Passage 1

Alan Brooker and Loren Teague are authors who have a book due out soon. You probably won’t find their titles on the shelves of your local bookstore. Their prose is published in computerized, digital bits. They are authors publishing e-books (short for “electronic books” or books published only on the Internet, and not in paper form).

They’re not getting big fat advances from publishers. Not even a small cheque. Instead, Brooker will get 35 percent of each e-book sold, and Teague will get 30 percent. That’s way above what either could expect in royalties if their titles were published in the familiar format, as beautifully bound bits of trees.

The usual author royalty is anyway between ten and fifteen percent of a book’s selling price. But the large percentage royalty for an e-book will come from a much smaller price—e-books sell online for somewhere between $2.50 and $7 a copy, compared to the bookstore retail price of between $US 10 and $90 depending on the size and quality of the publication.

But how many e-book copies can the authors expect to sell in an electronic market which is still in its infancy? The best-selling e-author of 1999, Leta Nolan Childers, sold just over 6,000 copies of her book The Best Laid Plans. “I’m expecting to sell more than I would in the traditional local market, simply because the US market is so much bigger,” says Teague, whose novel, Jagged Greenstone, was runner-up in the UK Romantic Novelists Association New Writers Award.

Email, e-commerce, e-authors, e-books, eeeargh! The whole world is on a technological treadmill. Surely not books? The pleasure of reading isn’t just in the way it allows escape into other worlds. Physical books are a tactile, visual experience. There’s nothing like the anticipation of a new book in your hands, the appeal of a cover, and the smell of ink and paper, not to mention a small frisson of guilt at all those murdered trees. You can curl up in an armchair, or in bed, with a good book. But surely it will not be the same with a small electronic device, even if it is the size of a paperback and the weight of a hardback, and has a small button that turns the page.

Even if you like the idea, you first have to have Softbook and the Rocket e-book—hand-held electronic readers with high resolution screens, the ability to store several books at once, but unless you have the small reading devices, that means reading books on a large computer screen, and that definitely doesn’t lend itself to a late-night reading experience in bed.

So far, those are the two forums for e-publishing, a field still the focus of the technologically infatuated. Teague still meets responses such as that of the librarian in her home town of Nelson. “When I told her about them (e-books), she just looked at me blankly,” says Teague, laughing. Or the response of the unnamed executive from a top publishing house who said of e-book publishing: “Isn’t that for failed authors?”

But the Bigs are moving in. Fatbrain.com, which has partnered with Adobe, will let anyone sell digital books on its website and is negotiating with publishers such as Macmillan and McGraw-Hill to find new ways of packaging their titles. Best-selling authors like mystery thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kelleman are now posting electronic titles on the Internet. The website www.originalsonline.com also displays only e-books that have never been published in paper form.

Recently, top-selling horror story author Stephen King wrote and published his first e-book, Riding the Bullet, a 66- page “ghost-story in the grand manner”. It was published only on the Internet on the website of American publishers Simon & Schuster who charged visitors $2.50 to download it. In the first week, 450,000 people visited the site, before other sites copied it and made it available without charge—it’s typical of the Internet, that something will always be copied for free.

Computer giant Microsoft and leading US bookstore chain barnesandnoble.com now plan to create a giant e-book store. Microsoft is also leading a push to standardize formats for online books to allow them to be downloaded to any computer. Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes and Noble, can see a time in the near future when there will be an electronic version of virtually every book in print.

For unknown authors, e-books offer a better chance to get published. Fatbrain allows any would-be author to store a manuscript online for just $1 a month. For publishers, it could mean a whole new headache because already established authors could cut out the middleman and release titles straight to their audience, although there will still be a role for the publishing houses in editing and marketing.

Small book publisher Hazard Press, however, is excited by the possibilities. Managing director Quentin Wilson believes that it will be especially invaluable for selling the company’s back catalogue because it won’t require a print run of thousands just a quick electronic format.

With the kind of heavyweights now backing e-publishing, it’s a matter of when, not if, the phenomenon rolls into town. Does it mean the death of books as we now know them? What happens when electronic readers are as cheap as dirt, or when media conglomerates give them away to help to sell their vast archives of material? Would you rather pack a box of discs next time you move to a new house, instead of seemingly endless cartons of books? There is still a romance to books that it’s hard to see their electronic cousins replacing.

“I don’t think we’ve reached anything like the version of e-books that will probably come about within a year,” says Wilson. “And I don’t see the actual physical book disappearing. But I do see the future including the downloading of a particular book in a formatted file of some kind. It’s inevitable.”

In the way that horses remained after the advent of the car, books won’t disappear entirely for book lovers. They will simply become a new form of recreation.

Nothing beats a beautifully produced book, says Wilson.

You are not likely to find Alan Brooker and Loran Teague’s forth-coming book on the shelves of a bookstore because ________.

According to the author, how many times of money can a copy of a book make in the traditional print compared with the computerized version?

Which of the following is obviously NOT in agreement with the author’s idea of what readers can enjoy when reading paper books?

If a publisher would like to put out some books of enigma and excitement, it is most likely to contact ________.

The concluding remark of the passage fully demonstrates a publisher’s confidence that ________.