Ideas: Paper and Pixel The Future of Publishing Ten years from now, you could be reading a mystery novel from a hand-held digital "reader" and perusing your morning newspaper from a retractable digital screen. By Cherian George Photograph by Anastasia Vasilakis BAY AREA WRITER Robert Strauss has published travel tales about places as distant as Chile and Tibet, but when his literary journeys brought him home to the subject of his unborn daughter, Allegra, publishers were somewhat less welcoming. "I'd wait weeks only to hear, 'It's too personal,' or 'I love it but don't know where to sell it,'" he says. That's when Strauss, MBA '84, turned to e-publishing a new avenue recently glamorized by best selling horror writer Stephen King, whose latest novel, Riding the Bullet, was released by Simon and Schuster only in electronic form. Strauss put his 154-page book How to Have a Baby on sale on the Internet Web site www.mightywords.com. It can be downloaded for $6.95, which is a steal for readers and not a bad deal for the author either, since his 50 percent cut far exceeds the royalties offered by traditional book publishers. He also took advantage of Xlibris.com, a free, no-questions-asked publishing service partly owned by Random House. Xlibris turned Strauss's manuscript into a paperback and made it available through the Web sites of Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Cyberspace is looking like a rather friendly place to this writer. Strauss is hardly alone. Writers of all kinds are tentatively experimenting with the electronic medium. Take professor emeritus and Nobel laureate William Sharpe, who has an uncompleted text, Macro-Investment Analysis, freely available on his personal Web site at www.wsharpe.com. In an overview section, Sharpe describes his book as an "electronic work in progress, a form of communication that is both new for and poorly understood by its author." Sharpe has no plans to publish traditionally. "Even if I were to finish it," he says, "the market would be fairly small, and I have at least reached a number of people with the part that I have completed. So I regard the experiment as at least semi-successful." Nor are writers the only ones feeling out the possibilities ahead. The publishing industry may not be known for its technological dynamism, but it is already grappling with the implications of the digital revolution. What, if anything, will succeed the book's centuries-old physical presence-ink on paper, bound and shelved? And how does the publisher's role change now that writers like Strauss and Sharpe can reach readers directly from their own computers? These were among the issues discussed at a major Business School conference in April. Industry players at the Future of Content forum provided glimpses of how the book business may be transformed. NuvoMedia, for example, is betting on its handheld Rocket eBook reader, a display device the size of a paperback. Its memory can hold about 10 paperback novels. Titles are downloaded, via the user's computer, from participating bookstores' Web sites. The Mountain View, Calif., company is retailing the readers for $199. But CEO Martin Eberhard predicted that by 2005, basic devices will be distributed free, subsidized by the sale of content, just as low-end cellular phones today are given away with service contracts. Another concept entirely is "electronic paper," being developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Nick Sheridon, a physicist at Xerox PARC, described his goal with the aid of a model: a slender tube resembling a retractable screen. Pull the page out and you get one newspaper page. Let it slide back into the tube and pull it out again, and you see another page. The system needs no backlighting, so it uses little power. It would look and feel like paper and be almost as portable. It would also have the advantage of being instantly and endlessly recyclable. "Major newspaper publishers are keenly interested in eliminating pulp paper," Sheridon said, noting that newsprint accounts for a major industry cost. Sheridon's invention, which he calls Gyricon, works. But, like so many other technological marvels, the question now is whether it can be produced economically enough to win the race of alternative platforms for traditional uses. Adobe ePaper's approach is less revolutionary. With its ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF) and Acrobat software, Adobe aims to provide the format for content delivery, regardless of the final output. The company, which specializes in desktop publishing software, is not ready to bid farewell to pulp. David Lehr, senior manager for business development in the company's ePaper Solutions Group, observed: "What you won't see is paper going away." For many in the content business, however, an equally critical question is what will happen to book publishers. Lehr noted that in the first phase of the digital revolution, Amazon.com and other online bookstores had merely changed the location of book purchases. The publishing industry itself was untouched: Writers continued to market their books via publishing houses. "In the second phase, we'll see a shakeup of the model," Lehr said. "Publishers will have to find a new role, but nobody knows what that is." For clues, consider Robert Strauss's experience with How to Have a Baby. Writers can be thwarted by the economics of mainstream book publishing. The high cost of printing, distribution, and marketing means that a publisher must be assured of critical reader mass before it becomes worthwhile to accept a manuscript. The Internet transforms the math. With investment in printing and distribution reduced to nearly zero, a solitary writer can make a book available to millions worldwide and bypass the publisher entirely. However, there is a huge catch: The Net enables a writer to put content out but does not guarantee that it will be noticed. For a book to become a bestseller, a traditional publisher's marketing muscle and distribution network through bricks-and-mortar bookstores is hard to beat. Few contemporary novelists are big enough brand names in their own right to draw attention regardless of who publishes their books. For most, a publisher's stamp of approval is an endorsement that readers look out for. E-publishing doesn't change that, speakers at the Future of Content conference agreed. NuvoMedia's Eberhard pointed out that although most Rocket-compatible content is published directly by its authors, the bulk of sales is accounted for by traditional publishing houses' electronic publishing divisions. Consumers need filters, he noted. In a real bookstore, books are already filtered by the costly decision to print and distribute them. E-publishing, however, allows anyone to market a book and readers know it. "So consumers look for brand name publishers even more on the Net than in a bookstore," he said. For many writers, therefore, e-publishing is not an end in itself but a stepping-stone to a book deal with a traditional publisher. MightyWords does not claim any rights to books sold on its site, so it offers a quick and cheap way to market-test a work. Strauss says, "One of my reasons for using MightyWords was to attract the attention of an agent or publisher and to break through their reservations." It appears likely that both routes to the reader, paper and pixel will exist side by side. Large publishers will continue to dominate the best-seller market and account for the lion's share of revenues, just as Hollywood studios rule the box office in an age when anyone can produce a home video. But the accessibility of the new publishing technology at least ensures that writers cannot be shut out of the market by publishers who do not share their visions. Accordingly, Strauss has mixed feelings about his e-publishing experience. On the bright side, his book has reached MightyWord's top 10 list. But he readily acknowledges that self-promotion is hard and that total sales have been small by traditional publishers' standards. "There are obviously real advantages to having a large publisher with all its marketing resources behind you. 'Viral marketing,' where you depend on word of mouth, as I am doing, may not be so effective when you are asking people to actually pay for something. I'm not Stephen King." 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