FROM THE PRINT MEDIA TO THE INTERNET © 1999 by Marie Lebert is licensed under
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit
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FROM THE PRINT MEDIA TO THE INTERNET
MARIE LEBERT
Editions 00h00, Paris, 1999 & NEF, University of Toronto, 2001
How does the world of the print media approach this new means of communication
that is the Internet? How does the Internet take into account the various parts
of the print media? A study written in March 1999 and based on many interviews.
With many thanks to Laurie Chamberlain, who kindly edited this paper. The French
version of this paper - De l'imprimé à Internet - is not a translation, but a
different text. The original versions are available on the NEF, University of
Toronto: http://www.etudes-francaises.net/entretiens/print.htm
TABLE
1. Introduction
2. The Internet
3. On-Line Bookstores
4. Publishers on the Web
5. On-Line Press
6. Libraries on the Web
7. Digital Libraries
8. On-Line Catalogs
9. Perspectives
10. Index of Websites
11. Index of Names
1. INTRODUCTION
The world of the print media is big: it includes everything related to books,
periodicals and pictures. The world of the Internet is much bigger. It is that
tremendous network which is leading to the upheaval of communications and
working methods we are hearing so much about.
Are these two worlds antagonistic or complementary? What is the influence of one
world on the other, and vice versa? How does the world of the print media accept
this tremendous means of communication which is the Internet? How does the
Internet take into account this centuries-old tool which is the print media? Do
they work together? Do they compete? What is their common future? Will the world
of the Internet completely swallow up the world of the print media, or, to the
contrary, will the print media domesticate the Internet as an additional means
of communication?
We are not even aware yet of the many interconnections and transformations the
Internet is going to bring if the Internet changes the world as much as writing
or printing did in the past, as we are constantly being told it will.
What are the implications for all the professionals of the print media: authors,
booksellers, journalists, librarians, printers, publishers, translators, etc.?
How do they see the breaker which is beating down on them, and the storm that
the Internet is bringing into their professional life? These are the questions I
will try to answer in the following pages.
More and more publications have both an electronic version and a paper version
and, in some cases, both can be ordered on-line. Numerous texts are available
on-line in digital libraries. Many of these texts also have a paper version the
cybernaut can buy if he prefers reading 500 pages lying on his sofa instead of
reading them on the screen of his computer. Some texts or magazines are
available on-line only.
More and more newspapers and magazines have a website on which their readers can
find the full text or abstracts of the latest issue, archives giving access to
the previous issues, dossiers on various topics, etc. More and more library
catalogs are available on-line. And most sites offer hyperlinks to other
websites or documents on related subjects. In short, the Internet has become an
essential tool for getting information, having access to documents and
broadening our knowledge.
I will examine the interaction of the print media and the Internet in the
following areas: bookstores, publishers, press, libraries, digital libraries and
catalogs. I shall also include the contributions of the media professionals who
answered my inquiry about: (1) the way they see the relationship between the
print media and the Internet; (2) what the use of the Internet has brought in
their professional life and/or the life of their company/organization; and (3)
how they see their professional future or the future in general with the
Internet. I express here my warmest thanks to all those who replied to my
inquiry.
I will also comment on the future trends regarding intellectual property,
digitization, multimedia convergence and the information society. A selection of
websites is also available. Some of the information included here is probably
already obsolete. Never mind. The world of the Internet is fast-moving and
evolves constantly - that is one of its many assets.
This study follows a Ph.D. I completed in 1998-99 at the University of the
Sorbonne (Ecole pratique des hautes études), Paris, France. Although the key
ideas are the same, it is not the translation of the French study, which was
Francophone-oriented. New websites and new contributions from people belonging
to the English-speaking and the international community have been included here.
Originally, I worked as a librarian in Europe and in the Middle East, under
contract to set up libraries and/or computerize catalogs. More recently, I have
been contributing to the preparation of publications as a writer, translator,
editor or indexor. Since 1996 I have been working mainly for the International
Labour Office (ILO), Geneva, Switzerland. As I am fascinated by languages, I
also wrote a study about Multilingualism on the Web.
