Biting The Bullet: Publishing And The Net

By e-distributing a Stephen King novella last week, the publishing industry lumbered in the footsteps of its dinosaur-cousin, the newspaper business, which has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on mostly useless and unprofitable Web sites. But it forgot to produce better or different papers, an enormous mistake, and publishers are making the same mistake. Why interactivity isn't about delivery, but attitude and content. Read more.

Like the newspaper industry, publishing thinks it can enter the digital age by switching formats. It shows little interest in examining, dismantling and re-assembling its own rusty culture, something admittedly tough for any entrenched institution to do. So like newspapers, book publishers are making it clearer by the month that they would rather die than really change.

For nearly a decade now the newspaper industry has been using the Internet as a pretext for committing cultural suicide -- for cannibalizing its own form and attributes in a panicky response to new information technologies. Some of these once-influential papers may evolve into profitable information Web sites. But increasingly, it appears that most newspapers will not survive at all, at least in their familiar form. We'll never know how interesting or successful newspapers might have become if they'd have taken all the money they've spent on tepid Web sites and simply made their papers better. All that's really clear is that year by year, papers have become more marginalized, less vital.

Newspapers never grasped that interactivity isn't about technology, but rather about attitude, not about the form in which content gets but the means by which the content changes. Interactivity is about the increased power personal computing gives to consumers of information. The industry has spent billions of dollars throwing up sites that mostly underscore the idea that newspapers aren't very important -- that much of their content can be moved online, or given away.

Recently the newspaper business's cousin in industry, book publishing, has indicated that it's about to go the same sorry route. Rather than publish interesting new kinds of books that reflect the intensely interactive cultural ethos sweeping the United States, book publishers are tossing away the very qualities that makes them unique and valuable, and showing their customers that even they don't value the very forms they are trying to sell and, presumably, preserve.

All over New York, unnerved publishers who until recently held their noses at suggestions that the Internet would affect their industry, are rushing to figure out how to move publishing online.

Most recently, Simon & Schuster made available, at the enthusiastic urging of Stephen King, what it called "an electronic book," King's latest novella, Riding the Bullet. The demand online was so great -- more than 400,000 orders -- that would-be readers trying to download the digital horror story into their computers, electronic readers and Palm Pilots overwhelmed retailers' Web sites within 48 hours. If nothing else, King demonstrated how much people love free online stuff. What that means for book publishing isn't quite as clear, other than an indication of the trouble it's in.

King's novella, which will not be published as a traditional book, was promoted both in print and on Amazon and Bn.com. The release week saw a wave of publicity as several other authors publicly made the leap from print to monitor. For advances of up to $100,000, Fatbrain.com hired ten authors to write short essays about the Bill of Rights. The first of these essays -- by Coretta Scott King, Newt Gingrich, Pete Hamill and Doris Kearns Goodwin -- began appearing last week. Fatbrain has now demonstrated that online publishing sites can be pretentious and boring too. Fatbrain (doing this mostly to hype its new site MightyWords) also announced that it had signed a contract to publish Toni Morrison's l993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Fatbrain didn't seem to grasp the inherent irony in its promotion -- a site devoted to new ways of publishing new writers launches itself by signing up some of the best-known traditional ones it can find. Like the e-publication of the King novella, it's obvious what MightyWords does for Fatbrain, but what it does for writers, readers or publishing is a puzzle. Maybe the New York book publishers don't have as much to worry about as they think.

This hype about e-publishing made for lots of heat, but little light. It wasn't clear why readers would find this preferable to reading books in their traditional form, or help publishing in any measurable way. You might be holding your breath to hear Newt Gingrich's or Pete Hamill's take on the Second Amendment, but will any of this make books more interesting, relevant, affordable, or vital? Like the newspaper industry, publishers are rushing to embrace a lose-lose model of 21st Century innovation. If they don't change the way they do business, they lose. If they change in the ways they seem to be, they'll lose even more.

Closer to a fat e-mail than a book, King's story ran the equivalent of 66 pages. Its publisher was startled to learn that some booksellers were giving it away for the first day, (this isn't what publishers have in mind when they talk about innovation) and sometimes thereafter, to spur the fledgling e-book market. The 400,000 figure, according to Simon & Schuster, included both paid ($2.50) and free downloads, as well as orders received but not immediately filled because of the heavy demand.

