ten thousand volumes. Today, the Project Gutenberg library contains thirty thousand free books contributed by “tens of thousands” of editors (Lebert 2005).
These numbers may seem anemic when one considers the number of books in the Internet Archive or in Google Books. Yet, for nearly four decades, two decades before the World Wide Web, Project Gutenberg has been in the forefront of e-book digitization and collections. Gutenberg first expressed a philosophical basis for Internet e-book collection development policies, in Hart’s words “to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search” (Hart 1992). Gutenberg’s mission is elegantly simple: to “encourage the creation and distribution of e-books”; hence the texts are offered primarily in plain text in order to make the e-books as widely accessible as possible.
Project Gutenberg was the first and, for some time, just about the only Internet e-book library. Eventually other libraries went online. In 1985 the classics department at Tufts University began planning the Perseus Digital Library, a digital library of materials on the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world. Launched in 1987, Perseus was one of the first subject-specific Internet e-book libraries; it has also proven to be one of the most durable.
The Perseus Digital Library’s mission is “to make the full record of humanity—linguistic sources, physical artifacts, historical spaces—as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background” (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/research). This is a lofty goal, but one tempered with realism: “Of course, such a mission can never be fully realized any more than we can reach the stars by which we guide the twisting paths and blind alleys through the world around us.” Perseus’s creators believe that, although the ideal is unobtainable, it is everything—”that idealized vision allowed each to change the worlds in which they lived and carry humanity a little farther.” In pursuit of these goals, the editors of the Perseus project have expanded the scope of their collections. The site now includes a collection of nineteenth-century American literature and the full text of the Richmond Times Dispatch. As of this writing, Perseus stands at over fifty-eight million words of text.
Early efforts such as Project Gutenburg and the Perseus Digital Library were based in a humanist and egalitarian notion of sharing and preserving knowledge, a philosophy shared with the libraries the sites’ creators used in their academic studies. Gutenberg adopted something of a “great books” collection policy, concentrating on classics and building a core collection. Perseus took a subject-specific approach. Both efforts were sustained by a cadre of dedicated individuals.
Early Internet e-book creators faced substantial technical challenges. E-books had to be typed and progress was slow. Early e-book creators viewed one thousand or five thousand books as significant milestones—and they were. It took over twenty-five years for Project Gutenberg to complete its thousandth book: Dante’s Inferno, added in August 1997. Scanner technology—originally developed in 1957—was not widely available, nor were optical character recognition systems, even though Intelligent Machines Research had introduced the first commercial OCR systems in the 1950s. Eventually scanners and OCR software would change the role of the early e-book creator from typist to editor/proofreader.
Sharing information on the early Internet was not easy. The Internet, advanced for its time, was still clunky. Download speeds were slow, and basic transfer protocols were in their earliest iterations. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was developed in 1974, after Hart typed his first e-book. Computer use was not ubiquitous. The first Apple computer, the Apple I, was released in 1977, the first IBM PC in 1981. E-book audiences were small, limited to a handful of academics and scientists.
Early e-book creators faced the twin challenges of building collections and learning how best to use new digital technology. Despite these significant challenges, many of the early collections flourished and survive today.
The origin of the Web takes on the aura of modern-day myth when told in its fullness. Unfortunately, we will have to settle for a brief synopsis based on an authoritative account. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN aggressively promoted the idea, bringing the first web servers online in 1991. In 1994 its promotional efforts culminated in the first annual World Wide Web conference, dubbed the “Woodstock of the Web.” Less than one year later, the Web had ten thousand servers and over ten million users. Ultimately, it was the introduction of the Mosaic browser by the University of Illinois in 1993 that opened the floodgates. Mosaic was the first browser to be widely adopted; it opened up the Web to a broad audience (CERN n.d.).
Many of the technical issues faced by e-books creators were resolved with the advent of the Web, a natural platform for e-books that was far more user friendly than BITNET and previous TCP/IP and FTP platforms. With a viable platform in place and a potential audience of millions, academics, libraries, and enthusiasts jumped into digitization projects and the number of e-book libraries began to increase dramatically.
