For a lot of years, I have attended the general meetings and Sigs (Special
Interest Groups) of this organization, NYPC, the New York Personal Computer club,
and many other technical and computer expos and seminars. I am a
meeting-and-convention-goer in other fields as well, such as the
publishing/writing industry. As a result, about three years ago, I became
very aware of vast changes that had been and were continuing to take place in
both fields. I knew a little about digital printing; I knew a lot more about
the travails of authors (myself included) trying to deal with the traditional
publishers. So the thought came to me: there's got to be a better way for
authors. And of course there was - and is.
Aside from the great poet, Walt Whitman, and a few others, professional journalists and authors do not turn to the vanity press. To self-publish, which many authors are choosing to do these days, takes a fair amount of money and a considerable amount of marketing know-how. But aaahhh, there's a few "new kids on the block" - print-on-demand publishers and ebooks. In print-on-demand, anyone at all can get a book into print without a large monetary expenditure. And one of the beauties of the new paradigms is that it is good for anyone at all. In other words, you do not have to be a writer to get into print. For instance --
Want to leave a memoir for your children? Want to compile your recipes into a large or small book? Do you have a bunch of fishing experiences to give as a birthday gift book foe your grandchild? Or maybe, you have notebooks full of jokes that would be fun to put into book form for a family get-together. All of these and literally thousands of other ideas for books for non-writers are now a real live reality for you whatever your age, skill or financial status. The computer, the Internet and other electronic developments, have given every one of us a means of self-expression.
And if you are a writer, joy! What has happened is fast becoming the reality of many writers' dreams: the ability to have some control over the product of their talent, even for books with a very limited market. You may have heard of some of these new players. For instance, there is Replica & XLibris (part of a very large distributor, Baker & Taylor) which has wonderful library distribution; FatBrain.com in California which is offering famous writers large advance money for writing small commentaries on our Bill of Rights; NetLibrary which is doing print-on-demand for libraries; ViviBooks in Rockland County, NY which is a smaller outfit but part of an actual digital printing firm; Lightning Print (part of another large distributor, Ingram) that does a lot of the digital printing for other companies; Sprout which is connected with Borders Bookstores; iUniverse that is 49% owned by Barnes & Noble. And these are just a few; others are springing up as we write. The book business is huge - 24.02 billion dollars of total publishers sales for 1999 in the United States alone! Clearly, this will grow and grow with the new print-on-demand situation and with ebooks.
To get back to my own experience. I had been having a very rough time getting a few books published - and believe me, they are good, good, good! Other writers, too, have had the same problem. The rejections have had nothing to do with the quality of the books. They have been based upon peculiar market considerations. Parenting books - too many on the market; inspirational books - too many on the shelves now; important book on cancer, one by a friend went to 29 publishers - she is not a celebrity, every single publisher told her agent; a how-to book accompanied by funny cartoons - can't mix humor and service; a book on mental health - you do not have a platform was the common answer!
This type of reasoning finally hit me hard. As a writer, I'm used to rejection. But I will never be used to narrow, limiting, illogical thinking and so I began a search. I am a long-time member of an organization I love, the American Society of Journalists and Authors. And a year ago, I formed an ad hoc Publishing Committee within that organization to explore ways that we as writers could benefit from the revolution starting in publishing. It became a great committee with every one contributing a lot of work, ideas, supportiveness, diplomatic know-how - and time. The latter was very important. We (my committee and I) as we explored the whole situation became dedicated crusaders - and most of our Board of Directors had heard not a word about this new thing! Plus when they did hear a little, some became opposed! Wow! What a situation.
ASJA's current President (a California resident who writes about computers!), Sam Greengard, did his own diplomatic best to keep the program alive and working to the benefit of ASJA writers. There were a lot of ups and downs.
But now, finally, a year later, ASJA and iUniverse have signed a contract which was announced at our Members' Meeting on April 28th at the New York Hilton. For the first time, a writers' organization will be bringing new manuscripts, our own line of books on writing as well as books out of print into existence electronically, and in actual soft cover printed form. IUniverse, in our opinion, will give us very strong marketing help and other benefits (not to be disseminated). We will, for the first time, have some say over title, cover, design of our own books. And we will be able to work on marketing our own books as never before. Of course, this is still an experiment. And we know that the amounts of money to be made (even with a much better royalty return than traditional publishers) are likely to be small. But at last, the least of us will have a platform, a published voice and a feeling of achievement and pride that is very hard to come by in traditional publishing these days. DEPARTMENT OF
One day, standing in a Barnes & Noble store, I noticed a sort-of book-sized object that had a screen. I walked over and realized that this was one of those ebooks I'd heard about. And almost turned away. After all, who in their right mind would want to read a book on an electronic screen? As someone with a huge library of books, I felt even more anti-the ebook phenomenon. Still, my curiosity overcame me and I tried it out. And fell in love!
The reading was so much easier than I had imagined. The font size can be enlarged, enormously if you like, with the touch of a button. The touch of another button and you can search for something you want to see. You can read a page or two and come back later to the same spot. Ten or twelve books can be loaded on this little machine. The machine weighs 1½ pounds. Nirvana! The cost at that time, however, was $350.00. Not for me.
Now, this Rocket eBook costs around $200. And the aim is to reduce the weight to one pound and to reduce the cost to $100.00. At present, there is only one other company that makes this type of book, SoftBook.com. That machine weighs more and costs more, but offers other items as well.
I really can say no more about these devices, since neither company had any in stock to send me for evaluation purposes! And I do not review anything I haven't tried. But I did have that one experience in Barnes & Noble and wanted to tell you about it. Obviously, there will be a column update about this new development.
In a previous column, I wrote about a small item called CardScan. Now they have sent me the latest software - and it is fabulous. As you may or may not remember, CardScan is just what its name is - the machine scans business cards into your computer. All items can be exported to Outlook and still remain in CardScan. And wonder of wonders, if you categorize a card in the CardScan format, and then export it to Outlook's Contacts List, it will come out with the new category intact! Cool. And another wonder: you can put the name, etc. in as many categories as you like! As an inveterate collector of business cards that I can never find again, this will change my life. Another item I truly love!
@ Copyright 2000 Shirley Camper Soman