Lit.com

E-books: Egads or e-okay?

By Tanya Whiton

DOWN-READABLE: “covers” of just a few of ebooksonthe.net’s offerings.

Four years ago, Constance Foster went out on a literary limb and started an online publishing company, ebooksonthe.net. Based in Ellsworth, she began with a mere seven titles, most of them her own books on psychology. Now she has over 400 titles in all genres, and acts as executive director of the Electronic Publishers Coalition.

Foster — for obvious reasons — is hot on the topics of digital rights management; whether or not quality writing can be found online; and if so, who reads it. What I wanted to know was how people read digital content. And I don’t mean that in a theoretical sense. As a technophobe bibliophile who only recently figured out how to send a mass email (huzzah!), I wondered if anyone could actually read a novel on screen. Sure, I use a computer, but I print everything out, even my messages. My cell phone-wielding friends mock me for this anachronistic behavior, and even go so far as to accuse me of being another tree-felling romantic, but I relish tangibility.

Foster informed me that she “hadn’t turned a page in years,” that she read everything on a hand-held reader.

A what? Apparently another development in the digital age has passed me by.

Foster was very patient during our interview, responding to my suspicious questions with good-natured ease. Low-culture profiteer, I thought, dialing her phone number. Pulp-fiction purveyor. By the time her voicemail system located her (via robot?) I was fully ready to make one last stand on behalf of Literature, on behalf of the Book, the Tome, the Object d’art that is a well-printed volume.

“It is true,” Foster replied, when I (in slightly more diplomatic terms) posed a question about which genres were most successful online. “When [e-publishing] was first happening, sci-fi and horror was what you saw.” Exactly as I suspected. While I’d like to say that I’m a deeply egalitarian person who feels that all forms of writing have merit, I’m not. I’m a snob.

I prefer sneezing in the basement of a used bookstore, with one of the inevitable fifteen copies of the Gulag Archipelago on my “maybe I’ll buy this” pile to being merely entertained. I expressed my doubts that serious writing could succeed on the net.

“Well, I have everything from bodice rippers to how-to books from Argentina,” Foster said, unapologetically. “I had a doctor contact me last week who wants me to do his book on urology.”

Urology? Not pulp fiction, exactly . . . Who reads this stuff? I asked.

“Most of my customers come from India and Scandinavia,” Foster answered. “The two most plugged-in countries in the world — especially the Finns. They’re very aggressive in digital content.”

I began to feel rather provincial. Would printed books someday be the mules plodding alongside the information highway? Would I, as a reader and writer who loved them, be marooned by the speedy evolution of culture?

To demonstrate some degree of sophistication, I asked Foster if the recent downturn in the dotcom industry was affecting business. I felt momentarily pleased with my knowing, official manner. “No,” she said.

Oh.

“Business has never been that great to begin with. I mean, Stephen King did a fabulous job with Riding the Bullet, but if you’re a Stephen King fan, you’re gonna buy it on paper towels,” she said.

So why go from a successful print business into the cyber void?

“It offers my writers a level playing field,” Foster said.

That got my dander up again. How do you maintain standards in a level playing field? I demanded.

“First of all, let’s not misconstrue electronic material as shoddy work,” Foster replied. “My submissions have been closed for the last six months — and I turn down 89 percent of the material that comes my way. The difference between self-publishing and what I do is that I pay 40 percent of all royalties.”

She stressed that digital publishers couldn’t compete with traditional print houses. “And we don’t need to,” she said. “The question is, what can we offer that’s different?”

Feeling slightly less threatened, I tried to pose a more objective question: What are the stickier issues surrounding digital copyright?

“Fair use,” Foster said, without hesitation. “It’s my sixties [upbringing] showing. But when I sell a book to someone, they paid money for it, so they should have fair use. Books get passed along from person to person. Why should e-books be different?”

Foster is something of an activist in the digital realm, I learned over the course of our conversation. She recently joined with a herd of other e-publishers in defense of Dmitry Skylarov, a Russian programmer who broke the code on Adobe’s “unassailable” e-book format, and then proceeded to give a how-to lecture at a Vegas tech conference. Skylarov was arrested immediately afterwards, for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — an act considered by many to be of dubious constitutional merit. (According to the online research I did following my discussion with Foster. I look forward to bandying my new digi-terms around in conversation.)

“We [the Electronic Publishers Coalition] took the stand that the DMCA was not flouted,” Foster said. “To say ‘we have an encryption you can’t break’ is ridiculous. There’s always a 14-year-old kid sitting in a garage somewhere who can break it.”

Finally, I voiced my darkest fear. Did Foster think that someday printed books would be obsolete?

“No,” she said. “I mean, when the automobile came along, people who rode horse and carriage still could. And they still do . . .”

Hmm.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Maybe that’s not such a good example.”

I thought of the signs posted on every major highway, which say: “No animals, ridden, driven or led.”

Guess I’d better figure out how this newfangled e-book business works. After all — like the rest of the hacks — I gotta get me to market.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.