Fahrenheit 451
The online publishing revolution is here.
      by Rachel Hyland

Sunnydale High Library: best used for pizza parties.

"Isn't the point of computers to replace books?" -- Cordelia, "The Dark Age," Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Libraries are quiet places. They're "shh" places. Sometimes even turning a papery page with extra rustle can garner you a disapproving stare, as though you had just jumped up on the reference table and started doing an enthusiastic Can Can. There are no excited yelps as you discover a new author allowed; no groans of despair as you realize just how many of those damned Gor novels there really are. Libraries, our beloved libraries, are the last bastions of a totalitarian society in our democratic age. (Well, except for everywhere else that you're not permitted to smoke.)

So how ever can it be that libraries are becoming less and less popular?

Two Words: The Internet. (Aren't they great words? Aren't they just the best words ever? Well... maybe "the" is no great shakes.) For while the books that are the librarian's raison d'eter are getting to be increasingly passe in this fast-paced, ever-changing world, you'd be hard-pressed to find a library PC -- hooked up to the 'Net -- that is not being utilized day and night. And as more and more people gain access to this technology the world over, they don't even need to leave their houses to locate the information they require. Not to mention all of the wordy goodness great authors put out on a regular (sometimes too regular) basis.

J. Michael Straczynski's Tribulations, free!

And at Internet libraries, business is booming.

Sites like PeanutPress.com are in the front lines of the online publishing revolution, providing straight-to-hard-drive versions of many, many titles to anyone with a modem and a credit card. Everything from recipe books to sex manuals to the Encyclopedia frickin' Brittanica is available on line. Newspapers. Magazines. The very best in copyright-sanctioned fan fiction, as brought to you by Pocket Books. Roget's Thesaurus is, appropriately, at Thesaurus.com, and the dictionary has a similarly apt domain name.

Sometimes you only get a glimpse at the product before you buy it. Sometimes you get several chapters -- or paragraphs in the case of articles -- for free, and then a little shopping cart shows you the way to the checkout, asking what kind of format you want to use to download your purchase. (After all, you need the right software... and just so you know, Microsoft Reader probably ain't it.) And often you get the whole damn kit and caboodle (wondering what the hell a caboodle is? Check out Dictionary.com!) right there, a kind of try before you buy technique that really only works if the book is also available in hard copy (which it rarely isn't). Of course, for many periodicals you pay a subscriber's fee to access the full story -- and if only the book publishing companies could find a way to make a similar system really profitable for them, then they'd all be doing it, and no more plantation pines would have to kiss their sweet trunks goodbye.

After all, publishing books on-line is certainly less of a pain in the proverbial. No sourcing materials, no dealing with manufacturers, distributors, retailers, irate consumers who accidentally purchased Dune: House Atreides. You just send it to some coder type people, they code, they upload, and then you're pretty much done.

Why wouldn't they want to take the path less bothersome? It only makes sense. Yet only a few of them really have made any strides into this arena...

While genre publishers like Del Rey are certainly experimenting with e-books in a big, cater-to-the-core-audience way (their latest "on-line only exclusive!" is a Shannara story, though), it is the Honor Harrington-publishing BAEN Books that has taken the biggest leap in the save-the-trees direction. Not only does their website feature copious sample chapters of forthcoming novels and a Free Library (gotta love the way they think!) of complete older ones, but their relatively unpublicized WebScriptions service has taken the online publishing concept to new heights.

With WebScriptions, the BAEN reader can get advance copies of all of that publisher's output, sent to their e-mail account, for a mere US$10 a month. Say a new Lois McMaster Bujold novel (like this one) is due out this month. (It's not, but let's put reality aside for a moment, shall we?) Well, BAEN WebScribers would probably have already have read it by now (or the uncorrected galley version, anyway), having received the first half of the novel in September, and the subsequent quarters in October and November. This, of course, means that fanatical BAEN fans (of which there are many -- just check out their Message Board!) can read about the latest doings in the worlds of their heroes long before these books appear on store shelves....

And at least they promise closure at the end of the frustrating serial-like process.

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