*** From the Archives ***
This article is from July 21, 2000, and is no longer current.
For Position Only: Looking for Books in All the Wrong Places
I conducted a little experiment this morning. There’s a book I’ve been wanting to read for ages — Lithium for Medea, by Kate Braverman — but I haven’t been able to find it, not in the library, not in the local bookstores, not online. When I got the “This title is out of print” message the last time I checked at Amazon.com, I dropped my pursuit.
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about e-books, especially print-on-demand books, and how they have the potential to bring millions of out-of-print books back into circulation. As you may or may not recall, a few months ago I used this space to wax eloquently about how e-books aren’t ready for prime time. What set me off back then was Stephen King’s just-released e-book, Riding the Bullet, which struck me as a pompous publicity stunt. Although I still have reservations about the resolution and legibility of handheld e-book readers, I’m open-minded, time has passed, and I admit I had a visceral reaction: I may be a snob but I’m proud to say I’ve never read anything Stephen King has written and probably never will — whether it’s printed in ink or published in pixels.
Still, I’ve begun to come around to the idea of e-books, because they promise to transform the publishing industry in profoundly positive ways. In addition to being able to keep books in print, they dissolve economic barriers and allow a new genre of writing and a new class of authors to emerge. E-books and print-on-demand books are the perfect format for novellas, essays, research papers, and other works that are nearly impossible to sell to traditional publishers; they democratize a traditionally monopolistic industry.
So this morning I got to thinking: Let’s see if e-books are really “there” yet. Let’s see if I can find a print-on-demand version of my out-of-print book.
Not This Time
I started my search at Amazon.com. Amazon.com hasn’t been hyping e-books the way Barnes & Noble has, but I’d rather support an independent bookseller (albeit virtual and seller of more than just books), as well as a pioneering dot-com. Also, I wanted to make sure the book wasn’t miraculously back in print, which it’s not.
Although Amazon.com was kind enough, as usual, to offer to query its network of used bookstores and send me an update within a couple of weeks, it didn’t have to: I got a handful of hits at Amazon’s zShops, as well as one copy on the auction block. Great! At last I’d found not one but multiple copies of the Lithium. The Internet came though with the real McCoy, so I began to wonder who needs print-on-demand books after all?
I do. I don’t want an expensive and heavy hardcover book, not even a signed first edition; I don’t want to buy from a bookshop or individual I’ve never heard of; and I’m not into bidding. Ultimately, I really just want what print on demand has to offer: a simple, bound soft-cover book that I can’t tell from a mass-market paperback in terms of price or quality.
I clicked over to Barnes & Noble, where I found a few dozen more used hardback copies in the Rare, Second-Hand, and Out-of-Print section. Although one copy listed was at Black Oak Books in Berkeley and I was tempted to hop in the car and drive across the Bay Bridge to support one of the world’s greatest independent bookstores, I still didn’t want to cough up $65.
Then I struck out at Barnes & Noble’s eBooks store and at all of the other e-book publishing sites I could think to visit: iUniverse.com, FatBrain.com(which I checked for good measure, even though they’re a technical book publisher), MightyWords.com, Rocket eBook, Electric Umbrella, RoxyBooks.com, and SoftBook Press (Actually, the SoftBook store didn’t have a search engine and I wasn’t willing to page through an alphabetical listing of 759 books to find Lithium, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t there). The selection was a hodge-podge of expensive classics and bestsellers. You can get any Mary Higgins Clark mystery from SoftBook Press, for example, but they’re $8 each (compared to $6 for a mass-market paperback at Amazon.com). You can’t beat $1.95 for an e-book version of “Wuthering Heights” at Barnes & Noble — it’s cheaper than the cheapest paperback ($2.00) — but if you don’t already have Emily Bronte on your bookshelf, the library is still a better option.
Future Bound
I didn’t really expect to be successful in my search, or for this nascent industry to have published a relatively obscure 1979 work of literary fiction (black-and-white inside pages printed on a Xerox DocuTech and a four-color cover produced on a Heidelberg QuickMaster-DI, perfect-bound, thank you very much), but I was still disappointed. Only MightyWords.com, with an interesting selection of inexpensive and self-published “eMatter,” as well as a stylish and professional site, tempted me to order and download some printable PDF “books.”
My little experiment did convince me of one thing, however: In the future I want to be able to go to an online bookstore, request any modern work of fiction or nonfiction (I’ll go to Octavo for rare or old texts), and have the book delivered to my doorstep later the same day (because it will be produced on-demand by a local printer). Or, when e-books really offer an onscreen reading experience as good as paper, my book order will be instantly downloaded to my computer or portable reading device. The bookseller will automatically debit my credit card (or whatever e-currency we use at the time), and it will be no more expensive than a regular paperback.
Hmm. It looks like the Penguin Books edition of Later the Same Day, by Grace Paley, takes 4 to 6 weeks to be delivered by Amazon.com. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
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E-books are just a new form of media. I prefer a paperback edition of most of the books I read (usually computer books) because I like to highlight the text and write notes in it. But, just as some people prefer the evening news on the television, where others prefer the newspaper, it just depends on your own style and the purpose you purchased the book for. As a college student, it would have been great if I could have purchased my textbooks at a much reduced price as well as weighing way less than a hardback edition of a textbook. Also updates of textbooks would happen much sooner. I just hope the prices don’t go up on either media too much. Anyway, wanted to let you know that your book is available in paperback from http://www.powells.com for $7.95. They are located here in Portland, Oregon and are the largest reseller of used books on the west coast. I have purchased from them online myself as they have a database accessing all of their stores and the shipping was pretty reasonable. Thanks for your informative articles!
I can remember sitting in a presentation hosted by local Macintosh dealers 12 years ago, at which we watched a video depicting future uses of computers in our daily lives. One image that stayed with me over these many years is that of a man sitting on a park bench who appears to be reading a book. The book, in fact, is a computer, and he is interacting with it, highlighting sections, getting definitions and pronunciations for words and so forth. It was demonstrating the personal computer’s future purposes in literacy training and electronic publishing, and the interactivity of both.
Just look at the ads we saw over Christmas for products like Leap Frog for children. It is very close to the kind of technology I witnessed in this video 12 years ago. E-publishing and on-line reading is a growing business, and will continue to gain momentum. Perhaps we won’t see the rapid spikes in growth that we did in the dot-com fad of the late 90’s, but that’s fine. Slow and steady growth makes for longer-term success.
Once again, hats off for another insightful article.