NetWorld!

Chapter Four

Pulped Wood versus
Electrons: Can the
Print World Learn to
Love the Net?

I ran across A. C. Snow on the Internet the other day, and old memories poured forth.^[4.1] A.C. is as low tech as they come. He writes a Tar Heelish column with jokes and stories about church picnics and football and beach trips, and yet there he was online with the folksy prose that I remembered from eons ago. The Raleigh Times is gone now. A.C. works instead for the bigger News & Observer, a sister newspaper that thudded against my dormitory door when I was in college. Weekday circulation is around 150,000 nowadays, and many state legislators wake up each morning to the N & O—it just might be the most powerful paper in North Carolina.

Millions of people on the Net, however, would question the need for the three-story tan brick building, the fleet of delivery trucks, and the recent decision to invest $36 million in color presses.

You can’t update the ink on pulped trees the way you can move around dots on a computer screen. “Aren’t newspapers obsolete?” scads of techies are asking. Besides, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area has changed. Thousands of locals swap e-mail addresses at cocktail parties, while many schoolchildren grow up reading off computer screens as well as from books. IBM and other Fortune 500 companies are in Research Triangle Park outside town.

Still, like the Raleigh area, the N & O has evolved. In a nearby building, a small crew is putting out electronic newspapers on the Internet and on a bulletin board system. This isn’t just a pulp-and-ink-era newspaper company. It’s also an Internet provider. Aided by two phone companies, the N & O gives out free Internet service to teachers and students to find out what the latter would like online in the future. It’s offered Netfolks a colorful, multimedia tour of the state. Tens of thousands drop by the N & O area each week. “The Internet is like the real world—unorganized, unruly, and filled with more happenings than any one person can possibly track,” says Frank Daniels III, the paper’s executive editor. “It’s growing at a fantastic speed, and its citizens are literate. An opportunity for editors!”^[4.2]

Not everyone on the print side feels as he does. When a Washington Post writer did a gossipy little item on Cliff Stoll’s net.exposé, the journalist said book editors were looking forward to reviewing Silicon Snake Oil as “confirmation of what they hoped was true all along.”^[4.3] That may or may not have been a joke. Whatever the case, a war is going on between pulped wood and electrons. Can commercial publications, from newspapers to book publishers, learn to love the Internet, and what does this mean to us readers?

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Net will force a transformation of newspapers,” says Peter Lewis, a cyberspace writer for the New York Times, “but demise? That’s what they said about radio and television as well.”^[4.4] Just the same, a headline in Wired magazine said online newspapers “still suck.” Many newspapers are too enamored with the traditional models where editors and writers inflict whatever they want on the unsuspecting public. They don’t give their readers enough of a chance to speak back online or communicate with each other. Still, the best electronic publications can indeed be two way. And more and more of them will be packaged for the medium. You’ll be able to read summaries of stories, for example, and then summon up longer versions with a click of the mouse.

Even ads may improve. “Think of the typical print tire ad,” says Teresa Martin, an online expert with the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. “Yawn. But what if touching each tire bought up detailed specs about it, or the sizes in which the store currently has it in stock—or even some really cool car careening around a racetrack with the voice-over ‘speed rated?’ The ad can be like a window to a store, enticing the reader in to look for information.”

I know—computers are too hard for many technophobes to learn, too big to use in bed, and often too blurry or flickery to read off of; and batteries are forever eager for their next charge. But life will get better. It will happen faster if governments worry less about smartening up TV sets and more about smartening up schoolchildren with programs that drive down the cost of book-friendly computers. Much, however, is already going on. Xerox, for example, has experimented with a computer screen whose output is as sharp as printing on paper. It’s a power hog, but less hungry screens are coming. Writing in Digital Media, Martin says the right hardware could be a mere six years away.^[4.5] I myself think—based on my monitoring of technical publications—that her estimate is conservative.

Besides, even now, electronic texts can at least complement the paper kind. For example, they can increase the variety of newspapers, books, and magazines available. After U.S. Senator Jesse Helms joked that Bill Clinton would need a bodyguard to protect him from angry service people who resented his military policies, I did not rely just on the Washington Post for details. I called up the story directly from the News & Observer hundreds of miles away. What’s more, it’s easy to wander from one electronic publication to others when you are after facts on the same topic, or to search back issues of newspapers and magazines. Even novelists are discovering the possibilities of the new media. Readers can choose their own endings or pass on suggestions to the authors of works in progress.

Adventurous media people are trying to adapt to this online world as gracefully as they can, and the Internet is oh so enticing to many. The cost of the technology has fallen to the point where a bare-bones newspaper can go on the World Wide Web by investing as little as $5,000-$10,000 up front. Publishers needn’t divvy up revenue with a commercial online service, such as America Online or CompuServe.

Compared to pulped wood, the Net looks better and better—the price of paper shot up some 30 percent between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995. Environmental regulators are forcing the pulp mills to quit sullying the air and the water, and new mills can cost half a billion dollars each to build. “Like the rest of us,” writes Jonathan Seybold, publisher of Digital Media, “the paper company executives read all of the press stuff about the Information Highway, the rise of online services, and the decline of paper-based publishing.” And he says they are now asking, “Why should we invest in a new paper mill?” The result? Newsprint shortages and higher prices. “The fear,” Seybold says, “creates its own reality.”^[4.6]

More than 100 newspapers either are on the Internet or are planning to be there. The New York Times, for example, has used the World Wide Web to transmit a fax edition condensed from the normal paper. A full-grown Times may be on the Net now. The San Jose Mercury News in California not only is online, it offers a service called News Hound. For just $10 a month, the Hound will automatically scan a massive database from Knight-Ridder papers and additional dailies, then e-mail you the latest articles on the cover girls of Sports Illustrated, on Afghanistan, on the Chicago Bears, on Bill Clinton, or on any other topic that quickens your pulse or makes you reach for your Valium. From the Halifax Daily News to Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, newspapers are trying the Net. Even a strike paper, published by reporters of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, made it into cyberspace.

Some Netfolks preferred the strike daily to the electronic spin-offs of the regular ones, and I wasn’t surprised. What applies to business applies to newspapers: The Net is a great equalizer in some ways; a small newspaper can reach as far-flung a readership as an international daily. In fact, the first paper on the World Wide Web just might have been the Palo Alto Weekly from Silicon Valley. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, a 30,000-circulation weekly, finds the Internet a much cheaper way to reach people overseas than air-mail. Devoted to Russian news, the St. Petersburg Press uses the Internet to serve an English-speaking audience throughout the world. The London Telegraph has shown up on the Net with some striking graphics. No longer is the Internet just for little magazines published by techies and smart young English majors.

Time Warner has put Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, and a shelf full of other magazines in a colorful, well-done area of the World Wide Web. Readers can praise and flame the editors and each other. Hearst magazines have their own area. PC Magazine, one of the giants of the Ziff-Davis chain, enraged many Netfolks with clueless articles suggesting a rather thorough ignorance of the Internet and its reasons for existence. But guess what. Now Ziff-Davis has a wonderful Web area with generous samples from its magazines, including PC. The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel is on the World Wide Web, too, complete with some news in English; from Japan, specialized publications serve Net audiences ranging from gays to office workers.

