ELECTRONIC BOOKS : We Have Seen the Future, and It Beeps

Even computer people agree that we’ll be reading print on paper for at least 10 more years--which is an eternity in the computer world.

--Michael Crichton, “Electronic Life” (1983)

Earlier this month I drove out to the headquarters of Voyager, a young electronic publishing company in Santa Monica, to see how books on computer will soon be revolutionizing all our lives. There was a hand-lettered sign on the door. “Sorry,” it read. “The demonstration scheduled for tonight will have to be rescheduled. There has been a power failure.”

All the blackouts in the world may not keep electronic publishing from someday changing how we read. To be sure, there will always be purists who wax rhapsodic over the mystical properties of vellum and ink. You know these people. They’re the ones who predicted that word processors would be the death of real writing, and who now call to say, “Sorry I haven’t written, but my Mac’s in the shop.”

The rest of us want to know the same things about electronic books we always want to know about some sexy new technology: What’s it do, what’s it cost and what’s it going to be marked down to the week after we buy it?

Easy answers first. An electronic book costs anywhere between $19.95 and $5,000, depending on whether you have a personal computer to read one on. With an Apple Macintosh, or, even better, with a laptop Mac Powerbook (a battery powered personal computer) it is now perfectly possible to read an entire book without ever once touching paper.

If you happen to be allergic to wood pulp, it’s easy to see where something like this might come in handy. If not, come read over my shoulder while I put a Voyager “Expanded Book,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray”--through its paces.

Just as USA today is sold in vending boxes designed to look like TV sets (white boxes on black stands with rounded corners), expanded books, or EBs, as they are called, come in packages designed to look like books. In both cases, the intent is not to deceive but to reassure. Smaller than hardbacks yet larger than mass market softcover, EBs resemble thinner, lighter trade paperbacks, complete with cover art. Take off the shrink-wrap, though, and the unfolded package looks a lot like a greeting card with a 3 1/2” floppy disk for a punch line.

Tucked billfold-style inside the greeting card are the simple, four-step installation instructions. Fittingly for an EB, these four steps also expand: into five, six, two and two sub-steps, respectively. Like turning on a computer, performing these 15 sub-steps takes almost an hour the first time, and almost no time from then on.

Of course, opening a regular, old-fashioned book takes exactly one step, and won’t show up your electric bill next month, either. But traditional books don’t have nifty electronic bookplates inviting you--backspace: make that “obliging you”--to type in your name. Presumably this is some kind of anti-piracy precaution, but I reacted to it with a wariness usually reserved for pizza-delivery outfits wanting to know my phone number. Under Ex Libris, I carefully typed in the name of “Ned Ludd,” the early 19th-Century Leicestershire workman dedicated to the sabotage of all labor-saving machinery.

Instantly, “This book belongs to Ned Ludd” flashed up in a corner of the screen. I felt ashamed, as if I’d just been caught teaching a parrot how to swear. To make matters worse, Oscar Wilde’s face, propped on one hand and looking extremely dubious, now stared out at me from a kind of pointillistic frontispiece.

Chastened, I tried to turn the page.

Page-turning in a book without any pages takes some getting used to. To turn a page, one presses the down key. Pages appear one at a time instead of the familiar two, and contain fewer than 20 lines. Since most books published nowadays run about 40 lines to a page, this makes for some very high page counts. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” for example--248 pages in Penguin paperback--tips the scales at 491 in electronic form. A Mac powerbook, with two expanded books inside, still weighs less than Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.”

Electronic pages also pose the same design problem movies on video do: how to fit a rectangular image onto a square screen. Movies, wider than they are tall, are formatted as a “letter-box” band across the center of the video screen. Because books are taller than they are wide, EB designers have resorted to a kind of vertical letter-boxing--perhaps key-holing would be a better term.

The page takes up only the middle third of the screen, flanked on the left side by any marginalia you care to type in, and on the right by a menu of functions from which to choose. Some functions, such as flipping back to a previous chapter, would be just as easy to perform with a traditional book, and probably easier. Others, such as displaying all references to a given word or phrase--or to an ill-remembered secondary character in a Russian novel--would be impossible. For example, if you’ve ever wondered how many times Oscar Wilde uses the word languid in “Dorian Gray,” the answer is eight. It just seems like more.

For students and book reviewers tracing a word or name throughout a book, or for key-punchers needing a reading break on the sly, EBs look like a godsend. But unless God also sends them the money to buy one, the target market for some time to come will still consist largely of hackers (accounting for the high proportion of science-fiction titles available) and frequent fliers (likewise all those travel guides and bestsellers). “The Picture of Dorian Gray” turns up as part of a deal Voyager cut with Random House’s Modern Library, whose cackling patriarch Bennett Cerf actually speaks to the reader as an EB sound effect on computers with the requisite chip.

So how do these horseless books compare with traditional horse-drawn books for simple readability? In admittedly brief trials conducted under rigorously unscientific conditions, electronic books proved themselves the equals of traditional books in nearly every important particular. Unfortunately, the converse was also true. Traditional books do almost everything EBs do, and there are lots more titles to choose from. You don’t need a screen filter to prevent eyestrain, either. If the electronic book had somehow come first, might we now be hailing paper and ink as the medium of the future?

Probably not. Sexy technologies, like sexy people, are perhaps sexiest in what they promise, and electronic publishing promises a lot. The educational applications appear limitless.

Soon, goes the promise, we will have books whose every word can be defined at the twitch of a mouse’s tail. Eventually, goes the promise, a Library of Congress inside every neighborhood library! But until someone makes good on these dazzling promises, the electronic book will have to remain little more than a novelty item, scarcely worth the paper it isn’t printed on.

Voyager’s Itinerary

The Voyager Co. offers about 50 titles in its current catalogue. Agreements with the Modern Library and Macmillan give them access to classics, new fiction and nonfiction, and there are several areas of planned expansion--including a publishing tool kit, which would democratize the book publishing business (for example, you could publish your own Ph.D. thesis). Another new application is on CD-ROM technology. It would add the ability to call up the context of a particular word, hear a scene dramatized, display original manuscripts, correspondence, maps or film clips.

Among the current electronic books available from Voyager are:

“Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton

“The Pelican Brief” by John Grisham

“Waiting to Exhale” by Terry McMillan

“Indemnity Only/Guardian Angel” by Sara Paretsky

“Neuromancer,” “Count Zero,” “Mona Lisa Overdrive” by William Gibson

“Genius” by James Gleick

“Backlash” by Susan Faludi

“Revolution From Within” by Gloria Steinem

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley

“Savage Inequalities” by Jonathan Kozol

“The Complete Novels of Jane Austen” (in two electronic volumes!)

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” by Robert Pirsig

“The Tao of Pooh” and “The Te of Piglet” by Benjamin Hoff

For information about local Voyager dealers, phone (800) 446-2001.