2. THE INTERNET
[In this chapter:]
[2.1. The Internet and the Other Media / 2.2. The "Info-Rich" and the
"Info-Poor" / 2.3. The Web: First English, then Multilingual]
2.1. The Internet and the Other Media
Since a few years ago, the Internet has become integrated into our daily life,
and people have gotten connected at home, at work or in their university. At the
end of 1997, the number of Internet users was estimated at 90 or 100 million,
with one million new users every month. In the year 2000, the number of Internet
users will be over 300 million.
Does the Internet compete directly with television and reading? In Quebec, where
30.7% of the population is connected, a poll taken in March 1998 for the
cybermagazine Branchez-vous! showed that 28.8% of connected Quebeckers were
watching television less than before. Only 12.1% were reading less. As stated by
the French Canadian magazine Multimédium in its article of April 2, 1998, it was
"rather encouraging for the Ministry of Culture and Communications which has the
double task of furthering the development of information highways... and
reading!"
The Internet has become the medium of choice for many news consumers, in many
cases matching and occasionally surpassing traditional forms of media, according
to a survey conducted in February 1998 for MSNBC on the Internet by Market
Facts.
In an article of Internet Wire, February, 1998, Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief
of on-line MSNBC, wrote:
"The Internet news usage behavior pattern is shaping up similar to broadcast
television in terms of weekday use, and is used more than cable television,
newspapers and magazines during that same period of time. Additionally, on
Saturdays, the Internet is used more than broadcast television, radio or
newspapers, and on a weekly basis has nearly the same hours of use as
newspapers."
The corresponding number of hours per week are: 2.4 hours for magazines; 3.5
hours for the Internet; 3.6 hours for newspapers; 4.5 hours for radio; 5 hours
for cable TV; and 5.7 hours for broadcast TV.
When interviewed in Autumn 1997 by François Lemelin, chief editor of L'Album,
the official publication of the Club Macintosh de Québec, Jean-Pierre Cloutier,
editor of the Chroniques de Cybérie, explained:
"I think the medium [the Internet] is going to continue being essential, and
then give birth to original, precise, specific services, bywhich time we will
have found an economic model of viability. For information cybermedias like the
Chroniques de Cybérie as well as for info-services, community and on-line public
services, electronic commerce, distance learning, the post-modern policy which
is going to change the elected representatives/principals, in fact, everything
is coming around. [...]
Concerning the relationship with other media, I think we need to look backwards.
Contrary to the words of alarmists in previous times, radio didn't kill music or
the entertainment industry any more than the cinema did. Television didn't kill
radio or cinema. Nor did home videos. When a new medium arrives, it makes some
room for itself, the others adjust, there is a transition period, then a
'convergence'.
What is different with the Internet is the interactive dimension of the medium
and its possible impact. We are still thinking about that, we are watching to
see what happens.
Also, as a medium, the Net allows the emergence of new concepts in the field of
communication, and on the human level, too - even for non-connected people. I
remember (yes, I am that old) when McLuhan arrived, at the end of the sixties,
with his concept of 'global village' basing itself on television and telephone,
and he was predicting data exchange between computers. There were people, in
Africa, without television and telephone, who read and understood McLuhan. And
McLuhan changed things in their vision of the world. The Internet has the same
effect. It gives rise to some thinking on communication, private life, freedom
of expression, the values we are attached to and those we are ready to get rid
of, and it is this effect which makes it such a powerful, important medium."
The Web must not only give the necessary space to all languages but it must also
respect all cultures. During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized
by the International Labour Organization (ILO), Geneva, Switzerland, in January
1997, Shinji Matsumoto, General Secretary of the Musicians' Union of Japan
(MUJ), declared:
"It is not only in developing countries, but in advanced countries as well that
we need to maintain our traditions. Japan is quite receptive to foreign culture
and foreign technology. [...] Foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, in
fact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this,
when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there has
been insufficient support from the Government. [...] With the development of
information networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to be
able to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual
understanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures and
social systems."
The Technorealism website first appeared on the Web on March 12, 1998. According
to the website, technorealism is "an attempt to assess the social and political
implications of technologies so that we might all have more control over the
shape of our future. The heart of the technorealist approach involves a
continuous critical examination of how technologies - whether cutting-edge or
mundane - might help or hinder us in the struggle to improve the quality of our
personal lives, our communities, and our economic, social, and political
structures."
