******************************************************************* TELEREAD: HOW ELECTRONIC BOOKS COULD COST LESS AND BE EASIER TO READ THAN PAPER ONES Vice President Gore has long championed electronic books--a fine cause. But how much will books, educational software and other material cost the average American family to dial up? And is there a way to build millions of inexpensive computers with sharp, viewable screens that would be *easier* to read than books? Technology is destiny. What's our destiny, though, if video stores are everywhere but half the school libraries in California have closed since 1982? Here is a proposal addressing those issues--an expanded version of my article in the April 4 Washington Post Education Review. -- David H. Rothman April 5, 1993 ******************************************************************* TABLE OF CONTENTS --TeleRead: How Electronic Books Could Cost Less and Be Easier to Read than Paper Ones. --Who Wins and Who Loses if Online Libraries Are Affordable? Students and teachers could be winners. On the other hand, some Washington think-tankers might not fare so well. --Stamping Out Curiosity: The Trouble with Pay-Per-Read and "Knowledge Stamps." --Seven Myths--and Responses. TeleRead should appeal to many parents, educators, researchers, librarians, writers, editors, software developers and, yes, enlightened publishers of books; but the pay-per-read gang will hate it. Here are arguments and counter-arguments. --The Origins of TeleRead. TeleRead is not a group, just one writer's idea. I do hope, of course, that others will join me in fighting for the plan. --Acting on the Idea. Why you should *not* fax or e-mail the White House or your local member of Congress. --How to Reach Me. Please reply directly to me rather than to the network IDs of the people posting this file. --Copyright Information. Alas, TeleRead doesn't exist yet, and cumbersome copyright laws do. So please read the notice at the end of this file if you want to publish this proposal on paper--yes, the old-fashioned way--or print long excerpts from it. You are free to distribute the material online and pass out disks with the TeleRead file. --Addendum: Is Bridgeport the Future? Without TeleRead, what happens when cities slash library funds? ****************************************************************** TELEREAD: HOW ELECTRONIC BOOKS COULD COST LESS AND BE EASIER TO READ THAN PAPER ONES The Kid Next Door helped confirm the big bang theory. He was no longer T.K.N.D. of course--rather, a bearded professor of astronomy--but I could still see him as a gangly child perusing his father's physics journals. Ned was always a reader. Even before he could puzzle out words on paper, he was begging his mother to read to him about internal combustion engines. Years later he relied on public libraries, not just the local junkyard, when he built his first telescope. Luckily for science, Dr. Edward L. Wright grew up in affluent Fairfax County, Virginia--not in Harlem or Watts, where the libraries were wanting and where he could never have found those arcane journals. We just cannot say where potential Wrights will show up. Given current demographics, more will have to come from ghettos, barrios and other book-short areas. Suppose, however, that we live out an old dream of hackers and librarians. What if computers can drive down the cost of providing books to African Americans, Hispanics, Appalachians and, yes, Fairfax Countians? Already politicians have proposed online libraries. In the Scientific American of September 1991, for example, Al Gore wrote: "We have the technical know-how to make networks that would enable a child to come home from school and, instead of playing Nintendo, use something that looks like a video games machine to plug into the Library of Congress." A technology plan, unveiled February 22 in Silicon Valley, helped confirm the White House's interest in computer networks for the masses. With Bill Clinton looking on, Gore even summoned back his high-tech child. Questions, however, abound. How much will it cost average Americans to dial up books, articles, government records, phone directories and other material? And what about Al Gore's mythical child? Just how many books will he or she be able to retrieve without impoverishing the whole family? Will middlemen make killings at the expense of the rest of us? If commercial databases are any clue, the news will be bad. Extensive online research on just one topic can cost hundreds of dollars today, a real burden for students or small business people. What's more, special databases for education would not be the final answer, even if they were free. The Edward Wrights of this world need all kinds of information, not just facts from designated journals. Except for proprietary material, we should put almost everything online for Americans to dial up for free or at little cost; and reading-computers should be affordable to potential users of online libraries. Technology is destiny. What's our destiny, though, if video stores are everywhere but half the school libraries in California have closed since 1982? Even the libraries in Fairfax County, the ones where young Wright read about the galaxy, have cut back their hours. Pollyannas rejoice that private enterprise will take over from underfinanced public institutions, and that business people will make billions off an enlarged information industry. As a country, though, we can never grow richer just by selling bits and bytes to each other. Real wealth--for example, 100-miles-per-gallon automobiles, cures for cancer and a well-informed electorate--will come from how we use information. The fewer price tags on knowledge, the more wealth created. Let me, then, propose a three-part plan, TeleRead, which would help students, other readers, writers and the American computer industry, too. I. Impose a Five Percent Tax on TV-related Sales Many foreign countries tax television in one way or another. Why shouldn't the United States? And why can't we use the money to promote the activity with which television so often competes: reading? Extrapolating from Commerce Department and industry figures, we could collect more than $3.5 billion a year for TeleRead if we imposed five-percent taxes on cable revenue, advertising sales of TV stations, and retail sales of new television sets and other video products such as blank and recorded tapes. When TV-computer hybrids arrived, they would be taxed, too, unless the were clearly suitable for reading books online. The television taxes would hardly bankrupt consumers. You would pay the equivalent of just $3.50 annually if you kept a $350 set for five years. That's less than half the amount you might spend on a large pizza to eat on Super Bowl Sunday. If too many small merchants complained about new paperwork, the government might instead collect at the wholesale level. Unlike many taxes, this one would directly benefit millions of Americans. Go to typical suburban public libraries on weekends, and you will see crowds of frugal citizens borrowing books to improve themselves professionally. Some college texts can cost $75 or more. Reeling from local property taxes, even some of the most rabid tax-haters might champion TeleRead as a way to slash the cost of buying books for local libraries and schools. II. Make Powerful, Affordable Laptops Available to All The student-computer ratio in American public schools is about 16-1; imagine a bureaucrat at Agriculture or Exxon sharing a PC with 15 colleagues. So let's use part of the $3.5 billion a year to help subsidize a long-range program to buy laptops that schools and libraries can lend to students and the public at large. Eventually the schools could even give away "TeleReaders" to many students from low-income families. By encouraging mass production, the TeleRead program would make laptops almost as cheap as calculators, so that middle-class children could buy them without any subsidies. The procurement program would award contracts in stages, of course, to avoid locking into outdatable technology. Using TeleReaders or substitute machines, students would learn word-processors, swap electronic mail, and work with personal databases, spreadsheets and other applications, such as educational programs. Especially, however, TeleReaders would encourage reading, the most vital skill. They would be small and affordable and boast sharp, American-made screens that you could read more easily than you could a paper book. The screens would be flickerless; and you could adjust the size and style of the type, and perhaps the screen colors, too. If you wanted, you might even detach a TeleReader keyboard and curl up in bed with just the screen. You could instantly "flip" the "page" or move on to another chapter by pressing