I learned of the most dramatic use of cyberspace by a magazine just as I was finishing this book. Omni, the popular science publication, said it would forsake monthly paper editions in favor of a version on America Online, augmented by just four print editions, one each quarter. It expected to save some $4 million a year. The newsletter Interactive Week Publishing Alert raised some valid questions—copies of back articles from Omni were too hard to locate—but even if the grand experiment failed, the model was out there. A major publication was more or less forsaking pulped wood in favor of computer networks.

Meanwhile, however, some old-fogey publishers view the Internet as an unfathomable virus transmitted via cable. That’s especially true of the book business. People in it fear a massive bootlegging of their wares. Using the Net, you can even pirate paper books; there is no technical reason why machines cannot scan the latest from Philip Roth or Tom Clancy, convert their novels to bits and bytes, and zap them to your friends in Juneau. Software-based copy protection could help safeguard electronic books. But I myself think there are other solutions as well—for example, a national library fund to make free or low-cost books practical and reduce the incentive for bootlegging.

Paper publishers also complain that if electronic books are cheaper to create and distribute, manuscripts will receive less editing. With a good library system in effect, however, a way would exist to highlight works of merit—marketers would enjoy less clout and we’d see fewer best-sellers on astrology and more on history. And without the distribution costs, more money could go to writers and editors.

Other obstacles also exist in the minds of publishers eyeing the Internet. Some worry about finding a market for text offered through a global network. And certain people in the book industry also dread the competition from the many gigabytes of free material that the Internet offers. Didn’t Samuel Johnson know best?—No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. If nothing else, many word people are captives of their senses. They hate reading off computer screens; they want to hear a newspaper thunk against their doors, hold Section A in their hands, hear it rattle, sniff the ink.

Going in the other direction, many people on the Internet love to bash the print world as benighted and even a little worthless. Who needs publishers when you can post your own books and little magazines for the world to read on the Net? That’s simplistic in many cases; I’ve got a little more faith in the editors at Knopf or Viking than I do in the proofreading gang from the Department of Chemistry or Joe’s Literary Bar.

People on the Net, however, are right to criticize the print media’s ignorance of electronic publishing and computer networks. If nothing else, many traditional publishers fail to grasp the potential here. Looking at the old, underpowered machines that clutter their offices, they may believe that computers won’t progress from there. An intelligent staffer with a publishers group—someone I respected on other matters—didn’t understand the promise of computers for reading e-books. I shared this story with Robin Peek of Simmons College, who coedited a book on electronic publishing for the American Society for Information Science and the M.I.T. Press. She told me that many book publishers just hoped that computers wouldn’t improve until the publishers died or retired. Computers keep stubbornly getting better, though; blurry screens and fragile hard disks won’t always be the order of day.

More amazingly, a popular magazine misinformed some of us Netfolks that we were “netgods.” Didn’t our Internet addresses end with a prestigious “.net” rather than “.com” (the designation for a commercial site) or “.edu” (for a school site)? Strange. Anyone can pay $14 a month to ClarkNet or many other services and automatically get an address like [email protected]. So much for my godliness.

Zeuslike, however, I’ll hurl thunderbolts at HarperCollins and Doubleday. The former published the book that the immigration lawyers in Arizona used to justify the off-topic ads that they had inflicted on thousands of newsgroups. The Canter and Siegel guide was in the same class as astrology books. It talked about spending just $.0333 per thousand users per month to reach 30 million people on the Net. Most of the people, however, can only use e-mail and aren’t on Usenet or the Web. Doubleday erred in other ways. It let Cliff Stoll smear cyberspace as “devoid of warmth and human kindness.” Devoid? A rather all-encompassing word. In both cases the paper publishers were entering an unknown world.

To give another example, a New Yorker article lamented the destruction of library catalogues without really telling how electronic libraries could do the job better. The article went on about the handwritten annotations on the cards, and I could see the point here. Couldn’t a card for a Civil War book include an informal recommendation for a book on Antietam or Gettysburg? Must all cross-references be official? So I could appreciate writer Nicholson Baker’s worry about the fate of those beautiful wooden cabinets. What he played down, however, is that technology can let electronic librarians create quick paths from one work to another.^[4.7]

Far from being exotic nowadays, this technology is the essence of the World Wide Web. So if you looked up a general item on the Civil War, you might see some annotated references to an item on Antietam, and go there instantly with a click of the mouse.

Just as wrongly, an article in the Atlantic Monthly of September 1994 said future electronic books could perish because they used many disk formats. “The End of the Book?” asked the headline over T. J. Max’s doomsaying. But CD-ROMs and books on floppy disk are just transitions. Unless legislators interfere in the most ham-handed of ways, computer networks should be the natural homes for electronic books. They could reach us more cheaply, and in greater varieties, without the bottleneck of physical bookstores. So disk standards should be just plain irrelevant in the end. The true raison d’etre for the Internet is its ability to let many kinds of machines share information without the least worry about floppies or magnetic tape. Most of the time I don’t know if my no-name IBM clone is talking to a Mac or a $5-million mainframe. Besides, we mustn’t preserve books just physically; in a videocentric era we also need to help them survive in the minds of readers, particularly those outside the elite. We should spread books far and wide, then, and make the technology as friendly to words as possible.

But tell that to Max. In his eagerness to put down electronic text, Max depicted the print version of Wired magazine as hypocritical. He wrote:

Although Wired communicates extensively by e-mail with its readers, conducts forums, and makes back issues available on-line, its much-repeated goal of creating a magazine—currently called HotWired—that is especially designed to exist electronically remains fuzzy. For the moment this is no open democracy, and Wired is no computer screen—its bright graphics would make a fashion magazine envious. Wired celebrates what doesn’t yet exist by exploiting a format that does: it’s as if a scribe copied out a manuscript extolling the beauty that would one day be print.

Strange. Just what’s so odd about using old technology to spread word of alternatives, especially the dazzling e-magazines that already enliven the Web? When Nicholas Negroponte published Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), a bestselling collection of his lively Wired essays, some Generation Xers bought it not for themselves but for their parents—which was exactly what Negroponte wanted.

Max is especially off target about HotWired. Today, just months after he wrote of the publishers’ “fuzzy” goal, the magazine is one of the most successful on the Net with far more than 100,000 readers. It makes massive use of hyperlinks—the technology I described by way of the Civil War example. Within discussion areas, readers can create links from their posts to text, pictures, and sound elsewhere in the World Wide Web, including their own electronic pages—they needn’t confine themselves to tiny letters to the editor. Simply put, HotWired both praises and exemplifies the new medium.

I couldn’t care less, moreover, if this electronic magazine runs long articles that have come out in print or could have—just so HotWired also gives me new material. Not everyone on the Internet reads the printed Wired. One of joys of the Net, moreover, is the ability to offer greater levels of detail for those wanting it. What a grouch Max is. He might as well be a monk lecturing Gutenberg about the glories of calligraphy.

