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NEW YORK-- Electronic books made a splashy debut Friday in the world capital of publishing, but the high-profile event, held at Barnes & Noble's flagship store in Union Square, raised as many questions about the industry's future as it answered.
The press conference and party marked the formal launch of the Rocket eBook, the first of the current wave of digital reading devices to come officially to market. Several hundred book titles (from Dante's Inferno to Michael Wolff's Burn Rate) will be available in digital form as "RocketEditions" at barnesandnoble.com early next month. The Rocket eBook is available online at Levenger, which bills its high-end pens, book lights, and cushions as "tools for serious readers."
The makers of a competing product, the Softbook, are slated to open their electronic bookstore on the Web in November.
Attendees at the invitation-only launch event reflected the intense interest in e-books among traditional publishers, representing a cross-section of big-name publishing houses and print media, from Simon & Schuster, Random House, Doubleday, and Penguin-Putnam to The Wall Street Journal.
NuvoMedia, makers of the Rocket eBook, continued in a brand-building strategy of linking its devices to high-quality literary content by enlisting the 39th poet laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky, as the keynote speaker. Barnes & Noble vice chairman Steve Riggio and NuvoMedia co-founder Martin Eberhard also spoke. The New York event kicks off a 21-day tour.
Pinsky, a charismatic, basso-voiced orator, riffed on the image of the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for e-books: a doorway that transports readers to other realms.
"We've invented ways of turning a very small space into a very large world," Pinsky said. "Everybody has experienced this who's had a computer. It seems really appropriate that my Rocket eBook had Alice in Wonderland loaded into it." (Carroll's classic comes bundled with the Rocket eBook, along with a user's guide and an abridged Random House Dictionary.)
The poet, who wrote an early electronic text in the mid-'80s called Mind Wheels, and is the poetry editor at Slate, added, "My office here seems to be to ease the fears that we all feel about things that are different."
The differences that e-books will make in the book industry are the subject of much heated speculation. Pinsky said that he hoped that the ability to market titles with no costs for paper distribution could trigger a small press renaissance, and be a boon for literary publishers like Copper Canyon and Greywolf Press.
Fears that the roles of traditional publishers and retailers may change dramatically if electronic publishing takes hold in the marketplace were not completely assuaged by Barnes & Noble's Riggio. When asked if consumers might opt to buy electronic texts directly on the Net from publishers and writers -- rather than from established booksellers -- Riggio drew hoots from publishing reps when he said, "You want to buy from a company you can trust."
For a publisher or writer to market electronic texts directly to readers, he said, "It does require a Web site.... We don't imagine publishers trying to do this." The "whole issue of Internet security, downloading, and transactions" will keep people coming back to brand-name online bookstores, he insisted.
While the sleek, crisply legible, lightweight Rocket eBooks seemed to be making an excellent impression on the noontime crowd, other concerns bubbled under the surface.
The news earlier this month that Microsoft was weighing in as the advocate of a single shared set of protocols for the electronic publication of texts, the so-called Open eBook Standard, was greeted with mixed emotions by Charles Levine, vice president of Random House's reference division.
"We wouldn't want Microsoft to come into another marketplace that they don't yet dominate and become the arbiter," he said.
NuvoMedia's Eberhard defended Microsoft's championing of the standard. "The last thing any of us wants to do is fragment the market. You need a strong and neutral party to step up" and arbitrate standards, he said. But Redmond's interest may appear less "neutral" if Microsoft begins marketing its own operating system for e-books, Levine countered.
Author's rights in the age of digital texts were also a topic of discussion. One of the virtues of electronic texts is that they need never go "out of print," even if a title only sells a single copy a year. But when Pinsky was asked how he would feel about a publisher claiming ownership of the digital rights to one of his books of poetry forever, he replied, "I assume that the publishers will protect their interests, and [my agent] will protect mine."
An attorney who represents authors said he had just received a letter from Simon & Schuster seeking to obtain the electronic rights to one of his clients' texts for half the royalty rate paid for print rights.
"If publishers are going to be piggish about this, this industry is never going to get off the ground," he warned.
Another publishing rep, Jeff Lefevere at Macmillan Computer Publishing, expressed doubts that e-books would catch on with mainstream consumers of romances and novels. "The baby-boomer woman doesn't want to read her Oprah selection at the beach on one of these things," Lefevere said.
He did, however, predict a huge electronic market for readers of his own product -- bulky computer-reference texts.
Earlier this month, NuvoMedia announced that it was partnering with the Sharp Corp. to develop a range of Rocket eBook-compatible reading devices.
Even in a world where Sharp manufactures the end-user product, Microsoft makes the operating system, and Barnes & Noble sells the books, NuvoMedia would still play a "central hub role" in the distribution of electronic texts, Eberhard predicted.
"WebTV was swallowed [by Microsoft], but WebTV technology is all driven by WebTV," he said. "We'll always be deeply involved."
