The Web, as I saw it, held out yet other possibilities for local papers such as the N & O. Suppose you lived in Chapel Hill and wanted to see what news had happened there in the past 24 hours; you could click on a map of the Raleigh area and behold a story list from your town. Neighborhood-level submaps could show still more. You could read the most minor tidbits—for example, new requests for zoning changes or items from neighborhood newsletters. Even more helpful, you could find old stories and other background information. Let’s say you were shopping for a condo on a certain street. You might think the neighborhood was safe—Chapel Hill is a university town, remember—but learn that many crimes had occurred nearby. Furthermore, you could adjust the kind of information that you summoned from the Web. For example, you could see lists of houses for sale in a neighborhood and then retrieve their photos along with audio sales presentations. Moving on to another information category, you could uncover lists of nearby stores or see test scores from the closest elementary school. And you might even see ads from nearby restaurants and click on them to order.

The food-related examples weren’t entirely hypothetical; Zonker Harris pointed me toward me some mock ads from Hardee’s and a chain called Little Caesar’s Pizza. The same business principles I discussed in chapter 2 applied here. Rather than planning to inflict vast quantities of material on the unwilling, the N & O made the ads useful and entertaining. Elsewhere in the N & O area I saw an ad for a computer dealer, among others, but the real triumph was the area from Mammoth Records—with home pages for bands, promo photos, discographies, tour dates, album covers, and more, including a catalogue and, yes, free samples.

But what about the economics of all this? Via an electronic edition the N & O wouldn’t collect the fifty cents it charged per hard copy issue, but it wouldn’t have to buy newsprint and distribution services. That was how George Schlukbier hoped the newspaper would turn a profit eventually. The electronic activities, although not yet profitable as a whole, were coming along. People on the Net, for example, were calling up the pages within the N & O’s area several hundred thousand times a week. A page was what you saw when you clicked the mouse to call up an item, and each page could be just a few lines of information, or go on for a number of screens. Zonker Harris expected that by the end of 1994 as many people would be dialing up the N & O as called up SunSite UNC, the popular collection of files at the University of North Carolina. Readers retrieved Mammoth Record’s pages some 35,000 times a week. That didn’t mean 35,000 people—there was plenty of repeat business, and of course the same people looked at more than one page—but the numbers looked good as a start.

Just who, however, was reading the Web areas of the N & O and other Internet publications? The Washington Post and many other dailies had chosen to avoid the Net for the moment because they thought that the right people weren’t there. And some marketers and journalists tried to reinforce such arguments by citing a study of 4,777 Web readers by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ninety-four percent were men, and 56 percent were 21-30 years old—almost half were students or faculty members or had other university ties. “These are hardly the type of people to make large consumer or business purchases,” a San Francisco Chronicle story observed. The experience of JoAnn and Bob Lilienfeld, as recounted in chapter 2, showed that riches would not automatically come to merchants on the Web. And yet the potential was there. The Web readers uncovered by the institute weren’t charity cases—just yups. Studying the readers of the Baseball server, the N & O found they were a long way from poverty. Twenty percent of these Netfolks, for example, earned $35,000-$50,000 a year, 18 percent earned $50,000-$75,000, and 4 percent earned more than $75,000. And, of course, many of these Netfolks were young people who would carry their Net habit over to their jobs and their personal lives. Not surprisingly, Schlukbier claimed keen interest from representatives of companies such as J.C. Penney and Radio Shack, and, of course, from fast-food chains, which, in so many cases, targeted their ads at the young.

Cleverly the N & O built on existing relationships with advertisers. If you were already on the paper and bought X number of lines, then you could get the Net as a bonus. North Carolina businesses paid as little as $50 a month in basic fees to be in the N & O’s area on the Net, not including add-ons such as design services. Big national firms would pay well into the thousands. Given the newness of the medium, this would scare off many—unless, like the N & O itself, they saw the Net as an investment in the future. Then the experiment might work. In my mind, however, there was one other variable: What about national publications competing with local papers for the same national advertisers? Already Time Warner and the N & O were watching each other carefully.

Typing away on Macintoshes on the fortieth floor of the Time Life Building in Manhattan, ten floors above People magazine, a small team started an area of the Web known as Pathfinder. It offered electronic versions of Time Warner’s vast stable of magazines. Zonker Harris at the N & O had a slogan, “May the best server win.” The Durham newspapers might not be in the game so far, but Time and brethren were.

Zonker was justifiably proud of the 300,000 or so accesses a week that the N & O’s Web area was enjoying after several months on the Web. But just within a week of start-up in fall 1994, the Time Warner area was drawing more than 80,000 accesses a day. That didn’t mean that the N & O’s efforts were doomed—hardly. But despite all the talk about the Net being nirvana for smaller companies, Fortune 500 corporations arrived with some advantages of their own. Once readers grew comfortable with a certain area of the Web, they might spend less time on other parts of the Net. This wasn’t so much a pattern at the time, but as mass audiences descended on the Net, corporate logos might count far more. Beyond that, Time Warner already offered a daily version of Time—a newspaper in effect. It was just one service among a rackfull of publications. Readers could read up on foreign policy or the latest Star Trek film in Time, take in reviews from Entertainment Weekly, keep up with Ice-T and other hip-hop musicians in Vibe, or fire off questions to authors of best-sellers from Warner Books.

