TIME: Almanac (Reference Edition)/Time Almanac Reference Edition (COMPACT Publishing)(1994)(Mac 4 TM-030).iso/TIME/051892/0518310.000;1

Text File | 1994-04-13 | 6KB | 215 lines

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Read a Good PowerBook Lately?

Publishers are discovering the virtues of paperless novels. But

will readers curl up to a computer screen?



By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT



    The hard-cover book is a pretty venerable piece of

technology. The letters on the page are descended from movable

type pioneered by Johanes Gutenberg in the 1400s. The paper is

not all that different from papyrus used by the Pharaohs. Books

today may be written with word processors, but they are still

printed in ink, bound with thread and delivered essentially by

hand.



    Computer enthusiasts have long predicted that the digital

revolution would soon liberate the word from the printed page

and put it directly on the screen. In the past decade, hundreds

of reference books -- including such well-known titles as

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Roget's Thesaurus -- have

appeared in electronic form. But when it comes to literature,

the electronic-publishing movement has run into resistance from

both readers and publishers. As inevitable as the paperless book

may seem, neither group could quite imagine sitting down to read

Faulkner, Fielding or Flaubert on a computer.



    So it was something of a breakthrough last week when Harold

Evans, president of Random House, and John Sculley, chairman of

Apple Computer, met in a New York City boardroom and announced

that titles from one of America's most famous book series, the

Modern Library, will be published in electronic form. Among the

first to be issued on disk are Faulkner's The Sound and the

Fury, Melville's Moby Dick and Dickens' David Copperfield. The

disks, priced below $25, are designed to run on Apple's portable

PowerBook computers, which are widely considered to be more

reader-friendly than IBM-type laptops.



    The PowerBook packs the features of a Macintosh into a

machine the size and weight of a dictionary. But driving the new

venture is a bit of magic performed by programmers at Voyager, a

Santa Monica, Calif., software company, that makes the

experience of reading a book on a screen amazingly close to

reading it on paper. "It's the first thing I've seen that I

could curl up in bed with," says Nora Rawlinson, editor in chief

of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.



    Voyager's software displays the text on clean white pages

that replicate the design of the hardback rather than using the

scrolling strings of text so familiar to computer users. A touch

of a button turns the page or allows the reader to flip back and

forth. Users can dog-ear the corner of a page to mark their

place, or attach an electronic paper clip for easy reference.

Passages can be underscored or marked on the side, and there are

generous margins for putting down notes.



    The computer also brings benefits not offered by ordinary

books: a backlit screen that permits reading in a darkened

bedroom without disturbing a spouse, the option of enlarging the

type to reduce eyestrain, the ability to copy passages onto a

"notebook" page, and a search feature that displays occurrences

of any chosen word, name or phrase. This last option could prove

handy for, say, recalling the identity of an obscure Dostoyevsky

character who suddenly reappears after 100 pages.



    Other firms are working on similar products. Microsoft has

published dozens of electronic reference books for

IBM-compatible computers. The Slate Corp., an Arizona-based

software vendor, has developed software that lets people flip

through the pages of an electronic book by flicking a stylus

across a touch-sensitive screen. And Booklink, a Florida-based

start-up, is designing a notebook-size reading device that could

be loaded with digitized books from a cash machine-type

dispenser that would serve as an electronic library. By

eliminating distribution and warehousing costs, Booklink's

backers think they can make classics available for as little as

$1 or $2 a title.



    Elegant as these products may be, there is no guarantee that

even those readers who own the necessary equipment will want to

use it for reading novels. If anything, the new paperless books

are reminders of how good real books are. As Denise Caruso,

editor of the newsletter Digital Media, points out, books are

everything that everyone wants the new electronic media to be:

portable, intensely personal and highly interactive.



    Will readers give up the feel of paper and the smell of ink

for a machine whose batteries have to be recharged every three

hours? "The great power of the printed book is that it requires

no techology; it is accessible to anyone who can read," admits

Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress and a member

of the Modern Library editorial board. Initially at least, the

market for computer books will probably be among students and

scholars, who can use the electronic features to do productive

work, rather than those simply reading for pleasure.



    Ultimately, it may be the economics of publishing, not the

aesthetics, that determine what shape literature will take.

Fiber-optic wires and data-compression techniques make it

possible to deliver books -- as well as magazines and newspapers

-- over telephone or cable-TV lines. In the future, readers may

select what they want to read from a menu of titles and have

their choices zapped almost instantly to their portable

machines. Old-fashioned books will probably never be entirely

displaced, but as the cost of digital information continues to

fall, and the environmental and production costs of paper keep

rising, the pleasure of buying and reading a new hardbound

volume may someday be limited to the few who can still afford

it.