E-books: the Next Chapter
By Sean O'Neill

Predictions that electronic readers will replace paper books have been in such demand that consultants can't make up the numbers fast enough. Anderson Consulting predicts that by 2005 one out of every 10 books will be published electronically, which includes texts downloaded to electronic readers, PCs, or print-on-demand kiosks. PricewaterhouseCoopers, more optimistic, says one out of four books by 2004 will be published electronically. Last March, e-books were zapped into popular awareness when half a million copies of Stephen King's 16,000-word ghost story "Riding the Bullet" were downloaded in just two days. But in the meantime, downloads of King's second novella, "The Plant," are dwindling, and sales of his first book remain the only dent in the market any electronically published book has made.

Into such a quiet desert this month (November) lands the RCA Ebook electronic reader, hoping to expand e-book sales like nuclear fission. The RCA Ebook is a about the width of two Palm Pilot personal data assistants put together and comes in two versions, a black-and-white screen ($299) and a color one ($699). The cheaper, half-pound machine is a wonder. When I tested it, its screen was easier to read than the screens on earlier Rocket e-books and Softbook Readers, which sold in the tens of thousands but were discontinued.

Despite the RCA e-book's woo-woo features, though, I wouldn't run out to buy one. Not only is the machine itself expensive but the e-books made available for downloading from the Gemstar Ebook service are also expected to be expensive. To make illegal copying difficult, the RCA e-books do not allow you to access the Internet to download books. Instead, they force you to dial-up on the phone Gemstar, an electronic storehouse, which will likely sell titles at approximately the price that hardcovers are sold at online or bricks-and-mortar stores. The virtual books averaged $28 this year according to Books In Print. Why should I pay the same price for a hardcover when the image quality on a RCA e-book isn't comparable to the print experience?

Onto the raft of e-book predictions, let me toss my own. I don't expect any single electronic reader to become the one multipurpose device that downloads all the texts anyone ever wants to read. I don't expect either the RCA e-book or its as-yet-unnamed rival, to be released in late 2001 by Microsoft and Toshiba, to become omnipresent. Most people have little patience for reading lengthy items on screens with poor resolution, a problem not expected to be solved for years to come. Novels abhor 7-inch screens, whereas magazine articles might become widely read on electronic readers.

This month, Jason Epstein offers an alternate vision of the future of publishing in his slim volume, "Book Business." Epstein, a former Random House editor-in-chief, predicts that few people will read novels and non-fiction on hard-to-read, handheld electronic readers. Instead, novels and non-fiction will be speedily printed out with perfect-binding from machines, like ATMs, that will be placed in corner shops, such as Kinko's and Starbucks, or in post offices.

Epstein, despite being an end-of-career, cranky traditionalist, is surprisingly optimistic about the promise of print-on-demand. He recommends young people who love books to enter publishing, which he expects will return to a pre-conglomerate state of being an unconventional business more interested in producing good books than in making a profit. (See Andre Schiffrin's "The Business of Books" on how the takeover of publishing by 15-percent-profit-demanding conglomerates and rise of chain superstores since 1989 changed the business from nurturing authors careers to championing celebrity-written bestsellers.)

Epstein expects twentysomethings to create small publishing outfits that use websites to create online communities. These outfits would build reputations on the Internet for editing and listing good titles in particular genres. Such small publishing outfits will be able to break even by selling novels and high-quality non-fiction because they will be able to sell those works cheaply to readers who print them on demand while sipping a cappuccino at a coffee shop. Unlike today's publishers, tomorrow's Web-based outfits won't have to lose tons of money trying to get good shelf space in chain superstores or lose tons of money over-printing or under-printing copies. Instead, books will be made only when customers swipe their credit cards through machines and order them.

All this is not to say that electronic readers will never succeed. They will just work for other kinds of texts than novels and so called mid-list books. College students, eager to lighten the weight of their book-filled backpacks, might take kindly to the four-ounce, tablet-sized GoReader electronic reader. GoReader's maker is contracting with textbook publishers and universities to provide core texts on a single portable device. GoReaders will contain all the texts a student will need to read for a semester of schooling. A company called LiveInk hopes to make long texts easier to read for college students and others with software that displays sentences in a prose-poetry style supposedly easier to read.   Their LiveInk format is
      easy on the eyes
  because it doesn't force you
        to track long lines of
horizontal text.

Using or not using such eye-relaxing prosetry, libraries, too, might come to rely on electronic readers. This month, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh will make electronic readers available for borrowing. Each device will be loaded with about ten best-selling titles. Diane Berry, a chief librarian in Utica, New York, also plans to introduce e-readers.

The advantage, she says, to storing electronically books from all branches is that people living in tiny communities without access to large research libraries will be able to download from a central server the same books that today would take over a week to be borrowed through inter-library loan, if borrowed at all.

Documents for corporate work, though, will likely be read in the future on laptops, instead of electronic readers, given that traveling businessmen are car-bound and seem to prefer a single source for all their documentation. That's the gamble the company Adobe is making by selling Glassbook, a software program that reproduces a traditionally designed printed page in an easy-to-manipulate format on laptop and PC screens, and that, unlike Microsoft's similar Reader software, allows users to print pages. Dell is also rumored to be designing a laptop with a detachable screen, allowing readers to hold the screen vertically for a more book-like, page view.

In the end, though, none of the above-mentioned efforts at electronic publishing, from the RCA e-book to the GoReader, have features that improve upon the many virtues of the paper format enough that you should start saving up money to buy one. These readers, like laptops, are too heavy or they require you to squint at the text. Unless some as-yet-unseen technology comes along soon, the predictions of many analysts of a wholesale switch from paper to electronic reading during the next few years could prove too hopeful and optimistic. Gutenberg, after all, didn't revolutionize the world with moveable type overnight.

E-mail Sean O'Neill at NewsFromDC@cs.com.