a button or by touching the appropriate part of the screen with a pen-like device. The same stylus could let you jot notes electronically, or underline or highlight key paragraphs. Different TeleReaders might serve different needs. Some machines, for example, might be able to read material aloud and highlight the spoken words on screen--one way to help bring books to the very young, the vision-impaired and the semi-literate. Voice recognition could pick up commands from the handicapped. Sooner or later, some TeleReaders could take dictation; users could write in corrections with the stylus. Since the screens on TeleReaders would be so good, you would not need to print out books or magazines. Why clutter up your house? If need be, however, TeleReaders could work with low-cost computer printers. TeleRead wouldn't just supply laptops or promote the production of them. The program could also make certain that machines were used regularly and well--it could help pay the salaries of computer instructors to bring teachers and librarians up to speed. Let's not turn teachers into programmers, however. Rather, instructors could show teachers how to apply high-tech effectively to their respective disciplines. Teachers in the future should be able to tell students how to write clear, well organized prose with a word-processor, use spreadsheets, dissect electronic frogs, retrieve facts on a proposed national budget, or send e-mail notes to local members of Congress. While helping education most of all, the TeleRead program would be a boon to Silicon Valley and other high-tech areas hit by defense cutbacks. Flat screens, new kinds of memory chips, and other technologies would grow more attractive to our oft-skittish venture capitalists. TeleRead would not ban the use of foreign parts or ideas, but within reason would favor laptops with a high American content. Simply put, TeleRead would be a sane alternative to the mindless tariffs that the United States slapped on some foreign-made screens for laptops. Moreover, since the government would buy finished equipment, Washington wouldn't be setting up a massive research and development bureaucracy. Rather, the taxpayers could benefit from competition for TeleRead contracts. III. Set Up a National Database As Soon as Possible TRnet, part of the TeleRead program, would offer an electronic cornucopia. Like most public libraries, it would avoid pay-per-read. TRnet would be free or would charge reasonably for an annual subscription based on family income, and perhaps included as an option on federal tax forms. The poorest Americans, of course, should be able to dial up TRnet without paying a penny. Think of the I word, consider TRnet an investment in our economic and intellectual development, and use general revenue money to make the network affordable to all. Reachable from anywhere in the U.S., TRnet would carry the full texts of all new books and other publications. How? All material longer than 10,000 words, and intended for publication, would have to be in digital form before the government would grant copyrights. The government could phase in this change quickly with a voluntary program. As for undigitized material shorter than 10,000 words, scanners could pick up the images, either for conversion to computer text or as pictures to be dialed up on TRnet. To transmit books and other material, TRnet could use old-fashioned phone lines, fiber optic cables, radio or cable television connections--whatever cost the least. The Great Gatsby could reach you in a fraction of the time it took to watch a rerun of "I Love Lucy." Before you hooked into the network, you would answer a series of easy questions to pinpoint exactly what you needed. you might punch in the name of an author, dial up the network and instantly get a list of all of his or her works, with quick descriptions. Then your TeleReader would disconnect you from the network. At your leisure, without tying up the phone lines, you would go on to choose which books you wanted sent into your computer when you logged on a second time. You could select not only by author, but also by publisher, editor, general category, subject, search words, geographical setting or other criteria. If you keyed in "Washington" and "novels," you would see everything from Democracy to Washington, D.C. Or suppose you added the word "black literature"; then you could call up Afro-American fiction from the local writers. Inner-city teachers could easily track down books that meant thousands of times more to bright teenagers than anything on television. in fact, they could tailor reading assignments to individual children. TRnet could transmit, too, a wealth of educational software; and teachers could choose the best programs for their students. Math and science students could especially benefit. And young immigrants could use software rich in moving images and synthesized speech to help learn English. Normally, however, TRnet would favor the written word, which is so often the best way to pass on detailed instructions and convey abstract ideas and feelings. Whatever the medium, TRnet would pay fairly. Software houses or independent programmers would receive fees based on the number of times the public dialed up their creations. And the same arrangement could apply to individual articles from newspapers and other publications. When writers kept rights to the articles, then payment would go to them. TRnet would allow publications a delay--maybe two weeks for daily newspapers and eight weeks for monthly periodicals--before the network posted issues online for all to see. So publishers could still make profits off paper versions or their electronic editions. The latter editions could be highly customized for individual subscribers, just as some experts now foresee; they could even offer interactive ads through which subscribers could order merchandise. Newspapers and magazines could rely directly on phone companies and cable systems to speed these current editions to paid subscribers, but often TRnet might make more sense. Understandably, many newspapers see phone companies as rival publishers. Suppose, however, that telecommunications firms signed long-term contracts with TRnet; then the network could act as a buffer between them and the newspapers that subleased the lines. What about TRnet's compensation for professional writers of books--and their publishers? Authors could sell to TRnet directly, or, armed with this new bargaining power, they could sign contracts with publishers. Without heavy production and distribution costs, publishers could pay far better. Under TeleRead, writers and publishers would earn fees based on how often people retrieved books. And as a mass purchaser of material, TRnet could pay de-escalating royalties on best-sellers to discourage publishers from overhyping "big" books at the expense of midlist titles. Publishers could set advances by the expected number of dial-ups. Outside business people could pay authors and publishers for rights to anticipated TeleRead money; let Wall Street invest in literary futures. Yes, if TRnet gouged readers, then the public would bootleg books electronically and cheat authors, publisher, and literary investors; but if network use were free or low cost, piracy just would not be worth the trouble. TRnet would actually safeguard literary property better than any copy protection scheme that publishers might happen to be contemplating. Even CD-ROMs are not safe. You don't have to be Sony to be able to copy them. And the more powerful computers grow, the easier it will be to defeat copy-protection schemes. Hackers love a challenge. To answer an obvious question, no, people couldn't type their names over and over again, go on for 60,000 words, call it a book, and have their friends dial it up at public expense. Anyone could post virtually anything on TRnet; but professional librarians, each working within his or her own budget, would help decide which works merited royalties. The librarians would be at national, state and local levels. After a certain number of dial-ups, almost any book or program could earn dial-up fees regardless of the wishes of the librarians. Writers and publishers could also bypass librarians by gambling a certain amount of money up front to reduce the number of dial-ups required for royalties. The TeleRead laws might require TRnet to reserve maybe a fifth of its budget for "bypass books," as I'll call them. By raising or lowering the fees charged authors or publishers, the network could help control the total bypass expenditures. Sharply de-escalating royalties on best-sellers would also keep a lid on costs. That still leaves open the question of TeleRead's total expenses. To be hypothetical, suppose we could immediately put all paper books and some