An even greater threat to the N & O, in the long run, was the fact that Time Warner didn’t just own magazines and book publishers. It also owned pipes, including a cable operation in the Raleigh area. And someday it might use cable TV lines to send the Net into homes there, competing with the N & O, which had already been providing Internet services. If no antitrust or other legal boundaries existed, then Time Warner would be remiss in its duties to its stockholdersstockholders if it did not explore this route. Think what this would mean to users of the World Wide Web. If an article came with fancy photos, they might have to wait several minutes for the whole works to reach them at a speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. But suppose Time Warner used cable TV to bring the Internet to them. Their televisions would still work with cable the usual way. But their computers could share the cable and retrieve Web articles and other material in a fraction of the time. Cable modems sold for hundreds of dollars. But pilot projects were going on with other companies, and the cost could soon drop to a fraction of that amount. More important, big, well-financed corporations might be willing to modify the old cable for these new capabilities.^[4.15] What did this mean for local, N & O-sized companies? Just as high tech had blurred the difference between telephones and televisions, the Net itself was blurring the barriers between local and national. It was unclear whether the public would win or lose.

For better or worse, Time Warner’s area on the Net was part of an evolution in cyberspace. The process had begun with the small academic magazines and hobbyist publications that turned to the Net as a cheap way to find readers. Many if not most still relied on plain text without graphics; they were little more than archived dispatches to mailing lists—which was fine because the words mattered above all. One of the best of these was Adam Engst’s Tidbits. Written for Apple owners, it also appeared on the World Wide Web and bulletin board systems, and Engst claimed more than 100,000 readers—no small feat for a kitchen-table-style publisher. Nonconglomerates still provided most of the magazines on the net, and not all were for techies or sci-fi buffs. International Teletimes was edited by Ian Wojtowicz, a gifted high school student who lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. Teletimes went out over the Web with fetching art, not just text, and some of the prose could have graced Harper’s or the Atlantic. Recounting a winter trip by train, a college student named Paul Gribble wrote: “Every now and then we pass a lake, completely frozen over, flat and white, smooth as a skating rink. I’d love to walk to the center of a big frozen lake like that and just sit there for a while. I’d feel like the first blot of paint on a fresh silk canvas.”

Many steps up from Teletimes, in business terms, was Global Net Navigator. Like the N & O in North Carolina, GNN was trying to use advertising to support its activities, and you could see ads from companies as large as Digital Equipment Corporation. GNN was not just technical. It posted informative, brightly written articles on topics ranging from money to food and travel. Wired magazine was on the Net, too, with an offshoot called HotWired, which itself wandered far from technical topics and attracted lucrative ads from the likes of Volvo and AT&T. None of these publications, of course, happened to be a Household Name like Time Warner’s Time or People. Many experts felt that as a profitable medium for big-time magazines—and let’s not confuse size with quality or lack thereof—the Internet had a long way to go.

Jeffrey Dearth offered at least an interim answer. Teaming up with a small corporation with the grand name of the Internet Company, Dearth offered the Electronic Newsstand. Like the Pathfinder or N & O’s Net edition, the Newsstand was a godsend to browsers. You could wander through sample articles from Business Week; Field & Stream; The Economist; The New Yorker; National Review; Maclean’s, Canada’s largest newsweekly; or The New Republic, of which Dearth himself was publisher. The Time Warner experiment notwithstanding, most of the Names were far behind. Dearth offered them the equivalent of a catch-up course or at least some solid remedial instruction. They could test the waters of the Net to see how much interest their articles drew, before deciding whether to set up their own areas there. Via the Newsstand, magazines could accept subscription orders.

But order taking was a long way from fancier “interactivity”—to use a pet term of media people—and this was where Time Warner’s Pathfinder area would shine. The area didn’t just recycle magazines on the Net, it also offered powerful tools to find old articles by typing in search words or the names of topics. From the start, the searching capability was among the more popular services. Soon Pathfinder would include hypertext links that let you go from an article on a certain topic to an ongoing discussion. Already Time Warner provided special services such as one for gardeners. They could type in their general wishes about flowers and supply their location and other odds and ends, and then Time would offer tips on what to grow. It also allowed inquirers find out how their congressman or senator had voted on certain key issues. And many more applications like this were on the way. What’s more, people could talk back to Time Warner writers and others by way of an advanced bulletin board system designed for the Web. It was much easier to use than the N & O’s.

Not everyone liked the Web area. One woman hated the “overstuffed” artwork—others said it gobbled up too much downloading time. She also chided Time for putting out the online version of Sunset magazine “for Northern Californians still living in their ’50s ranch houses.” I myself, however, enjoyed the kitsch and flashy, busy look of the Web area as a whole. That was the way the real magazines came across; this was pop culture, not the Kenyon Review.