An example of such a site is Renascence Editions, an online repository of works printed in English between the years 1477 and 1799. The site was founded in 1992 by Risa Bear, a staff member of the University of Oregon Libraries (which hosted the site) and an accomplished poetess with a passion for the literature of the period. From 1992 to 2005, Bear and her contributing editors published over 164 e-books on the Web, including works by Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Spenser, and Jonathan Swift.
As these libraries grew, people with similar interests began to collaborate and share ideas. E-book communities began to emerge and libraries began to merge. The Luminarium was founded in 1996 by Anniina Jokinen. Initially, Jokinen created the site as a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English literature. The site grew, adding links to similar sites such as Renascence Editions and eventually hosting content shared by colleagues. In essence, the owners of Internet e-book libraries began to do cooperative collection development, often with great success. The process was so easy as to be almost transparent: hyperlink to the other libraries.
One of the best ways to gain an understanding of the excitement of 1993/94 is to read contemporary accounts of the period. One such account was written by Lynn H. Nelson, a professor of history at the University of Kansas. In June 1993, Nelson launched CARRIE, the first full-text history library on the Web. CARRIE was named after the first professional librarian at the University of Kansas. In a brief article titled “CARRIE: A Full-Text Online Library,” Nelson gives a firsthand account of the site’s launch, which he indicates was an immediate success. Within a month the site had approximately three thousand links to historical texts. Nelson describes receiving enthusiastic letters from people telling him where to find additional texts. One writer sent him a mysterious letter that suggested he “look deep in Colorado State.” Nelson searched the site and eventually found a folder called “Stuff.” “Stuff” contained three megabytes of socialist texts, including Marx’s Das Capital and The Communist Manifesto (Nelson n.d.).
Despite its success, CARRIE was soon overtaken by other sites. As Nelson writes, “It was only two months until a new day dawned and colleges and universities throughout the country were scrambling to put up World Wide Web sites, and HNSource and CARRIE lost their uniqueness and were overshadowed by the well-funded and professionally staffed projects that began appearing.”
Libraries and well-funded projects such as the Library of Congress American Memory project, which grew from a pilot digitization project that ran from 1990 to 1994, were uniquely positioned to develop Internet e-book collections. Aside from their obvious expertise in information management and collection building, they also had the funding and staff necessary to meet the increasing demand for more books, better access models, and more advanced searching tools.
One of the best known of these collections was the University of Virginia Library’s Etext Center, founded in 1992. The Etext Center sought “to build and maintain an Internet-accessible collection of documents central to teaching and research in the humanities, and to nurture a user community adept at the creation and scholarly use of these materials.” An integral part of the Etext Center’s mission was to explore the creation and use of digital collections. A comprehensive list of faculty, staff, and student projects on the center’s website (http://etext.lib.virgina.edu/collections/projects/) illustrates the range of the digital projects completed under the aegis of the center; here are just a few of them:
Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century,
created by the Bibliographical Society of Virginia
Witchcraft in Salem Village: The Witchcraft Trials of 1692,
by Benjamin Ray, Religious Studies Department
Absalom, Absalom! Electronic, Interactive! chronology by
Stephen Railton, University of Virginia English Department
Many of the projects merged e-texts with other media. The notion that online texts can be enhanced with other media is a natural connection, much like illustrations enhance print books.
As technology improved, projects became more ambitious. In the late 1990s the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon launched the Universal Digital Library (www.ulib.org) “to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge.” The Universal Library’s well-known Million Book Project was launched in 2001 with the goal of putting one million free-to-read digital books online by 2007. The scale of the project indicates the incredible advances in digital technology made since 1993. Carnegie Mellon also partnered with governmental and research institutions in India and China. At one point they had over fifty scanning facilities operating worldwide. The Million Book Project met its goal in 2007, scanning approximately 1.5 million e-books. The library holds materials across a broad range of subject areas, everything from Sanskrit literature to technical reports. Twenty languages are represented, including 970,000 works in Chinese, 360,000 in English, 50,000 in the southern Indian language of Telugu, and 40,000 in Arabic (London Business School 2007).