other material on TRnet. My estimates add up to $30.05 billion: --$10 billion for online books, which would be more appropriate than the less than $5 billion that publishers most likely spent on writers and editorial workers today. The $5 billion is my estimate based on a book industry study and on informal talks with publishing authorities. --$0 for fresh editions of newspapers and magazines--including academic journals--since TRnet would be a mere conduit. --$5 billion for past editions and old articles. That's a fifth of the approximately $25 billion that American readers pay each year for newspapers and the magazines, according to Commerce Department figures. --$50 million for articles and papers that TRnet bought directly. As any professional writer or academic can tell you, some of the most valuable writing will never find readers because it is outside the commercial or academic formats of existing publications. Granted, thousands of Americans would upload material to TRnet without counting on financial rewards. But TRnet could at least hold out a slim possibility of pay. --$3 billion for educational software, or about three times the amount that schools and families now spend if you extrapolate from statistics of the Software Publishers Association. --$2 billion for computers for libraries, schools and some low-income people, and some computer training programs for librarians and teachers. A billion dollars could buy a million TeleReaders at $1,000 each, or, eventually, 10 million computers at $100 each. Again, the idea is not to give every American a machine, but rather to spur production of good, affordable portables for reading. --$10 billion for staffers, telecommunications and leasing of computer facilities. Many would consider the $10 billion to be far high. I've tried to err on the cautious side. Staff costs would be low since TRnet would rely heavily on existing librarians, who are already accustomed to choosing books for public use. Telecommunications might well be the biggest cost. Rather than squandering tax money on rapidly outdatable technology, the government could rely on private phone companies. As much as possible, TeleRead could take advantage of the nooks and crannies of existing networks. The system might even offer bargain subscriptions to user willing to dial up their books after regular business hours. Also, TeleRead could lease private computer facilities to avoid technolock (technolock: n. A tendency of many large bureaucracies to keep using antique equipment to justify past investment). The hypothetical $30.05 billion total is about two percent of the federal government's 1993 budget, or around half a percent of the Gross Domestic Product. What's more, the actual first-year expenses of TeleRead would be in the hundreds of millions, and perhaps much less. Only a minority of Americans would sign up in the beginning if we limited the first users to specialized books and articles of a scientific, technical or educational nature. TV taxes and modest subscriptions fees--maybe $50-$100 per year for an average family--would pay entirely for this scaled-down program. TeleRead, then, needn't come to life full grown. At the start, it could even send surplus TV tax revenue back to the U.S. Treasury. Let a lean TeleRead sell itself; and then support will quickly grow for a full-service system that can give the Wrights all the books they needed. Of course, TeleRead and its TRnet should be just one option for readers. We should still be able to buy electronic or paper books from publishers, stores and authors. That would be one way to cope with the risk of censorship by officious politicians (another way would be to make TeleRead an independent agency with long-range funding). Also, TRnet must not compromise privacy. If the program charged nothing or just flat subscription fees, there would be no need to keep permanent records on the reading choices of individuals. When you retrieved a controversial political work--in fact, anything--your machine would tell TRnet to pay the author or publisher. But the central computers would be programmed to forget your personal selections in a week or two. TRnet would keep the temporary records only as a way to guard against constant dial-ups by those profiting off them. What's more, for the really worried, private companies such as Barnes & Noble could set up vending machines that would accept old-fashioned, untraceable paper money as well as credit cards. The machines would copy books onto a tiny memory card that plugged into your computer and held many volumes. Bearing bright logos, such machines could be a fixture at malls, airports and other public areas. They could serve both the privacy-minded and people who just did not want to become regular subscribers (revenue would go both to TRnet and operators of the vending machines). As a rule, however, TRnet itself would be the best, most economical way to spread the written word. Without it, students, teachers, and other Americans may never be able to read so much and so cheaply by way of one easy-to-use database. "This program would benefit average students as well as gifted ones, and it would better prepare Americans for work in an information-dependent society," says Dr. Vicki Hancock, an educational technology expert at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in Alexandria, Va. Skeptics might dismiss TeleRead and its TRnet as socialistic; but they are not, any more than a public library. If Andrew Carnegie--the 19th-century capitalist extraordinaire--were alive today, he would be probably be funding demonstration projects, just as he helped small-town libraries across the United States, hoping that ambitious Americans could use the technology of the day to better themselves. David H. Rothman is the author of The Complete Laptop Computer Guide (St. Martin's Press). ****************************************************************** WHO WINS AND WHO LOSES IF ONLINE LIBRARIES ARE AFFORDABLE? No, electronic books will not make all teachers and librarians go the way of blacksmiths--quite the contrary. Even book chains might find new roles. On the other hand, TeleRead could traumatic for some of the more mediocre of Washington's think-tankers. Move ahead twenty years now; here's life in the TeleRead era. Teachers and Students Humans in the classroom offer kindness and encouragement that silicon chips can never replace. Teachers dial up TRnet to learn their subject matters better. On paper and in classroom discussion, they demand more of students--who can tap into the same databases. With so many books and educational programs to retrieve, teachers can customize lessons for students with all learning styles. If high school students show enough discipline, they can spend just several hours each day in school. Students suffer less rote learning and fewer multi-choice exams. TeleRead has revived the old-fashioned essay as a way to teach the research skills and logical thinking that 21st-century workers need. Students modem in their term papers. From elementary school on, they accustom themselves to working off computer screens. At all levels, schools save billions on textbooks and have more to spend on other resources and faculty salaries. And students at public schools and state universities can retrieve the same books as those at prep schools or Ivy League institutions. Librarians Paper books remain on library shelves. But spending for new ones has fallen off steeply. Librarians teach patrons to use TRnet, offer assistance online and help the national program select book to post on the network for royalties. The profession enjoys new power. Well-educated librarians play a bigger role in determining the nation's reading tastes than do the marketers at the large book chains. Compared to the past, today's librarians spend less on clerical duties and more time judging the worth of potential acquisitions. Under pressure from librarians with easy access to a wide variety of facts, book publishers are diligently fact-checking their nonfiction. Small Bookstores Book-loving proprietors still cater to traditionalists who favor paper. But they also offer vending machines that can copy electronic books onto memory cards owned by the customers. Even the bookstore owners will not know the choices of customers who insert paper money into the machines. Some bookstore owners have become publishers or editors--sometimes specializing in locally oriented books . Plenty of good clerks have remained behind to sell paper books, answer customers' questions, and put out chatty newsletters online that draw people into the stores to discuss books and meet local authors. Other clerks have left the business and become literacy instructors, teachers or editors. Bad clerks also are gone. They can