Almost immediately the Time board teemed with lively talk on issues ranging from Clintonian stupidities to, yes, the future of the electronic medium. I felt much more comfortable here than in the message area of the N & O; people on the Time board spoke their minds more freely. Some amusing posts showed up. Amazingly, the software let people key in their own identities, and the late Henry Luce, cofounder of Time, arose from the grave as luce@pastmytime.com. One message appeared, truthfully or not, with the name of a staffer at U.S. News & World Report. He promised that U.S. News would set up an outpost on the Net soon, and someone at Time twitted him for not answering e-mail promptly. Despite my fondness for the reporting in U.S. News, I had to agree. Researching a Net guide for political activists, I’d written U.S. News six months ago and had yet to receive an answer.

Time Warner also showed network savvy by following the example of GNN and similar publications and providing some hypertext pointers to the rest of the Internet, rather than expecting readers to stay within its own area. Time Warner even enlisted some of its household names in the cause. The electronic version of Entertainment Weekly, for example, did not just review Madonna or Springsteen or the latest Hollywood films; it also directed people to popular, entertainment-oriented sites on the Net itself by way of hypertext links. I still wanted to see many, many more links—a strength of GNN. But I suspected that would come in time.

Planning the Pathfinder service, Time Warner had even consulted with the publisher of Wired. “They’re providing real news, not just PR blather or sales areas for their products,” said Chip Bayers, the managing editor of HotWired, the Wired offshoot on the Web. And he was right.

I myself was no cheerleader for Time Warner in some ways—I worried about media concentrations.^[4.16] But here the Suits deserved their due. HotWired offered avant-garde graphics on the Web along with services such as bulletin boards and free archives; I was pleased, yet hardly surprised. Wired, after all, was still a bit of an upstart despite heavy investment from a corporate arm of the powerful Newhouse family.^[4.17] But Time Warner was different—the epitome of the journalistic and Hollywood establishments, a company with many benefits from the status quo. I recalled the upbeat stories that Time had run about the world of 500-channel television. Such articles betrayed far more tolerance of the “one to many” broadcast model, as opposed to the newer, more anarchistic model of the Net. Many in the Time Life tower, especially on the entertainment side, might still harbor these less adventurous visions. And yet the company was now spreading its bets around. That seemed sensible enough, given the chilliness that some test markets had shown interactive TV.

A Time writer named Philip Elmer-DeWitt had grown more and more attuned to the potential of the Net. He was a regular on The WELL, the bulletin board system frequented by many of the elite journalists on the Internet. Again and again Elmer-DeWitt showed up on newsgroups and mailing lists with spunky, opinionated posts on such topics as the media and telecommunications. He lent his name to a successful legal campaign to aid Brock Meeks, a small publisher on the Net who faced a libel suit from a mail-order tycoon in Ohio. What’s more, Elmer-DeWitt was sensitive to the threats from the Clipper chip, which Washington might use someday to invade the privacy of millions of Americans. He clearly represented the interests of his employer, but he did so with a good mix of wit and smarts that endeared him to many on the Internet. His electronic signature said, “Read Time on America Online where we are paid to take abuse.”

Enlivened by posts from Netfolks and WELLfolks whom Elmer-DeWitt had befriended, Time’s message board thrived on America Online. But now, quite correctly, Time had run an article pointing out the advantages of the Internet from the perspective of publishers. Time raised a big question, the same one Frank Daniels had asked. Did publications really have to fork over such a hefty percentage of their online revenue to commercial services, such as America Online, when the Internet existed? Time Warner’s well-stocked area on the Net was itself an answer of sorts. Granted, the company’s outpost on America Online wasn’t about to vanish. Time Warner was testing both interactive TV and computers as transmission vehicles; similarly the company was not committing itself to any single network in cyberspace. I took it for granted that sooner or later Time Warner might end up on the network that Bill Gates was starting. Just as Time reached newsstands everywhere, the electronic equivalent could seek out eyes wherever the phone lines led. Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and People would soon be on CompuServe. And yet Time Warner’s priority in the computer world was clear: the Internet above all else, at least for the moment.

“When we put Time on America Online,” said Walter Isaacson, editor of new media at Time, “it is done on their server, using their software, and only someone subscribing to America Online and using America Online software can access it. On the Web, anyone using public domain software can get to it.” I could just have substituted “News & Observer” for “Time,” an impression only strengthened by the next sentence: “We have a direct relationship to our readers.” Isaacson went on: “There will be massive amounts more content from Time Inc. on the Web than on America Online or CompuServe, which will just feature individual magazines.”

Some twenty-two magazines were to go on the Web. Isaacson said around ten editors would participate full or part time. Total investment in the Web site was to reach the “mid six figures,” and “with advertising it should be in the black within a year.”year.” “There may be a mix of ads and subscription fees,” Isaacson said. Mercifully, the advertising would not be the intrusive Prodigy kind that popped up on the bottom of my screen in a garish, Vegas style.