The eight principles of Technorealism Overview have been signed by over 1,472
people between March 12 and August 20, 1998. Here are the first three:
"a) Technologies are not neutral.
A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely
free of bias - that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote
certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with
both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every
tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and
specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to
consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect
our values and aspirations.
b) The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new
opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet as
cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large,
in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired
life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or rather
ordinary.
c) Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.
Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction
separate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs that
have arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficient
regulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has no
sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does on-line.
As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the
state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and
conventional society.
Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be
entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little
interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully
functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not
necessarily insure the public interest."
2.2. The "Info-Rich" and the "Info-Poor"
There is a close correlation between economic and social development and access
to telecommunications. Access to new communication technologies expands much
more rapidly in the North than in the South, and there are many more web servers
in North America and in Europe than on the other continents. Two-thirds of the
Internet users live in the United States, where 40% of households are equipped
with a computer, a percentage that we also find in Denmark, Switzerland and
Netherlands. The percentage is 30% in Germany, 25% in United Kingdom, and 20%
for most industrialized countries.
The statistics of March 1998 on the percentage of connections per number of
inhabitants, available in the Computer Industry Almanach (CIA), a reference
document on the evolution of cyberspace, show that Finland is the most connected
country in the world with 25% of its population connected, followed by Norway
(23%) and Iceland (22.7%). The United States is in fourth place with 20%. Eleven
countries in the world have a proportion of Internet users above 10%, and
Switzerland is eleventh, with 10.7%.
Regarding the global percentage, the statistics of end 1997 of the Computer
Industry Almanach - which take into consideration the connections at home, at
work and in academic institutions - show that the United States is still
considerably ahead with 54.68% of the global percentage, followed by Japan
(7.97%), the United Kingdom (5.83%) and Canada (4.33%). The survey also shows
that the US lead is constantly decreasing - it went from 80% in 1991 to less
than 65% in 1994, with prospects of 50% in 1998 and less than 40% in 2000.
Nevertheless, if we consider the whole planet, universal access to information
highways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity varies
from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries to
less than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in the
world are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's population
has never used a phone.
In the developing countries, it is unlikely that Internet connections will use
traditional phone lines, as there are other technological solutions. The
developing countries' equipment rate for digital lines is equivalent to the rate
of industrialized countries. The growth in mobile telephony is also spectacular.
The solution could be brought by cellular radiotelephony and satellite
connection.
However, the demarcation between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" does not
systematically follow the demarcation between the so-called developed and
developing countries. Access to information technology in the so-called rich
countries is also rather uneven. Some developing countries, such as Malaysia or
a number of countries in Latin America, have a very dynamic telecommunication
policy. In the documents prepared for the second Conference on the Development
of Telecommunications in the World, organized by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) from March 23 to April 1, 1998 in Valletta, Malta,
it was stated that several developing countries, such as Botswana, China, Chile,
Thailand, Hungary, Ghana and Mauritius, succeeded in extending the density and
the quality of their phone services during the last three years. On the other
hand, the situation was getting worse for the poorest countries.
During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Wilfred
Kiboro, Managing Director and Chief Executive of Nation Printers and Publishers
Ltd., Kenya, stated:
"Information technology needs to be brought to affordable levels. I have a dream
that perhaps in our lifetime in Africa, we will see villagers being able to
access [the] Internet from their rural villages where today there is no water
and no electricity. We hope they will be able to watch Sky News on their
portable televisions, but maybe this is just a dream."
For the media particularly, there is an abyss between the 'info-rich' and the
'info-poor'. In many African countries, the circulation of newspapers is very
low compared to the population figures, and each copy is read by at least twenty
people. According to Wilfred Kiboro, who noticed in his company a drop in the
newspapers' price thanks to multimedia convergence, distribution costs could
drop with the use of a printing system by satellite which could do away with the
need for transporting newspapers by truck throughout the country.
Nevertheless, multimedia convergence in particular and the globalization of the
economy in general has put the developing countries in a position of inferiority
because the printing and radio-television broadcasting means are in the hands of
a few main western groups. Cultural problems exist alongside economic problems.
