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 communicationthat is the Internet? How does the Internet take into account the various partsof 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 Frenchversion of this paper - De l'imprimé à Internet - is not a translation, but adifferent text. The original versions are available on the NEF, University ofToronto: 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 thattremendous network which is leading to the upheaval of communications andworking methods we are hearing so much about. Are these two worlds antagonistic or complementary? What is the influence of oneworld on the other, and vice versa? How does the world of the print media acceptthis tremendous means of communication which is the Internet? How does theInternet take into account this centuries-old tool which is the print media? Dothey work together? Do they compete? What is their common future? Will the worldof the Internet completely swallow up the world of the print media, or, to thecontrary, will the print media domesticate the Internet as an additional meansof communication? We are not even aware yet of the many interconnections and transformations theInternet is going to bring if the Internet changes the world as much as writingor 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 thatthe Internet is bringing into their professional life? These are the questions Iwill try to answer in the following pages. More and more publications have both an electronic version and a paper versionand, in some cases, both can be ordered on-line. Numerous texts are availableon-line in digital libraries. Many of these texts also have a paper version thecybernaut can buy if he prefers reading 500 pages lying on his sofa instead ofreading them on the screen of his computer. Some texts or magazines areavailable on-line only. More and more newspapers and magazines have a website on which their readers canfind the full text or abstracts of the latest issue, archives giving access tothe previous issues, dossiers on various topics, etc. More and more librarycatalogs are available on-line. And most sites offer hyperlinks to otherwebsites or documents on related subjects. In short, the Internet has become anessential tool for getting information, having access to documents andbroadening our knowledge. I will examine the interaction of the print media and the Internet in thefollowing areas: bookstores, publishers, press, libraries, digital libraries andcatalogs. I shall also include the contributions of the media professionals whoanswered my inquiry about: (1) the way they see the relationship between theprint media and the Internet; (2) what the use of the Internet has brought intheir professional life and/or the life of their company/organization; and (3)how they see their professional future or the future in general with theInternet. I express here my warmest thanks to all those who replied to myinquiry. I will also comment on the future trends regarding intellectual property, digitization, multimedia convergence and the information society. A selection ofwebsites is also available. Some of the information included here is probablyalready obsolete. Never mind. The world of the Internet is fast-moving andevolves constantly - that is one of its many assets. This study follows a Ph. D. I completed in 1998-99 at the University of theSorbonne (Ecole pratique des hautes études), Paris, France. Although the keyideas are the same, it is not the translation of the French study, which wasFrancophone-oriented. New websites and new contributions from people belongingto the English-speaking and the international community have been included here. Originally, I worked as a librarian in Europe and in the Middle East, undercontract to set up libraries and/or computerize catalogs. More recently, I havebeen contributing to the preparation of publications as a writer, translator, editor or indexor. Since 1996 I have been working mainly for the InternationalLabour Office (ILO), Geneva, Switzerland. As I am fascinated by languages, Ialso 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 theend 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 Internetusers will be over 300 million. Does the Internet compete directly with television and reading? In Quebec, where30. 7% of the population is connected, a poll taken in March 1998 for thecybermagazine Branchez-vous! showed that 28. 8% of connected Quebeckers werewatching television less than before. Only 12. 1% were reading less. As stated bythe French Canadian magazine Multimédium in its article of April 2, 1998, it was"rather encouraging for the Ministry of Culture and Communications which has thedouble task of furthering the development of information highways. .. Andreading!" The Internet has become the medium of choice for many news consumers, in manycases matching and occasionally surpassing traditional forms of media, accordingto a survey conducted in February 1998 for MSNBC on the Internet by MarketFacts. In an article of Internet Wire, February, 1998, Merrill Brown, editor-in-chiefof on-line MSNBC, wrote: "The Internet news usage behavior pattern is shaping up similar to broadcasttelevision in terms of weekday use, and is used more than cable television, newspapers and magazines during that same period of time. Additionally, onSaturdays, the Internet is used more than broadcast television, radio ornewspapers, and on a weekly basis has nearly the same hours of use asnewspapers. " The corresponding number of hours per week are: 2. 4 hours for magazines; 3. 5hours for the Internet; 3. 6 hours for newspapers; 4. 