Produced by Al Haines

FROM THE PRINT MEDIA TO THE INTERNET

MARIE LEBERT

Editions 00h00, Paris, 1999 & NEF, University of Toronto, 2001

Copyright © 1999 Marie Lebert

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?"

MS: "For one thing, the Internet serves other print media. […] My recently published book, The Kids' How to Do (Almost) Everything Guide, would probably not have been done prior to the invention of e-mail because it would have cost too much in money/time to locate the experts. So the Internet is a powerful research tool for writers of books, articles, etc.

Also, in a time of great change, many 'facts' don't stay factual for long. In other words, many books go quickly out of date. But if a book can be web extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next edition ever came out.

Also, in terms of marketing, the Web seems crucial, especially for small publishers that can't afford to place ads in major magazines and on the radio. Although large companies continue to have an advantage, in Cyberspace small publishers can put up very competitive marketing efforts.

We think that paper books will be around for a while, because using them is habitual. Many readers like the feel of paper, and the 'heft' of a book held in the hands or carried in a purse or backpack. I haven't yet used a digital book, and I think I might prefer one - because of ease of search, because of color, because of sound, etc. Obviously, multimedia 'books' can be easily downloaded from the Web, and such books probably will dominate publishing in the future. Not yet though."

ML: "What did the Internet bring to your professional and personal life?"

MS: "Professionally, the Internet has become my major research tool, largely - but not entirely - replacing the traditional library and even replacing person-to-person research. Now, instead of phoning people or interviewing them face to face, I do it via e-mail.

Because of speed, it has also enabled me to collaborate with people at a distance, particularly on screenplays. (I've worked with two producers in Germany.)

Also, digital correspondence is so easy to store and organize, I find that I have easy access to information exchanged this way. Thus, e-mailing facilitates keeping track of ideas and materials.

As for personal uses, the Internet has increased my correspondence dramatically. Like most people, I find that e-mail works better than snail mail. My geographic range of correspondents has also increased - extending mainly to Europe. In the old days, I hardly ever did transatlantic pen-palling.

I also find that e-mailing is so easy, I am able to find more time to assist other writers with their work - a kind of a virtual writing group. This isn't merely altruistic. I gain a lot when I give feedback. But before the Internet, doing so was more of an effort."

ML: "How do you see see your future life - professional and personal - in connection with the Internet?"

MS: "I'm not very state-of-the-art so I'm not sure. I would like to have direct access to text - digitally read books in the Library of Congress, for example, just as now I can read back issues of many newspapers. Currently, while I can find out about books on-line, I need to get the books into my hands to use them. I would rather access them on-line and copy sections that I need for my work, whereas today I either have to photocopy relevant pages, or scan them in, etc.

I expect that soon I will use the Internet for video telephoning, and that will be a happy development.

I do not know if I will publish 'books' on the Web - as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop multimedia learning materials, and it's a form of teaching that I like a lot - blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and - when possible - interactivity)."

Esther Dyson is the president and owner of EDventure Holdings, a company focused on emerging information technology worldwide, and on the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe. The company produces the annual PC Forum and High-Tech Forum conferences. Since 1982 she has been the editor of Release 1.0, a monthly information newsletter which is considered the computer industry's most intellectual letter.

In 1997, her first book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age was published at the same time by several publishers in the world (Broadway in the United States, Viking/Penguin in the United Kingdom, Droemer Knaur in Germany, Shueisha in Japan, etc.). In this book, she explores the impact and implications of cyberspace: its effect on our daily lives, the responsibilities that come with our new powers, and the global issues the Internet creates. She also addresses the fundamental conflicts in the spread of digital communication: conflicts between personal privacy and society's interest in openness; between security and freedom; between commerce and community. At the same time, Esther Dyson opened a website to converse with her eaders. She will take her readers' comments into consideration in a paperback version, Release 2.1.

Jean-Paul, a musician and writer living in Paris, sent his comments in his e-mail of June 21, 1998:

"My future on the Web is more personal than professional. The Internet will allow me to do without any intermediaries: record companies, publishers, distributors… Above all it will allow me to formalize what I have in my head (and elsewhere), for which the print medium (micro-publishing, in fact) only allowed me to give something approximate. Then the intermediaries will take over, and I'll have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is greener…"

4.3. Electronic Publishing

Since the seventies, the traditional publishing chain has been drastically disrupted.

The printing work traditionally done by pre-press shops was first weakened by the introduction of photocomposition machines. The text and image processing work began to be executed by advertising agencies and graphic art studies. The impression costs went on decreasing with the spread of desktop publishing, copiers, color copiers and digital printing equipment.The text and image processing work is now provided at low price by desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios.

Furthermore, digitization accelerated the preparation process of a publication, because the sub-editor, the artistic designer and the staff responsible for the make-up can now work at the same time on the same book.