E-book libraries of a similar scale, particularly Internet libraries that offer free e-books, are not common. One that has reached a similar size is the Internet Archive, launched in 1996. The Internet Archive offers “permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format” (www.archive.org). The archive’s mission is rooted in the library/ archive tradition. It is a visionary effort to create a historical record of a new medium, “to prevent the Internet—a new medium with major historical significance—and other ‘born-digital’ materials from disappearing into the past.” “Born-digital” content included in the archive includes software, audio, video, and e-texts.
As of November 1, 2009, the Internet Archive’s Text Collection contained 1,716,115 items. The largest collection, the American Libraries Collection, included 1,139,936 texts. Other collections are Canadian Libraries, 208,867 items; Universal Library, 70,200 items; and Project Gutenberg, 20,377 items. A list of contributors for the American Collection (www.archive.org/details/americana) shows the diverse institutions involved in digitizing books. Contributors include academic and public libraries, the Boston Library Consortium, Lyrasis, and CARLI, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois. Corporate contributors include Microsoft, Yahoo! and the Sloan Foundation. Microsoft’s contribution alone numbers 339,609 books from its defunct Microsoft Book Search.
The Internet Archive includes an open-source e-book reader. The reader is developed and maintained by volunteers. In a refreshing move, the Internet Archive has an open bug reporting system. Readers can report bugs, view a list of known issues, and even see who has been tasked with correcting each issue.
As a result of the combined efforts of all these individuals and institutions, a prodigious number of e-books are available on the Internet. The collections are as diverse as they are numerous. Aficionados of children’s books have many sites to choose from: the International Children’s Digital Library, Lookybook, Kids’ Corner from Wired for Books, Children’s Books Online: The Rosetta Project, Children’s Literature from the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress, and a scan of the Original Alice, by Lewis Carroll, in the British Museum’s Turning the Pages collection. All these sites are easily found with a search engine.
The Internet also caters to more rarified tastes. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft can read all of his tales of horror at Dagonbytes.com. Readers curious about evolution can browse Darwin’s complete works online at the Thackray Medal–winning Darwin Online. Classical music fans might be drawn to the Bavarian State Library’s digital library of Felix Mendelssohn’s writings. This chapter necessarily fails to do justice to the many e-book libraries available on the Internet; there are too many to document in this article. Suffice it to say, there are many wonderful e-books collections on the Internet waiting to be discovered.
All of these efforts at e-book digitization served as a proof of concept for commercial publishers. Still, it was only after the successful transition from print to electronic journals proved the viability and profitability of electronic publishing that publishers warmed to the idea of e-books. Even then, publishers faced several practical issues including digital rights management, the risk of e-book sales undercutting print sales, and finding a suitable electronic format and reader. Many of the early efforts to sell e-books were by aggregators who modeled their databases on commercial journal databases and marketed e-books to libraries.
NetLibrary launched the first e-book database for libraries in 1998. Modeled on journal databases, the platform coupled a discovery interface for finding e-books with a reader for viewing the full text of the e-book. NetLibrary’s key innovation was allowing readers to search the full text of an entire e-book library at once. Once an e-book was open, readers could take notes electronically, add bookmarks, link to outside resources, and copy and paste text. Reading from cover to cover was an option, of course, but the emphasis was on research use, similar conceptually to the periodical databases NetLibrary emulated. Within a few years, other e-book aggregators entered into the market, including EBL, ebrary, MyiLibrary, and OverDrive. All these platforms offer similar base functionality, but each has its own unique features as well.
As aggregators were marketing to libraries, other companies sought to break into the consumer market. The history of these efforts is often a study in mergers and acquisitions as opposed to selling e-books. In 1998, Peanut Press began selling e-books online. Peanut Press was subsequently renamed eReader, then after its purchase by Palm was renamed Palm Press. In 2008, eReader (which had reverted back to its earlier name after Palm spun the company off) was purchased by Fictionwise, an e-book company that had formed in 2000. Soon afterward, March 5, 2009, Fictionwise was acquired by Barnes and Noble for $15.7 million. Barnes and Noble has since parlayed this property and its other e-book holdings into one of the largest e-book stores on the Web, with over 500,000 books available.