make more money selling golf carts or refrigerators. Bookstore Chains Inferior chains have shut down. The better ones sell not only paper books, but also TeleReaders with capabilities far beyond those of basic models. Also chains have installed thousands of book-vending machines in their stores and in public places. They offer electronic networks, too, for people who would rather not deal directly with the TeleRead program. The program lets the chains enjoy enough of a markup to make such efforts worthwhile. In addition, the smarter chains encourage their local stores to imitate independent stores and publish online newsletters--and otherwise serve the people of Albuquerque, Chicago or San Jose. Book Publishers Editors have risen in importance in the book industry; sales reps and marketers have declined. Perhaps 90-95 percent of professionally edited titles qualify for royalties on TRnet; if they do not, the publisher can pay to get them on the network as bypass books. All publishers enjoy coast-to-coast distribution. Midlist works thrive. Publishers of all kinds have grown more adventurous in their selections since they do not need to gamble fortunes on paper, printers and warehouse space. They no longer worry about local or federal governments taxing their back lists to the detriment of non-best-sellers. Nor must publishers bow so often in the direction of the large book chains. Newspapers and Magazines Like paper books, traditional newspapers and magazines have not vanished immediately, but sooner or later, most subscribers switch to TRnet. Good reporters and editors thrive. Publishers must offer enticing news and prose, or see startups take business away. Many old publications, however, are earning bigger profits these days--since they spend less on paper, printing and distribution, and since Americans are more word-oriented. Writers of Books And Articles Few have become millionaires; but thanks to TeleRead's de-escalating royalty rates, the average writer stands a little more of a chance of enjoying a middle-class income. Technical, scientific, and medical writers fare much better than before. Instant publication allows books and articles to appear with fresh, easily updated facts, spurring innovation in the fields about which the authors have written. The big losers are best-selling authors who are better marketers than writers. Software Developers Small software houses can distribute their wares more easily than ever--either for free or for very reasonable charges. Back in the 1990s, many Americans programmers were not that different from writers. They came up with original ideas, but often had to pay too much to middlemen. Now a programmer on a West Virginia hilltop can reach big urban markets even if he (or she) lacks contacts with national software stores. He needn't rely on the uncertainties of "shareware" distribution. TeleRead has been especially helpful to publishers of educational software. No longer is bootlegging so major a threat. The Elderly TeleReaders have sparked a boom in reading among older Americans. The machines can vary the size and style of type to make reading as enjoyable as possible for people with poor vision. Pleasant, synthesized voices can read out anything. The Disabled The bedridden can enjoy whole libraries. Affordable machines respond to spoken commands and can take dictation. They make telecommuting--working from home--far easier for the disabled. Politicians and Bureaucrats Sleazes lose more elections; honest politicians do better. Average Americans can easily use TRnet to scour government records, and also to retrieve the precise wording of politicians' past promises. Voters can see the words that the candidates themselves posted online. This is the norm. It isn't just limited to the high-tech elite. What's more, via TRnet, people can write back to politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government, while knowing exactly which ones to complain to. Do you want a traffic light near your intersection on the George Washington Memorial Parkway? TRnet will bring you up to date on the relevant laws and regulations, the accident rates, and whom you should contact at National Park Service. TeleRead makes government more attentive than can push-button TV plebiscites. If an obtuse GS-15 tells you to get lost, then you can whiz copies of your correspondence to the newspapers and broadcasters, and if journalists ignore you, then you might post your grievance on an electronic bulletin board and organize other voters to pressure the bureaucracy. Literary Agents and Lawyers Writers can publish directly on TRnet, but most pros continue to rely on editing and promotion from publishers. Literary agents and lawyers are still around to help authors negotiate with publishers and Hollywood. Also, TRnet is a good research tool for lawyers of all kinds, whom private information services can no longer gouge. Lawyers and nonlawyers alike can look up official explanations--in clear English--of local, state and national laws. International Markets The United States helps other nations start their on TeleRead programs, and negotiates agreements with countries where similar programs exist. Via TeleRead, we create new markets for American books and can share technical expertise with the Third World. At the same time, foreign countries can develop their own electronic library systems--well-stocked with indigenous literature. The TeleRead approach encourages cultural diversity. Perhaps someday one TeleRead system will serve entire planet, but not until more countries grant freedom of the press. Of course, even now, people in most countries can dial directly into the American TeleRead system and thwart many a censor. Corporations Years ago, when TeleRead was proposed, some corporations saw the plan as a budget-buster from Satan. Instead, however, it consumes just a tiny fraction of our Gross Domestic Product and has added vastly to our national wealth. The smarter CEOs realized that the best way to protect capitalism was to be more flexible than the dogmatists of Eastern Europe were. Now employers of all sizes can benefit from computer-savvy workers who need not be supervised constantly. This skilled workforce makes us a more competitive nation. Other countries can tap into databases, ours or their own, but in no other land is high-tech so integral a part of the educational system. Even the poorest American children can grow up with TeleReaders. We were among the few countries that could make a computer available to each child, one way or another; and we took advantage of this. (For an example of what a well-educated workforce can accomplish with high tech, read The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century, written by William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone and published last year by HarperCollins.) What's more, TeleRead is a boon to many corporate marketers. With so much information online for free, they can more easily anticipate national and international consumer trends--by searching databases for patterns. Good companies enjoy more business since consumers can dial up detailed reviews of specific cars, woks, or washing machines. Badly run corporations are failing faster as word spreads of inferior products or financial or environmental scandals. Stockholders can dial into TRnet for past articles on companies, large and small; markets are more efficient at rewarding winners and punishing losers. Religion TRnet is a dream come true for the Gideon Society and equivalents. The Old and New Testaments, the Talmud, the Koran, and other major religious works are online. Christian fundamentalists once worried about dial-up pornography, but now rejoice that the new generation of young people is more contemplative, less hedonistic, as books regain much of the influence they lost to television. With so many books and educational software on TRnet, it is easier for conservatives of all faiths to home-school their children or start private schools without draining resources from the public education. Volunteers Retired managers and executives use TRnet to tutor students and consult with small business people from afar. An Electronic Peace Corps lets Americans share technical and medical expertise with people abroad (see my proposal in the Washington Post of Feb. 5, 1984, Page D5). Thanks to the EPC, we can now learn of any AIDSlike epidemic long before it threatens the United States (see International Health News, November 1987, Page 4). Anyone Displaced by TeleRead and TRnet No worker got a pink slip without plenty of warning; everyone knew TeleRead was coming. With so many educational resources online, career-switching is much easier. Although employers have eliminated useless mid-management jobs, many ex-managers have