"Traditional book publishers used to cultivate fine new writers," publisher David Gettman said in a recent L.A. Times interview. "They built literary lists they believed in. That has all but disappeared. Most publishers today are owned by huge conglomerates. And most publishing decisions are made by marketers eyeing profits, not by editors whose primary concerns are intellectual and literary."
That's why Gettman developed Online Originals [www.onlineoriginals.com], a London-based electronic publishing firm. Gettman and his partner, philosophy professor Christopher Macann, seek out literary works "of high quality (that will) make a positive contribution to literature or to the history of ideas." They have cultivated a collection of over three dozen original works, and are adding an average of one title a month. The books, which sell for about the price of a paperback, are available only in electronic format. After selecting a book and paying for it with a credit card, the reader completes the transaction by downloading the book directly off Gettman's web site and directly into his or her personal computer.
If you're looking for something a little less, well, contemporary, the Project Gutenberg web site [sailor.gutenberg.org] may have exactly what you need. Begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, a student with more computer time than he knew what to do with, Project Gutenberg exists to make literary works available to the world at no charge and as soon after the copyright expires as possible. If you're looking to download the complete works of Shakespeare, Austen, or Conrad, Gutenberg's the place. As with Online Originals, all Project Gutenberg texts are available for download to your home or office computer.
What do you do after downloading an electronic book? If you don't want to plant yourself in front of a PC to do your reading, you could print the book yourself. However, most find the idea of ruffling through a sheaf of 8.5" x 11" pages in bed or bath awkward, at best.
Enter the Rocket ebook (pictured above) [www.rocket-ebook.com]. About the size of a paperback and weighing in at just 22 ounces, the Rocket eBook holds up to ten, 400-page books worth of words and images at any one time. The battery lasts from 20-25 hours, and recharges in under 90 minutes.
The Rocket ebook fits comfortably in the palm of either the left or right hand, and the dual page-turning buttons can easily be operated with your thumb. Icons at the edge of the screen allow you to search for key passages, highlight words, add your own notes and comments, or set bookmarks. You can even look up unfamiliar words in the (included) Random House dictionary. If your vision isn't what it used to be, you can adjust the text size and typeface to further improve readability. The display is crisp and easy to read under a wide variety of lighting conditions.
What's it like to use? As Rocket owner Vickie Davis put it: "I can read in bed without disturbing my husband, with no 'booklight' to have to keep adjusting. I can read in a car at night without a light to bother the driver. The hands-free reading is especially wonderful when eating and reading." Another owner adds: "The [Rocket] eBook is wonderful! With the easy-to-read backlit screen I can read anywhere, in any light, and carry the equivalent of a sack full of books in the space of one."
At the present time, the Rocket ebook only supports documents that have been specially formatted for the unit. However, the Rocket will soon be able to handle text documents (such as those you might download from Project Gutenberg), and Microsoft Word documents.
For the book lover who craves the convenience of an electronic book but finds the idea of cozying up to a cold, hard plastic device offputting, a Massachussets company called E Ink [www.eink.com] may have the solution. The company is set to unveil computer screens that are as thin, as readable, and as flexible as paper.
Embedded in the E ink screen, you'll find millions of microscopic, liquid-filled capsules. Each capsule holds a heterogeneous mixture of colored ink and tiny flakes of white paint. By applying a slight electrical charge to a capsule, E Ink can move the white chips either to the front or the back of the capsule's surface. When the chips are at the surface, the capsule will blend in with the page. When the chips are forced to the back of the capsule, the colored ink will be revealed, forming a tiny colored dot on the page. By combining that single capsule with hundreds of thousands of others on an E Ink page, the dots could work together to form words and images that can be changed easily and instantaneously.
E Ink's founders envision handsome, leatherbound books containing pages that are almost indistinguishable from the dead-tree-based pages in wide use today. However, the content on these pages will be ever-changing. The book will offer wireless electronic access to any book available in the world. Need a cookbook? Tap a button on the book's spine and the pages will fill with recipes. After dinner, you tap another button to switch to a how-to manual. At bedtime, hit a third button to polish off the exciting suspense novel you've been dying to finish. "Such a device is, in effect...a library," E Ink inventor Joe Jacobson was once quoted as saying.
When asked if he thought electronic books might someday outsell conventional books, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said: "it's not a question of if. It's a question of when. Electronic downloadable books make too much sense for it not to happen."
Other sources of electronic books:
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Building a Better Book by Craig Power
Or could it? The Internet is changing the way many writers, publishers, and readers think about how we package and distribute the written word. The growing scarcity of bookstore shelf space and the increasing costs of raw materials and labor are making it economically unfeasible to publish certain kinds of books, including academic criticism and literary fiction.