Even PC Magazine, one of my favorites, at times can be all wet about the Internet and related topics. A columnist suggested that most people on the Net be forced to pay for each letter sent out; supposedly, Netfolks were too quick to e-mail each other. Excuse me. Such an approach could kill off many of the mailing lists through which academics and nonacademics swap ideas and research notes en masse. A very small fee based on actual costs and Net congestion? Maybe. But not one designed to minimize use. To the columnist, however, the Net’s role as a petri dish may count less than its promise as a corporate mailman. He misses a major point. The Internet is one of the planet’s cheapest ways to transmit knowledge, including the kind that might cure cancer or give us a 150-mpg automobile. While commerce on the Net is laudable, we need those mailing lists as well—and not just for professors but public schools, libraries, charities, psychological support groups, and activists of all ideologies, to name just a few of the better examples. The economics of the Net will make this possible, especially as bandwidths increase to accommodate greater use of audio and video—text just won’t cost that much. Alas, the columnist in this instance failed to understand the Internet and its possibilities.

I myself won’t claim omniscience about the Net. Once I saw a message on a mailing list from someone pushing for a huge National Knowledge Foundation to benefit educators, librarians, journalists, and investigators. The post mentioned international topics, among others, and flares went off in my head. I posted some sharply critical, journalistic questions, wondering if the post had come from a CIA type. Some people on the list cheered me on while I pressed for public answers. It turned out that the post was from a former Company man, and as I persisted in querying Robert David Steele about his funding and motives, he sent me a colorfully worded note that might have made a Paris Island drill instructor envious. I quoted his e-mail, as I would have done if writing this up for a magazine. What a way to justify my fears of the intelligence establishment playing too powerful a role in determining the content of material online. I remembered the valuable exposés that the press had done of the CIA years ago; we need to separate U.S. journalists from spies, lest impartiality of the news media suffer. This debate I would win.

But I didn’t. In fact, I suffered a major debacle; flame after flame from bystanders assailed me. Even though I told Robert Steele I wanted public answers, people felt that I had violated the traditional prohibition against quoting private posts in public, at least with names attached. Some of the bluntest Anglo-Saxonisms came from luminaries on the Internet. People wanted perfect freedom to speak their minds in messages deemed private, just as professors and students in class would want to be free to say outrageous things without ending up on the front pages of the local paper. I, on the other hand, had applied journalistic expectations to the Net. A reporter might end up with a better story if a celebrity exploded during an interview and this fact came out in print. But on the Internet, the freedom to be outrageous in private mattered more than the freedom to quote, even with advanced warning. Yes, I had questions about this custom. What if people took advantage of this Netiquette to engage in sexual or racial abuse, or just abuse, period? Should rules really be hard and fast? Just the same, in Net terms, I was the loser here because I wore my Writer Hat at the wrong time.

Luckily the story ended happily. Robert Steele and I, while disagreeing, made our peace. I went to one of his conferences and shook his hand. Later I happily discovered that he shared my hatred of the Clipper chip, the loathsome White House scheme to make it easier to snoop on citizens’ communications. He was far more openminded than I’d originally expected. Even without that consideration, however, a feud just didn’t make sense here. Canter and Siegel may claim you can reach 30 million people in one swoop, but as I say repeatedly, the Net is a series of communities, some of them rather small-townish. Within our somewhat overlapping circles, it would have been mutually harmful for Robert Steele and me to squander time and reputations on a protracted flame war.

Other kinds of clashes take place between Internet culture and that of traditional media types; in the eyes of many people on the Net, print people are not the only villains. Dateline NBC ran a story about children using computer connections to locate recipes for making bombs. The children, however, could have done the same at bookstores or public libraries. Dateline’s episode reminded one Netizen of the time NBC secretly used a hidden ignition system to show that an automobile could explode. Just as bizarrely, in print and on the air, some journalists love stories about the Internet as a playground for child molesters. If we on the Net were a religious or ethnic group, we could start an antidefamation league and keep it forever busy.

By Net standards, the media bumble in yet other ways. If you’re a newspaper or magazine journalist, you may have been reared to neuter yourself about The News; no opinions online, please. On the Net, however, many people are suspicious if you do not join the crowd and speak out. They dislike net-thropologists; that is, media people and others who study the Net rather than contribute to it. Among some journalists the standard modus operandi is to post questions for an article, then vanish without sharing anything with the Netfolks.

Happily, this is changing somewhat. In fact, you can find a few journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other major papers speaking up online about matters dear to them. Recently a reader flamed the Post for its Internet coverage (“what those idiots at the Post write isn’t worth minimum wage”). Alluding to software that can screen out messages from offensive people, reporter John Schwartz punched right back: “It’s bozo filter time.” He had been using online services for years, and here, it showed. The old stereotype, in which all members of the major media are clueless, just doesn’t fly any more. Not too long ago somebody shared a New York Times article—discussing some other people’s proposal for a national digital library—with hundreds of a members of a list devoted to law in cyberspace. He did not ask permission from the Times. A pithy reference to copyright law then emanated from none other than Peter Lewis, who had written the article and was a regular on the list.

So how are Netfolks treating Lewis nowadays? He e-mailed back an answer in prose worthy of a discussion group on the Internet itself:

It took me a while to get used to being flamed by pencil-dicked geeks who hide behind their terminals, saying things I’m sure they’d never dream of saying to my face. But now I’ve become something of a connoisseur of flamage, and while I regret that it is widespread on the Net, I regret more that the quality of flaming is almost uniformly weak. I now savor good flames and ignore the rest. On the other hand, it took me almost as long to get used to having instant feedback, often pointed and critical and right-on, to my writing. While there is a danger of a “chilling effect” from flamage, perhaps subtly influencing reporters to back off a subject in anticipation of a flood of “Dear Clueless” letters, I think the overall benefit of instant and widespread reader feedback is a Good Thing. Perhaps all rookie reporters should be required to write a Net story just to let them know that they do not write in a vacuum, whether their beat is the Internet or the police station or sports.

Like the police beat, the Internet comes with its set of rules—as my experience with the CIA alum vividly showed. Some on the Net attach a statement to every post saying it’s copyrighted. Others just worry that the wrong set of people may read and quote their more outspoken messages. Lewis considers list and newsgroup posts to be public: “My mother once advised me, long before she knew I would be a journalist, ‘Never put anything on paper that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times.’”

Still, Lewis normally catches up with the writers of posts he plans to quote. “However, the reason has more to do with verification than with netiquette. In cyberland as well as in the real world, as you know, the fact that someone’s name and address appear in a letter does not guarantee the identity of the writer.” Lewis reminded me that “half a century ago some newspapers forbade reporters from quoting sources contacted by telephone on the same rationale: How do you really know that was Mr. Doe on the phone if you didn’t see him? In cyberville, not only can we not see our sources, but neither can we hear them.” And then a few sentences later came the electronic signature, “Pete (at least, you think it’s Pete) Lewis.”^[4.8]

Other challenges exist online. When reporters use e-mail for interviews, they take away the element of surprise—often the surest route to the best answer. “Also,” says Jordan Green, a Canadian freelancer who relies heavily on e-mail, “there is no body language or voice intonation in e-mail. We do have our various symbols to >>>highlight<<< and _emphasize_ WORDS and feelings:-) but there is far more which cannot be picked up.”