Jim Kinsella, the ex-newspaper editor who presided over the Web area, said he was pushing for a subscription fee of around $8 a month. I would have wanted the price to be a few dollars lower, but it was fine if I got enough for my money. If nothing else, Kinsella wanted readers to be able to stay online without the time charges that made thousands unplug their hookups with America Online and similar services. A product manager with Microsoft would later say as much to the New York Times in discussing Bill Gates’ new service: “We’re trying to reduce the threshold of pain. We think users hate connect fees.”^[4.18]

Kinsella’s $8 monthly fee—his proposed figure, not Time Warner’s—would be for Pathfinder itself, not for the Internet connection. I did some quick math. Pathfinder could indeed be a competitive possibility if Time Warner were able to lower the cost of using the Internet by way of cable television from the $75-$100 a month that people typically paid for such arrangements.

Mass use might enable Time Warner to undercut the $20 that the N & O presently charged. Typical readers might want to keep reading a local newspaper, and the N & O could drop its own prices, but this was still a good example of how national media just might drain at least some readers away from the local media. Understandably, Kinsella was thinking in mass, national terms, as I would have done. He predicted that within five or ten years half the country might be able to reach the Net in one way or another. Others at Time were similarly optimistic.

Not everyone in late 1994 was so sanguine. Mark Stahlman, for example, a media expert in New York, shrugged off Net publications as “just the latest in a series of fads.” Richard M. Smith, Newsweek’s editor in chief who was running the new-media committee of the Magazine Publishers of America, was skeptical about online services in general: “The people who are making money are the people who are running conferences about it.”^[4.19]

Smith was oversimplifying somewhat, but formidable barriers did exist, of which one of the biggest happened to be the limits of the technology. Reading electronic text for hours on end could be murder on both the back and the eyes. All day long I sat in front of a computer screen; the last thing I wanted was to have to do it while I wandered through magazines or books. Television wouldn’t do: I hated the idea of reading a magazine or novel from ten feet away. Besides, didn’t magazines and books exist to be enjoyed in bed, on the hammock, or at the beach?

Mightn’t Silicon Valley, however, come out with small, tablet-style computers designed for reading? “TeleReaders” could feature optional keyboards for people who wanted to use them as general purpose computers. Screens, needless to say, must be much sharper than today, and without so much flicker. Batteries should last longer. And, ideally, you should be able to dart from place to place in a newspaper or magazine by merely touching a “pen” to the appropriate part of your screen. That was what the magazine, newspaper, and book industries needed, rather than just more conferences. Washington could even encourage this by way of a focused procurement program for schools and libraries; the same machines could even be used for electronic forms for government and commerce.

Roger Fidler of Knight-Ridder had already been experimenting with mockups of tablet-style machines. He was more interested in a newspaper-oriented approach and less in a general one than I was. But the basic idea was the same—words needn’t be captives of the printed page. The real question was this: How soon until the right technology appeared? Electronic magazines such as Time Warner’s would still make money without a TeleRead-style approach, but the full potential would not be reached, especially if more children abandoned words for TV and computer images. That was even truer for the world of books. Even more than magazines and newspapers, e-books suffered from the limits of technology. It wasn’t just a question of the right machine for viewing; at issue were other matters such as copy protection and billing. But at least some partial solutions were on the way, and even with the present difficulties of the medium, online bookstores were sprouting up on the Internet. One of the best was run by Laura Fillmore, an editor in Massachusetts who had once worked for Little, Brown.

An elderly man owned a charming old store in a southern town with the standard magnolias, wrought iron staircases, and hot, moist summers, and he loved to brag about his shiny new safe. Most customers did not know about it or care. Rather than worrying so much about the protection of his wealth, he might have been better off to imitate his rivals and invest his money in air-conditioning instead of the safe.

The man reminded me of myopic publishers and authors. Not quite grasping the full potential of the Internet, they fretted too much about copyright protection, and not enough about making their wares friendly to shoppers. A pay-per-read company in Virginia was typical here. You could download its books off the Internet, but you did not enjoy such niceties as links to other titles online. Nor could you print more than a page or so at once. Beyond that, you had to clutter up your computer system with a $25 gadget hooked up to the printer port. If you were working on tight deadlines and were rich and desperate enough, you might stomach this copy protection system. But I dreaded the possibility of its adoption by the book industry as a whole; established publishers and writers just might see the world pass them by if they cared too much about cybersafes and not enough about customer amenities. Many megabytes of good, free reading awaited the public on the Web, and not everyone understood the value that professional editors and writers could add.