Paradoxically, information relating to Africa and broadcast for Africans doesn't
come from the African continent, but is broadcast by westerners who transmit
their own vision of Africa, without any real perception of its economic and
social situation.
Some developing countries - such as Mauritania - rely on the Web to regain
prestige, as explained by Emmanuel Genty and Jean-Pierre Turquoi in the daily
French newspaper Le Monde of March 30, 1998. Mauritania presented its Government
Official Site at the headquarters of the World Bank during the Days of the
Consultative Group for Mauritania (Journées du Groupe consultatif pour la
Mauritanie) on March 25-27, 1998. This event took place following the media
focus on the continued existence of slavery in this country, despite the fact
that it has been officially abolished for years. The website is intended to be
the country's shop window for tourists and foreign investors. On the other hand,
the use of the Internet inside the country is heavily regulated by the Post and
Telecommunication Office (Office des postes et des télécommunications - OPT),
which is the national operator. And things are made even more difficult because
of prohibitive connection costs - three times the cost of a local phone call.
China is also discovering digital information through the China Wide Web, which
is the country's national Internet. The number of its subscribers jumped from
100,000 in 1996 to 600,000 in 1997. Set up by the China Internet Corporation
(CIC), a company based in Hong Kong, the China Wide Web is a business and
information network more or less cut off from the rest of the world, and
screened and controlled by the Chinese authorities.
The abyss between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" is not only the one
dividing developed and developing countries. In any country, there are gaps
between the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the people who
belong to society and the people who are rejected by it. As a new communication
medium, the Internet can be a way out of the abyss. Anyone can have an e-mail
address on the Net. Anyone can use the Web in the public library or in the
premises of some association, to find information or look for a job.
2.3. The Web: First English, Then Multilingual
In the beginning, the Web was nearly 100% English, which can be easily explained
by the fact that the Internet was created in the United States as a network set
up by the Pentagon (in 1969) before spreading to US governmental agencies and to
universities. After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by Tim
Berners-Lee at the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), Geneva,
Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic (the ancestor of
Netscape) from November 1993 onwards, the Web, too, began to spread, first in
the US thanks to considerable investments made by the government, then around
North America, and then to the rest of the world.
The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than in
any other country is due to different factors - these countries are among the
leaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware and
software, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than in
the rest of the world.
In Hugues Henry's article, La francophonie en quête d'identité sur le Web
(Francophony in search of identity on the Web), published in the Dossiers of the
daily cybermagazine Multimédium, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, author of Chroniques de
Cybérie, a weekly cybermagazine widely read in the French-speaking Internet
community, explained:
"In Quebec I am spending about 120 hours per month on-line. My Internet access
is $30 [Canadian]; if I add my all-inclusive phone bill which is about $40 (with
various optional services), the total cost of my connection is $70 per month. I
leave you to guess what the price would be in France, in Belgium or in
Switzerland, where the local communications are billed by the minute, for the
same number of hours on-line."
It follows that many European surfers spend much less time on the Web than they
would like, or choose to surf at night to cut their expenses. At the end of
1998, in several countries (Italy, Germany, France, etc.), surfers began to
boycott the Internet for one day to make phone companies aware of their needs
and give them a special monthly rate.
In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies and the Internet
Society, ran the first major study of the actual distribution of languages on
the Internet. The results are published in the Web Languages Hit Parade, dated
June 1997, and the languages, listed in order of usage, are: English 82.3%,
German 4.0%, Japanese 1.6%, French 1.5%, Spanish 1.1%, Swedish 1.1%, and Italian
1.0%.
To reach as large an audience as possible, the solution is to create bilingual,
trilingual, even multilingual sites. The website of the Belgian daily newspaper
Le Soir presents the newspaper in six languages: French, English, Dutch, German,
Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poètes (Club of Poets), a French site
dedicated to poetry, presents its site in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
E-Mail-Planet, a free e-mail address provider, provides a menu in six languages
(English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).
As the Web quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of
English-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of the
Web recognize that, although English may be the main international language for
exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.
Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use AltaVista Translation, which
translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfer
can also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he will get a
usable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very helpful, but
will never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a human translator
with special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the site.
The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverse
languages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improve
communication among everyone in the international Internet community.
