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March 27, 2000

New Technologies Transform Publishing Industry
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Books24x7.com, which launched its service in September, surpassed the 10,000-subscriber mark in February. It charges $199 per individual subscription for access to more than 1,000 technical reference books, and is adding two to four books per day. "Later this year, you'll see a marketing, finance, management, and human-resources library geared toward corporate professionals," Ambrose says.

Baker wants to use Books24x7.com's software to offer an online subscription to a library of visually oriented manuals, called Visual Quick Start Guides. These books are designed with pages that consists of a column of text accompanied by full-color pictures that provide step-by-step, "how-to" instructions on a variety of subjects related to Web authoring and design.

Baker plans to launch the Peachpit Visual Quick Start Guide online subscription service this summer; pricing hasn't been set. She says it will satisfy a critical reader demand. "Our readers really want revision insurance, and because we want to build more direct connection with our readers, that's what we are striving to do," she says.

Customers who buy a subscription to Peachpit's online service will get access to all the books in the Visual Quick Start Guide series for a year, letting them access and read any books in the series. Baker hopes to expose readers to multiple books in the Quick Start series by letting them conducting online searches using Books24x7.com's powerful search tool. "We want to sell more books," she says. "We think reading online will help spur sales of more books."

Peachpit has been offering downloadable E-books and operating companion Web sites for popular titles such as The Macintosh Bible and The OS Bible for several years. The Web sites enhance a book's content, offering a way to connect with readers. They also help Peachpit maintain up-to-date information on software revisions that are simply not practical to do in print versions. The computer book publisher also hopes to offer print-on-demand services soon, to sell out-of-print volumes, and provide custom printing options.

Still, this is uncharted territory for Peachpit. It hasn't charged for online content before; the subscription service will be its first electronic product that costs money. While Baker won't disclose the price of the system, software, and service assistance from Books24x7.com, she says it's less expensive than trying to contract with software engineers and Web designers to build a similar system from the ground up. "The application we've chosen is strong, from its user interface to its ability to run in-line graphics and provide a powerful search engine across all of our online content," she says. "We are really pleased with the product."

Meanwhile, there are many other avenues for E-book publishing and online publishing that are enabled by various technologies.

Netlibrary.com Inc., for example, is targeting academic and business libraries and converting printed books by literally chopping off the spine, putting the pages through a scanner, digitizing them, and laying them out in an electronic format that can be read on a variety of computer devices.

MightyWords.com Inc. offers writers royalties of as much as 50%. The Web site launched on March 19 with original content from high-profile contributors such as writer and editor Pete Hamill, actress Whoopie Goldberg, astronaut Sally Ride, and former Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich. The site calls itself a "revolution in publishing--a new, secure digital marketplace where you can buy, sell, and publish the written word.

Fatbrain.com Inc. is another Web site that offers authors the chance to be published online. It has commissioned many original works, and it takes original text and graphics and presents them in a readable online format. The company also returns a greater amount of the profits from book sales to authors than do conventional publishers.

"But what authors lack from working this way is the marketing muscle that only a big publishing house can provide, and the distribution channel offered via Amazon or Barnes & Noble," says Nichols of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

These new electronic-publishing options may change the relationship between authors and publishers. It's possible to envision a day when some publishers no longer have the print, distribution, or shipping costs. When that happens, they might only be responsible for the creation and electronic storage of content. Nichols maintains that could remove as much as 40% of the publisher's cost. But "that day is still just a distant dream," she says.

For writers, the expectation is that those cost savings will turn into to higher royalties. Increasingly, "authors want more royalty money, since it's less work for the publisher to edit and produce their works online," says Gartner Group's Votsch. Whether that happens remains to be seen. If it doesn't, Votsch says, the power of the Web as a delivery channel for books could take publishers out of the process completely. "Authors with leading brand recognition and quality works may not need a publisher," he says.

For now, Simon & Schuster's Tentler says new technology and the Internet have changed everything--and nothing--about book publishing. "We're in the business of getting valuable content to the widest possible audience, through hardcover, softcover, audio books, and now books in an electronic format."

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