re-established themselves as consultants or master technicians. Washington Think-Tanks A few hacks at Washington think-tanks--not the true stars, but rather the plodders who turned corporate propaganda into academic research--are among the displaced. TRnet for them is a nightmare come true. Grubby high school students and Idaho professors can now dial up the same arcane information as our national elite can. Fresh Insights are more of a commodity. The outsiders can't go to Washington cocktail parties and hear the latest gossip. But the more diligent among them can dial up a number of databases in search of trends invisible to the duller of the D.C. think-tankers. * * * We now return you to 1993 and a more immediate prediction. Somewhere a dutiful tanker will boot up his word-processor and write, "Fascinating idea; but of course it will take decades to resolve the copyright issues, and we'll all go broke and end up slaves of the Japanese if we even dream of spending half percent of our Gross Domestic Product on TeleRead." ****************************************************************** STAMPING OUT CURIOSITY: THE TROUBLE WITH "PAY-PER-READ AND "KNOWLEDGE STAMPS" Via computer, you've just dialed up Shakespeare, a biology text or maybe a manual telling you how to fix a diesel engine. You log on the network for the next series of books. And then a rude message flashes across your screen: "User hereby agrees to transfer $20 for the designated material. Type Y or N." Get used to such hassles if we go in the direction of pay-per-read. One of the worst proposals comes from a Washington consultant who has suggested that Americans receive "Micro-vouchers" to pay for courses and instructional material and tools. Couldn't these knowledge stamps help replace "government-run and -controlled institutions" with "free enterprise"? Excuse me. What about the Stalinist institutions known as public libraries? When thousands of books go online and many are not even available on paper, a national public library should store copies of everything for ordinary Americans to dial up. Otherwise, we may have to dart back and forth between, say, a Time Warner computer network and a McGraw-Hill equivalent to retrieve all books on topic X. Even more important, our government should not limit our free reading to stamp-style allotments (why have stamps if allotments or pay-per-read schemes won't exist?). A traditional public library encourages curiosity and browsing. We must not let the pay-per-read gang discourage them. If pay-per-read wins out instead, future Michael Dirdas will suffer. Dirda, a Washington Post editor from the Ohio steel town of Lorain, has written how his clever working-class father used reverse psychology to cultivate a love of books. Now, what if pay-per-read prevails in the 21st century? Then, knowledge stamps or not, a future version of Dirda's father might truly mean it when he discouraged reading: Mr. Dirda (looking at a record of young Michael's account): "Why are you wasting your stamps? If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. no more novels this month." Michael: "Not even Tolstoy? Not even Faulkner?" Mr. Dirda: "I thought you were practical." Michael: "Tom Mikus reads all the novels he wants. Bellow, Mailer, you name it." Mr. Dirda: "Look, Mike, you've got only so many stamps. If we could afford all those books on our own--believe me, we'd get 'em." Michael: "Just because his old man's a lawyer--" Mr. Dirda: "You've still got $300 in credit this year. Why not take accounting?" Michael: "But I want to go to Oberlin. I want to save my stamps for the classy stuff." Mr. Dirda: "Forget it, Mike. That's for people like Tom." I'm assuming, of course, that the future Michael could befriend the future Tom in a public school attended by children of diverse backgrounds. By draining away resources, knowledge stamps might kill off many public schools where social classes mixed. ****************************************************************** SEVEN MYTHS Say "TeleRead" to a certain species of "information management" guru, and it will be like touting Fords to a buggywhip maker. After Computerworld printed an early version of my TeleRead proposal in July 1992, it received an angry letter from a Chicago consultant who was "appalled." He hated the idea of the *government* spending money on "universal access to on-line information." Presumably we should sit back and let Fortune 500 companies and the information priesthood decide what's best for the average American. I won't blame some elite consultants for loathing the idea. While many would adapt to TeleRead--and actually come out ahead--others would find that it took away their raison d'etre. Many prospective clients could dial-up information for themselves. With people like the Chicago consultant in mind, I'll list seven myths and rebuttals: --Myth #1: Apple started in a garage, so why do we need a new government program like TeleRead? What a waste. Reply: By the time Apple came along, the government had poured billions into military and space technology. Would integrated chips and other key components have been invented without years of investment in more primitive forms of electronics? Consider, too, the shot in the arm that the laptop industry received when the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies started buying portable computers. Such benefits, however, are small compared to those that TeleRead could bring over time. Without being too xenophobic--not the smartest mindset in an industry as international as high-tech--TeleRead would try to favor vendors with American-made screens and other key components. The biggest need for TeleRead, of course, has nothing to do with the immediate welfare of regions such as Silicon Valley and the Route 128 corridor in Massachusetts. It has to do with the decline of reading in the United States. Millions of students are growing up in bookless homes and going to schools that lack money for books or squander the funds. Some of the worst outrages have occurred in Washington, D.C. Schools there spend more than half a billion a year, of which a mere $2 million goes for books. Teachers are tired of using their own money to buy extra books and other supplies for students. Courtland Milloy, a Washington Post columnist, recently wrote: "In the absence of up-to-date textbooks, many teachers say they must rely heavily on current publications, routinely spending more than $100 a year just on duplicating news articles." Anyone still question the need for TeleRead? --Myth #2: Wouldn't TeleRead stifle competition among publishers and writers. What's this about DE-escalating royalties? Reply: But what's so competitive about our present system? Go to the computer-book stands at your local chain stores, for example, and you'll very likely see the same colophons again and again. That's a hint of what the rest of the book world may face. At least one famous publisher tells agents that it no longer wants midlist books, only potential best-sellers or specialized professional books. Marketers at some big publishing houses don't exactly dream of publishing Nobel Prize winners and printing scores of good first novels. Their secret fantasy is a little more MBAish. They would like to print just one book a year--anything, good or bad--and sell 20 million copies. Forget about the explosion in the number of small publishers. Desktop publishing technology makes it easier to set type and lay out books, but what's the use if you normally can't get the big chains to display your wares as well as those from major houses? Most small publishers survive by sticking to niches and paying meager royalties to writers, who, with less at stake, often turn out sloppy, badly researched work. Nor does the present system truly promote competition among writers. In a country of a quarter of a billion people, fewer than 10,000-20,000 freelancers are writing books full time and giving the trade their best efforts. Going full time is normally out of the question unless you're rich, hyperfrugal or have a working spouse. Write a $20 paperback, and you may receive all of $1.20 for every copy sold. Sociologist Paul Kingston once calculated that writers could earn more per hour by flipping hamburgers at Wendy's than they could make at the typewriter. He co-authored a book with a rather apropos title: The Wages of Writing: Per Word, Per Piece, or Perhaps (Columbia University Press, 1986). No meaningful government figures exist on the average incomes of professional book and magazine writers who freelance full-time; but you can bet that you wouldn't want your daughter to marry one. Meanwhile, publishers keep bidding up the prices of a lucky few writers without truly encouraging them to write better or even in a more popular style. Judith