In the end, however, computer networks will make the press better informed, not worse. Via Lycos, for example, a searching tool on the Web, I can track down files written by just the right person to interview or find background information that someone archived from the relevant newsgroup. Besides, who says that all interviews are confrontational? Often e-mail is just right, and I can always use the telephone to fill in gaps. “I used to ask, ‘What’s your fax number?’ at the end of a phone interview,” says a magazine writer named Peggy Noonan.^[4.9] “Now I also ask, ‘What’s your e-mail address’ because it’s often much faster to post a question or send a draft for approval via e-mail than by another means.” Some journalists might object to showing drafts to sources. But Noonan clearly sees the networks as a godsend for other purposes as well.

Another believer is Arik Hesseldahl, a young reporter with the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello who, like many journalists of his generation, grew accustomed to the technology in college. “Remember that flesh-eating bug scare a few months ago?” he said. “I got in touch with a doctor in England who debunked all the rumors and media hype, which is what it was—hype. Just today I am looking for an expert on nuclear fuel reprocessing equipment who is untainted by the Department of Energy and the rest of the federal nuke bureaucracy. Already I’ve gotten five suggestions for experts.”

I myself see other advantages for people in the pulped-wood world; via the Net I don’t just approach editors—I hear from them out of the blue when they like my postings. Other freelancers have also benefited. Steven Sander Ross, a professor at Columbia University, uses the Net to communicate with European magazines that pay better than those in the States. Just as the Net creates global markets for florists and sellers of teddy bears, it multiplies opportunities for the best writers. That is true for newspaper and magazine writers now and will be increasingly true for authors of books. Mind you, there is a downside, too. The Net may actually hurt the worst writers as they face more competition, whether from professionals across the planet or from the free material that Netfolks share with each other.

Here are three case histories that should be of interest to writers, editors, publishers, and the rest of the cosmos:

• Case History 1. The News & Observer has used the Internet not only to reach the denizens but also to get existing readers and advertisers on the Net. In an era when so many greedsters hope to charge outrageous fees to consumers for online information, the N & O is hoping that ads will pay much or even most of the freight.

• Case History 2. Time Warner, as noted, is putting magazines and book excerpts on the Internet, and it’s doing so in ways befitting the medium. Many of the same concepts carry over from online newspapers, which is why this section and the next will be much shorter than Case History 1. In fact, so far, an N & O-style business model seems to be influencing Time at least somewhat.

• Case History 3. Laura Fillmore runs an online bookstore that not only sells books but gives them away on the Internet. She even used the Net to promote a pulped-wood book that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Fillmore’s ideas are significant because she is working hard to reconcile publishers’ needs with those of society at large, and I commend one of her business models as an alternative to pay-per-read gouges. The ultimate answer, in my own opinion, is a national digital library and a program to drive down the cost of book-friendly hardware. Using this approach—a mix of editorial and technical wizardry to add to the value of plain text—good publishers would flourish. Readers and writers would come out ahead, too.

Finally, I’ll offer an update on the N & O and other publications on the Internet. When Frank Daniels described the Net as “unorganized” and “unruly,” he might also have been talking about certain trends in his own industry. A surprising twist unfolded in the story of the N & O.

Newspapers on the Net:
The Raleigh Experiment

More than two decades ago in a scuffy-floored room at the University of North Carolina, not that far from the N & O, I heard Professor Walter Spearman expound on the prickly question of uppity letters to the editor. What if a reader taunted, “You’ll never print this?” The crux of Walt Spearman’s wisdom was this: Don’t go for the bait. If you don’t want to print it, don’t.^[4.10] He was teaching me to be, in modern parlance, a “gatekeeper”—to decide which news and opinions made it into print and which didn’t. Only so many column inches existed on the editorial page, and we journalists were to watch over this space as if it were the Mona Lisa. Without the slightest apology, we should tell the public what to read, and besides lording over the editorial pages, we should inflict the same front page stories on everyone. The notion that each reader could write regularly for other readers, or that he or she could see wire service stories online, was as sacrilegious as it was science fiction-like.

By the end of the 1970s, however, at Duke, UNC, and N.C. State, hackers were paving the way for Usenet, a series of discussion areas on the Internet and on bulletin board systems that let everyone have a say—from Nazis to Maoists. Together with talk radio and with other forms of computer communications, Usenet could help Americans bypass the gatekeepers. Readers wouldn’t see on their screens an appealing combination of headlines and Times Roman type. But no blue pencils would be around to scratch out the heresies of nonjournalists.

Usenet in the end wouldn’t just carry alt.activism or comp.general or alt.sex; it would also be home to a nice little electronic newspaper called ClariNet, which in 1995 enjoyed 100,000-plus readers, and which each day let readers choose from among hundreds of dispatches from Reuters, the Associated Press, and more specialized services. My friend Jim Besser covered Washington for a string of Jewish newspapers. He could dial up ClariNet, other sections of Usenet, and the Internet at large and see material that might take days and days to wend its way into the Washington Post, assuming it ever got there at all. Usenet in the end was more of a wire service than a newspaper; that just may have been its real triumph. Some old print people hated ClariNet, seeing it as a threat to their gatekeeping. For a while, ClariNet sent out the columns of Dave Barry, the quirky but popular humorist enjoyed by thousands of Netheads. Then, however, his syndicate pulled him off the service. Illegal copies had wafted all over the Internet, and the bootlegging had surely outraged client newspapers—the main reason; but a second, minor one may have existed as well—the hostility between the Net and many members of the print media.

The Internet was partly why Michael Crichton, the author of the novel Jurassic Park, could shrug off newspapers and some other mass media as “tomorrow’s fossil fuel.” The Cable News Network and radio talk shows are not the only threats to the hegemony of the old-time gatekeepers. So are the Internet, CompuServe, America Online, GEnie, Delphi, and, of course, the more than 50,000 bulletin board systems run by hobbyists and others. “Newspapers,” wrote the media critic Jon Katz, “have been foundering for decades, their readers aging, their revenues declining, their circulations sinking, their sense of mission fragmented in a world where the fate of presidents is slugged out on MTV, Donahue, and Larry King Live.”

I was fascinated, then, to learn that the old News & Observer was on the Net now. Was the N & O serving readers better? With the above in mind I spent several weeks talking to the Raleigh people on the phone and via e-mail, and studying the electronic versions of the newspaper, both the free samples on the Net and the version for paying customers.

My conclusions were positive, though not entirely. Katz, the author of the “Still Suck” article in Wired, would have disliked some aspects of the N & O’s electronic efforts. Wired had asked, “How can an industry which regularly pulls Doonesbury strips for being too controversial possibly hope to survive online?” And, sure enough, if you were on the Internet by way of the N & O’s service in fall 1994, you couldn’t subscribe to the alt.sex string of newsgroups. Moreover, unlike the Time areas online, the N & O’s BBS had not sprouted hundreds of messages from free-spirited readers and editors. Truly controversial postings were rare. And yet the editors were clearly moving away from the traditional gatekeeping role. Meanwhile, the N & O was enriching the Internet by way of well-written news stories and features—many available for free. Flaws aside, this was a fine example of how the print media could befriend the Net and the young people who favored computer screens over pulped wood.

