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"The Fig Eater" by Jody Shields
A first-time novelist, recasting a Freudian case history as a psychosexual detective story, wonders what would have happened if "Dora" had been murdered.
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[03/29/00]

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[03/28/00]

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"Passionate Minds" by Claudia Roth Pierpont
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[03/28/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
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I'm having sex with my daughter's basketball coach and I'm terrified she'll find out. Should I bail out now or go for it?
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[03/28/00]

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By Stewart O'Nan
[03/27/00]

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By Craig Offman

March 29, 2000 |  To Matt Lauer, host of "Today," "Riding the Bullet," the 66-page novella by Stephen King that was released in e-book form by Simon & Schuster earlier this month, sure looked like the future of publishing. On his show, Lauer pressed Simon & Schuster trade publishing division CEO Carolyn Reidy with what he considered a trenchant point: "You get a proven author like Stephen King, who's pretty good and has written so many books he probably knows how to do some editing. He could take his works right to the Internet."

To readers and casual observers, Lauer's proposal doesn't sound that far-fetched. Time magazine, in a cover story featuring King, touted the Internet not just as an amateur's playground but also as a professional's potential gold mine, observing that "if you're already a star, you can avoid the middleman by using the Net to keep most of the money yourself."

The Future of the Book Salon examines how the digital revolution is changing what and how we read.   Yesterday: The revolution that wasn't Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old. By Steven M. Zeitchik

Authors like King or John Grisham already enjoy extensive name recognition, and some of these writers often rely on their agents, not the editors at publishing houses, to edit their work. Several big names even hire publicists to spread the word about their books, making an end-run around the marketing campaigns that book publishers claim will still make them valuable to authors in the information age. Surely, outsiders like Lauer and many of his viewers have been thinking, it's the publishers of name-brand authors like King who ought to be worried right now.

In fact, any e-book-initiated shake-up in store for the publishing industry is likely to strike hardest in other sectors. Several factors conspire to protect traditional book publishing houses from the prospect of seeing their bestselling authors defect to the still-evolving e-book publishers. The real threat, in fact, may be to glossy magazines, book distributors and vanity presses.

A case in point is Fatbrain.com, an online publisher and retailer in Santa Clara, Calif. Fatbrain.com had originally attempted to obtain the rights to "Riding the Bullet," only to be slapped down by Simon & Schuster. "We met with [Simon & Schuster president] Jack Romanos," said Judy Kirkpatrick, executive vice president and manager of Fatbrain.com's new publishing division, MightyWords.com. "He did not want us to approach 'Simon & Schuster authors' directly, and if we did, he would perceive us as competition and act accordingly."

Fatbrain.com contends that Simon & Schuster's decision not to let Fatbrain.com join other online retailers like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in selling King's book was a way of punishing Fatbrain.com for presuming to poach on the venerable publisher's territory. (Simon & Schuster says it did this because Fatbrain.com allows purchasers to download a book twice.)

If Round 1 in the battle between the people of the old book and the people of the new book seems to have gone to Simon & Schuster, Fatbrain.com nevertheless has other irons in the fire. It has just launched MightyWords.com, a "digital marketplace" where writers and readers can publish and purchase "eMatter." Fatbrain.com is kicking off the launch of this new division by making "American Perspectives," a series of essays on the Bill of Rights, available free in PDF format for downloading and printing. Contributors include Whoopi Goldberg, Newt Gingrich and Pete Hamill, each writing on a different amendment.

"We're the sweet spot of something that is longer than a magazine article and shorter than a book," says Kirkpatrick. MightyWords.com anticipates that its customers will print out the content for "reasons of comfort and convenience." The company is negotiating with Time Warner, Random House and John Wiley & Sons about other editorial projects as well. "One of the things we've talked to [Time-Warner trade publishing chairman] Larry Kirshbaum about is publishing early chapters of books before they're made available," Kirkpatrick said. "So we're looking at chunking up content and selling it by the drink, so to speak."

Fatbrain.com claims to be the second fastest growing company in Silicon Valley (right behind eBay), with sales that rose 78 percent to $35.3 million in its fiscal year ending Jan. 31 -- although its net loss mushroomed from nearly $10 million to over $30 million in the same period. Around 75 percent of Fatbrain.com's revenue derives from the sale of in-house books and training materials to companies like Lucent Technologies and the Bank of America. In addition to corporate publications, Fatbrain.com offers more than 7,000 titles by 5,000 fiction and nonfiction authors, who in general pay Fatbrain.com a $1 per month hosting fee to keep their books available.

MightyWords.com authors also receive royalties at 50 percent of their sales. (That's after they've earned out any advance.) That's a sweet deal compared to the 5 to 15 percent royalties paid by traditional book publishers. Nevertheless, brand-name authors haven't been rushing to such publishers to reap the rewards. "The first issue," says David Gernert, Grisham's agent, "is how many people can an electronically published story reach and how will those people know where to get it? So they offer [an author] the moon and the stars, but does John or Stephen King or any other author of that stature want to bestow that legitimacy, that superiority, on one electronic publisher? It's almost a power I don't think they want. No one knows at this point how these electronic publishers will perform."

Next page | Are e-book publishers glorified vanity presses?