During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, Peter
Leisink, Associate Professor of Labour Studies at the Utrecht University,
Netherlands, explained:

"A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work."

Digitization makes possible the on-line publishing of educational and scientific publications, for which the latest information is essential. Some U.S. universities distribute specific textbooks gathering a selection of chapters selected in an extensive database and some professors' articles and commentaries. For a seminar, a very small print run can be prepared upon request with electronic scientific texts sent to a printer. Electronic publishing could also keep alive some academic publishers, and publishers issuing documents relating to very specific and specialized research, for which the printing of a document in a small number of copies has become more and more difficult for budgetary reasons.

At present, electronic publishing and "traditional" publishing - such as on-line bookstores and "traditional" bookstores, or cyberlibraries and "traditional" libraries - are complementary.

Even if electronic publishing considerably expands over the next few years, people will still find it convenient to have the paper version of a book or a magazine, perhaps until the digital books become really cheap. Nevertheless, the functions of traditional publishing will certainly have to be thoroughly redefined in relation to the development of electronic publishing and its considerable prospects, beginning with the low costs and the quick access to documents.

The Web has developed more and more interaction between the printed document and the electronic document, to such an extent that it becomes difficult to establish a frontier between the two supports, and it will probably no longer be necessary to make a distinction between them in the future. Most of the recent print media already stem from an electronic version on a word processor, a spreadsheet or a database. More and more documents are "only" electronic. Because of the development of digital libraries, there are fewer documents available in print. Those documents existing only in a print version can easily be scanned if necessary.

In his article The Future of Publishing, Kushal Dave, an avid computer and modem user and a high school freshman, stated:

"[…] the fully electronic document is coming into its own, thanks to the many benefits it provides. The cost is a magnitude lower than paper, while the speed is much higher. Michael Hart is the executive director of Project Gutenberg […]. In an electronic mail dialogue, he cited the example of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland. Not taking into account the cost of a computer (as little as $1000) since most people have them anyway, a copy of the book on floppy might cost a dollar. There is also no time spent publishing the document, once it's in e-text (electronic text) form it can be gotten almost instantly. On the other hand the cheapest possible paper copy of the book would be $5 because of the cost of printing, and printing would also delay its availability to the public. Electronic documents also have a better availability, since they can be reproduced infinitely and do not require leaving your house, thanks to low-cost modems. Furthermore, it is now possible to read Associated Press Reports as they are released, not in the next morning's paper, and you don't even have to pay the 25 cents. Cost, speed, and availability are just some of the compelling arguments for electronic publishing instead of paper.

Another advantage of electronic publishing is all the new possibilities it provides. Just about anybody can electronically publish anything. […] Karin L. Trgovac, director of communications for Project Gutenberg, sums it up by saying, 'I think electronic publishing helps to level the field in terms of who can publish. Look at the range of people who have access.'

Fortunately, the increased variety of the documents does nothing to impede searches for particular documents. Services like Gopher on the Internet can lead you in the right direction, and within a document, searching is a snap. Just type in what you want and before you could find the index in a paper document, you'll have found what you want.

Thanks to feedback and other features, electronic documents are an example of the encroachment of interactivity upon the passive activities we hold dear. […] 'Physical media just can't compete . . . [electronic text] just offers more 'bang for the buck', explains Hart.[…]

There are also many companies attempting to capitalize on the multimedia possibilities of electronic publishing. Sound and pictures are being incorporated in low-cost Internet World Wide Web 'publications', and companies like Medio and Nautilus are producing CD-ROMs that represent the new generation of periodicals - now music reviews include sound clips, movie reviews include trailers, book reviews include excerpts, and how-to articles include demonstrative videos. All this is put together with low costs, high speed, and many advantages."

Kushal answered my questions in his e-mail of September 1, 1998:

ML: "How do you see the relationship between the print media and the Internet?"

KD: "This is still being worked out, of course. So far, all I've been able to see is that electronic media undermines the print form in two ways: a) providing completely alternative presses that draw attention away from the previous strongholds and b) forcing the print publications to spend resources trying to counteract this trend. Both forms of media critique one another and proclaim their superiority. Print media operates under a self-important sense of credibility. And the electronic media operates under a belief that they are the only purveyors of unbiased truth. Thus, there are issues of niche and finance that need to be resolved. The Internet is certainly a more accessible and convenient medium, and thus it would be better in the long run if the strengths of the print media could be brought on-line without the extensive costs and copyright concerns that are concomitant. As the transition is made, the neat thing is a growing accountability for previously relatively unreproachable edifices. For example, we already see e-mail addresses after articles in publications, allowing readers to pester authors directly. Discussion forums on virtually all major electronic publications show that future is providing not just one person's opinion but interaction with those of others as well. Their primary job is the provision of background information. Also, the detailed statistics can be gleaned about interest in an advertisement or in content itself will force greater adaptability and a questioning of previous beliefs gained from focus groups. This means more finely honed content for the individual, as quantity and customizability grows."