Frank Daniels III, the executive editor, tinkered with computers himself in high school two decades ago, and as early as the late 1980s he was using Macs to shuffle around stories on the pages of a magazine that his family owned in Charlotte, North Carolina. Working with a stock analyst, Daniels created a computerized database of the top fifty companies in the Charlotte area, and that, in turn, led to a newsletter. So early on, Daniels saw how high tech could spawn lucrative opportunities. He also saw the negatives. The owners of the Los Angeles Times, Knight-Ridder, and other organizations were experimenting with Videotext, which allowed news stories to scroll across television screens.

Such endeavors were brave. They were also premature. Videotext at the time cost the customers too much, and just as the Prodigy service would err later on in the same way, the newspapers failed to appreciate the fondness of many customers for typing to each other. Reading news stories and shopping from home weren’t enough.

Many U.S. dailies would go on to flounder even on pulped wood. Whether Americans were watching video-cassettes or hang gliding, millions had other uses for their time, especially baby boomers. Some 60 percent of the households in Wake County had once subscribed to the N & O; by the late 1980s, just 40 percent did. Newspapers kissed off much of the market, jacked up their prices, and began seeing themselves as a way for advertisers to reach at least the Oldsmobile set if not the BMW set. And yet, even by those criteria, the N & O was a slacker. Back then, as it does today, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area boasted one of the highest concentrations of Ph.D.s in the country. Some 40 percent of the households now own computers, more than 10 percent can go online, and the average home price is well on the way to equaling that of some major metropolitan areas. Even five years ago, and long before, high tech was enriching the Research Triangle.

But would the N & O adapt to this new market, a harbinger for many other areas in the United States and elsewhere? Frank Daniels saw the newspaper as a change-proof antique, and he was ready to dump his N & O stock and sink the money into an online service.

Then Daniels got some journalistic religion at a newspaper seminar, the secular equivalent of a good Baptist soaking. To hear him tell it, he suddenly understood that “the relationship between a newspaper and a community has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” And he felt that online services could take advantage of those relationships with readers and advertisers. Today the N & O goes by this philosophy, not entirely but to a great extent. Readers can e-mail many of their favorite writers, while long-time advertisers can buy X number of column inches in the paper editions and receive exposure in the electronic editions.

Something else, however, may have bound Frank Daniels to his paper as well—old family stories and the memories they stirred. The first Daniels landed in North Carolina several hundred years ago, and the family reunions continue to this day. Frank III’s great-grandfather, Josephus Daniels, purchased the N & O at a bankruptcy auction in 1894. He carried on as one of the state’s more colorful and outspoken publishers, with a strong populist streak, and took time off in Washington to serve as secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. I ran across Josephus on the Internet, just as serendipitously as I had found A. C. Snow. Through the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, I could hear Josephus honor two naval heroes with a speech called “There Is No Rank in Sacrifice.” I passed on word of my discovery to Bruce Siceloff, an online editor, and he played another Daniels’ speech for the clan while showing off the paper’s marvels of technology. Frank Jr., publisher of the N & O, tapped the arm of a cousin who had just walked into the room. “That’s your grandfather,” he said as the spooky old wax recording crackled away in its new electronic incarnation.^[4.11]

Josephus, though his racial views softened, reflected the separatism of many Carolinians in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper itself changed. It eventually hired Claude Sitton, a Pulitzer winner notable for his civil rights reporting in his days with the New York Times. The N & O in some ways became the Times South. Reporters fought racial injustices. Frank III portrayed the paper of that era as never having met a cause it didn’t like. What’s more, he said the N & O, although exposing politicians on the take, was too quick to editorialize for local programs that raised local tax rates. I myself favored the crusading kind of newspaper—in fact, one risk of a high-tech orientation was that it could turn a newspaper into an uncritical cheerleader for business if editors were not careful—but I could understand Daniels’ concern over government spending. At any rate some felt that the N & O was losing touch with many readers, and so Frank Jr. and the others on the board of directors agreed to let Frank III serve as executive editor in the wake of Sitton’s retirement.

The contrast between the old and new editors couldn’t have been more stark. Sitton was a formal man who insisted that his reporters wear suits and ties. Frank III relaxed the dress code. In place of a sign with his editorial title, he stuck up one that said simply, “Frat Man.” Old-timers groaned that this young Duke alum lacked enough journalistic experience. The man had been the newspaper’s operations manager. Wasn’t it apparent? For each year of experience on the State side of newspapering, you could subtract two years of experience with the Church.

Even under Sitton, the reporters typed away on a modern publishing system for newspapers. But that was more or less all they did—write. Many could just as well have been pounding away on old Smith Coronas. They hadn’t any desire to learn the technology, not when there were doors to knock on, vote counts to check, political corruption to chronicle, Ku Klux Klan rallies to report, and courthouse records to search the old-fashioned way. Young Daniels set to work changing all that, and with the most surpassing of allies. The news librarians almost instantly grasped the potential of computerized databases. So did Pat Stith, the senior investigative reporter. The N & O would go on to collect state records showing traffic or hunting violations, or others, and then seek out patterns. “We analyzed all the speeding tickets,” said Daniels, “and found out what percentage of tickets were given at each mile-per-hour level. It turns out that if you go 63 miles per hour in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, you have less than a 1 percent chance of getting a ticket.” Via the same quantitative techniques, the N & O could evaluate the programs of local government. By the time Daniels had effected his transformation, he had squeezed dozens of personal computers into an already-crowded newsroom.

A year or so after Frank Daniels III became executive editor, he first beheld the Internet over at North Carolina State. “An engineering student said, ‘Have you seen this?’ and he showed me Usenet. And about forty-five minutes later, while I was thirty minutes late for a meeting, I was speechless. I walked out. I was just buzzing with the possibilities.” Daniels saw some engineering newsgroups and, yes, some sexually related ones. “I couldn’t believe how many people I saw talking together, just following each other’s conversations. The letters to the editor at the time were the only connection the News & Observer had with its readers.

“Our business is connecting people. Here was a whole world that existed without our knowledge. It was a small world and an elitist world, but it confirmed my earlier belief that computers were going to be ubiquitous.”

Effortlessly Daniels understood that Usenet wasn’t Videotext—people wanted you to talk back. So the Internet was at least on his mind as a possibility for the time when the numbers were right. Daniels for the moment pushed into less exotic areas; for example, he started a useful, lively, but expensive fax newsletter for the elite, The Insider, which covered North Carolina politics with a commitment to detail missing from the daily press. The N & O also offered sophisticated research services, using the databases it was amassing. And the paper let readers dial up stories over the telephone through a technology known as Audiotext.

The electronic action, however, really took off after Daniels hired George Schlukbier, a computer-oriented librarian who had worked wonders at the Sacramento Bee. Like Daniels the frat boy, Schlukbier flaunted a few eccentricities within bounds. An electronic signature at the bottom of his Internet messages identified him as “Chief Bull Goose Looney,” a tribute to the giant Indian who terrorized Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Ken Kesey novel. Some, of course, might argue that the Internet is itself a virtual asylum with the inmates in charge.