Nowadays, however, more publishers and hangers-on were catching on to the nuances of the Net. Among them was Laura Fillmore, a publishing consultant who owned the Online BookStore in Rockport, Massachusetts. She must have driven some traditionalists crazy. Fillmore actually had the notion that ASCII—text in a popular format, without italics and the other trimmings—should be free to everyone. She loved Project Gutenberg, which an Illinois academic had started to put classics and other works on the Net at no charge. Fillmore was the antithesis of a techno-geek, the kind of woman who just might read Dickens to her two children on snowy days, and who was a regular on the speaker circuit within her industry. She had majored in English at Barnard College and worked for a publishing company that dated back to the nineteenth century. Fillmore helped bridge the past and the electronic era. Her vision wasn’t quite the same as mine, but it was worlds apart from that of piracy-fixated publishers who saw electronic readers as a criminal class.

The move to the Net was, in her opinion, part of a long evolution toward a new form of decentralized publishing. She recalled when the great houses didn’t farm out editing and other tasks as often as they do today, and when almost every book took nine months to reach the stores. “Back in the late ’70s when I was at Little, Brown,” she said, “we needed to get special permission to use ExEx. When an author wanted his sales figures, I’d walk up the street to the top floor of a separate building where Rose, the lady with the P & L cards, had been keeping tabs for twenty years, and I’d sign out the neatly penciled card and carefully carry it to my boss, wrapping it in plastic against the weather if necessary. I passed the copyediting department with their well-stocked reference library, a bastion against inaccuracies, and the design department, smelling of wax, hung with rulers, sizing wheels, and X-acto knives.”^[4.20] The industry, though, had changed; now freelancers throughout the country, not just in New York or Boston, were often editing and even publishing books. Fillmore herself had gone into freelance editorial work years before, and she still remembered “the shrinking feeling in my stomach the first time I bought a computer setup back in 1984: $10,000 of the bank’s money for an XT and an HP LaserJet. The salesman left, I was back at the C prompt, and the room grew dark. No matter which buttons I pushed, ‘Abort, Retry, Ignore’ glared back persistently. Finally, I chose none of the above and unplugged the whole thing.”^[4.21] Fillmore overcame her technophobia, but the chaos of change still made her uncomfortable. “Increasing speed and volume have led to high job turnover, a blurring of disciplines. Our computerized tools allow the editor to become a typist, a designer, and a type-setter, the designer becomes a software junkie, a graphic artist, a prepress house. No time for galleys! Straight to pages! No time for pages; straight to film. The drop dead date is bottom line. Sales are needed this quarter.”^[4.22]

Years ago, competition had reached the point where many typesetting jobs left the United States. “We even hired freelancers thirdhand in Singapore and Haiti,” Fillmore recalled in a speech. “The publisher hired me; I hired someone stateside to hire someone in-country to hire the keyboarder and, still, the publisher ended paying maybe half what the job would have cost him at $15 per hour. Our topic today is slavery.”^[4.23]

But in Fillmore’s opinion, this distributed form of publishing, where tasks went every which way, would take a newer and more humane form. In the 1980s books had appeared on computer networking, a kinder technology than the brutal, production-oriented variety of the past. And now Fillmore saw in networks a chance to “elicit life from people” who used computers to communicate. Her own “epiphany” came when a Net-oriented writer, John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, introduced her to “the then alien concept of electronic mail. My assistant would pick up mail from my lone correspondent, the author, print it out, put it in my in box, and I would handwrite responses which she would input and send back in due time. It sounds quaint, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time—in the same way computerized typesetting distributed though unconnected PCs made sense.” On the Net, everyone could publish, not just giant publishing houses. And so Quarterman could forward to her some public messages from students who were defying the Chinese Army in Tiananmen Square. They could speak for themselves; no one edited them. They weren’t like the freelance typists in Haiti: They were not “hidden and voiceless behind four middlemen” and “with no hope of a phone, much less an Internet connection.”^[4.24]

The overlap in Fillmore’s mind, between publishing and communicating via the Net, was entirely natural. When the Haitians typed, they created a digitized version of the book they were working on. They were not just transferring words to paper. Bits and bytes, once created, could go anywhere.

Fillmore, of course, was hardly the first to think of consolidating knowledge. As early as 1945 a scientist had published a preternaturally farsighted Atlantic Monthly article that was to electronic publishing what Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were to inventions in general. Vannevar Bush had proposed a memex, a microfilm-based device that could bring together knowledge from many disciplines—along with the thoughts of the user. It would be, in other words, a cross between a personal file cabinet and a giant library. In a speech, Fillmore quoted a key passage: “The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails covered by the brain.”^[4.25] Bush might as well have been describing the World Wide Web and its links that allow you to click on “Boeing” and see “Airplanes” or click on “Clinton” and see “Presidents.” Ted Nelson, a dreamer-writer-programmer, was thinking of the memex when he invented hypertext links. That concept, in turn, excited Tim Berners-Lee, a staffer at a physics institute in Berne, Switzerland, who was the father of the Web—the vast network of computers through which I could retrieve the Raleigh News and Observer, Time, and Fillmore’s offerings.