5 hours for radio; 5 hoursfor 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, andthen give birth to original, precise, specific services, bywhich time we willhave found an economic model of viability. For information cybermedias like theChroniques de Cybérie as well as for info-services, community and on-line publicservices, electronic commerce, distance learning, the post-modern policy whichis going to change the elected representatives/principals, in fact, everythingis 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 orthe entertainment industry any more than the cinema did. Television didn't killradio or cinema. Nor did home videos. When a new medium arrives, it makes someroom 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 mediumand its possible impact. We are still thinking about that, we are watching tosee what happens. Also, as a medium, the Net allows the emergence of new concepts in the field ofcommunication, and on the human level, too - even for non-connected people. Iremember (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, inAfrica, without television and telephone, who read and understood McLuhan. AndMcLuhan changed things in their vision of the world. The Internet has the sameeffect. It gives rise to some thinking on communication, private life, freedomof expression, the values we are attached to and those we are ready to get ridof, 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 alsorespect all cultures. During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organizedby the International Labour Organization (ILO), Geneva, Switzerland, in January1997, 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 thatwe need to maintain our traditions. Japan is quite receptive to foreign cultureand foreign technology. [. .. ] Foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, infact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there hasbeen insufficient support from the Government. [. .. ] With the development ofinformation networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to beable to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutualunderstanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures andsocial systems. " The Technorealism website first appeared on the Web on March 12, 1998. Accordingto the website, technorealism is "an attempt to assess the social and politicalimplications of technologies so that we might all have more control over theshape of our future. The heart of the technorealist approach involves acontinuous critical examination of how technologies - whether cutting-edge ormundane - might help or hinder us in the struggle to improve the quality of ourpersonal lives, our communities, and our economic, social, and politicalstructures. " The eight principles of Technorealism Overview have been signed by over 1, 472people 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 completelyfree of bias - that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promotecertain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded withboth intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Everytool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world andspecific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us toconsider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflectour values and aspirations. b) The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian. The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of newopportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet ascyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wiredlife, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or ratherordinary. c) Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier. Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdictionseparate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs thathave arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficientregulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has nosovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does on-line. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, thestate has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace andconventional society. Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to beentrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have littleinterest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fullyfunctioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do notnecessarily insure the public interest. " 2. 2. The "Info-Rich" and the "Info-Poor" There is a close correlation between economic and social development and accessto telecommunications. Access to new communication technologies expands muchmore rapidly in the North than in the South, and there are many more web serversin North America and in Europe than on the other continents. Two-thirds of theInternet users live in the United States, where 40% of households are equippedwith a computer, a percentage that we also find in Denmark, Switzerland andNetherlands. 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 ofinhabitants, available in the Computer Industry Almanach (CIA), a referencedocument on the evolution of cyberspace, show that Finland is the most connectedcountry 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%. Elevencountries in the world have a proportion of Internet users above 10%, andSwitzerland is eleventh, with 10. 7%. Regarding the global percentage, the statistics of end 1997 of the ComputerIndustry Almanach - which take into consideration the connections at home, atwork and in academic institutions - show that the United States is stillconsiderably 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 showsthat the US lead is constantly decreasing - it went from 80% in 1991 to lessthan 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 informationhighways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity variesfrom more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries toless than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in theworld are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's populationhas never used a phone. In the developing countries, it is unlikely that Internet connections will usetraditional phone lines, as there are other technological solutions. Thedeveloping countries' equipment rate for digital lines is equivalent to the rateof industrialized countries. The growth in mobile telephony is also spectacular. The solution could be brought by cellular radiotelephony and satelliteconnection. However, the demarcation between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" does notsystematically follow the demarcation between the so-called developed anddeveloping countries. Access to information technology in the so-called richcountries