Peter Sinclair: e-Booked

By PETER SINCLAIR

Despite doomsayers, the Internet has revived the art of writing - well, if not the art, at least the practice.

E-mail has revitalised the dying letter as billions of mini-missives flash across the world each day. And if they tend to sign off with "CU" rather than something more graceful, that's the price of progress.

The e-book market, too, is exploding. Online purchases tripled last year to more than 50 million, according to an NPD survey released at BookExpo America last week.

It shows that in four years the virtual book has become publishing's fastest-growing sector, already representing 5.4 per cent of the total book market. Andersen Consulting predicts this will increase to 10 per cent by 2005.

The trend was highlighted last March when demand for shudder-meister Stephen King's 66-page e-novella, Riding the Bullet, swamped all major online booksellers.

With more than 500,000 sales in two days, Simon & Schuster demonstrated that tree-based publishers have nothing to fear by making new titles available in cyberspace.

The company now plans to release 15 Star Trek titles online, while Random House is making Michael Crichton's Timeline available free to handhelds that use Microsoft's CE operating system.

Start-ups like BookFace, an interactive site "committed to ... online reading experiences," will be supplied by major bricks-and-mortar publishers like HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam and Time Warner Trade Publishing.

Time-Warner, which already dominates e-book software with the SoftBook and Rocket eBook readers, has announced a new publishing venture, iPublish, for early next year, an ambitious online community "to unite readers, authors and editors and explore ... sales of new forms of fiction and non-fiction material created specifically for the Internet."

Readers who feel like snuggling up in bed with a good computer on a wet winter's night can arrange the experience at a Website like Van Goach Books, but I'm not sure I'd advise the one I chose - Mark Anthony Rossi's The Intruder Bulletins: The Dark Side of Technology.

This Web essayist, playwright and poet (you'll find some of his other work in an e-publication called Black Pancreas Enzymes - which reads as biliously as you'd expect - actually appears to hate and fear the medium for which he writes. This is the dark side of reading.

His jeremiads against the tempora and mores of the e-millennium are hysterical or paranoid or both - Old Diseases Make a Comeback, Pharmaceutical Fascism, Organised Organ Theft ...

As for virtual reality, that's pure "neuro-assassination," and you can probably guess who the real guilty party is: "Five decades of television exposure ... is producing unwholesome long-term effects on the human mind ..." Well, we knew that.

But "the practice of marrying old-fashioned torture with virtual reality manipulation" is as good a description of the average local sitcom as you'll come across.

And "if a man's character changes with ...flogging, virtual reality may prove a better weapon for neutralising the rights of liberty-loving citizens through identity erasure," you have to wonder whether Lindsay Perigo shouldn't be told.

"The first sign of impending doom is at the checkout counter ..." Bar-codes! They're just waiting for the first digital dictator to come along. Buy a packet of crisps and you're enslaved, apparently.

It's all enough to put you off e-books entirely and make you reach for the nearest copy of anything by Jane Austen, reassuringly musty and morocco-bound ...

Links:

NPD

Book Expo America

Simon & Schuster

BookFace

SoftBook

Rocket eBook

iPublish

Van Goach Books

Black Pancreas Enzymes

Lindsay Perigo

Jane Austen

Peter Sinclair: petersinclair@email.com