Back in 1992, however, the World Wide Web was a fraction of its present size, and programmers had yet to release easy, graphically oriented browsers such as Mosaic that would help tame the Web. Even more than today, people needed books to fathom the Net. And yet no popular-level guide was in print. So it was entirely fitting that when Fillmore decided to create a book from scratch—rather than just produce it for a publisher—the Internet was the subject. This how-to guide was The Internet Companion, the author was Tracy LaQuey, and the paper publisher was Addison-Wesley. Fillmore kept the network rights and looked forward to distributing the book through her new Online BookStore. Barry Shein of Software Tool & Die, the first commercial service to hook ordinary mortals into the Internet, had offered her space on his bank of hard disks. “He described his operation,” she said, “as basically an electronic store with empty shelves and a cash register at the door. I decided that I’d find electronic properties to fill these shelves.”^[4.26] But the Internet at the time had Acceptable Use Policies that prevented her from making a profit. What to do?

Fillmore hit on a solution that actually rewarded her for an idealistic approach to publishing. She gave away—with great luck in the end—ASCII files from the book in hopes of drumming up interest in the paper version. “Who wants to read hundreds of pages in ASCII anyway?” Fillmore would later ask. Unadorned ASCII by itself wasn’t always that pleasant to read, and many people liked the Net version well enough to shell out money for a paper book. “Even our publisher was supportive of our effort,” Fillmore said, “and happy with the resulting sales figures.”^[4.27] Orders poured in from as far off as Finland and Korea. Netfolks all over the world could learn of Fillmore’s offering immediately rather than waiting for reviews to show up in local magazines and newspapers.

Within two years, Companion had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Al Gore had written the foreword just before his election as vice president, but the freebies on the Net certainly hadn’t hurt. Other publishers also found that free copies could be a boon, not a bane. Zen and the Art of the Internet (Prentice Hall) and The Hacker’s Dictionary (MIT Press) similarly flew off the racks. “Giving something valuable away for free,” Fillmore said, “can make money.”^[4.28]

Of course some would say she hadn’t actually published online. Rather she had used the medium to promote a paper book. Still, the prospect of purely electronic publishing beckoned. “I was seduced by the prospect of the then 10 million people on the Internet—10 million literate people with disposable incomes—attached to the Net. Why not acquire lots of Internet rights to lots of books and put them online at the Online BookStore. Surely some percentage of those people would buy files of a popular author’s books for a reasonable price.”^[4.29] Fillmore was sensible enough to price her offerings for consumers who were spending their own money, not their bosses’. Some commercial databases were charging as much as $200 per hour or more, while Fillmore was thinking more in terms of $5, say, for a short story downloaded from the Net.

The test story was “Umney’s Last Case,” a fifty-page Stephen King story from a collection called Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King was among the best-selling writers on the planet. Fillmore dreamed of tens of thousands of dialups even if “Umney” intrigued only 1 percent of the 10 million people on the Net at the time. Fillmore had picked out just the right King story, one where a time traveler gave a Toshiba T-1000 laptop computer to a tough detective around 1939—someone who in turn used his “plastic Buck Rogers steno machine” to write a story within King’s own tale.

Fillmore’s “Umney” project was a sensation at the biggest book fair in the world, the one at Frankfurt; upbeat stories appeared in places ranging from European news programs to the Wall Street Journal. She witnessed “a vast amount of smoke, a tremendous marketing boost for the printed book again, lots of noise—and by extension, lots of profit for the publisher and for the author—but handfuls of per-copy sales.”^[4.30] They didn’t even pay for all the phone calls used to set up the deal.

I was hardly surprised. Enjoying access to many megs of free material on the Net, the typical denizen didn’t want to shell out even $5 for the story even if she or he could simply fax in a credit card number. It wasn’t that King’s work was worthless—quite the opposite. Rather, on the Internet and with this business model, “Umney” at most any realistic price could not compete with free material such as Usenet postings.

Yes, the Net teemed with sci-fi and fantasy fans. But as I saw it, they were too busy talking to each other, and, while they would have been delighted to download “Umney” for free, they balked at spending the $5. You might say that “Umney” was like a typical TV program. The appeal was potentially broad but not deep. Pay-per-view wasn’t that much of a hit on cable TV, and the same principle applied here. “Umney” could enhance a collection of material for subscribers—we go back to the flat-fee example of the News & Observer and Jim Kinsella’s vision for Time Warner—but even a Stephen King story wasn’t strong enough on its own for online use. Part of the problem, I believed, was the medium. The right technology for reading fifty-page short stories just wasn’t out there yet. With the proper equipment, the value would increase.

Besides, even now, Fillmore could use a license or sponsorship model. She sold “Umney” to two computer networks, one of them CompuServe, which gained the right to post the story for a week during a conference on paperless publishing. “Hundreds of people have accessed it,” Fillmore said. The future possibilities were evident now. Corporations someday might sponsor books on computer networks the way they sponsored programs on CBS or NBC. In fact, whole sites on the Net—with the names of companies—could serve as homes for innovative projects. Sun Microsystems was oriented toward UNIX, relied heavily on sales to Net users, and benefited from the goodwill and publicity that its SunSite libraries enjoyed. Fare ranged from presidential speeches to the Internet Underground Music Archive; there could be a place for commercial e-books as well in these high-tech sandboxes, as Fillmore jokingly called such areas.