is also rather uneven. Some developing countries, such as Malaysia ora number of countries in Latin America, have a very dynamic telecommunicationpolicy. In the documents prepared for the second Conference on the Developmentof Telecommunications in the World, organized by the InternationalTelecommunication 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 andthe quality of their phone services during the last three years. On the otherhand, the situation was getting worse for the poorest countries. During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, WilfredKiboro, Managing Director and Chief Executive of Nation Printers and PublishersLtd. , Kenya, stated: "Information technology needs to be brought to affordable levels. I have a dreamthat perhaps in our lifetime in Africa, we will see villagers being able toaccess [the] Internet from their rural villages where today there is no waterand no electricity. We hope they will be able to watch Sky News on theirportable 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 verylow compared to the population figures, and each copy is read by at least twentypeople. According to Wilfred Kiboro, who noticed in his company a drop in thenewspapers' price thanks to multimedia convergence, distribution costs coulddrop with the use of a printing system by satellite which could do away with theneed for transporting newspapers by truck throughout the country. Nevertheless, multimedia convergence in particular and the globalization of theeconomy in general has put the developing countries in a position of inferioritybecause the printing and radio-television broadcasting means are in the hands ofa few main western groups. Cultural problems exist alongside economic problems. Paradoxically, information relating to Africa and broadcast for Africans doesn'tcome from the African continent, but is broadcast by westerners who transmittheir own vision of Africa, without any real perception of its economic andsocial situation. Some developing countries - such as Mauritania - rely on the Web to regainprestige, as explained by Emmanuel Genty and Jean-Pierre Turquoi in the dailyFrench newspaper Le Monde of March 30, 1998. Mauritania presented its GovernmentOfficial Site at the headquarters of the World Bank during the Days of theConsultative Group for Mauritania (Journées du Groupe consultatif pour laMauritanie) on March 25-27, 1998. This event took place following the mediafocus on the continued existence of slavery in this country, despite the factthat it has been officially abolished for years. The website is intended to bethe 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 andTelecommunication Office (Office des postes et des télécommunications - OPT), which is the national operator. And things are made even more difficult becauseof prohibitive connection costs - three times the cost of a local phone call. China is also discovering digital information through the China Wide Web, whichis the country's national Internet. The number of its subscribers jumped from100, 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 andinformation network more or less cut off from the rest of the world, andscreened and controlled by the Chinese authorities. The abyss between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" is not only the onedividing developed and developing countries. In any country, there are gapsbetween the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the people whobelong to society and the people who are rejected by it. As a new communicationmedium, the Internet can be a way out of the abyss. Anyone can have an e-mailaddress on the Net. Anyone can use the Web in the public library or in thepremises 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 explainedby the fact that the Internet was created in the United States as a network setup by the Pentagon (in 1969) before spreading to US governmental agencies and touniversities. After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by TimBerners-Lee at the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), Geneva, Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic (the ancestor ofNetscape) from November 1993 onwards, the Web, too, began to spread, first inthe US thanks to considerable investments made by the government, then aroundNorth America, and then to the rest of the world. The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than inany other country is due to different factors - these countries are among theleaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware andsoftware, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than inthe 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 thedaily cybermagazine Multimédium, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, author of Chroniques deCybérie, a weekly cybermagazine widely read in the French-speaking Internetcommunity, explained: "In Quebec I am spending about 120 hours per month on-line. My Internet accessis $30 [Canadian]; if I add my all-inclusive phone bill which is about $40 (withvarious optional services), the total cost of my connection is $70 per month. Ileave you to guess what the price would be in France, in Belgium or inSwitzerland, where the local communications are billed by the minute, for thesame number of hours on-line. " It follows that many European surfers spend much less time on the Web than theywould like, or choose to surf at night to cut their expenses. At the end of1998, in several countries (Italy, Germany, France, etc. ), surfers began toboycott the Internet for one day to make phone companies aware of their needsand give them a special monthly rate. In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies and the InternetSociety, ran the first major study of the actual distribution of languages onthe Internet. The results are published in the Web Languages Hit Parade, datedJune 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 Italian1. 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 newspaperLe Soir presents the newspaper in six languages: French, English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poètes (Club of Poets), a French sitededicated 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 ofEnglish-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of theWeb recognize that, although English may be the main international language forexchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English. Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use AltaVista Translation, whichtranslates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfercan also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he will get ausable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very helpful, butwill never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a human translatorwith special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the site. The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverselanguages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improvecommunication among everyone in the international Internet community. In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD NetworkNews) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained: "This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace thegrowth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World WideWeb'. [. .. ] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbiesare 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 theWeb whose native language is not English. [. .. ] Only 6 percent of the worldpopulation speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), whileabout 80 percent of all web pages are in English. " Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2, 061, 220words 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, hewrote: "An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and Ithink I learned something from it. In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package ona particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the sameproblem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me. .. The software waswritten only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way aroundthe world. Distance and geography no longer mattered! OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate inEnglish but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as Germanwhich was his mother tongue. The Internet has removed one barrier (distance) butwith that comes the barrier of language. It seems that the Internet is moving people in two quite different directions atthe same time. The Internet (initially based on English) is connecting peopleall around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people touse for communication. But it is also creating contact between people ofdifferent languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A commonlanguage is great but in no way replaces this need. So the Internet promotes both a common language AND multilingualism. The goodnews is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need iscreating incentives for people around the world to create improved languagecourses and other assistance and the Internet is providing fast and inexpensiveopportunities to make them available. " For more information about the Web and languages, please see my study aboutMultilingualism 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: SomeExamples / 3. 3. Digital Books] 3. 1. Books: A Good Product to Sell On-Line Many "traditional" bookstores - with booksellers, windows, books piled upondisplay shelves or lined up on shelves around the shop - have created on-linebookstores on the Internet - for example, Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble. Com) inthe United States, Chapters (Chaptersglobe) in Canada, Waterstone's in theUnited Kingdom, etc. Other bookstores have no walls and no windows looking outon the street. They are "only" on-line (for example Amazon. Com in the UnitedStates, 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 andthe Internet, we shall focus on books only. The book-lover searches the on-line bookstore's catalog on his screen. In mostcases, searches are possible by author, title and subject. The home page of thebookstore often looks like a literary magazine, so the book-lover can be keptinformed of the latest current events. For someone who does not like queuing inhis 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-linethe books he is interested in and pay with his credit card. The only delayencountered is the time necessary for the book to be shipped to his house. Sucha person is looking forward to being equipped with a digital book, which willappear in 1999. Jeff Bezos created Amazon. Com in July 1995, after a market study which led himto 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, butamong the main criteria was the size of the relative markets. Books, I foundout, were an $82 billion market worldwide. The price point was another majorcriterion: I wanted a low-priced product. I reasoned that since this was thefirst purchase many people would make on-line, it had to be non-threatening insize. A third criterion was the range of choice: there were 3 million items inthe book category and only a tenth of that in CDs, for example. This wasimportant because the wider the choice, the more the organizing and selectioncapabilities of the computer could be put in good use. " However, Jeff Bezos doesn't think traditional bookstores are going to close anytime 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, independentbookstore in downtown Seattle which has exposed brick walls, a cafe and lots offriendly salespeople. And he talks about how 'books creak in that nice kind ofway'. 