In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD Network
News) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained:
"This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the
growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide
Web'. [...] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies
are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German,
14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the
Web whose native language is not English. [...] Only 6 percent of the world
population speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), while
about 80 percent of all web pages are in English."
Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2,061,220
words in 432 dictionaries (as of December 10, 1998) in various fields: business;
computer/Internet; medical; miscellaneous; religion; science; sports;
technology; general; and slang. In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, he
wrote:
"An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and I
think I learned something from it.
In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on
a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same
problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me... the software was
written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around
the world. Distance and geography no longer mattered!
OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in
English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German
which was his mother tongue. The Internet has removed one barrier (distance) but
with that comes the barrier of language.
It seems that the Internet is moving people in two quite different directions at
the same time. The Internet (initially based on English) is connecting people
all around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people to
use for communication. But it is also creating contact between people of
different languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A common
language is great but in no way replaces this need.
So the Internet promotes both a common language AND multilingualism. The good
news is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is
creating incentives for people around the world to create improved language
courses and other assistance and the Internet is providing fast and inexpensive
opportunities to make them available."
For more information about the Web and languages, please see my study about
Multilingualism on the Web.
3. ON-LINE BOOKSTORES
[In this chapter:]
[3.1. Books: a Good Product to Sell On-line / 3.2. On-line Bookstores: Some
Examples / 3.3. Digital Books]
3.1. Books: A Good Product to Sell On-Line
Many "traditional" bookstores - with booksellers, windows, books piled upon
display shelves or lined up on shelves around the shop - have created on-line
bookstores on the Internet - for example, Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com) in
the United States, Chapters (Chaptersglobe) in Canada, Waterstone's in the
United Kingdom, etc. Other bookstores have no walls and no windows looking out
on the street. They are "only" on-line (for example Amazon.com in the United
States, Internet Bookshop in the United Kingdom). Their window is their website,
and all the transactions are made through the Internet.
These on-line stores don't sell only books, but also CDs, audiobooks, DVDs,
computer games, sheet music, movies on VHS, console and CD-ROM software games,
etc. As we are dealing here with the relationship between the print media and
the Internet, we shall focus on books only.
The book-lover searches the on-line bookstore's catalog on his screen. In most
cases, searches are possible by author, title and subject. The home page of the
bookstore often looks like a literary magazine, so the book-lover can be kept
informed of the latest current events. For someone who does not like queuing in
his favorite library on a Saturday afternoon, the Web can bring a lot of relief.
He can "leaf" through short descriptions and extracts of books, order on-line
the books he is interested in and pay with his credit card. The only delay
encountered is the time necessary for the book to be shipped to his house. Such
a person is looking forward to being equipped with a digital book, which will
appear in 1999.
Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com in July 1995, after a market study which led him
to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the Internet.
In Spring 1994, he drew up a list of 20 products that could be sold on the Net,
from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched his top five: CDs, videos,
computer hardware, computer software, and books.
"I used a whole bunch of criteria to evaluate the potential of each product, but
among the main criteria was the size of the relative markets. Books, I found
out, were an $82 billion market worldwide. The price point was another major
criterion: I wanted a low-priced product. I reasoned that since this was the
first purchase many people would make on-line, it had to be non-threatening in
size. A third criterion was the range of choice: there were 3 million items in
the book category and only a tenth of that in CDs, for example. This was
important because the wider the choice, the more the organizing and selection
capabilities of the computer could be put in good use."
However, Jeff Bezos doesn't think traditional bookstores are going to close any
time soon, as quoted by Bruce Knecht in The Wall Street Journal of May 16, 1996:
"He regularly hangs out at the Elliott Bay Book Co., a sprawling, independent
bookstore in downtown Seattle which has exposed brick walls, a cafe and lots of
friendly salespeople. And he talks about how 'books creak in that nice kind of
way'. 'We are trying to make the shopping experience just as fun as going to the
book store', he says, 'but there's some things we can't do'."
3.2. On-Line Bookstores: Some Examples
Amazon.com is the largest on-line bookstore, with instant access to 3 million
titles, authoritative reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer reviews,
and book recommendations. It is an Internet retailer of books, music, and other
information-based products that offers services traditional retailers cannot:
lower prices, selection, and a wealth of product information.
