TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/051892/0518310.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6KB | 121 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 69

Read a Good PowerBook Lately?


Publishers are discovering the virtues of paperless novels. But
will readers curl up to a computer screen?

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT


    The hard-cover book is a pretty venerable piece of
technology. The letters on the page are descended from movable
type pioneered by Johanes Gutenberg in the 1400s. The paper is
not all that different from papyrus used by the Pharaohs. Books
today may be written with word processors, but they are still
printed in ink, bound with thread and delivered essentially by
hand.

    Computer enthusiasts have long predicted that the digital
revolution would soon liberate the word from the printed page
and put it directly on the screen. In the past decade, hundreds
of reference books -- including such well-known titles as
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Roget's Thesaurus -- have
appeared in electronic form. But when it comes to literature,
the electronic-publishing movement has run into resistance from
both readers and publishers. As inevitable as the paperless book
may seem, neither group could quite imagine sitting down to read
Faulkner, Fielding or Flaubert on a computer.

    So it was something of a breakthrough last week when
Harold Evans, president of Random House, and John Sculley,
chairman of Apple Computer, met in a New York City boardroom and
announced that titles from one of America's most famous book
series, the Modern Library, will be published in electronic
form. Among the first to be issued on disk are Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury, Melville's Moby Dick and Dickens' David
Copperfield. The disks, priced below $25, are designed to run
on Apple's portable PowerBook computers, which are widely
considered to be more reader-friendly than IBM-type laptops.

    The PowerBook packs the features of a Macintosh into a
machine the size and weight of a dictionary. But driving the new
venture is a bit of magic performed by programmers at Voyager,
a Santa Monica, Calif., software company, that makes the
experience of reading a book on a screen amazingly close to
reading it on paper. "It's the first thing I've seen that I
could curl up in bed with," says Nora Rawlinson, editor in chief
of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

    Voyager's software displays the text on clean white pages
that replicate the design of the hardback rather than using the
scrolling strings of text so familiar to computer users. A touch
of a button turns the page or allows the reader to flip back
and forth. Users can dog-ear the corner of a page to mark their
place, or attach an electronic paper clip for easy reference.
Passages can be underscored or marked on the side, and there are
generous margins for putting down notes.

    The computer also brings benefits not offered by ordinary
books: a backlit screen that permits reading in a darkened
bedroom without disturbing a spouse, the option of enlarging the
type to reduce eyestrain, the ability to copy passages onto a
"notebook" page, and a search feature that displays occurrences
of any chosen word, name or phrase. This last option could prove
handy for, say, recalling the identity of an obscure Dostoyevsky
character who suddenly reappears after 100 pages.

    Other firms are working on similar products. Microsoft has
published dozens of electronic reference books for
IBM-compatible computers. The Slate Corp., an Arizona-based
software vendor, has developed software that lets people flip
through the pages of an electronic book by flicking a stylus
across a touch-sensitive screen. And Booklink, a Florida-based
start-up, is designing a notebook-size reading device that could
be loaded with digitized books from a cash machine-type
dispenser that would serve as an electronic library. By
eliminating distribution and warehousing costs, Booklink's
backers think they can make classics available for as little as
$1 or $2 a title.

    Elegant as these products may be, there is no guarantee
that even those readers who own the necessary equipment will
want to use it for reading novels. If anything, the new
paperless books are reminders of how good real books are. As
Denise Caruso, editor of the newsletter Digital Media, points
out, books are everything that everyone wants the new electronic
media to be: portable, intensely personal and highly
interactive.

    Will readers give up the feel of paper and the smell of
ink for a machine whose batteries have to be recharged every
three hours? "The great power of the printed book is that it
requires no techology; it is accessible to anyone who can read,"
admits Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress and a
member of the Modern Library editorial board. Initially at
least, the market for computer books will probably be among
students and scholars, who can use the electronic features to
do productive work, rather than those simply reading for
pleasure.

    Ultimately, it may be the economics of publishing, not the
aesthetics, that determine what shape literature will take.
Fiber-optic wires and data-compression techniques make it
possible to deliver books -- as well as magazines and newspapers
-- over telephone or cable-TV lines. In the future, readers may
select what they want to read from a menu of titles and have
their choices zapped almost instantly to their portable
machines. Old-fashioned books will probably never be entirely
displaced, but as the cost of digital information continues to
fall, and the environmental and production costs of paper keep
rising, the pleasure of buying and reading a new hardbound
volume may someday be limited to the few who can still afford
it.