Not everyone in late 1994 was so sanguine. Mark Stahlman, for example, a media expert in New York, shrugged off Net publications as “just the latest in a series of fads.” Richard M. Smith, Newsweek’s editor in chief who was running the new-media committee of the Magazine Publishers of America, was skeptical about online services in general: “The people who are making money are the people who are running conferences about it.”[[4.19]]

Smith was oversimplifying somewhat, but formidable barriers did exist, of which one of the biggest happened to be the limits of the technology. Reading electronic text for hours on end could be murder on both the back and the eyes. All day long I sat in front of a computer screen; the last thing I wanted was to have to do it while I wandered through magazines or books. Television wouldn’t do: I hated the idea of reading a magazine or novel from ten feet away. Besides, didn’t magazines and books exist to be enjoyed in bed, on the hammock, or at the beach?

Mightn’t Silicon Valley, however, come out with small, tablet-style computers designed for reading? “TeleReaders” could feature optional keyboards for people who wanted to use them as general purpose computers. Screens, needless to say, must be much sharper than today, and without so much flicker. Batteries should last longer. And, ideally, you should be able to dart from place to place in a newspaper or magazine by merely touching a “pen” to the appropriate part of your screen. That was what the magazine, newspaper, and book industries needed, rather than just more conferences. Washington could even encourage this by way of a focused procurement program for schools and libraries; the same machines could even be used for electronic forms for government and commerce.

Roger Fidler of Knight-Ridder had already been experimenting with mockups of tablet-style machines. He was more interested in a newspaper-oriented approach and less in a general one than I was. But the basic idea was the same—words needn’t be captives of the printed page. The real question was this: How soon until the right technology appeared? Electronic magazines such as Time Warner’s would still make money without a TeleRead-style approach, but the full potential would not be reached, especially if more children abandoned words for TV and computer images. That was even truer for the world of books. Even more than magazines and newspapers, e-books suffered from the limits of technology. It wasn’t just a question of the right machine for viewing; at issue were other matters such as copy protection and billing. But at least some partial solutions were on the way, and even with the present difficulties of the medium, online bookstores were sprouting up on the Internet. One of the best was run by Laura Fillmore, an editor in Massachusetts who had once worked for Little, Brown.

Books: Laura Fillmore and

the Online Bookstore

An elderly man owned a charming old store in a southern town with the standard magnolias, wrought iron staircases, and hot, moist summers, and he loved to brag about his shiny new safe. Most customers did not know about it or care. Rather than worrying so much about the protection of his wealth, he might have been better off to imitate his rivals and invest his money in air-conditioning instead of the safe.

The man reminded me of myopic publishers and authors. Not quite grasping the full potential of the Internet, they fretted too much about copyright protection, and not enough about making their wares friendly to shoppers. A pay-per-read company in Virginia was typical here. You could download its books off the Internet, but you did not enjoy such niceties as links to other titles online. Nor could you print more than a page or so at once. Beyond that, you had to clutter up your computer system with a $25 gadget hooked up to the printer port. If you were working on tight deadlines and were rich and desperate enough, you might stomach this copy protection system. But I dreaded the possibility of its adoption by the book industry as a whole; established publishers and writers just might see the world pass them by if they cared too much about cybersafes and not enough about customer amenities. Many megabytes of good, free reading awaited the public on the Web, and not everyone understood the value that professional editors and writers could add.

Nowadays, however, more publishers and hangers-on were catching on to the nuances of the Net. Among them was Laura Fillmore, a publishing consultant who owned the Online BookStore in Rockport, Massachusetts. She must have driven some traditionalists crazy. Fillmore actually had the notion that ASCII—text in a popular format, without italics and the other trimmings—should be free to everyone. She loved Project Gutenberg, which an Illinois academic had started to put classics and other works on the Net at no charge. Fillmore was the antithesis of a techno-geek, the kind of woman who just might read Dickens to her two children on snowy days, and who was a regular on the speaker circuit within her industry. She had majored in English at Barnard College and worked for a publishing company that dated back to the nineteenth century. Fillmore helped bridge the past and the electronic era. Her vision wasn’t quite the same as mine, but it was worlds apart from that of piracy-fixated publishers who saw electronic readers as a criminal class.

The move to the Net was, in her opinion, part of a long evolution toward a new form of decentralized publishing. She recalled when the great houses didn’t farm out editing and other tasks as often as they do today, and when almost every book took nine months to reach the stores. “Back in the late ’70s when I was at Little, Brown,” she said, “we needed to get special permission to use Ex[Ex]. When an author wanted his sales figures, I’d walk up the street to the top floor of a separate building where Rose, the lady with the P & L cards, had been keeping tabs for twenty years, and I’d sign out the neatly penciled card and carefully carry it to my boss, wrapping it in plastic against the weather if necessary. I passed the copyediting department with their well-stocked reference library, a bastion against inaccuracies, and the design department, smelling of wax, hung with rulers, sizing wheels, and X-acto knives.”[[4.20]] The industry, though, had changed; now freelancers throughout the country, not just in New York or Boston, were often editing and even publishing books. Fillmore herself had gone into freelance editorial work years before, and she still remembered “the shrinking feeling in my stomach the first time I bought a computer setup back in 1984: $10,000 of the bank’s money for an XT and an HP LaserJet. The salesman left, I was back at the C prompt, and the room grew dark. No matter which buttons I pushed, ‘Abort, Retry, Ignore’ glared back persistently. Finally, I chose none of the above and unplugged the whole thing.”[[4.21]] Fillmore overcame her technophobia, but the chaos of change still made her uncomfortable. “Increasing speed and volume have led to high job turnover, a blurring of disciplines. Our computerized tools allow the editor to become a typist, a designer, and a type-setter, the designer becomes a software junkie, a graphic artist, a prepress house. No time for galleys! Straight to pages! No time for pages; straight to film. The drop dead date is bottom line. Sales are needed this quarter.”[[4.22]]