The sponsorship model wasn’t perfect, of course. Fillmore herself was the first to wonder which corporations would have sponsored writings about the uprising in Tiananmen Square. Big companies often favored upbeat material. As I saw it, fiction and nonfiction books alike might suffer if this model alone prevailed. They differed from newspapers and magazines; book publishers thought more in terms of individual properties, and beyond that, publications such as the N & O and Time already enjoyed strong identities from their paper incarnations. The new media were less a challenge to their editorial integrity. But many sponsored books might degenerate into the Net equivalent of the wretched infomercials on TV, the ones where over-the-hill actors “interviewed” astrologers or memory experts, and where the audiences clapped thunderously on cue.

Wisely, Fillmore did not give up on “Umney” entirely—it was still online when I was writing this chapter—nor did she quit using the Net to promote writings on paper. Even more important, she tried out writings that took advantage of links to other material on the Web.

Bless This Food: Amazing Grace in Praise of Food was an example of prime material for hypertext. The paper book bought together food-related prayers from many times and places. But everything was contained. You couldn’t wander outside the printed pages. Thanks to Fillmore, however, you could click on Buddhist-related material and see a Buddha’s image piped in from the Smithsonian. You could even e-mail the author of Bless, Adrian Butash. Fillmore wasn’t just selling the book itself—she was offering it as a “dashboard” that could take you to related material on the Net. Certainly the Smithsonian hadn’t had Bless in mind when it posted the picture of Buddha. However, through the pointers in the electronic edition, you could learn of this image and view it in just the right context; that, after all, was the splendor of the Web. Quite honestly, then, Fillmore could charge $25 for a book that sold in hardback from Delacorte for $18.95. She was giving you more for your money. Besides, if you proposed new links and she liked them, you would receive some royalties. You, the reader, could be part of the book and the author’s life. We could all be editors.

As a writer, I had somewhat mixed feelings about this. I loved e-mail from readers. But I was already spending too many hours a day on electronic correspondence of one kind or another. I hated the idea of suffering a constant stream of e-mail from Project X when I wanted to move on to Project Y. If this model won out, writers would have to be much choosier about the projects they took on—knowing that publishers expected more commitment.

Given the deluge of 50,000 titles a year that readers face just from U.S. publishers, more than a few people would enjoy such a prospect. But they shouldn’t grow too complacent. With electronic publishing much cheaper than the paper variety, we might eventually see 100,000 commercially published titles a year. I, for one, wouldn’t mind as long as quality and royalties don’t suffer. The problem is not too many books, but rather the need for better software to sort through them—or for more hypertext editors to issue good pointers. That is one reason why I loved the idea of publishers selling pointers as well as actual material.

Not every writer would be open-minded, of course; even Fillmore at first had feared hypertext. When O’Reilly and Associates put one of her papers on the Web through GNN—spreading around her observations on electronic publishing—she saw all kinds of links. By clicking on blue letters, for example, readers would call up material about a founder of Internet. Fillmore felt as if a Philistine had taken her beautiful bowl, her self-contained piece of writing, and turned it into a colander. Some writers might see a parallel in another way: Suppose the colander leaked readers, who, seeing the links, dove off into another area of the Net, and never returned. Fillmore had adjusted to this possibility, and I could, too. Just like Zonker Harris I was of the “May the best server win!” mentality, except that I refused to confuse popularity with merit. Books weren’t like sports servers.

From society’s viewpoint, another issue presented itself here. Both Fillmore and I wondered about the damage that television and computers might be doing to people’s attention spans. “Attention deficit disorder seems to have arisen at the same time that computers have spread to the home and office,” she said, “and I don’t think that’s an accident. How many people age twelve and younger are capable of reading 300 pages of sustained argument about anything?” Another worry arose, too, in my mind. Like Frank Daniels, I realized that an entire generation of children was spending more time gazing at computer and TV screens than they devoted to books and traditional newspapers.

I felt that technology was destiny, that Washington and other governments should promote computers that encouraged the receptive to read e-books hour after hour. Too much of the new-style education, as envisioned by many, would be task oriented—would be training as much as education per se. That was fine for technical matters where, for example, a future factory worker might want to learn the basics of engine design. Hypertext was superb. The student could study a diagram of a diesel engine, click on an individual part, and read and hear a detailed explanation of its function. But I wanted technology that also encouraged people to read and absorb whole books.

If book readers were too small a minority, then countries such as the United States would be less democratic and more oligarchic, with the elite all too able to manipulate the other citizens. Some social critics such as Neil Postman demonized technology as a source of mindless distractions for the masses. I, however, saw opportunity if we acted soon enough before we lost more children to TV. That meant sharp screens, smaller, lighter machines, and other advances—which would come sooner or later, but which could be hastened by the coming of a focused procurement program. Washington should assure the Valley a market for the right hardware. It should also try harder to help schools absorb it, so the machines wouldn’t just sit idle in closets.

