your net:// The e-book is coming

By CHRIS BARTON

In the evolving arguments in our house about the impact of the internet on the future, there is often one about print on paper.

She says: The internet will never replace books. You can't take a computer to bed and curl up with it, like you can with a good book.

He says: Well, actually you can. There are battery-powered handheld computers now that store electronic books - about the size of paperback so you can take it anywhere you like.

She says: But I love books, the feel of them, the sound paper makes when you turn a page - even the smell of them. You can't get that from an electronic gadget.

He says: They're ergonomically designed to feel book-like. They've already got some that make electronic page-turning sounds.

She says: But I don't like reading from a screen. It hurts your eyes.

He says: The latest screens are very like reading from paper. And there are some advantages - like being able to increase the type size if your eyesight's fading. Or immediately checking a word with the built-in electronic dictionary.

She says: People will still want real books.

He says: Think about the environment - all the shredded trees it could save.

She says: Pah! What about the environmental mess created by millions of obsolete computers?

He says: Consider this then - one electronic book can hold about 50 real books in its memory, and new ones can be downloaded from the net. Imagine what that might do for illiterate parts of the world.

She says: I can really see that - e-books in the middle of Africa!

As usual the argument never really gets resolved. She's right. Reading on screen is not a great experience - mainly because the resolution just isn't the same as beautiful type on a paper page.

That is because a single screen pixel - the minute dot that presents what we see on screen - isn't small enough to form type properly.

The answer is to make screens with much higher resolution. Today most PC screens present at about 70-80 pixels per inch (ppi), while liquid crystal display (LCD) notebook screens are 100ppi or higher.

But what you really need to make print seem just like a printed page is about 300ppi - and screens of that quality are still hideously expensive.

Meanwhile, e-book manufacturers are upping the resolution with software that does clever things at the "sub-pixel" level - making fonts sharper and easier to read for long periods. The goal is to make on-screen type that doesn't intrude when you read.

But he's right too. E-books, although slow to catch on, are a coming thing. Just as MP3 threatens to bring cataclysmic change to the music industry, so too do e-books scare the hell out of publishers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the online antics of horror novelist Stephen King. In March his publisher, Simon & Schuster, released Riding the Bullet in electronic format only for $US2.50. There were 500,000 downloads, although about 200,000 occurred during a 24-hour free promotion period at Barnes&noble.com.

King did not make a fortune from his trial run, but it showed that the demand was there. It also showed up one of the problems of putting books on the web. Hackers tore apart the reader software the book was packaged with and cracked the encryption code, so the novel could be illegally copied and distributed free.

But King is undeterred and is now conducting another fiendish experiment. He - not his publisher - has put the first instalment of another novel, The Plant, online (www.stephenking.com). The second part goes online this month.

But there's a catch. He is waiting to see how many people will pay $US1 for each download and will only release the third part if at least 75 per cent have paid for the first two.

It is the first high-profile test of how authors and artists might make money in an environment where copyright is rapidly being rendered irrelevant. To get compensated for their efforts, authors have to behave like online street performers.

Many are already saying that King's efforts are doomed to failure - and net users accustomed to getting so much free will never pay. They are also critical of King's ransom tactics - using the sins of the "free" downloaders to punish the "honest" downloaders. Under King's rules, those who don't pay get $US2 of reading pleasure free. Those who do get $US2 of reading pleasure.

If the novel is never completed, who comes out on top?

Links


Barnes & Noble
Stephen King