Schlukbier and Daniels checked out Prodigy and America Online to see about getting on those networks and decided that the numbers stank. Yes, Prodigy-style services already had their networks in place, and the Los Angeles Times and papers in George, New York and elsewhere would go on to sign up. But the N & O concluded—rightly, in my opinion—that the online services would need the newspapers more than the newspapers would need the online services. Newspapers were the best source of steady, detailed news about local communities. Each year the N & O spent $12 million covering mainly local and state news, an amount that even a giant like Prodigy could not replicate everywhere. “They’ve got their view of the world that’s defined by whatever technology they adopted at the time they started their service,” Daniels would later say. “We got uncomfortable with the fact we’d be living their rules, and the customers would be their customers.”^[4.12]

Some other newspapers felt happy with Prodigy. “No,” said Mike Gordon, an editor with Cox Newspapers in Atlanta, “Prodigy isn’t taking most of the money.” What’s more, his online edition could enjoy revenue from online ads. Still, more and more publishers were turning to the Internet rather than Prodigy-type alternatives, and the balance of power changed. When Microsoft started a new online service later, it offered newspapers as much as 80 percent of revenue—at least several times the amount that Prodigy had offered the N & O. (The Atlanta papers would themselves end up on the Internet eventually, not just on Prodigy.)

Instead of relying on a Prodigy-style service, Schlukbier started a locally oriented BBS with an Internet connection and a strong emphasis on schoolchildren, not just the adult readers of today. This orientation may have baffled many. Some newspaper publishers were too myopic to see past the next quarter, especially if they worked for the big chains. Exceptions did exist, of course. Knight-Ridder, for example, regardless of its public ownership and its Videotext flop, was still pouring millions into the new technology. As a family-owned newspaper, however, without security analysts breathing down its corporate neck, the N & O was especially free to experiment. Schlukbier believed that a decade would pass before 40 or 50 percent of the homes in Raleigh were online, and by then the children would be of customer age.

“By focusing on third-graders,” Schlukbier said, “I’ve got ten years to learn from them what information they really need and want.”^[4.13] What they hoped for, in many ways, didn’t seem like a newspaper at all. Rather they wanted their own tools. The bulletin board blossomed with imaginary worlds in which, for example, Frank Daniels was the owner of a fictitious newsstand. Children could wend their ways through cyberspace by using written descriptions and computer commands to tell where they were and what they were doing. George Schlukbier’s young son, Shane, designed a mythical camp online with danger-ridden woods. Some may have wondered how this applied to newspapers; I myself did. And then it dawned: if newspapers would be increasingly two-way in the future, just like the Net, then didn’t it make sense to see how the children interacted with each other, as they did in role-playing games? The children could change as they grew older, or moved away from the area when their parents packed up for another job with IBM, but the journalists could still observe the basic patterns.

The N & O put more than 6,000 children and 700 teachers online for free. NandOLand was the name of the educational service designed with children in mind; a mouse click on a cloud, for example, would take children to a NASA area on the Net. The students could send electronic mail to each other or type to each other instantly. “I have seen children who never cared what they wrote turn to a dictionary rather than send a letter to a key pal with misspelled words,” said a teacher named Stephanie Toney. “I have seen a child with a severe reading disability sit for hours and concentrate on e-mail to another person on the other side of the world. His English teacher would have given her right arm to interest him in reading and writing for this period of time.”

Granted, NandOLand wasn’t the entire solution to the needs of children. Many couldn’t spend much time on a machine at school and lacked one at home. But the program was much better than the alternative: expensive school connections to the Net or no Internet at all.

Like the children, the N & O itself was learning—about the local schools and other institutions and the Net itself. “How many newspaper editors and reporters get to talk with students, parents, and teachers any time they want to without making a big deal of it?” asked Daniels.^[4.14] And so the educational coverage was better. Rosalind Resnick, publisher of Interactive Publishing Alert, wrote that the N & O was “at the head of the pack when it comes to promoting interactivity between its readers and reporters.” By the summer of 1995 every staff member, including those in circulation and advertising, would be able to go on the Net from their desks. Daniels’ own Net address showed up on the paper’s editorial page each day. The N & O was publishing a dozen or two Internet items each month, complete with a column called “Net Rider.” How different the paper was from a rival in nearby Durham: “We don’t print many Internet stories,” a staffer there said when I asked to speak to whoever covered the Net. The words were spoken almost in a way to suggest that “Internet” was synonymous with “N & O.”

Not everyone was happy with the N & O’s Internet service. Around 700 people had subscribed commercially by fall 1994, paying $20 a month, and some rightly complained about the look and feel of the BBS and the busy phone lines they had encountered during the summer. When I posted a query on the Internet, at least half of the replies were hostile to the online N & O. Some showed a knee-jerk hatred because they disagreed with the paper’s politics. But others were right on target. The BBS incarnation of NandO.Net, the name for the commercial part of the online endeavors, was more of a rutted dirt road than an eight-lane information highway. Customers for some months had trouble dialing up the service’s modems for want of enough phone lines. Other glitches arose. The service prided itself on the ability to whip people back and forth between the local board and the Internet-related services without any effort. And yet in making the transitions, customers suffered delays and software glitches that they might not encounter with a more polished service. Schoolchildren and BBS junkies were the best kinds of people to enjoy the wild ride and the scenery.

The online N & O responded with some technical improvements; the paper added many more phone lines and gave customers the ability to use Mosaic to point and click their way through the Web. Mosaic had a much smoother feel than the BBS software. By late 1994 the N & O was offering the public an electronic newspaper and the Internet at the competitive rate of $20 a month while helping to subsidize the educational side. And it was serving people with different levels of equipment. The BBS was designed to work especially well with less powerful machines and snailish modems that were far too slow for Mosaic.

On the Net, the people who answered my queries had another major complaint—the inability of NandO.Net to make alt.sex-style groups conveniently available. Frank Daniels made no apologies. However liberal towns like Chapel Hill might be, the state as a whole was of the opposite bent. And that included more than a few church-goers in Raleigh. “The community standards of our community don’t mix with some of the sexual parts of Usenet,” Daniels said, “so we edit them out.” In addition, most subscribers were children. “I have a seven year old,” he said, “and I don’t want him delving into alt.sex.bestiality or those other places.” Many of the Netheads would have said that one person’s “editing” was another’s “censorship.” I myself, however, understood Daniel’s worries. At least two other Net services were available in the same area, so it wasn’t as if he were gatekeeping for the entire town; what’s more, he said that when the software allowed, the sex-related newsgroups would be available as an option. Just the same, the issue epitomized the clash between the gatekeeping ethos and that of the Internet.

More serious than the lack of alt.sex, to my mind, was Daniels’ failure to appreciate sufficiently the political freedom of Usenet, the same service that had attracted him to the Internet in the first place. I complained to him that his own BBS included far, far less in the way of political discussion than I’d have wanted, and I contrasted this to the robust debates of Usenet. “To be honest, David,” he said, “I think one of the least useful pieces of the Internet so far is their political discussions. They’re not very good ones. There’s a lot of flaming. The political discussions aren’t very productive. I follow mainly the local ones here. These people discuss national issues and never have a policymaker looking in there. So why discuss it if it isn’t going to have an impact on policy?”

