Years ago, competition had reached the point where many typesetting jobs left the United States. “We even hired freelancers thirdhand in Singapore and Haiti,” Fillmore recalled in a speech. “The publisher hired me; I hired someone stateside to hire someone in-country to hire the keyboarder and, still, the publisher ended paying maybe half what the job would have cost him at $15 per hour. Our topic today is slavery.”[[4.23]]
But in Fillmore’s opinion, this distributed form of publishing, where tasks went every which way, would take a newer and more humane form. In the 1980s books had appeared on computer networking, a kinder technology than the brutal, production-oriented variety of the past. And now Fillmore saw in networks a chance to “elicit life from people” who used computers to communicate. Her own “epiphany” came when a Net-oriented writer, John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, introduced her to “the then alien concept of electronic mail. My assistant would pick up mail from my lone correspondent, the author, print it out, put it in my in box, and I would handwrite responses which she would input and send back in due time. It sounds quaint, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time—in the same way computerized typesetting distributed though unconnected PCs made sense.” On the Net, everyone could publish, not just giant publishing houses. And so Quarterman could forward to her some public messages from students who were defying the Chinese Army in Tiananmen Square. They could speak for themselves; no one edited them. They weren’t like the freelance typists in Haiti: They were not “hidden and voiceless behind four middlemen” and “with no hope of a phone, much less an Internet connection.”[[4.24]]
The overlap in Fillmore’s mind, between publishing and communicating via the Net, was entirely natural. When the Haitians typed, they created a digitized version of the book they were working on. They were not just transferring words to paper. Bits and bytes, once created, could go anywhere.
Fillmore, of course, was hardly the first to think of consolidating knowledge. As early as 1945 a scientist had published a preternaturally farsighted Atlantic Monthly article that was to electronic publishing what Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were to inventions in general. Vannevar Bush had proposed a memex, a microfilm-based device that could bring together knowledge from many disciplines—along with the thoughts of the user. It would be, in other words, a cross between a personal file cabinet and a giant library. In a speech, Fillmore quoted a key passage: “The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails covered by the brain.”[[4.25]] Bush might as well have been describing the World Wide Web and its links that allow you to click on “Boeing” and see “Airplanes” or click on “Clinton” and see “Presidents.” Ted Nelson, a dreamer-writer-programmer, was thinking of the memex when he invented hypertext links. That concept, in turn, excited Tim Berners-Lee, a staffer at a physics institute in Berne, Switzerland, who was the father of the Web—the vast network of computers through which I could retrieve the Raleigh News and Observer, Time, and Fillmore’s offerings.
Back in 1992, however, the World Wide Web was a fraction of its present size, and programmers had yet to release easy, graphically oriented browsers such as Mosaic that would help tame the Web. Even more than today, people needed books to fathom the Net. And yet no popular-level guide was in print. So it was entirely fitting that when Fillmore decided to create a book from scratch—rather than just produce it for a publisher—the Internet was the subject. This how-to guide was The Internet Companion, the author was Tracy LaQuey, and the paper publisher was Addison-Wesley. Fillmore kept the network rights and looked forward to distributing the book through her new Online BookStore. Barry Shein of Software Tool & Die, the first commercial service to hook ordinary mortals into the Internet, had offered her space on his bank of hard disks. “He described his operation,” she said, “as basically an electronic store with empty shelves and a cash register at the door. I decided that I’d find electronic properties to fill these shelves.”[[4.26]] But the Internet at the time had Acceptable Use Policies that prevented her from making a profit. What to do?
Fillmore hit on a solution that actually rewarded her for an idealistic approach to publishing. She gave away—with great luck in the end—ASCII files from the book in hopes of drumming up interest in the paper version. “Who wants to read hundreds of pages in ASCII anyway?” Fillmore would later ask. Unadorned ASCII by itself wasn’t always that pleasant to read, and many people liked the Net version well enough to shell out money for a paper book. “Even our publisher was supportive of our effort,” Fillmore said, “and happy with the resulting sales figures.”[[4.27]] Orders poured in from as far off as Finland and Korea. Netfolks all over the world could learn of Fillmore’s offering immediately rather than waiting for reviews to show up in local magazines and newspapers.
Within two years, Companion had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Al Gore had written the foreword just before his election as vice president, but the freebies on the Net certainly hadn’t hurt. Other publishers also found that free copies could be a boon, not a bane. Zen and the Art of the Internet (Prentice Hall) and The Hacker’s Dictionary (MIT Press) similarly flew off the racks. “Giving something valuable away for free,” Fillmore said, “can make money.”[[4.28]]
Of course some would say she hadn’t actually published online. Rather she had used the medium to promote a paper book. Still, the prospect of purely electronic publishing beckoned. “I was seduced by the prospect of the then 10 million people on the Internet—10 million literate people with disposable incomes—attached to the Net. Why not acquire lots of Internet rights to lots of books and put them online at the Online BookStore. Surely some percentage of those people would buy files of a popular author’s books for a reasonable price.”[[4.29]] Fillmore was sensible enough to price her offerings for consumers who were spending their own money, not their bosses’. Some commercial databases were charging as much as $200 per hour or more, while Fillmore was thinking more in terms of $5, say, for a short story downloaded from the Net.
The test story was “Umney’s Last Case,” a fifty-page Stephen King story from a collection called Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King was among the best-selling writers on the planet. Fillmore dreamed of tens of thousands of dialups even if “Umney” intrigued only 1 percent of the 10 million people on the Net at the time. Fillmore had picked out just the right King story, one where a time traveler gave a Toshiba T-1000 laptop computer to a tough detective around 1939—someone who in turn used his “plastic Buck Rogers steno machine” to write a story within King’s own tale.
Fillmore’s “Umney” project was a sensation at the biggest book fair in the world, the one at Frankfurt; upbeat stories appeared in places ranging from European news programs to the Wall Street Journal. She witnessed “a vast amount of smoke, a tremendous marketing boost for the printed book again, lots of noise—and by extension, lots of profit for the publisher and for the author—but handfuls of per-copy sales.”[[4.30]] They didn’t even pay for all the phone calls used to set up the deal.