Individual publishers were a little slower in moving to e-books. The publishers that jumped in most quickly were those successful with e-journals. Notables include Springer and Elsevier, both of which added e-books to their respective proprietary platforms, SpringerLink and Science Direct. The direct-to-consumer market began to open for publishers with the development of affordable e-book readers.
Ultimately, Amazon’s Kindle may have the same impact on e-books as Mosaic did on the Internet. The Kindle was not the first reader to market, but it has captured public attention. Amazon, which offers over 350,000 e-books on its website, recently announced plans to sell the Kindle in over one hundred countries. Other companies are competing for the growing market. Sony recently partnered with Google to make over 500,000 books available online. Barnes and Noble unveiled a new e-book reader, the nook, in October 2009. The nook can store and play MP3 files, and it also allows readers to lend electronic books to friends. Apple introduced the iPad and corresponding iBooks app in April 2010. Asustek, maker of Asus netbooks, will soon release its Eee Reader, and Samsung is set to release its Papyrus reader, already available in South Korea, in the United States. Major publishers now sell frontlist e-books direct to consumers. HarperCollins, Random House, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin all offer e-books and downloadable audiobooks online. Publishers are also adding free e-books to the Internet, often as part of promotional campaigns. For example, anyone who has sifted through piles of Harlequin romances in used book stores (or happened to hold a temp job pulping Harlequin novels returned by members of the Harlequin Romance Book Club, as I did) will be touched to know that Harlequin is offering sixteen of its novels for free online in celebration of the company’s sixtieth anniversary.
Graphic novel publishers are also getting into the mix. Every week, Marvel Comics offers fifteen free comic books to users who are not ready to subscribe to the Marvel online library, Digital Comics Online. This is a subscription service with over five thousand comics available, including classics like The Amazing Spiderman. For those interested in more topical graphic novels, Slate magazine’s graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Commission’s report is available online for free at www.slate.com/features/911report/001.html.
The availability of e-books on both noncommercial and commercial sites coupled with publishers’ growing enthusiasm for the direct-to-consumer market is a strong indicator that e-books are reaching maturity on the Internet.
Google’s plan to make money from e-books is straightforward. First, digitize as many in-print and out-of-print books as possible, thus creating a massive e-book library. Next, when the inevitable lawsuits are filed, negotiate a settlement with industry associations that sanction your business model and establish a revenue-sharing model that heels your biggest threats. Finally, make gobs of money with your e-book storefront, print-on-demand services, e-book subscriptions to libraries, and advertising revenue. The more complex issue is whether Google’s strategy is a good or a bad thing for anyone other than Google employees and the company’s shareholders.
In creating Google Books, Google has done an excellent job of building partnerships. Initially, Google partnered with publishers. Among the first to join in were Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Springer, and Taylor and Francis. In December 2004, Google partnered with prominent libraries in launching the Google Print Library Project, subsequently renamed Google Books. Google sought to work with prominent libraries such as Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford, and Stanford. Eventually other libraries joined in the effort, including the University of California, University Complutense of Madrid, and University of Virginia.
It was the Google Books project—specifically the scanning of the libraries’ books—that provoked a lawsuit by the American Publishers Association and the Authors Guild. At the heart of the lawsuit was the assertion that Google had violated copyright law by digitizing dozens of works without the copyright holders’ permission. The lawsuit played itself out in a series of increasingly self-serving and tedious pronouncements by both Google and the APA (led by lobbyist Pat Schroeder).
Happily, the parties ran out of things to call each other. In October 2008 they announced a settlement, detailing the key terms in a lengthy (some might say tedious) legal document. Google got the right to scan and display books. For books in copyright, rights holders have to opt in to have their material included; for out-of-print materials, rights holders have to opt out. Google retains 37 percent of the profits from sales of the texts; the remaining 63 percent is divided between the publishers and the authors. The settlement also calls for the creation of a Book Rights Registry. The registry, a nonprofit institution, is to track sales and hold money in escrow for copyright holders until the funds are claimed.
