Editor’s Corner:
E-PUBLISHING AND THE INTERNET: CHANNEL OR PANEL?

Every month in New York I attend an informal meeting we call "the salon." It's a gathering of different internet media professionals who get together and rap about what's going on on the Net. People come from many different companies: Barnes & Noble, Billboard Magazine, ad agencies and web development firms.

At the last meeting one person remarked that no one envisioned the information highway would end up selling information electronically but delivering it in hard copy. That's why the push to develop and sell e-books, which we cover in this issue, is an important indicator of what direction the online community is headed.

The fundamental issue online strategists now face is determining what people really want to do online.

Currently, e-mail is the killer app of the online era. Yet a colleague told me earlier this year that a major study found businesses are ordering ten percent more paper due to people printing out the e-mail they receive.

There seems to be the same dynamic with e-mail as the one of selling hard copy books. The Internet is a great channel or pipeline to push things through, especially when the results conveniently show up on the screen on your desktop. But the actual panel or screen you use to view the information is not a satisfactory "read" for most people. As exact as using a computer can be for many tasks it's really a very abstract experience. Since you can only see 26 lines at a time, in most cases, you have to imagine the rest of what's there. There's cyberspace and then your own "recallspace" of what is on a previous page, where a chapter is.

While we ponder the future of publishing perhaps we are losing sight of yet another major issue: will people continue to read books? And then again, as we move into the future, what do we mean by books? Text only, with a sound track, streaming video? I'll bring that up at the next salon and keep you posted.