E-Books: A Fantasy Come True?

Has the electronic book finally arrived? Perhaps so, judging from the overwhelming demand for Stephen King's e-book, Riding the Bullet.  However, in a fledgling market where most individual electronic titles have only sold a few hundred copies, the true test of the e-book's commercial viability may come from midlist authors, those writers who don't have the big publicity and marketing muscle of a Stephen King but who, by publishing and selling consistently over the years, have built a large base of loyal readers. Authors like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

Well known for her popular vampire St. Germain series, Yarbro is taking her first step into the brave new world of digital publishing with Magnificat, a 635-page metaphysical thriller that is being released only as an e-book by a new press, Hidden Knowledge. Already available in downloadable PDF (looks like the page of a printed book) and HTML (plain running text) formats from the publisher's web site (http://www.hidden-knowledge.com), the novel will also be issued in May on CD-ROM with the same formats.

A spirit of experimentation

"Mike [Michael Ward, Hidden Knowledge's publisher and the author's old friend] and I did this e-book in a spirit of experimentation, to see what was possible," said Yarbro in a phone interview from her home in California. A motivating factor in the decision to publish the novel in an electronic format was, ironically, its 600-page length. Yarbro had actually finished the book in 1991 and sent it to a number of publishers, many of whom were nervous about its length and touchy subject matter (the Roman Catholic Church). Unable to sell it, Yarbro put the manuscript away until a year ago when Ward asked if he could publish it as an e-book.

"The big houses felt Quinn's book was too chancy, partly because it crossed a number of genres and partly because of the high production costs involved with its length," explained Ward, who spent the last 15 years in the computer, printing, and publishing industries before starting Hidden Knowledge. "But production costs for e-books are not an issue because they are the same whether the book is 50 or 500 pages. For a small press, it's a solid win."

Before committing to any more joint electronic projects, Yarbro, who retains the e-rights to most of her backlist, and Ward are waiting to see what kind of interest Magnificat generates in the next six months. In particular, Yarbro is interested in finding out if the results will convince print publishers to take a chance on her book. (Yarbro retained the print rights while selling the digital to Ward.) Still, the author is realistic about the possibility of failure. "If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But at least my book will be accessible online. I would rather have Magnificat available to readers as an e-book than not at all."

In an age when the shelf life of a print book has shrunk to nanoseconds, Yarbro and Ward say the ability to make titles readily available gives digital publishing a big advantage over traditional publishing. Because e-publishers don't have to worry about the printing, warehousing, and distribution costs associated with print, they can afford to maintain their backlists (the bread-and-butter of midlist writers like Yarbro) and reactivate out-of-print titles.

"There are a lot of wonderful fantasies that sank like stones when they were first published in the 1970s and 1980s," commented Yarbro. "With e-books, there's a chance to get these into the hands of readers who otherwise would have to spend a small fortune in the o.p. market."

Copyright fears

Despite her enthusiasm for the new medium, Yarbro is nervous about possible copyright infringement, noting that the proliferation of web sites, and users, makes monitoring much more difficult. "The reality of the Internet means publishing becomes automatically worldwide," she said. "In fact, one of the earliest downloads that Mike did was to a customer in Malta."

Ward takes a more pragmatic view. "We have to balance the rights of the author with making it a pleasant experience for the customer. If you make it difficult for him to download a book, he is going to go away."

In deciding how to sell Yarbro's book, he followed the model that software companies use, in which a customer is given a passward to install the software. Unlike the King novella, which was secured so that readers could download it but not print copies from their computers or e-mail the text to others, buyers of Magnificat are allowed to print out a copy or put a copy on another computer such as a laptop. "It's very expensive and intrusive to install an elaborate encryption infrastructure in an application like this, [so] we have to depend on the honor of most people."

Both Yarbro and Ward are excited about the e-book's potential impact on the way books are published and marketed. Ward predicts greater variety as more small presses get into the business, no longer hampered by traditional costs and able to publish for a much narrower audience.

Typifying this new diversity is Hidden Knowledge, which Ward is modeling as an academic, digital version of Dover Books. For now, he is producing four e-books a year in the areas of history, philosophy, travel, and bibliophilia. His first list is an eclectic mix of obscure but interesting titles, some plucked out of the public domain and brought back into print.

For Yarbro, the e-book will break down the blockbuster mentality of traditional publishing, forcing houses to think on a per order basis, as they did in the 19th century. She also foresees the electronic market loosening the increasingly stringent genre perception in standard publishing that makes it difficult to sell novels that defy categorization -- like Magnificat. "These are not boxes of cornflakes," she exclaimed. "These are books!"