Keeping up with the dozens of announcements released by publishers heralding the age of the e-book is like reading the Oxford English Dictionary, beginning with "A." Each word holds a germ of revelation, but taken together, a numbness sets in somewhere around the letter "B," if not before.

Unless you've retreated to a cabin in a remote area to write the Great American Novel and missed the news, publishers and authors and the media are talking about the new opportunities created by e-publishing, e-books and print on demand (POD).

The original dream followed the surging interest in the Internet as a new business model. The logic is simple and straightforward. Most writers are already creating digital files. Why not use these digital files to form a new business model?

POD allowed short run printing, companies created digital book readers, Internet businesses sprang up to sell books online and e-books and voila! Now everyone could publish, at lower costs because it wouldn't include printing and distribution, time-to-market would decrease and revisions would be made easily and quickly. Lower production cost meant higher commissions for writers. A perfect world.

Not so Fast
Unfortunately, this new utopia hasn't come to fruition, although the "digital revolution" is hitting the book world in full force. The publishing industry is notoriously slow to adopt new technology. They adopted desktop publishing long after it entered the mainstream. Today's changes in technology threaten to replace publishers as middlemen, just as Napster threatens to replace music publishers. The book publishing industry is in a turmoil and has set up dozens of "tasks forces" to recommend standards.

Definitions
Buzzwords accompany new business models. The rule appears to be, stick an "e-" in front of any word to denote electronic. Hence, the new field of e-publishing, which appears to include creating, transporting, reproducing and distributing electronic files.

New Internet businesses create confusion when they offer a variety of print-on-demand services, e-book distribution and combinations of e-services to writers and publishers. It's not that complicated. Most books today are created in original digital files, often laid out in Quark or PageMaker, sometimes Microsoft Word, and referred to as being created by desktop publishing. Essentially, anyone with a computer can create such files.

Once created, these digital files can be sent over the Internet as attachments, although they are large and take time to transmit. They can be compressed into Adobe's Page Description Format (PDF) and read on computers or Personal Data Assistants (PDA) such as Palm Pilots. PDF is also becoming a printing format because it recreates a exact image of a digitally created page with typefaces, photos and spacing, regardless of whether the reader has the fonts or software that created the original files or not. Digital files can be placed on CD-ROM or DVD disks. They can be placed on Websites to be read or downloaded, either with an encrypted code or credit card-hence the term "e-books."

Print On Demand
Previously books were printed in long runs on offset presses that required expensive makeready time. With the development of the Xerox DocuTech, a toner-based digital printer, software companies began printing manuals on these machines to deal with the problem of rapidly changing content as software revisions occurred.

Rather than printing large runs that were often outdated due to revisions, software companies turned to the DocuTech and others such as the IBM InfoPrint 4000, to print short runs quickly. These upgraded toner-based or "copy" machines make printing low quantities, under 1,000, economical.

While the unit cost is higher with shorter runs, POD eliminates large capital expenditures, warehouse space and transportation costs (if the books are sent over the Internet and delivered close to the delivery site). POD is here to stay. Lightning Source, formerly Lightning Printing, printed their one-millionth POD book in July, has over 10,000 titles in its digital library, and works with over 600 publishers.

E-books came about when portable digital files formed the basis for a number of companies, such as Gemstar and Glassbook, to develop e-book viewers. With Microsoft's new reader that allows users to read e-books on hand-held PDAs, such as Palm Pilot, or on laptops, the market is expected to take off. An Arthur Andersen study estimates e-book sales will be between $1 billion and $3.4 billion by 2005. Publishers, such as Random House, the largest U.S. publisher, are rapidly digitizing their backlist and formatting new books as e-books.

Internet Publishing
Dozens of Internet companies devoted to publishing have sprung up. (In 1998, books were the second most purchased item on the Internet with $600 million in sales.) Companies, such as Xlibris.com, iUniverse.com and MightWords.com, offer to publish writers using POD or e-book technology, as well as services that vary from editing to listing with online booksellers. Smaller publishing businesses number in the hundreds.

There's no doubt that the next technology is exciting, or that it will create a topsy turvy world for publishing in the coming few years. It doesn't present easy answers on how to be successful. Nevertheless, technologically savvy writers can benefit by experimentation, inventiveness and using their creativeness in new and bold ways.

Copyright 2000