Krantz will never turn out Pride and Prejudice--or even a more popular Hollywood saga--just because the industry pays her $2 million rather than $1 million. The industry would be far more competitive without all those blockbuster advances and without a tendency to promote just a few writers at the expense of many. And that's where the concept of de-escalating royalties would come in. It could revive the midlist book in America. Right now, printers give discounts for large printings--favoring best-sellers, in effect, and harming many technical and educational books, along with literary novels. And even with computerized inventory systems, big chains would rather play up certified best-sellers than midlist books. Most chain stores are in malls. Booksellers must pay the same rent on the space a book takes up, whether it sells one or 1,000 copies a month. TRnet, however, would be different. It wouldn't cost that much more per dial-up to distribute a first novel rather than a Krantz book. Moreover, as suggested in the main TeleRead proposal, TRnet should be entitled to a steep discount as a mass buyer. In the end, then, through de-escalating royalties, the new book-distribution system would be skewed in favor of competition and diversity. --Myth #3: The government has no business funding writers and publishers. What about the risk of censorship? Do we really want the feds telling us how to spend money on books? Reply: Marketers already are censoring new ideas more relentlessly than any government bureaucrats could. Write a book about a social or political problem, and watch the typical publisher run in the other direction if you aren't good talk-show fodder. Ideally, of course, you'll have your own show and a large audience that shares your prejudices. Rush Limbaugh is the publishing world's gift to itself. Pesky new idea lose out under this system. The wonderful witticism from the late A.J. Liebling, the media critic, has held up well; freedom of the press is for those who own one. TeleRead, on the other hand, would be a boon to new publications and to small publishers of books, newsletters and magazines with original ideas. I think of people like Roldo Bartimole, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. For decades he has been taking on the Cleveland establishment. Read his Point of View newsletter and you will understand why new skyscrapers arose in Cleveland while neighborhoods crumbled. PoV is a delight for citizen activists, journalists, librarians, academics and others. In fact, some of its most constant readers are its targets. They keep up with Bartimole's little sheet for the same reason many financiers read the front page of The Wall Street Journal; his exposes enrage them at times, but uncover fresh facts that they could never find elsewhere. The problem is, many big law firms and others are not buying PoV so much as they are *photocopying* it. Under TeleRead, Bartimole-style mavericks could reach larger audiences without worrying about the costs of postage and printing. Yes, some copying would take place. But he would still benefit from the wider exposure. At the same time, big dailies would come out ahead, too, since they could distribute electronic editions without relying on the goodwill of the local telephone and cable monopolies. But what about the risk of politicians censoring material? That is exactly why TeleRead would be an independent agency; receive long-range funding; have many librarians involved in the selection of books and other material; rely heavily on input from state and local levels rather than being a top-down organization; offer explicit procedures for writers and publishers to bypass the librarians; and allow private publishers to run their own networks and sell books and magazines independently through subscription programs of their own. TeleRead would not even have to be in Washington near the normal policymakers and lobbyists. Spread out the functions. Let a Silicon Valley office do much of the laptop-procurement. Have Boston help handle contracts for the memory-bank facilities, in many different areas of the country. Let the librarians--most of whom would work for local, state and university libraries rather than for TeleRead--live anywhere. Keep the Library of Congress open as a servant of the Congress and as a preserver of paper manuscripts, but don't let it run TeleRead, not when it is within a short walk of the Capitol Building. In short, make TeleRead a decentralized, virtual organization without a Washington headquarters around which the usual lobbyists could hang out. Astute politicians should welcome this approach. It would provide less opportunity for book-burning group to hassle them over TeleRead. A decentralized TeleRead might lease TRnet computer facilities in several regions and cut down on communications costs. Granted, each facility would store the same books (so that comprehensive searches for information would be easy). But many librarians, in different locations, would be able to certify titles for dial-up fees. These TeleLibrarians would be working within their own budgets, just like doctors at HMO's. Consider a librarian in Bismarck, North Dakota, working for the local library system there; he or she would use the central database to monitor all new books submitted for possible certification--no matter where the authors or publishers were located. Thanks to the powerful search capabilities of computers, our North Dakotan could flag the system to look regularly for books of interest to her. No book on the Great Plains or on the Dakota history would escape her notice--nor would any biography of her favorite composer or artist. The central database would tell her which books already received enjoyed certification. Armed with all these facts, she could intelligently approve a certain number of books each week or two--whatever her budget allowed. The money would come from the federal government, but this local TeleLibrarian would be watching out for the interest of her fellow Dakotans. Statisticians would help TRnet monitor the dialup patterns and constantly adjust the allowances for purchases of certain kinds of books and other material. The book world already has a classification method, none other than the Dewey Decimal system. Clearly, then, ways would exist for TRnet to avoid cost overruns, especially if royalties on best-sellers were de-escalating. With clear selection and budgeting procedures in place, TRnet in some respects would be like the Internet, the giant network of networks that is available to thousand of researchers, academics, business people and others in the United States and throughout the rest of the world. The U.S. government made the Internet possible, but the network has taken on a life of its own. It now carries hundreds of message areas on topics ranging from ozone to "Practical Christianity." In fact, the Internet offers much more freedom that people find on some private networks. Some months ago, while researching a computer book, my wife and I asked Prodigy members what they thought of this service. Our neutrally worded notice vanished within hours. The book was many months from publication and we did not even mention a title, yet Prodigy claimed we were using the network for commercial purposes. Prodigy has added some wonderful new wrinkles, such as 9,600-b.p.s. services, and I very much hope that this innovative network will survive and thrive--but with more freedom of expression. Carly and I were hardly the first victims of the Prodigy censors. A New York Times gardening columnist had a brush with them several years ago and wrote about it in his paper. Should you still see TeleRead as more Big Brotherish than "Free Enterprise" is, then you might consider the following scenario: Let's say the government gave your local newspaper what some have called "a license to print money." As a believer in separation of state and press, would you approve of this practice? Would you consider it to be unfair federal intervention? Then you are a little too late. Television licenses already exist--for newspaper companies and other businesses--and the Federal Communications Communication can take them away if the FCC believes that TV stations are not acting in the public interest. What's more, even opinion magazines must plead their case with the Postal Service if they want to enjoy special mailing rates. And publications of all kinds of all kinds must satisfy the Internal Revenue. So true separation between government and the media is a dream. If it were reality, copyrights would not be with us. Jesse Helms notwithstanding, federal copyright law makes it possible for Hustler to turn a profit--by assuring Larry Flynt that if someone pirates his girlie photos, then Flynt can sue. Copyrights do not