ML: "What did the use of the Internet bring in your professional/personal life?"

KD: "The Internet has certainly been a distraction. ;) But beyond that, an immeasurable amount of both trivial and pertinent information has been gleaned in casual browsing sessions. […]"

ML: "How do you see your professional/personal future or the future in general with the Internet?"

KD: "In my personal future, I'd like to get a B.S., M.S., and M.Eng, working in the industry for a while before moving on to write about the medium for some reputable publication. The future of the Internet in general I see as becoming more popular and yet more fraught with conflict over the growth of commercialism and the perception that the Net's devolutionary spirit has been undermined. There will also be a need to deal with a glut of information - already we see Internet search engines reinventing themselves to try to provide a more optimal and efficient portal."

Concerning taxation, an outline agreement was concluded between the United States and the European Union in December 1997, and this agreement should be followed by an international convention. Internet is considered as a free trade area, that is to say without any custom duties for software, films and electronic books bought on the Internet. The material goods and other services are subject to the existing regulations, with collection of the VAT for example, without any additional custom duties.

It has not yet been statistically proved that the large-scale use of computers and electronic documents will save paper, and therefore avoid or at least reduce the cutting of trees, as hoped by all those concerned by environmental problems. We are still in a transition period in which many people still need to print to read "better", or to keep track of a document in case the electronic file is accidentally deleted, or to have a paper support for their documentation or their archives.

Apart from its easy access and its low cost, the main quality of the electronic document is that, when it is regularly updated, the Internet user can benefit from the latest version. It is not necessary to wait for a new printed edition linked to commercial constraints and requirements from the publisher.

5. ON-LINE PRESS

[In this chapter:]

[5.1. On-line Press: Examples and Directories / 5.2. Future Trends for the On-line Press]

5.1. On-Line Press: Examples and Directories

Before the Web became widespread, the first electronic versions of newspapers were available through commercial services like America Online or CompuServe. Then the publishers of these newspapers created web servers. Numerous newspapers and magazines now have their sites on which they offer the full version of their latest issue - available freely or through subscription (free or paid) - and some dossiers and archives. Other on-line newspapers and magazines did not originally exist in paper version. They are "only" electronic. Everywhere in the world, the future of the on-line press is provoking an in-depth debate on the job of journalist and on copyright problems.

The New York Times' website can be accessed free of charge around the world. It includes the daily contents of The New York Times newspaper, breaking news updates every ten minutes and original reporting found only on the Web. The site of the Los Angeles Times will soon be equipped with a machine translation software provided by Alis Technologies which will translate the web pages into Spanish and French, and later into Japanese. The Washington Post gives the daily news on-line, and has a full database of articles, with images, sound and video.

In the United Kingdom, the Times and the Sunday Times have a common website, with the possibility to create a personalized edition. The Economist, a respected English economic magazine, is also available on-line, as are the French daily newspapers Le Monde and Libération, the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais or the German weekly magazines Focus or Der Spiegel, among many others.

The computer press on-line includes the monthly Wired, created in 1992 in California, a cult magazine which was the first to be dedicated to cyberculture and now wants to be the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century. ZDNet is the site of the main publisher of computer magazines in the world.

Some magazines are "only" electronic, like the Chroniques de Cybérie. In The New
York Times of November 25, 1997, Bruno Giussani explained:

"Almost no one in the United States has ever heard of Jean-Pierre Cloutier, yet he is one of the leading figures of the French-speaking Internet community. For the last 30 months Cloutier has written one of the most intelligent, passionate and insightful electronic newsletters available on the Internet […] an original mix of relevant Internet news, clear political analysis and no-nonsense personal opinions. It was a publication that gave readers the feeling that they were living 'week after week in the intimacy of a planetary revolution'."

Several sites maintain directories of the international press.

AJR/NewsLink is a joint venture between American Journalism Review magazine and NewsLink Associates, an academic and professional research and consulting firm studying electronic publishing and visual journalism worldwide. The site includes features from AJR magazine, the worldwide on-line publication lists of NewsLink - 8,000 links to newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and news services - and original content created especially for on-line readers.

Run by Oxbridge Communications Inc., MediaFinder is a major database of print media and catalogs. It is also a transactional service center, offering the ability to request subscriptions, advertising and list rental rates-for over 95,000 magazines, catalogs, newsletters, newspapers, and more.

Pathfinder is the website of TIME-Warner Group, publisher of TIME Magazine, Sports illustrated, Fortune, People, Southern Living, Money, Sunset, etc., with a free search function of articles by time period (last week, last month, or all).