E-books and e-publishing | Page 4

Leapfrogging Transition
IV. The Selfish Net - The Semantic Web Author: Sam Vaknin Contact
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E-BOOKS AND E-PUBLISHING
The Future of Electronic Publishing First published by United Press
International (UPI) By: Sam Vaknin
UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is:
""Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding
covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to
change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place

in the last few months. Time Warner's iPublish and MightyWords
(partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the last in a string of
resounding failures which cast in doubt the business model underlying
digital content. Everything seemed to have gone wrong: the dot.coms
dot bombed, venture capital dried up, competing standards fractured an
already fragile marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky
and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written or
already in the public domain. Terrified by the inexorable process of
disintermediation (the establishment of direct contact between author
and readers, excluding publishers and bookstores) and by the ease with
which digital content can be replicated - publishers resorted to
draconian copyright protection measures (euphemistically known as
"digital rights management"). This further alienated the few potential
readers left. The opposite model of "viral" or "buzz" marketing (by
encouraging the dissemination of free copies of the promoted book)
was only marginally more successful. Moreover, e-publishing's
delivery platform, the Internet, has been transformed beyond
recognition since March 2000. From an open, somewhat anarchic, web
of networked computers - it has evolved into a territorial, commercial,
corporate extension of "brick and mortar" giants, subject to government
regulation. It is less friendly towards independent (small) publishers,
the backbone of e-publishing. Increasingly, it is expropriated by
publishing and media behemoths. It is treated as a medium for cross
promotion, supply chain management, and customer relations
management. It offers only some minor synergies with non-cyberspace,
real world, franchises and media properties. The likes of Disney and
Bertelsmann have swung a full circle from considering the Internet to
be the next big thing in New Media delivery - to frantic efforts to
contain the red ink it oozed all over their otherwise impeccable balance
sheets. But were the now silent pundits right all the same? Is the future
of publishing (and other media industries) inextricably intertwined with
the Internet? The answer depends on whether an old habit dies hard.
Internet surfers are used to free content. They are very reluctant to pay
for information (with precious few exceptions, like the "Wall Street
Journal"'s electronic edition). Moreover, the Internet, with 3 billion
pages listed in the Google search engine (and another 15 billion in
"invisible" databases), provides many free substitutes to every

information product, no matter how superior. Web based media
companies (such as Salon and Britannica.com) have been
experimenting with payment and pricing models. But this is besides the
point. Whether in the form of subscription (Britannica), pay per view
(Questia), pay to print (Fathom), sample and pay to buy the physical
product (RealRead), or micropayments (Amazon) - the public refuses
to cough up. Moreover, the advertising-subsidized free content Web
site has died together with Web advertising. Geocities - a community of
free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! - is now
selectively shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a certain level
of traffic) to convince their owners to revert to a monthly hosting fee
model. With Lycos in trouble in Europe, Tripod may well follow suit
shortly. Earlier this year, Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of
discussion lists). Suite101 has stopped paying its editors (content
authors) effective January 15th. About.com fired hundreds of category
editors. With the ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed is the only
content aggregator which tries to buck the trend by relying (partly) on
advertising revenue. Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie
with its ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers
actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to e- books (i.e., the
lending of e-books to multiple patrons). But, libraries are not only
repositories of knowledge and community centres. They are also
dominant promoters of new knowledge technologies. They are already
the largest buyers of e-books. Together with schools and other
educational institutions, libraries can serve as decisive socialization
agents and introduce generations of pupils, students, and readers to the
possibilities and riches of e-publishing. Government use of e- books
(e.g., by the military) may have the same beneficial effect. As standards
converge (Adobe's Portable Document Format and Microsoft's MS
Reader LIT format are likely to be the winners), as hardware improves
and becomes ubiquitous (within multi-purpose devices or as standalone
higher quality units), as content becomes more attractive (already many
new titles are published in both print and electronic formats), as more
versatile information taxonomies (like the Digital Object Identifier) are
introduced, as