'We are trying to make the shopping experience just as fun as going to thebook 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 milliontitles, authoritative reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer reviews, and book recommendations. It is an Internet retailer of books, music, and otherinformation-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 3million people in more than 160 countries. "Businesses can do things on the Webthat simply cannot be done any other way", says Jeff Bezos. "We are changing theway people buy books and music. " Any book-lover can post his own reviews of books and read others. He can readinterviews with authors and blurbs and excerpts from books. He can search forbooks by author, subject, title, ISBN or publication date. Prices arediscounted, with savings of 20-40% on 400, 000 titles (40% on selected featurebooks, 30% on hardcovers, and 20% on paperbacks). The client usually receivesthe books within a week. If he requests it, he will receive an e-mail announcinga new book by an author he likes or on a subject he is particularly interestedin. He can also choose from 44 subjects, and he will be sent a monthly e-mailreviewing books Amazon. Com's editors consider particularly interesting. Success magazine of July 1998 wrote "that Amazon. Com is the universal model forsuccessful Internet retailing (a. K. A. 'e-tailing'). " Computer Weekly of July 24, 1997, defined it as "undoubtedly the most quoted example of go-ahead electroniccommerce and still the showcase for Internet trading" and PC World of July 1997stated: "In the summer of 1995, Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, decided torisk 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 smallbusinesses. Few who have braved the wilds of the Web have achievedAmazon. 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 theelements we work hard to provide. We continued to improve our customerexperience during the quarter [the second quarter 1998] with the opening of ourmusic store, our easier-to-navigate store layout, and our expansion into thelocal U. K. And German book markets. These initiatives will continue to requireaggressive investment and entail significant execution challenges. " Amazon. Com's press release of June 8, 1998, gives some information about itsAssociates Program: "The Amazon. Com Associates Program allows web-site owners to easily participatein hassle-free electronic commerce by recommending books on their site andreferring visitors to Amazon. Com. In return, participants earn referral fees ofup to 15 percent of the sales they generate. Amazon. Com handles the secureon-line ordering, customer service, and shipping and sends weekly e-mail salesreports. Enrollment in the program is free, and participants can be up andrunning the same day. Associates range from large and small businesses to nonprofits, authors, publishers, personal home pages, and more. The popularity of the program isreflected in the range of additions to the Associates Community in the past fewmonths: Adobe, InfoBeat, Kemper Funds, PR Newswire, Travelocity, VirtualVineyards, and Xoom. " The program surpassed 60, 000 members in June 1998. Barnes & Noble, the giant U. S. Bookseller, is the leading operator of booksuperstores in America, with 481 stores nationwide, in 48 states. It alsooperates 520 B. Dalton bookstores in shopping malls. Barnes & Noble stores offera selection of more than 175, 000 titles from more than 20, 000 publishers with anemphasis on small, independent publishers and university presses. The companyalso publishes books under its own imprint for exclusive sale through its retailstores and nationwide mail-order catalogs. Barnes & Noble entered the world of on-line commerce in early 1997, launchingits America Online site in March 1997 - it is the exclusive bookseller toAmerica Online (AOL)'s more than 12 million subscribers - and launching its newwebsite, barnesandnoble. Com, in May 1997. The site includes personalized contentrecommendations from authors and editors, and more than 630, 000 titles availablefor 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 bargainbooks). It has exclusive partnerships with more than 12, 000 websites through itsAffiliate Network, including CNN Interactive, Lycos, and ZDNet. On May 27, 1998, barnesandnoble. Com launched a significantly enhanced version ofits e-commerce website. The new site features Express Lane one-click ordering, anew design and navigation, improved book search capabilities and expandedproduct offerings - including an on-line software superstore. In the pressrelease of the same day, Jeff Killeen, chief operating officer, stated: "Through our first year in business we have listened intently to what ourcustomers have asked for and believe we have delivered a vastly superior productbased on those requests. [. .. ] Innovation based on customer-focus has been thehallmark of our success and we see our new site as proof-positive of ourcommitment to be the leader in on-line bookselling and related products. We'realso extremely excited to have Intel, a leader in the technology productscategory, open its SoftwareForPCs. Com site at barnesandnoble. Com. " The opening of barnesandnoble. Com sparked a fierce price war in a low-marginbusiness. 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". JeffBezos, CEO of Amazon. Com, doesn't fear the competition though. In Success ofJuly 1998, he told journalist Lesley Hazleton: "The gap has increased rather than decreased. We went from $60 millionannualized sales revenue in May to $260 million by the end of the year, and from340, 000 customers to 1. 5 million, 58 percent of them repeat customers - all thatin the context of 'Amazon. Toast'. We're doing more than eight times the sales ofBarnes & Noble. And we're not a stationary target. We were blessed with atwo-year head start, and our goal is to increase that gap. " Located in United Kingdom, Internet Bookshop (iBS) is the largest on-linebookstore in Europe. The main English bookstore Waterstone's also launched itselectronic bookstore, with a catalog of 1. 