It's been a difficult year for e-publishing, which shouldn't come as a surprise considering it's been a difficult year for businesses in general, and particularly those having to do with the Internet.
As 2001 comes to a close, Wired News asked 201 authors, publishers, retailers and other industry analysts to describe the high points and low points of the year, and to present a wish list for 2002.
The answers were varied and often predictable. Surprisingly absent from the responses was any mention of the Tasini v. The New York Times Supreme Court case, the Random House v. Rosetta Books case, or the arrest and subsequent release of ElmcomSoft employee Dmitri Sklyarov for presenting a paper on copyright security.
Nor did anyone specifically reference the large number of industry layoffs, which Publishers Weekly estimated at 7,300, with over 2,000 of those lost jobs coming in e-publishing alone. Not specifically, anyway.
Since it was a bad year, we'll start with the bad news.
What were some of the disappointments or overrated issues in 2001?
John Feldcamp, CEO of Xlibris.com: "2001 has not been about innovation, but about general devastation and retrenchment. In this new and very Darwinian world, the first crop of new publishing related companies has been massively selected for extinction and most real innovation will need to wait for a few more years."
Laurie Rippon, a senior vice president at HarperCollins Publishers: "Obviously e-books (at some houses) were over-hyped, over-staffed and the accompanying 'death of the e-book' news is overreaction. The sad thing is that overblown expectations of a dot-com revolution and the idea that technology can conquer all, combined with a recession and a newly subdued country veering towards conservatism and fear, make it hard to continue the optimism and creativity that force us to change habits and grow towards something new."
Linda Richards, editor of January Magazine: "I know a lot of people were disappointed that e-books didn't get the leg up it looked like they were going to get in 2001. But, it strikes me that e-books now are at the place, professionally, where the Internet was in 2000: The publishing industry has discovered that e-books aren't going to be a panacea. But this was a necessary discovery. After that initial disappointment, you start building a solid foundation based on logical evolution and the only place to go is up."
__Cynthia Orr, librarian and co-founder of BookBrowser.com: __"That the major publishers still can't see that working with librarians or distributors to figure out how to let libraries purchase or license their e-books, and let readers 'check them out' for free, would help build a market that otherwise threatens to just collapse for lack of interest. Librarians have been careful defenders of copyright over the years ... and our budgets are far higher than they realize."
__David Eide, editor of Oasis 2001: __ "That there wasn't a bigger migration of talent from print to e-publishing. Obviously, this is connected to the very low sales of e-books and lack of capital. It proved to me that e-publishing is going to be digging in hardscrabble for awhile."
__Mark Gross, president of Data Conversion Laboratory: __"That the major e-book ventures are closing down -- or really slowing down. My reading is that, in fact, they've now realized that e-publishing is really just publishing, and it's counterproductive to have a separate competing company to develop electronic books."
What was the best news of the last 12 months?
__Michael S. Hart, director of Project Gutenberg: __"The number of e-books available for free download on the Net will pass 20,000. The number of Net users will start heading towards 1 billion."
__Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, author, college professor and board member of the Electronic Literature: __"The growing tendency for online zines and journals to begin publishing hypertext in 2001. Since writers have always depended on the network of little magazines to build an audience and establish a publication base, the growing strength of the online zines represents a valuable resource for writers and a new source of material for publishers."
__Diane Greco, president of Eastgate.com: __"The Lite Show, a project of Boston Cyberarts, featured low-bandwidth Web animation and motion graphics. The most interesting thing about this juried exhibition was how these artists rose to the unique challenge of using bandwidth as an artistic constraint."
__Mark Gross, president of Data Conversion Laboratory: __"What people forget is e-books were going strong before they were called e-books and they went on to sweep into many aspects of business and publishing. Most of this has gone unnoticed by the media. Probably because it has been a kind of backdoor revolution. To cite one example: Print law books are just about gone. People don't use them in law firms anymore. It's all electronic books or online. A revolution has occurred, but no one's noticed."
__James Alexander, director of e-books marketing at Adobe: __"Eink’s announcement of a new handheld device. Their electronic paper technology is breathless and it really addresses the concerns people have for reading on screen. It’s truly amazing."
What’s on your wish list for 2002?
__Pete Alcorn, CEO of NetRead Software and Services: __"I wish that publishers would be publishers, retailers would be retailers and wholesalers would be wholesalers -- instead of everybody trying to vertically integrate."
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Exit Strategy: "I hope people develop collaborative experiments. I hope authors get less afraid of relinquishing their authority. I hope content creators put more faith in their so-called audiences, by realizing that the users are not passive recipients but active participants."
Joan Bramsch, author of Empowered Parent: "That the sellers of all the different e-book formats get their act together and compromise on a general format -- like VHS, CD, DVD. The shakeout is long past due, and it has impacted on the sale of e-books and the expense of selling them, as well."
__Emily Heckman, editor and writer: __"Now that corporations (publishers, e-book manufacturers, etc.) have lost so much money trying to force new, as-yet-undefined publishing technologies into unrealistically profitable business models, maybe writers, readers, inventors, lovers of the Internet and the written word will figure out how to make all of this great new technology really work for the right people -- the authors and their readers."
__David Eide, editor of Oasis 2001: __"I wish writers would understand the Net in terms of competitive advantage and a space for free development of their talents -- that it turns creativity from a passive activity of 'writing for the market' to an active one of 'creating the market.' That's where literary revolutions occur."
Dave Chappelle, technology reviewer at CanadaComputes.com: "I'd like to see more advances in speech and text recognition."
__Libby Jeffery, project manager at OzAuthors: __"Some extra creative forms of online storytelling and narrative forms will get some mainstream press to encourage creators to be experimental and adventurous with their combination of text, audiovisuals, interactivity, online communication and hyperlinks."
__Maxine Thompson, reviewer and author: __"I hope to see more African-American writers forming their own publishing companies and building coalitions between them. I’d like to see stockholders invest in their companies and see more self-published books reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.
__Gregory Voynow, formerly senior vice president at defunct iPublish.com: __"That publishers begin to look at the Internet much more broadly as a fundamental platform for their business. E-books vs. using the Internet for marketing should only be the beginning: I think that the Internet lines up well with all functional areas of publishing, soup to nuts. From finding talent, developing talent, test-marketing products, distributing products, marketing products. For consumer publishing, assume print is the base format, but publishers can do a lot more (not just marketing) online to build the business around the online space."
__Terry Bain, co-editor in chief at Zoetrope: All-Story Extra: __"What I wish would happen would be more people reading better books. Hell, I wish more people would read anything. I also teach, and I can't tell you how discouraging it is to stand in front of a classroom and ask how many of my students read and have one or two of them raise their hands. One or two of them. Maybe three. This is what nobody's talking about. And the Internet and technology moguls don't even approach this kind of problem -- yet. This is my wish for the future --that they do approach this kind of problem with a fraction of the passion with which they suck money.
M.J. Rose is the author of two novels and two nonfiction titles.
