The New York Times 4 Giants Set to Embrace Electronic Publishing
[requires 'free' registration]
"In signs of an intensifying digital rush in the American book industry, three trade publishing giants and Microsoft are poised to plunge deeper into the emerging electronic literary market."

""The large conglomerates realize now that they better learn by doing rather than to continue to observe not one, not 5, not 50, but hundreds of startup.coms that are entering this market," said Robert E. Baensch, a former publishing executive and director of New York University's Center for Publishing, who predicts that a mass market for electronic books is two to three years away.

But until then, the mainstream publishers that dominate the business appear unwilling to wait -- even if it is not clear yet how protected the electronic titles are from hackers. It took about two days before Mr. King's novella was successfully hacked and posted online."

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."

redux [04.07.00]
O'Reilly Network Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It
"I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public.

And the reason that they dislike it [interactivity] so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. These companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.

You really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. It reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."