While Daniels was worlds ahead of newspaper editors at large, he was showing the vestiges of the gatekeeping mindset that the new technology had made obsolete. I myself disliked unmitigated flaming. And yet there were times when harsh words were called for. The N & O didn’t wimp out when the editorial board attacked the Ku Klux Klan or the more outrageous statements of Jesse Helms, the right-wing senator. Why should people online be any different? And although it might be nice for a policymaker to read my public messages as soon as I sent them out—and, yes, I could recall hearing out of the blue from the White House after one such posting—that was hardly necessary. Democracy isn’t just a citizen writing to a congressman. It is also citizens communicating with citizens, educating, proselytizing; and with the economies of Usenet, more citizens could reach their peers for greater enlightenment. And then, if a consensus were reached, political action might ensue, such as letters to Congress. So why must politicians be involved from Day One? Daniels was out of touch here, and I hoped he’d catch on.

Admittedly NandO.Netters could hook up with the Usenet political areas, even if the N & O played them down; but the newspaper didn’t really promote political debates on the BBS itself. And it was not just because Daniels believed that the readers disliked flaming and extremism—it was also because he felt that real, live politicians were not ready for online appearances yet. “When we can get commitment from the politicians and policymakers, then we’ll make a push at it. But not until it becomes something where our community can have really productive discussions. I don’t want to train them not to like them. What happens is that the people on the Net are trained not to like them. Extremists and flamers love them.” I supposed there were a lot of us undesirables, however; for alt.activism and similar areas were among the more popular newsgroups on the Net—no match for alt.sex, but certainly not small time.

If Daniels had had a complete set of Net values, he would have understood the benefits of debate online, and not just the political action but the education. I myself was liberal. And yet when discussing information policy, I could learn at times from the most zealous of Libertarians and Objectivists. Some were among the most advanced of the technologists. In fact, their technical backgrounds may have led to their hatred of regulation—they loathed the bureaucrats who could not fathom the direction in which computers and communications were headed.

To his credit, Daniels at least was not calling for censorship of Usenet; he was merely saying that he wanted his own service to be different. What’s more, technology and marketing forces, the great deciders of cyberspace, might change his mind for him.

Just as he had assumed in the first place, people on the Net wanted to talk—not just to the N & O but to each other about all kinds of topics, including material in the paper itself. And the more comfortable the readers grew with the online world, the more spirited, the more Usenet-like, would be the discussions. No, the meek would not suddenly turn into flamers. But the thrill of technology would be less of a distraction, and they would pay more heed to what they had to say and grow more adventurous about it. On the N & O’s present BBS, with its often awkward commands, many people were not even leaving messages for each other. Instead they typically used the system at a more primitive level to type out their thoughts with the other person online at the same time. I hated this approach. It brought to mind Dave Barry’s crack that the Internet was like CB radio with typing.

Even if Daniels still did not enjoy the political debates on the Net itself, he was living up to the old tradition of sharing material with the rest of the world. In that sense his newspaper was exemplary. The N & O didn’t just offer news, discussion areas, and games for its subscribers: Sample news and features were free to anyone who wanted to read them. That was how I’d first run across A.C. Snow. I’d seen the N & O’s name on a list of newspapers, and A.C. had caught my eye as I was wandering through the Gopher that stored sample news stories and columns from the paper. The World Wide Web, however, was the best way to try out the electronic N & O. When I dialed up the main page for NandO.Net, I could see a colorful, bluish logo and enjoy a newsstandish atmosphere, with scads of goodies to explore. The N & O differed from many electronic newspapers. It didn’t just inflict on readers a digest of generic news, with only the most cursory helping of original material.

I read samples from the regular N & O and specialized publications such as the Insider; enjoyed brief but regularly updated electronic news intended for the Net itself; wandered through a little bookstore with cover shots from books by Snow and other columnists; wended my way through tens of thousands of words from a journalism seminar at Harvard; soaked up long, multimedia features; dialed up samples of rock music; and ventured into the sports area—the N & O’s most popular material on the Web.

The sports area was the baby of a bearded, forty-something editor named Eric Harris who had turned into a Nethead, and who like Schlukbier came with a nickname: “Zonker.” A child, seeing the beard and taking in the personality, had compared him to the Doonesbury character. That was a little unfair. Zonker of the comics is a goof-off, while Zonker of the Net is a workaholic whose messages might bear 4 A.M. time stamps. Harris is Webmaster—the man with the daily responsibility for the content of the Web area in general—but his true love was sports. He packed the server with game schedules. During the ’94 baseball strike the N & O indulged fans with whimsy such as “Cybersox Take the World Series”—reportage of mythical games. “Need something to do while we wait for the owners and players to resolve their differences?” the Web area asked on another electronic page. “Well, the Baseball Server is doing its part. Download the above images, tack them onto the wall, and buy a set of darts. Then, every time you feel a twinge of baseball withdrawal, grab a dart, think a ‘warm’ thought about one of the participants, and let the fun begin.” And sure enough, Netfolks could print out pictures of the villains, each of whom had a superimposed picture of a dartboard and the wonderful caption: “The only losers are the fans.”

The N & O also shared with the Net a variety of other material, of which my favorite was North Carolina Discoveries. A lively feature writer named Julie Ann Powers sought out offbeat places. In Lake Norman, for example, she found that “houses and hangars ring the airstrip and each lot comes with a grass taxiway to the paved and lighted runway.” In Orient, a hamburger-and-hot-dog cook named Red Lee claimed that at twenty-five cents each, his offerings were the cheapest in the country. And in Tryon, the publishers of the Daily Bulletin said that at 8 by 11 inches, their newspaper might be the smallest in the world. Powers drove from town to town in a Ford Explorer that she had nicknamed Barlowe after Arthur Barlowe—one of the first Europeans to behold the state of North Carolina. Barlowe was a gadgeteer’s heaven on wheels, full of audio and video equipment. People on the Web didn’t just enjoy gloriously descriptive stories from Powers: with Mosaic-style software they could see a picture of her wearing a sun hat on a beach or gaze at sand dunes or waterfalls or whatever she happened to be writing about at the time. If they owned a sound card, they could hear, too. She walked around carrying a microphone so large that it resembled a folded-up umbrella.

Powers might well be one of the first multimedia reporters to work for a Net-oriented daily newspaper. I asked her to share a few trade secrets. She said she interviewed people twice. The first time she gathered the basics for her regular story; the second time they spoke while tape rolled. Powers said she never knew which sounds would work out and which wouldn’t. A recording of a glorious waterfall ended up sounding like a toilet flushing.

I asked about the challenge of balancing her traditional duties as a reporter with those as an audio-oriented interviewer. Some old hands in the N & O newsroom saw the gadgetry as a threat. It was all too remindful of the days when computers were replacing typewriters in the newsroom, and many reporters and editors balked at being typesetters. But Powers turned the new technology to her advantage. The microphone and electronic camera—a photographer followed her around—made her more aware of her surroundings and sensitive to new story angles. Once she did a story on Ten Commandment Mountain. It was part of a Biblical theme park, a peak in western North Carolina with God’s words spelled out in “concrete letters each measuring five feet high and four feet wide.” A roar from a giant lawn mower kept drowning out the voice of the man she was interviewing. “They always ask,” he volunteered, “how do you mow that mountain?” Presto, she had the magic quote to use near the lead. “A special mower with a low center of gravity,” she revealed, “tilts and leans up and down the steep planes.”