Today Amazon.com offers 3 million books, CDs, audiobooks, DVDs, computer games -
more than 14 times as many titles as the large chain superstores - to more to 3
million people in more than 160 countries. "Businesses can do things on the Web
that simply cannot be done any other way", says Jeff Bezos. "We are changing the
way people buy books and music."
Any book-lover can post his own reviews of books and read others. He can read
interviews with authors and blurbs and excerpts from books. He can search for
books by author, subject, title, ISBN or publication date. Prices are
discounted, with savings of 20-40% on 400,000 titles (40% on selected feature
books, 30% on hardcovers, and 20% on paperbacks). The client usually receives
the books within a week. If he requests it, he will receive an e-mail announcing
a new book by an author he likes or on a subject he is particularly interested
in. He can also choose from 44 subjects, and he will be sent a monthly e-mail
reviewing books Amazon.com's editors consider particularly interesting.
Success magazine of July 1998 wrote "that Amazon.com is the universal model for
successful Internet retailing (a.k.a. 'e-tailing')." Computer Weekly of July 24,
1997, defined it as "undoubtedly the most quoted example of go-ahead electronic
commerce and still the showcase for Internet trading" and PC World of July 1997
stated: "In the summer of 1995, Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, decided to
risk it all on the Internet. They opened a cyberstore named Amazon.com [...].
Two years later [...] it's one of the World Wide Web's most successful small
businesses. Few who have braved the wilds of the Web have achieved
Amazon.com-style success."
Such success is explained by Jeff Bezos in Amazon.com's press kit:
"Our leadership position comes from our obsessive focus on customers. [...]
Customers want selection, ease of use, and the lowest prices. These are the
elements we work hard to provide. We continued to improve our customer
experience during the quarter [the second quarter 1998] with the opening of our
music store, our easier-to-navigate store layout, and our expansion into the
local U.K. and German book markets. These initiatives will continue to require
aggressive investment and entail significant execution challenges."
Amazon.com's press release of June 8, 1998, gives some information about its
Associates Program:
"The Amazon.com Associates Program allows web-site owners to easily participate
in hassle-free electronic commerce by recommending books on their site and
referring visitors to Amazon.com. In return, participants earn referral fees of
up to 15 percent of the sales they generate. Amazon.com handles the secure
on-line ordering, customer service, and shipping and sends weekly e-mail sales
reports. Enrollment in the program is free, and participants can be up and
running the same day.
Associates range from large and small businesses to nonprofits, authors,
publishers, personal home pages, and more. The popularity of the program is
reflected in the range of additions to the Associates Community in the past few
months: Adobe, InfoBeat, Kemper Funds, PR Newswire, Travelocity, Virtual
Vineyards, and Xoom."
The program surpassed 60,000 members in June 1998.
Barnes & Noble, the giant U.S. bookseller, is the leading operator of book
superstores in America, with 481 stores nationwide, in 48 states. It also
operates 520 B.Dalton bookstores in shopping malls. Barnes & Noble stores offer
a selection of more than 175,000 titles from more than 20,000 publishers with an
emphasis on small, independent publishers and university presses. The company
also publishes books under its own imprint for exclusive sale through its retail
stores and nationwide mail-order catalogs.
Barnes & Noble entered the world of on-line commerce in early 1997, launching
its America Online site in March 1997 - it is the exclusive bookseller to
America Online (AOL)'s more than 12 million subscribers - and launching its new
website, barnesandnoble.com, in May 1997. The site includes personalized content
recommendations from authors and editors, and more than 630,000 titles available
for immediate shipping, with deep discounts (30% off all in-stock hardcovers,
20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select titles and up to 90% off bargain
books). It has exclusive partnerships with more than 12,000 websites through its
Affiliate Network, including CNN Interactive, Lycos, and ZDNet.
On May 27, 1998, barnesandnoble.com launched a significantly enhanced version of
its e-commerce website. The new site features Express Lane one-click ordering, a
new design and navigation, improved book search capabilities and expanded
product offerings - including an on-line software superstore. In the press
release of the same day, Jeff Killeen, chief operating officer, stated:
"Through our first year in business we have listened intently to what our
customers have asked for and believe we have delivered a vastly superior product
based on those requests. [...] Innovation based on customer-focus has been the
hallmark of our success and we see our new site as proof-positive of our
commitment to be the leader in on-line bookselling and related products. We're
also extremely excited to have Intel, a leader in the technology products
category, open its SoftwareForPCs.com site at barnesandnoble.com."