The real fighting began with the settlement. Various organizations including the Internet Archive and the Consumer Watchdog Agency sprang into action, opposing the settlement on the grounds that it would give Google a virtual e-book monopoly. Some of Google’s library partners threatened to jump ship. Germany leapt into the fray, arguing that it would give Google the right to scan books by German authors, even though German authors were not represented in the court proceedings. Finally, the U.S. Department of Justice took notice, launching an investigation of the settlement’s potential impact on fair trade.
One might be justified in thinking that perhaps the Google uproar is overdone. The Google Books project will make more books available to readers than ever before. Those books will be easier to find and relatively inexpensive. There is also a built-in safety valve of sorts, for if the experience of the music industry has proven anything, it is that today’s tech-savvy consumers will find alternatives to commercial sites if the price is too high or if information is too restricted.
A ruling on the Google settlement from the U.S. District Court in New York had been expected in the fall of 2009; indeed, the first draft of this article expressed the hope that the settlement would at least signal a new act in the dialog about e-books. A complex settlement with such profound implications is hard to negotiate, however. As the date of the settlement came and went, it became clear that the matter would not be settled soon. In February 2010, well after the projected date for a decision, a hearing was held in the Federal Court of Manhattan with many of the participants, including the Justice Department, expressing strong opposition to the settlement even as its proponents strongly defended their interests. More recently, additional lawsuits have been filed, ensuring further litigation. In April 2010 the American Society of Media Photographers filed a class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court in New York, alleging that Google is displaying copyrighted images from digitized books without properly compensating the artists. The ASMP was joined in this action by the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photography Association, and Professional Photographers of America, among others. Also in April, the Open Book Alliance called on the Justice Department to open an antitrust investigation of Google.
Even as the legal argument intensifies, projects are coming to fruition that point out the importance of the Google Books project and the settlement. Most notable is the creation of the HathiTrust. The HathiTrust, a joint project of the CIC and the University of California, is a shared digital repository for all participants’ content, including e-books digitized by Google. Although some of the content will be available only to participants, e-books in the public domain will be made available to all, in keeping with the project’s goal to “make HathiTrust available, to everyone, anywhere, any time.” Should the project stay true to its goal, the result would be a boon to readers.
If the Google settlement is enough to make one want to curl up with a good book (print or electronic), efforts like the HathiTrust offer hope that a solution will be found that advances access to books rather than simply putting them into new commercial silos.
As of this writing, a settlement is still due at “any time.”
The e-book is still in the early stage of development as a medium. Now that e-book technology is reaching a level of advancement where it does not distract from the text, many writers are no longer content with simply replicating print. Blogs are alive with discussions about multimedia e-books. Writers are experimenting with embedding video, audio, and animation in their work. More engaged authors have already begun to influence the form and the market.
In 2000, Stephen King released his novella Riding the Bullet exclusively as an e-book on the Internet. Scribner’s servers were so busy that many people were unable to download the work. King had demonstrated that authors (well-known authors at least) could effectively use the Internet to publish their writing. On October 21, 2009, Scribner announced a $35 list price for the e-book edition of Under the Dome, Stephen King’s latest epic. Evidently, King and Scribner are hoping to prove the point once more at a significantly higher price point.
King’s Riding the Bullet was a conventional e-book (in terms of its technology, not the text) that was marketed unconventionally. As King was releasing his novella, other authors were working with the medium in less conventional ways. In 1999 the Kennedy Center and RealNetworks launched Storytime Online, a project aimed at using the Internet “to make the unique power and magic of children’s books more accessible.” Each story featured audio of the authors reading their works combined with visual and textual accompaniment. Stories included Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day; Debbie Allen’s Brothers of the Knight; and the poem Harlem by Walter Dean Myers. In merging audio, video, and text, the program demonstrated the e-book’s potential as a multimedia medium.
The Screen Actors Guild took a similar approach with Storyline Online, which featured members of the Guild reading children’s books, with accompanying text and video. Stories on the site include To Be a Drum, by Evelyn Coleman, read by James Earl Jones; My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother, by Patricia Polacco, read by Melissa Gilbert; The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg, read by Lou Diamond Phillips; and Enemy Pie, by Derek Munson, read by Camryn Manheim. Sadly, at the time of this writing a note had been posted on the site indicating that funding for the project had run out.