Simon & Schuster made front-page news all over the country with its "e-coup." Innovation in publishing is so shocking it's a major story in itself. But publishing executives weren't certain whether the enthusastic response marked (A) the official beginning of commercial Net publishing on a grand scale, or (B) was simply the result of offering a work from one of the world's most popular authors for little or no money. [Here's a hint: B.]

Simon & Schuster's stunt (these days, almost anything relating to the Internet will end up on the front page of the New York Times or leading NBC's Nightly News) was a textbook example of how to render one of the world's most valuable and cherished commodities -- the bound book -- less valuable, significant and lucrative, virtually overnight. As the Net traumatizes one institution after another, some appear to be eating their young.

Interactivity is one of the world's most powerful cultural forces. it transforms the relationships between consumers and sellers in everything it touches -- publishing, auctions, stock-trading, music. It doesn't eliminate the power of institutions and agenda-setters, but it alters the length of the levers they hold. Individuals now have more options, information, technology and ways to participate. They're more powerful. The institutions remain more powerful than individuals, but less powerful than they used to be. Just ask the music industry.

People selling things on the Net -- whether books, newspapers, chocolates, banking or ideas -- interact with their customers in jarring, often invasive ways. But both sides can benefit. The vendor is better informed, the consumer more involved.

Analysts like Francis McInerney and Sean White, two technology-investors and the authors of Future Wealth: Investing In The Second Great Wave of Technology, argue that this principle -- understanding interactivity -- is the key to corporate survival.

Throughout history, they write in Future Wealth, the falling cost of information has driven change by shifting the balance of market power from producers to consumers. The availability of cheaper information makes it easier for customers to voice -- indeed to force -- their preferences on producers.

"The Internet," write McInerney and White, "has given consumers with PC's the power to exercise market control as never before. On electronic networks of every kind, from television to the Internet, consumers exercise the new power they hold. Consumer reaction is instant, be it through the Internet, at the polling booth, or most important, at the cash register. It is no accident that the companies that have managed to profit most from the information revolution are the ones that devote the most energy to maximizing customer responsiveness."

That would be mean neither the newspaper nor publishing industries, both of which have made it a sacred virtue to be disconnected from and unresponsive to their customers.

Institutions like publishing are among the least interactive cultural entities on the planet. Run by a handful of canyon-dwelling executives who study tea leaves and frog entrails to decide what's "hot" or worth buying, they rarely interact with the people who buy their products. Book buyers face significant hurdles in reaching and influencing publishers, or even the authors who work for them. Yet as book chains (and book-selling Web sites) like Amazon and Barnes & Noble demonstrate, online and off, the enormous public appetite for books persists.

The ferocious interactivity of almost all successful Web sites -- hives of linked, communicative exchanges between dispensers and consumers of information -- or technology companies (think Dell, Amazon, Microsoft or even Wal-Mart, which uses technology intensively to monitor inventory and move products) is completely alien to the way newspapers or publishing work.

Most publishing Web sites don't aggressively link to other sites. Few publishing executives would dream of opening up their corporate processes and decision-making to public inspection, second-guessing and dissection in the way that truly characterizes interactive media. Yet the open source ethos spreading all over the Net and the Web suggests that such openness is the economic model of the future, the real way to prosper in the new century.

For companies like Simon & Schuster, entering the 21st Century doesn't mean moving its corporate culture into line with newer, profoundly interactive, techno-driven companies. It simply means distributing its usual product in bytes instead of paper and ink.

The message to its customers: We don't think the traditional book is worth publishing any more. If Simon & Schuster doesn't think so, why should readers? Why not wait a bit until AOL (and Deja.com and eBay) are peddling "used" downloads of new novels for pennies? Or for nothing at all.

Publishers are buzzing about book-form digital tablets that download text and can store books, magazines and files, but this assumes that consumers are ready for the book itself -- something that is personal and individualized, and can be stored, passed along, re-read, saved -- to disappear. There's no real evidence to support that conclusion.

That a celebrated author is making a sought-after work available online at little or no cost to anybody who wants it, is a brilliant PR stroke. And it doesn't matter that many people got it for free -- it was always more of a promotional giveaway than a book. It doesn't mean much that Stephen King, one of the world's most-read authors, is downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people in short story form. He'd sell that many books anyway.

What would mean something is for a publisher to scrutinize itself and its culture, its corporate hierarchy, its channels of decision-making and creativity, its secret processes of purchasing, editing and distribution -- and yes, its models of distribution. That would truly be novel.