One thing that surprises me is that people are not necessarily looking for short pieces. Many of our most popular items have actually been quite long. This challenges the idea that everything on the Internet ought to be short and sharp. People are also looking for longer, meditative pieces that provide an occasion for thinking.

There is an audience out there for high-end material. You don't hear much about them.

It's all supposed to be shallow glitz.

In the media biz it's taken for granted that magazines have to work a niche market. Yet if your site has a theme, it's variety.

We're very conscious of that. The site is intended to expand the reader's sphere of interest. It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let's expand ourselves intellectually.

I know people who love your site but scratch their chins, because they can't figure out your point of view. They want to know your agenda.

[laughs heartily] I heard recently about a British Marxist who finds that the site enrages him. But he can't help but look at it every day. We're reacting against cant and clichés wherever we find them. Whatever's prevalent in the universities and among the chattering classes is sometimes something that needs exploding. And we're willing to throw the dynamite. On the other hand, there are certainly many items on Arts & Letters Daily that present a fairly standard line that educated people take on many issues. A vegetarian gun-control advocate who opposes capital punishment is fine. But what pricks my interest more is the vegetarian anti-capital punishment cowboy who carries three shotguns displayed in the back window of the cab of his truck.

Let's talk about Cybereditions. Book publishing is such a nutty field. Why would a professor of philosophy want to get involved?

My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

When did Cybereditions go up?

It's been selling books off its site since the middle of this year. We have about 30 titles in process right now, and we're hoping to raise that number to over 100 in a couple of months. Books have been going out of print at the rate of 30-40,000 a year for the last 40 years. So Cybereditions takes high-quality, out-of-print books that the authors have the rights to and does a new edition where possible. Some of our books are unchanged from the original edition, but most are in some way updated.

What are your bestsellers?

Frederick Crews' book "Skeptical Engagements" has been selling, Norman Holland's book "Poems in Persons" has been selling. And Mark Turner's "Death Is the Mother of Beauty" has been popular. We recently acquired Ihad Hassan's "The Postmodern Turn," and Brian Boyd's first book on Nabokov's "Ada."

As successful computer people are beginning to kick back a little, are they becoming more interested in the cultural applications of the technology and the money?

A couple of years ago it was impossible to interest people in the computer world in anything that used the dreaded word "content." If it wasn't a switch that made something go faster or some kind of whizbang program, they weren't interested. Cybereditions is an application of computer technologies to a very traditional business. Book publishing is and always was, as Jason Epstein has said, a cottage industry. It's a matter of authors working with editors to produce books that are useful to readers. There's no way to mass-produce good editorial work. And good books are no more going out of fashion than good stories or good food. We have found backing in Silicon Valley, though it's very modest.

Authors tell me that, now that publishing houses are aware of electronic publishing, they won't let rights revert to authors anymore. The publishers are refusing to admit that books have gone out of print.

That's exactly right. This is going to enrich a lot of lawyers. Ask the publishers for the rights, and they'll dawdle and claim a book is simply out of stock. At the same time, there are thousands of authors who, before all this, when they were told their books were out of print, simply took the rights back. So there's a huge field that Cybereditions can work with even if the current publishing scene is not entirely friendly to a new entrant.

What rate do you pay?

We pay up to 40 percent of what we net, and with electronic downloads that can be done.

Does Cybereditions have a physical location somewhere?

The server's in Santa Clara, Calif. The company doing the editing is in Christchurch, New Zealand. The technical people are there too. We'll be using contract editors all over the world. Our authors will certainly come from everywhere. It is a New Zealand corporation, but with international investment. And the print-on-demand books will be done, mostly, in the U.S.

How do you react to the new Gemstar e-book readers?

The quality of the devices is excellent. But Gemstar is intent on controlling and licensing what the devices can actually be used for. Rather than using an open format, which allows you to use any file of your own, you can only read what you download either through their site, or what is licensed by them.

A lot of commercial publishers are high on Gemstar's approach.

If this is the future of electronic publishing, I think you can count most readers out. Who would have bought a television set in 1955 if it turned out that the television-set manufacturer controlled what programs you could watch?

What kinds of opportunities does electronic publishing offer someone interested in scholarly publishing?

For one thing, it changes the concept of the book. Normally a book comes out in a final finished edition. Perhaps years later a second edition follows. But an electronic book can be continually revised, more like a computer program than a printed book. You can have an initial edition, then make some corrections -- that's edition 1.01. Some more and you have edition 1.02. Right up to a really new edition, and that's version 2.0.

Everything becomes software.

We can continually update. Another thing: Traditionally, the book is published and sits out there alone and undefended while the critics pick it apart. With e-publishing, a scholar who's worked for years on a book can now come out with a revised edition answering critics. We think that the idea that writers can now answer their critics is very important. That's why we've registered the domain name booksthatbiteback.com.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.