The concept of creating Internet e-books by merging text with Internet technology was taken to another level by writers participating in the Penguin Books project We Tell Stories. We Tell Stories features six different stories from six different authors told over a series of six weeks. Each story incorporates the Internet in the storytelling in a unique way. For instance, Charles Cummings’s 21 Steps uses Google Maps to track the movements of the characters. Each chapter is accompanied by a map of the city of London indicating where the characters are standing. Toby Litt’s Slice uses a weblog to tell its story. Litt encourages readers to e-mail the characters, and the characters send text messages through Twitter. Nicci French wrote her story Your Place and Mine live on the Internet while readers followed along.
Other Internet e-book projects have more of a retro feel. USAToday.com’s Open Book series features original works of fiction published in weekly installments, similar to serialized stories published in popular magazines. Although Open Book does not use the Internet as innovatively as We Tell Stories, it takes advantage of the Internet’s strength as a syndication tool.
As writers continue to explore the medium, they will necessarily stake out a position in the ongoing debate about a standard file format for e-books. Indeed, they could conspire to render the notion of a single standard obsolete by working across formats as artists might work in a combination of inks, pastels, watercolors, and oils.
A significant change is not likely in the immediate future. Text will remain the most critical element in an e-book, as is appropriate. Moreover, the adoption of the EPUB standard, which supports multimedia functionality, will accommodate most writers’ needs. Authors will be able to incorporate video or even sound tracks in their works. Authors/publishers will be able to create so-called deluxe editions of books, just as movie studios have released director’s cuts of movies and recording companies have included bonus tracks and video on CD reissues. Soon readers will be able to hear Dan Brown explaining obscure references in The Lost Symbol or J. K. Rowling’s feelings on how sections of the Harry Potter books were adapted for the screen (clips from the movies could be included to illustrate her points). Successive editions of books will be just as, if not more, desirable than the first edition. Readers will experience books in a very different way than they previously have.
The thirty-year history of the e-book on the Internet began with slow and steady development and then launched into accelerated progress. Early efforts focused on putting public domain, rare, and unique content online, in Michael Hart’s words, “to make the full record of humanity as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background.” As the commercial implications of Internet e-books became clear, aggregators and publishers joined in, focusing on the Internet as a market for frontlist titles. Authors became involved too, wrestling with the commercial implications of e-books while exploring them as a new medium. The interests of all those involved are largely complementary. For instance, the digital projects tends to focus on books that are out of copyright, and publishers are concerned about their catalog. All want to promote e-books, even Google Books, which has caused the most legal commotion and disharmony to date.
Some may see something ominous, perhaps ridiculous, in the prospect of Google, large libraries, publishers, computer companies, trade organizations, and lawyers deciding the fate of works they had little hand in creating. Still, there is a possibility that a detente will be forged between these groups, for ultimately they may not have a choice. The Internet’s innate utility as a syndication tool is nearly impossible to suppress. Academics and enthusiasts will continue to create websites with free downloadable e-books. Authors will use the Internet as they explore e-books in their literary work. Consumers will make purchasing decisions based on costs (monetary and otherwise). If the costs are too high, independent-minded consumers will find ways to “liberate” e-books by harvesting and sharing the content.
If this situation seems oddly familiar, it is because the digital music industry has just been through a similar process. Happily, good music survived “corporate rock,” and the music industry survived Napster. Excellent music was produced under the aegis of large corporations. Thriller, the top-selling record of all time, was released by Columbia Records on cassette, LP, and CD; it is currently available in MP3 format on iTunes. Admittedly, good radio was lost along the way, but LastFM and Sirius are proving that the process is reversible.
Today more books are available for readers than ever before; they are also easier to access and less likely to go out of print. E-books are searchable, interactive, and less expensive (millions are free). Writers are exploring the e-book medium and are using it in novel ways. The future of the e-book, and the e-book on the Internet, has never looked brighter.
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