RSS feedsStephen King, Frederick Forsyth and Fay Weldon are all at it. Microsoft is heavily involved and every publishing company around the world is having to come up with a strategy to deal with it. So-called ebooks could do for print what MP3 did for music, and no one wants to get caught with their pants down as the music industry was.
While it finds its feet, the ebook experiment is pulling in many different directions. Microsoft is trying to persuade us to read books on our handheld computers, along the way signing up publishers and distributors to build up a library of several thousand titles that we can download to our personal digital assistants (PDAs). Meanwhile several authors are going it alone, publishing their latest books and stories on the internet and bypassing publishers altogether.
As you might expect from someone so prolific, Stephen King is leading the way in ebooks. He first dipped his toe in the water with Riding the Bullet, a 16,000 word novella distributed in electronic form by his US publishers Simon and Schuster (www.simonsays.com)
Teething problems
The book's text is encrypted and you have to pay $2.50 up front to download the story. Once you have it on your PC, however, you cannot print the novella. The host site had 400,000 hits in the first 24 hours, but the experiment was not without its problems. Many potential readers had problems with the download process. More seriously for the publishers, the encryption was cracked within a few days and Riding the Bullet became available free of charge from various sites around the world.
A reader suffering from guilt after downloading the novella from an illegal site mailed King his $2.50, prompting the author to dream up his second internet project. The result is The Plant, a novel which King is publishing in instalments on his own website (www.stephenking.com). Readers are not obliged to pay to read the novel, but King will not keep writing if less than 75 per cent of readers do not pay the $1 charge for each instalment.
The author warned on the site: "I'm counting on two things: the first is plain old honesty. 'Take what you want and pay for it', as the old saying goes. The second is that you'll like the story enough to want to read more. If you do want more, you have to pay. Remember: pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy!"
It appears that more than 75 per cent of readers have coughed up. Some reports suggest that King could make $1m from The Plant, while he is thought to have reaped about £450,000 from Riding the Bullet. All this suggests that someone of King's statue does not need a publisher to be successful online.
Come together
Simon and Schuster extolled the virtue of the continuing relationship between author and publisher when Riding the Bullet was released. Jack Romanos, its president and chief operating officer, said: "Riding the Bullet is yet another example of how Stephen King, and Simon and Schuster continue to embrace new possibilities in every facet of their relationship.... it reaffirms the publisher-author relationship at a moment when it is fashionable to predict its demise."
Yet King himself comments on his website that The Plant marks a very different turn: "My friends, we have a chance to become 'big publishing's' worst nightmare."
Certainly the relationship between publisher and author is likely to change in the next few years as more authors choose to publish their books in either electronic or book form. Fay Weldon is publishing her own serialised novel, Wormwood or Love Among the Scientists, on the political comment site YouGov (www.yougov.com), while Frederick Forsyth is publishing a series of five short stories, entitled Quintet with online publishers Online Originals (www.onlineoriginals.com).
Online Originals says that Forsyth himself was keen to explore the medium. Catherine Jones, head of marketing at Online Originals, says: "He was intrigued by it. He had seen what Stephen King was up to and was keen to try it out for himself. He is very much an early adopter."
It was apparently the speed of the internet process that appealed so much to Forsyth. Jones says: "He likes the fact that it is a rapid medium and once he had written stories they could be published quickly. Normally he would have to write a whole collection and then it can take another year for the book to appear in print."
The shape of things to come?
Jones sums up the future of online and book publishing when she says: "The two forms will live side by side for some time, but the traditional publishers are having to wake up to the online side as authors the stature of Frederick Forsyth are taking it so seriously."
But what are these ebooks going to look like and how will be read them? Microsoft has added Reader to its PocketPC operating system for handheld computers (see www.microsoft.com/pocketpc). Reader allows downloaded text to be read on the LCD, aided in part by ClearType, a technology that defines small characters, so making them easier to read.
Microsoft is busily signing up publishers and retailers to supply ebooks for the format. BarnesandNoble.com was the first partner to sign up to the scheme and has a section devoted to ebooks. Although the number of titles is limited at the time of writing, all the books are free to download.
Amazon has also signed up and plans to have its ebook section up and running later this year, while Penguin has promised to put 1000 classic books into Reader compatible format by early next year.
If you are not a PocketPC fan alternative devices exist, including the Rocket eBook from NuvoMedia (www.rocket-ebook.com). This is the size and weight of a hardback book, but has a far greater capacity, able to store on average 10 books. If you would rather read from your PC screen you can always download titles in PDF format from certain online publishers.
The printed word
However, there is one big stumbling block when it comes to reading books on electronic devices: quite simply they are not paper. The main problem for many people is that they would rather read a printed document than one on a luminous screen. Nor does PDA's fragility and need for a power source make it as convenient as a book. Reading in the bath or on the beach each has its own hazards with ebooks.
But there are some exciting advances around the corner, such as reusable electronic paper from those clever people at Xerox Parc (www.parc.xerox.com). This is essentially two sheets of plastic holding minute beads, each in a tiny well of oil. The beads are black on one side and white on the other and when a charge is applied will be spin to display words.
One thing is sure, that ebooks will take off when the right technology becomes available. As Jones from Online Originals says: "We are still in the very early days of the ebook, but when it takes off it will be very exciting for the consumer."
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