4 million titles. In Fall 1998, Chapters, the main Canadian bookseller, together with the dailynewspaper The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, opened their cyberbookstoreChaptersglobe. Com, "the on-line destination for Canadian book-lovers". A newon-line bookstore is also expected from Bertelsmann, one of the largest mediacompanies in the world, with headquarters in Germany. The companies of theBertelsmann Group employ about 60, 000 employees in more than 40 differentcountries. The 300-plus independently operating firms are organized into fivedivisions 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 twoAnglo-American companies Blackwell and Dawson - who work exclusively forlibraries and documentation services. Thanks to them, these organizations cannow avoid multiple orders and invoices, and they can also order foreign booksand periodicals without the complications related to ordering of documentsoutside a country. Based in Oxford (United Kingdom), Portland, Oregon, and New Jersey, Blackwell'sBook Services specialize in the supply of books and value added bibliographicproducts and services to over 15, 000 academic, research and special libraries inover 120 countries around the world. Dawson Information Services Group is Europe's largest journal subscription agentand corporate and academic book supplier. It is also a main information servicesgroup, providing resource acquisition and management services to libraries andcorporate research centers around the globe. Old books are now being sold through the Web. For example, Paulus Swaen Old Mapsand Prints, run by Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, specializes inmaps, atlases and globes from the 16th-18th century. The stock of maps of allparts of the world is produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The company alsosells atlases, globes, travel books, Medieval manuscripts and playing cards. Since November 1996, it offers an on-line Internet auction - twice per year, inMarch and November - for old maps, prints, globes, travel books and medievalmanuscripts. 3. 3. Digital Books When he buys through an on-line bookstore, the customer can almost instantlyselect, order and pay for the books he is interested in. The only delay is theshipping of the books to his house, which can take anywhere from one week tomuch longer. The problem of delay - as well as the problem of weight - should be solved soonwith digital books - or eBooks. A digital book is a book-sized electronic readerthat can store many texts at once. Some pioneer companies have created digitalbooks which will be available in 1999 - such as the Rocket eBook (created byNuvoMedia), the Everybook (EB) (created by Everybook), the SoftBook (created bySoftBook 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 byproviding a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users topublish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely andefficiently over the Web. Investors of NuvoMedia are Barnes & Noble andBertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the PC or the Macintoshis made through the RocketEbook Cradle, which provides external power through awall transformer, and connects to the PC with a serial cable. Everybook is "a living library in a single book". The Everybook (EB)'s masselectronic storage is one removable disk cartridge which can hold 80-100 collegetextbooks, or 500 to 1, 000 novels. The EB uses a hidden modem to dial into theEverybook Store, where it is possible to browse, purchase, and receive entirepublications, including cover art. Books, magazines, menus, sheet music allappear as they would in their printed form. Softbook Press is creating SoftBook®, along with the SoftBook Network™, anInternet-based content delivery service, which provided a completely paperlessreading system. Professionals and students can easily, quickly and securelydownload a wide selection of corporate documents, books, and periodicals usingits built-in Internet connection. Unlike a computer, the SoftBook isergonomically designed for reading long documents and books. Its publishingpartners are Random House and Simon & Schuster. Librius is a full-service, e-commerce company. It delivers digital copies ofbooks to consumers via the Internet from its World Bookstore. The digital booksare stored and read by the consumer in a small, low-cost reading device, calledthe Millennium EBook. Librius customers can obtain everything that they need tobecome "digital readers" directly from the Librius Web site, including EBookdevices, thousands of book titles, and full customer support. Digital books will not replace books, at least not in the very near future. Theywill be a new support for publishers to deliver the books through the Internetand for readers to store many texts in one digital support to be taken witheverywhere. In our technological society, some people are attached to books whateverhappens, like Robert Downs who wrote in Books in My Life: "My lifelong loveaffair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, andall other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry. " For some other people, being convinced about how much can be brought byelectronic texts doesn't prevent them from loving books. In an article publishedin the Swiss magazine Informatique-Informations of February 1996, PierrePerroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic textsrepresent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culturedissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These textsare "a good complement to the paper book, which remains irreplaceable when whatwe are talking about is reading". Pierre Perroud is convinced of the necessity to be kept closely informed of thetechnological developments to adapt print media and education. Nevertheless thebook remains "a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: wegrip it in our hands, we hold it against our bodies, we look at it withadmiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; itsfragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water andfire, 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 NeedPublishers? / 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 theWeb. 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 Sciencesto publish the reports issued by the Academy and by the National Academy ofEngineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. TheNAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, presenting the most authoritative views on importantissues 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 AdobeAcrobat PDF files. The MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is dedicated toscience and technology. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books a year andover 40 journals, and is a major publishing presence in fields as diverse asarchitecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computationalscience, with a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of newtechnologies.