A national digital library, not just a digital store leading to commercial collections, was just as essential as better hardware. Today a college student researching the effect of Shakespeare on popular culture is able to find the Bard’s work at the school library. But what about tracking down newer books that the library couldn’t afford to buy? Also, only one student could read a paper copy at a time; suppose a professor wanted many students to compare impressions of a novel, especially one that was out of print and long gone from the bookstores? People on the technical side could benefit even more than those in the humanities. The best and most recent guides to Microsoft Word or Windows, for example, didn’t come from educators; rather they came from the private sector. The faster this knowledge could reach average citizens, the easier it would be to upgrade the labor force.

A national digital library, moreover, would help many businesses market their goods. A food company trying to sell a new line of rice, for example, could instantly call up cookbooks of many ethnic groups and find out the relationship between food and the cultures. In an era of customized products, companies needed to learn quickly about niche markets. That would be especially true as business globalized; corporate planners had to keep on top of conditions in many countries.

So TeleRead-style libraries—which let people look through many kinds of information, everything from books to UN reports—could make real contributions in the United States and elsewhere. If nothing else, governments needed to understand the possible efficiencies. Yes, public and academic librarians would choose books. But innovative, private firms would own the computer banks (well backed up) storing the books and other material; many different contractors, always trying to outdo each other’s technologies, could compete. Other efficiencies would accrue. Pooling the public libraries of rich and poor citizens would help everyone by increasing the variety of books available to all.

Big Brother needn’t run a national digital library. Subject-oriented librarians in many cities might acquire material; in effect they would be putting a public library system online, one that reflected the tastes of, say, Lyons as well as Paris. How much more supple than the overcentralized approach that the French now favored for their national library! The elite librarians could still identify the books they had blessed, but the provincials could have their say as well; and, given the variability of literary tastes over the ages, the latter in some cases might prevail anyway.

What’s more, by gambling money up front to qualify for royalties from TeleRead, writers and commercial publishers could bypass the librarians. Book people such as Laura Fillmore could thrive under this approach. A national library could offer e-books not only to citizens directly but also to independent-minded entrepreneurs such as Fillmore, who could charge for their custom links. I loved the idealism she showed in suggesting that ASCII be free. It was a good model in many cases for today. But I feared that as computers grew better for book reading—and it would happen eventually, with or without a TeleRead program—free ASCII would take away too many paying customers. And if ASCII books weren’t free? Then, more than ever, piracy would occur regardless of various legal and technological precautions. So the answer should be free national digital libraries—well stocked and with fair pay for writers and publishers—to reduce the temptation to bypass copy protection. Use tracking to report dialup counts and pay originators of material, but not for billing. That was the way to take full advantage of the technology and keep market incentives while promoting literacy.

Rich countries would be the first to start libraries of this kind. They could safeguard their intellectual property by helping poorer countries get books online if the latter agreed to honor copyright laws. The time would come for national and international Electronic Peace Corps to make this possible. EPCs could help upgrade Third World phone systems on site and share knowledge via e-books, e-mail, two-way video, and otherwise. To enforce global copyright law, we needed carrots as well as sticks.

What’s more, governments could protect books with technology far less cumbersome than the $25 gadgets that the pay-per-read bookstore in Virginia used. Then e-text stood a chance. I thought of the old merchant down South: Safes were useful, but only if the customers could enjoy an air-conditioner—an easy-to-use digital library for all of a country’s citizens.

National digital libraries, of course, could link up with each other and form an official world library someday. But, given the many cultural differences, that was impossible now. National libraries, then, were the way to go—with opportunities for citizens in different countries to read each other’s books when governments allowed this. I pitied the censors. In an era of international computer networks, national libraries would end up anyway as one big global library for citizens of open societies and for the more resourceful people of countries such as Iran. Simply put, national digital libraries would make it so much easier to market or shop for books internationally. When a Swedish anarchist heard about TeleRead, his big question wasn’t, “Isn’t this an opportunity for cultural imperialism?” Instead it was, “Will I be able to read American best-sellers as quickly as people there can?” Whatever the kind of book—a Tom Clancy thriller or an anarchistic tract—TeleRead libraries would allow easy global distribution.

In rich countries such as the United States and Sweden, the need for national digital libraries would only grow with the introduction of better televisions and video games, not to mention the distractions of the Net itself—including virtual reality, at some point. Even in wealthy nations, people had only so much disposable income. How much of it would be left for online books? Mightn’t we use e-forms and digital libraries to transfer resources from paperwork to knowledge? As much as I applauded the good work that Frank Daniels was doing with the third graders in Raleigh, I was a little put off by the online questionnaire for adults and children using his BBS. It asked about favorite TV programs, physical appearance, sports, and other activities, but a simple question was missing—one that I felt certain would have been on the list twenty years ago: “What are your favorite books?”