The opening of barnesandnoble.com sparked a fierce price war in a low-margin
business. It now competes directly with the main on-line bookstore Amazon.com.
Because of this competition, Amazon.com came to be known as "Amazon.toast". Jeff
Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, doesn't fear the competition though. In Success of
July 1998, he told journalist Lesley Hazleton:
"The gap has increased rather than decreased. We went from $60 million
annualized sales revenue in May to $260 million by the end of the year, and from
340,000 customers to 1.5 million, 58 percent of them repeat customers - all that
in the context of 'Amazon.toast'. We're doing more than eight times the sales of
Barnes & Noble. And we're not a stationary target. We were blessed with a
two-year head start, and our goal is to increase that gap."
Located in United Kingdom, Internet Bookshop (iBS) is the largest on-line
bookstore in Europe. The main English bookstore Waterstone's also launched its
electronic bookstore, with a catalog of 1.4 million titles.
In Fall 1998, Chapters, the main Canadian bookseller, together with the daily
newspaper The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, opened their cyberbookstore
Chaptersglobe.com, "the on-line destination for Canadian book-lovers". A new
on-line bookstore is also expected from Bertelsmann, one of the largest media
companies in the world, with headquarters in Germany. The companies of the
Bertelsmann Group employ about 60,000 employees in more than 40 different
countries. The 300-plus independently operating firms are organized into five
divisions within an integrated leadership structure: books, entertainment,
Gruner & Jahr (publishing and printing house), industry, and multimedia.
There are also international suppliers of books and periodicals - like the two
Anglo-American companies Blackwell and Dawson - who work exclusively for
libraries and documentation services. Thanks to them, these organizations can
now avoid multiple orders and invoices, and they can also order foreign books
and periodicals without the complications related to ordering of documents
outside a country.
Based in Oxford (United Kingdom), Portland, Oregon, and New Jersey, Blackwell's
Book Services specialize in the supply of books and value added bibliographic
products and services to over 15,000 academic, research and special libraries in
over 120 countries around the world.
Dawson Information Services Group is Europe's largest journal subscription agent
and corporate and academic book supplier. It is also a main information services
group, providing resource acquisition and management services to libraries and
corporate research centers around the globe.
Old books are now being sold through the Web. For example, Paulus Swaen Old Maps
and Prints, run by Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, specializes in
maps, atlases and globes from the 16th-18th century. The stock of maps of all
parts of the world is produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius,
Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The company also
sells atlases, globes, travel books, Medieval manuscripts and playing cards.
Since November 1996, it offers an on-line Internet auction - twice per year, in
March and November - for old maps, prints, globes, travel books and medieval
manuscripts.
3.3. Digital Books
When he buys through an on-line bookstore, the customer can almost instantly
select, order and pay for the books he is interested in. The only delay is the
shipping of the books to his house, which can take anywhere from one week to
much longer.
The problem of delay - as well as the problem of weight - should be solved soon
with digital books - or eBooks. A digital book is a book-sized electronic reader
that can store many texts at once. Some pioneer companies have created digital
books which will be available in 1999 - such as the Rocket eBook (created by
NuvoMedia), the Everybook (EB) (created by Everybook), the SoftBook (created by
SoftBook Press) and the Millennium EBook (created by Librius.com).
Rocket eBook was set up by NuvoMedia, Palo Alto, California, founded in 1997,
and is dedicated to becoming *the* electronic book distribution solution by
providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users to
publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and
efficiently over the Web. Investors of NuvoMedia are Barnes & Noble and
Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the PC or the Macintosh
is made through the RocketEbook Cradle, which provides external power through a
wall transformer, and connects to the PC with a serial cable.
Everybook is "a living library in a single book". The Everybook (EB)'s mass
electronic storage is one removable disk cartridge which can hold 80-100 college
textbooks, or 500 to 1,000 novels. The EB uses a hidden modem to dial into the
Everybook Store, where it is possible to browse, purchase, and receive entire
publications, including cover art. Books, magazines, menus, sheet music all
appear as they would in their printed form.