exist like the Rockies and the Atlantic Ocean. Bureaucrats must grant them. The real way to promote freedom of speech, then, is not to deny the inevitable governmental role in what we read, watch and hear. Rather it's to come up with a system of checks and balances to guard against censorship by bureaucrats--or marketers. --Myth #4: A good $50 or $100 laptop? You've got to be kidding. Reply: What sells for $1,000 today is likely to sell for a tenth of the price within the next two decades. Consider how much the early televisions and calculators cost. Even without a government program, you can pay $100 for a used PC that would have sold in the mid-80s for several thousand dollars. Engineers are squeezing more power into less space, and driving down costs in the bargain. Twenty years ago, it's been noted, we could not cram more than 5,000 transistors into an integrated circuit. Now the upper limit has been said to be five million, and even that estimate may be dated. Meanwhile, computer memories are growing. An entire chip someday might house the entire contents of the Library of Congress. What's more, portable computer screens are sharper than ever. Already the Knight-Ridder chain has been studying the use of tablet-style portables for reading newspapers. The technology may be ready in the next two years or so. Today the screen of the typical portable is still not good enough for many people to read whole books with. But we are not that far off from the time when flat screens could actually be *easier* to read from paper. The screens could be sharp and flickerless, and you would be able to vary the color, type size and type style. So in the end, the issue isn't technology. It's money. Get publishers to digitize books, create enough of a market for TeleReaders, and Silicon Valley will oblige. No, a powerful $100 laptop won't be here immediately. But it will appear in the future--if Silicon Valley works on driving the costs down, not just on pushing the limits of technology. Myth #5: Wouldn't the kids steal or destroy the equipment? Reply: But who says every child must get a TeleReader immediately? Schools could loan the first machines to the children with the best prospects--the bright and the hardworking; reward them. Drug-peddlers flaunt beepers. Now let's get some high-tech into the hands of honest, well-motivated students who otherwise could never afford powerful laptops. Also, etch serial numbers into the cases. Compile a registery of legitimate users of government-supplied machines, and make it illegal to sell unregistered TeleReaders. Impose stiff penalties on offenders. Reduce damage to equipment by starting the program in the high schools and working down. Also, insist that durabilty be one of the criteria for awarding TeleReader contracts. Sooner or later we'd reach the point where first-graders could blithely play catch with their TeleReaders or drop them on the sidewalk. Yet another way to fight theft and breakage would be to involve parents in the TeleRead program from the start. The machines could improve their own literacy skills and make them more employable. Special video games--with audio and flashy, Sesame Street-style graphics--might even be designed to help parents and children work together to build up their skills. --Myth #6: It's un-American to tax TV-watchers to support readers. Reply: But don't we tax single people and childless couples to support the public schools? Even putting best-sellers online--everything from mystery novels to Judith Krantz's work--would contribute to general enlightenment. People do not maintain and sharpen their reading skills by just reading what they must. They also do this by reading what they want. That's especially true of children; literacy specialists are among the biggest boosters of comic books. --Myth #7: But why pick on the TV? Reply: By giving away billions of dollars spectrum space, the government helped launch the industry. Now the industry and its offshoots should repay the taxpayers. TV could survive TeleRead. The question is, Will books survive television? Outside the elite--especially in inner cities--many more children grow up in TV-centered homes than in book-centered ones. Here's a chance to right the balance for the good of society. Americans will never cure heart disease, fend off international economic competitors, end poverty, or wipe out the deficit by watching more television. But we might do all of the aforementioned if we read more. Shouldn't our government, then, favor TeleRead over the refinement of High-Definition Television? Powerful commercial motives exist for refining HDTV, and surely, within two decades, a 40- or 60-inch television will hang from the wall of the typical American home. But smarter television sets by themselves will never mean Einsteinian children. Of course, TeleReaders should offer sounds and moving images where appropriate; and eventually the units might come with goggles and datagloves that children could don to enter the world of virtual reality. However, let's not mix up our priorities here; reading is the most crucial skill. Although Sesame Street and instructional videos are valuable, they are no substitutes. Television often reduces our children's attention spans. Books help lengthen them. Would a long or short span be better for future doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, teachers--and, yes, voters? Do we really want push-button plebiscites where citizens obediently agree with their leaders after seeing a few images flash before them? Or do we want sophisticated voters who can tap into massive databases and send persuasive e-mail to the government officials? ****************************************************************** THE ORIGINS OF TELEREAD Several years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., complained that many students were using computers rather than card catalogues at the library. He had a point. Library skills were declining. Skimming a few facts off databases wasn't like reading *whole* books. I thought, "Why couldn't the complete texts be online?" The idea of dial-up books was already many years old. But to my knowledge, no one had truly resolved the big issue: Just how could we make online books affordable--yet also provide for fair compensation for writers and publishers? Without such a plan, we might well reach the point someday where most public libraries folded. Suppose only the rich could afford to be well read. I wondered if our library system would start failing the average American as badly as our health care system had. Middle-class people were reading books, but some of the fastest-growing demographical groups were not. What's more, I feared that future technology might increase the gap between the middle-class and the rich. My concerns have been all too justified. Within the past year, my local libraries have cut back hours; this happened to me in Fairfax County, Va., not Harlan County, Kentucky. Even the Library of Congress has scaled back the schedule of its reading room. On top of that, more and more students are shunning careers with public libraries, preferring to collect lawyerish money working for data-hungry corporations. Something else is happening, too: Publishers and stores are even more cavalier toward non-best-sellers than in past years. My books keep coming out late for business reasons. Typically my publishers are too busy promoting books by celebrities or hawking the 10 zillionth WordPerfect guide. Readers never have a chance to discover many midlist books of the kind that I write. When a writer for major computer magazines wanted to review The Complete Laptop Computer Guide, he could not find a copy on sale in all of Salt Lake City. Another outrage is the high price of books. Why is it that schoolchildren must pay $8 for little paperback editions of classics? Or that more and more of college textbooks cost $50 or $75? Or that many students must resort to used, outdated textbooks because the new ones are so expensive? Or that some novels list for $30? Just how can publishers lobby for more aid to libraries when the prices of books keeps zooming? And yet we cannot blame publishers alone, not when production costs have risen. I conceived TeleRead, then, as a good solution for readers, writers, and publishers alike--and even for bookstores, too, if they were willing to adapt to the new technology. Refining this proposal, I found that the Association of American Publishers was helpful with facts on the economics of the trade. AAP has not endorsed or even seen this detailed version of the plan; it has just supplied data. However, an AAP staffer seems open-minded. Perhaps readers, writers and publishers can put aside their differences and work together to hasten the coming of