From Cyber Books to Moses Mania, the Stories We’ve Brought You During the Year Have Had Some Surprising Developments : Cranking Up the Cyber Presses

Still reading books on paper, rather than in cyberspace?

When we first spoke with David Gettman in September (for a story called “The Cyber Book Bind”), the British entrepreneur had won worldwide notice as the first electronic publisher to submit a virtual volume for the prestigious Booker Prize, his country’s equivalent of the Pulitzer. Literary critics were sniping at his audacity in submitting a book that had not been published on paper. Electronic books are not books at all, they carped. The Times’ own Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Richard Eder, agreed with them: “If Shakespeare had hired a skywriter to write ‘Hamlet’ in smoke, would that be a book?” Gettman’s entry, “The Angels of Russia,” did not win the Booker.

He persisted. He could foresee the future of publishing, he said, and paper no longer would reign in the reading realm. But he would be an “old-fashioned publisher” in a newfangled world, publishing only in cyberspace--but publishing books of “high quality, that will make a positive contribution to literature or to the history of ideas.”

Since the article ran, Gettman says, he’s been enjoying “the huge influx of manuscripts we now get every day. Many of these are extremely good. We have become keen on a rapid expansion in order to take advantage.” His firm, Online Originals, now publishes one or two books a month. “We want to add one new book every day. We have enough quality submissions to support this. We would expand genres to include a wider range of fiction, some academic nonfiction, etc.”

Gettman, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, says that since September his U.S. “hit rate” (the number of people who log onto his Web site) and U.S. sales have quadrupled. And he is becoming a semi-celebrity as well. A mention in Forbes magazine brought approaches from some venture capitalists who might help finance the firm’s expansion, he says. He’s been invited to speak on e-commerce at Harvard Business School next month. And, according to British Airways’ Business Life magazine, he is “one of the 20 key people to watch in 1999.” Gettman says his 8-year-old son is not impressed. “He says he’s been watching me for years, and it’s boring.”