Softbook Press is creating SoftBook®, along with the SoftBook Network™, an
Internet-based content delivery service, which provided a completely paperless
reading system. Professionals and students can easily, quickly and securely
download a wide selection of corporate documents, books, and periodicals using
its built-in Internet connection. Unlike a computer, the SoftBook is
ergonomically designed for reading long documents and books. Its publishing
partners are Random House and Simon & Schuster.
Librius is a full-service, e-commerce company. It delivers digital copies of
books to consumers via the Internet from its World Bookstore. The digital books
are stored and read by the consumer in a small, low-cost reading device, called
the Millennium EBook. Librius customers can obtain everything that they need to
become "digital readers" directly from the Librius Web site, including EBook
devices, thousands of book titles, and full customer support.
Digital books will not replace books, at least not in the very near future. They
will be a new support for publishers to deliver the books through the Internet
and for readers to store many texts in one digital support to be taken with
everywhere.
In our technological society, some people are attached to books whatever
happens, like Robert Downs who wrote in Books in My Life: "My lifelong love
affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and
all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."
For some other people, being convinced about how much can be brought by
electronic texts doesn't prevent them from loving books. In an article published
in the Swiss magazine Informatique-Informations of February 1996, Pierre
Perroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic texts
represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culture
dissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These texts
are "a good complement to the paper book, which remains irreplaceable when what
we are talking about is reading".
Pierre Perroud is convinced of the necessity to be kept closely informed of the
technological developments to adapt print media and education. Nevertheless the
book remains "a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we
grip it in our hands, we hold it against our bodies, we look at it with
admiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; its
fragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water and
fire, but it has the power to shelter man's thoughts from Time."
4. PUBLISHERS ON THE WEB
[In this chapter:]
[4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories / 4.2. Do Authors Still Need
Publishers? / 4.3. Electronic Publishing]
4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories
A number of publishers chose to put the full text of some of their titles on the
Web. There was no drop in the sales of these publications - on the contrary,
sales increased.
The National Academy Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences
to publish the reports issued by the Academy and by the National Academy of
Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The
NAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science,
engineering, and health, presenting the most authoritative views on important
issues in science and health policy.
The NAP Reading Room offers more than a thousand entire books, free for reading,
from the first page to the last, and available in a variety of versions,
including scanned pages in image format, hypertext HTML books, and as Adobe
Acrobat PDF files.
The MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is dedicated to
science and technology. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books a year and
over 40 journals, and is a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as
architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational
science, with a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new
technologies.
In the Project Gutenberg's Newsletter of October 1997, Michael Hart wrote:
"As university publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering
scholarly documents on-line, some early innovators are finding that making a
monograph available electronically can boost sales of hard copies. The National
Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its books on-line, and is finding that
the electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy
monographs - often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great
advertising', says the Press's director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar
results: 'For each of our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our
sales. The plain fact is that no one is going to sit there and read a whole book
on-line. And it costs money and time to download it'."
Some sites maintain a directory of publishers, for example, Publishing Companies
Online and Publishers' Catalogues.
Publishing Companies Online is the WWW Virtual Library list of publishing
companies, classified in the following categories: academic publishers; computer
book publishers; scientific, technical, medical (STM) publishers; electronic
publishing companies; on-line publishing projects; and other commercial
publishers.
Maintained by Peter Scott of Northern Lights Internet Solutions Ltd. in
Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada), Publishers' Catalogues has a very practical
geographical index.
4.2. Do Authors Still Need Publishers?
The Internet has considerably reinforced the relations between the authors and
their readers. In fact, do authors still need publishers? Thanks to the Web, a
writer can now post his work, sell it or discuss with his/her readers without
any intermediary.
Murray Suid is a free-lance writer of books (How to be President of the U.S.A.,
Moviemaking Illustrated, etc.), multimedia products (Oval Office, The Writing
Trek), and screenplays (Now, Moving to Mars). He is also vice president of
Monday Morning Books, an educational publishing company located in Palo Alto,
California. He replied to my questions in his e-mail of September 7, 1998:
ML: "How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?"