TeleRead. ****************************************************************** ACTING ON THE IDEA If you like the TeleRead idea, spread this file around and write the White House or the appropriate people on the Hill. Many officials in Washington would rather not have their fax or e-mail boxes tied up. So please use paper mail. Feel free to reproduce this file on paper to accompany letters. I'm a writer, struggling with the usual deadlines, and I have just so much time to lobby for this idea. I hope that others can follow up. Below are possible people to contact. This list isn't all-inclusive; some of the best prospects may not be mentioned here. Do not worry about writing to all the names below, just to whomever you feel would be responsive. Executive Branch (In Alphabetical Order) --Pam Barnett, Executive Assistant for Domestic Policy, Office of the First Lady, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20500. We all know of Hillary Clinton's interest in educational matters. --President Bill Clinton, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C 20500. Contacting President Clinton and Vice President Gore, I'll be making the point at a national data highway is just a start. What really counts is what will be online, and whether the average household will be able to afford it. --Jeff Eller, Media Affairs, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania, Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20500. --Dr. John H. Gibbons, White House Director of Science and Technology, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20500. --Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20500. --Ira Magaziner, Senior Advisor for Policy Development, Domestic Policy Council, 1600 Pennsylania Ave., N.W., Washington D.C. 20500. --Roy Neel, Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20503. --Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, 200 Constitution Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20210. Reich, of course, has long pointed out the connection between educational opportunities and national prosperity. --Richard Riley, Secretary of Education, 400 Maryland Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20202-0100. --George Simon, Assistant to the Vice President for Domestic Policy, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20503. --George Stephanopoulos, Director of Communications, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania, Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20500. --Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Council of Economic Advisers, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20503. --Margaret Williams, Chief of Staff to the First Lady, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20500. The Senate (Alphabetically) --The Honorable Max Baucus, U.S. Senate, 706 Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C. 20510-2602. Sen. Baucus has shown an interest high-tech. His state, Montana, could benefit dramatically from a national electronic library and improved telecommunications. --The Honorable Robert Byrd, 311 Hart Senate Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510-4801. Sen. Byrd chairs the Appropriations Committee, and, like Sen. Baucus, comes from a rural state where most citizens lack easy access to large libraries. West Virginians might appreciate TeleRead's de-centralized nature. In this era of computer networks and faxes, why should the Washington area drown in federal offices while people in other states are begging for good white-collar jobs? --The Honorable Byron Dorgan, 825 Hart Senate Building, U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510-3405. A North Dakotan, he sits on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. And like Senators Byrd and Baucus, Sen. Dorgan is interested in ways to use high-tech to increase educational opportunities for rural people. --The Honorable Edward Kennedy, 315 Russell Senate Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510-2101. Chairman of Labor and Human Resources, the Senator has been interested for many years in long-distance learning. --The Honorable J. Bob Kerrey, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510. Last October he gave a speech to the Software Publishers Association calling for online networks for education. Sen. Kerrey is from Nebraska, one of the many rural state that could benefit from affordable online libraries. --The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Senate, 464 Russell Senate Building, Washington, D.C. 20510-3201. Himself an author (well known for sociology), he represents New York state--which of course is to books what Florida is to oranges. The House (Alphabetically) --The Honorable Edward J. Markey, U.S. House of Representatives, 2133 Rayburn, Washington, D.C. 20515-2107. Rep. Markey sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Telecommunications and Finance subcommittee. As befits anyone from Massachusetts, he is intensely interested in high-tech issues such as national data highways. --The Honorable Major Owens, U.S. House of Representatives, 2305 Rayburn, Washington, D.C. 20515-3211. Rep. Owens, the only professonal librarian in Congress, is on the Education and Labor Committe and is from Brooklyn. --The Honorable Charlie Rose, U.S. House of Representatives, 2230 Rayburn, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515-3307. The chairman of the House Administration Committee, Rep. Rose jokes that he is the "techno-nut" of the Hill. His state, North Carolina, has a number of high-tech firms in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. REACHING ME You may contact me through the following networks: --America Online (DavidHR). --CompuServe (73577,3271). --GEnie (D.Rothman1). --Internet (DavidHR@aol.com, 73577.3271@compuserve.com or 106-5024@MCIMail.com). Please check with your technical contact to see if you should preface the addresse with a prefix such as INET:. --MCI Mail (David H Rothman at the "To:" command) --Prodigy (TNFN63A). E-mail on this network can be cumbersome to answer, so please use alternatives if possible. ****************************************************************** COPYRIGHT INFORMATION A shorter version of the TeleRead proposal appeared in The Washington Post Education Review of April 4, 1993. Opinions expressed here are my own, not necessarily the Review's. You may make as many electronic copies of this expanded version as you want without permission--as long as you do not alter the text. Please do not reprint the present version on paper before April 25, 1993. Use common sense. Neither the Post nor I will mind, for example, if you print out a copy to send to your local member of Congress. ************************************************************************* ADDENDUM: IS BRIDGEPORT THE FUTURE? Bridgeport (pop. 143,000) is turning even bright children into future cooks and janitors. A story in the April 6 Washington Post tells of the decline of literacy in Connecticut's biggest city: "The public school system is so strapped for cash that it spends less than one-third of the state average on new books for its libraries. "And the public library system, a beacon for literacy for 143 years, is open only about one-third as many hours as in the late 1980s." You can blame Bridgeport for short-sightedness, and you would be right; but another reason exists, too--the disparity between the library budgets of rich and poor cities. That is exactly what TeleRead would help address. Contrast Bridgeport with Westport and Fairfield, nearby towns that boast thriving bookstores and libraries. The Post correctly notes that middle-class Americans are buying and borrowing more books than in past decades. That's good news in some respects (it suggests that a full-service TeleRead program could enjoy a sizeable constituency). But white, middle-class America is not the whole country. Some of the fastest-growing demographical groups are the least likely to be readers; besides, women in all economic groups lag far behind men in mastery of technical subjects. In an age when white male workers will soon be a minority, we could all lose. The yuppies in Westport will not fare well in their retirement if we lack enough skilled workers to support them. "With the growing inequities in schools and the cuts in libraries across the country, literacy is becoming increasingly class-based," the Post quotes Patricia Shulman, former president of the American Library Association. Furthermore, as shown by the library cuts in Fairfax County, Va., even the middle-class may not safe in the end. And this information gap will only grow worse if electronic libraries are not affordable and old-fashioned libraries go the way of the streetcar. ***************************************************************************