Whether reading about twenty-five-cent hamburgers or godly peaks, I could scoot easily between pictures and words. The N & O had a “North Carolina Discoveries” logo at the top of one page, a picture of Powers in the same area, and then a list of the Discoveries stories that she had done. By clicking my mouse on a list of story headlines in blue letters, I could immediately go to the stories. When I chose “Home Sweet Hangar,” I sped to the same headline atop a color photo of an aviation buff inspecting “his Cessna 172 after rolling it out of the hangar at his house in Lake Norman Airpark.” Yes, the caption was there too. And then I saw the story lead with an apt quote (“It’s like being an avid golfer and living on the golf course”) followed by a list of other items. I could choose “Audio: Talking about life on the flight line” if I wanted to hear an interview. What’s more, if I’d set up my software, I could even have picked “Video” and gone on to a list of short movies. I also saw background items such as a list of “Triangle-area flight schools” and “FAA regulations: How to get your pilot’s license.” The beauty of this arrangement was that the N & O could provide all kinds of wonderful details for the interested without inflicting them on others. Unless they mouse-clicked the appropriate words in blue letters (or whatever the special color), they would never see the material.

The N & O used the same approach on news stories. When North Carolina was about to gas a man named David Lawson, readers could click on the item “The Lawson Execution.” They could see a schedule of the events ahead—from Lawson’s removal from his cell to the EKG examination that would help certify his death. After the Associated Press reported the execution, readers could click on a headline and read the details. They could even summon up “Preparing for the execution” or “How the gas chamber works.”

The Lawson story was a just a sample—the N & O at the time wasn’t constantly doing multimedia on breaking news—but it was easy to envision the future for American newspapers using the Web. Imagine the blessings for journalists who wanted to write on neat little odds and ends without getting in the way of their main articles. They could merely add “links” to offshoot stories. Perhaps the reader could even click and summon up a collateral audio report or even a video. At first it might be hard to do all this on deadline, but links would be a cinch as software improved. What’s more, newspaper writers might evolve into true personalities just like their counterparts on television. After all, if a reporter’s byline were in blue letters, you could click your mouse to see a photo and maybe even a bio featuring credentials—you could find out, for example, if the legal reporter held a law degree. You could also quickly locate copies of earlier work or a list of his or her favorite books.

Granted, electronic newspapers posed new challenges. Not all stories lent themselves to multimedia, for example. What if newspapers played down those that didn’t? “If you tried to do that with a lot of news stories,” Julie Powers told me, “you would end up serving the video masters rather than the news functions.” Still, in the end, the reader would enjoy far more choices than before.

The Web, as I saw it, held out yet other possibilities for local papers such as the N & O. Suppose you lived in Chapel Hill and wanted to see what news had happened there in the past 24 hours; you could click on a map of the Raleigh area and behold a story list from your town. Neighborhood-level submaps could show still more. You could read the most minor tidbits—for example, new requests for zoning changes or items from neighborhood newsletters. Even more helpful, you could find old stories and other background information. Let’s say you were shopping for a condo on a certain street. You might think the neighborhood was safe—Chapel Hill is a university town, remember—but learn that many crimes had occurred nearby. Furthermore, you could adjust the kind of information that you summoned from the Web. For example, you could see lists of houses for sale in a neighborhood and then retrieve their photos along with audio sales presentations. Moving on to another information category, you could uncover lists of nearby stores or see test scores from the closest elementary school. And you might even see ads from nearby restaurants and click on them to order.

The food-related examples weren’t entirely hypothetical; Zonker Harris pointed me toward me some mock ads from Hardee’s and a chain called Little Caesar’s Pizza. The same business principles I discussed in chapter 2 applied here. Rather than planning to inflict vast quantities of material on the unwilling, the N & O made the ads useful and entertaining. Elsewhere in the N & O area I saw an ad for a computer dealer, among others, but the real triumph was the area from Mammoth Records—with home pages for bands, promo photos, discographies, tour dates, album covers, and more, including a catalogue and, yes, free samples.

But what about the economics of all this? Via an electronic edition the N & O wouldn’t collect the fifty cents it charged per hard copy issue, but it wouldn’t have to buy newsprint and distribution services. That was how George Schlukbier hoped the newspaper would turn a profit eventually. The electronic activities, although not yet profitable as a whole, were coming along. People on the Net, for example, were calling up the pages within the N & O’s area several hundred thousand times a week. A page was what you saw when you clicked the mouse to call up an item, and each page could be just a few lines of information, or go on for a number of screens. Zonker Harris expected that by the end of 1994 as many people would be dialing up the N & O as called up SunSite UNC, the popular collection of files at the University of North Carolina. Readers retrieved Mammoth Record’s pages some 35,000 times a week. That didn’t mean 35,000 people—there was plenty of repeat business, and of course the same people looked at more than one page—but the numbers looked good as a start.

Just who, however, was reading the Web areas of the N & O and other Internet publications? The Washington Post and many other dailies had chosen to avoid the Net for the moment because they thought that the right people weren’t there. And some marketers and journalists tried to reinforce such arguments by citing a study of 4,777 Web readers by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ninety-four percent were men, and 56 percent were 21-30 years old—almost half were students or faculty members or had other university ties. “These are hardly the type of people to make large consumer or business purchases,” a San Francisco Chronicle story observed. The experience of JoAnn and Bob Lilienfeld, as recounted in chapter 2, showed that riches would not automatically come to merchants on the Web. And yet the potential was there. The Web readers uncovered by the institute weren’t charity cases—just yups. Studying the readers of the Baseball server, the N & O found they were a long way from poverty. Twenty percent of these Netfolks, for example, earned $35,000-$50,000 a year, 18 percent earned $50,000-$75,000, and 4 percent earned more than $75,000. And, of course, many of these Netfolks were young people who would carry their Net habit over to their jobs and their personal lives. Not surprisingly, Schlukbier claimed keen interest from representatives of companies such as J.C. Penney and Radio Shack, and, of course, from fast-food chains, which, in so many cases, targeted their ads at the young.

Cleverly the N & O built on existing relationships with advertisers. If you were already on the paper and bought X number of lines, then you could get the Net as a bonus. North Carolina businesses paid as little as $50 a month in basic fees to be in the N & O’s area on the Net, not including add-ons such as design services. Big national firms would pay well into the thousands. Given the newness of the medium, this would scare off many—unless, like the N & O itself, they saw the Net as an investment in the future. Then the experiment might work. In my mind, however, there was one other variable: What about national publications competing with local papers for the same national advertisers? Already Time Warner and the N & O were watching each other carefully.

Magazines: Time Warner

Typing away on Macintoshes on the fortieth floor of the Time Life Building in Manhattan, ten floors above People magazine, a small team started an area of the Web known as Pathfinder. It offered electronic versions of Time Warner’s vast stable of magazines. Zonker Harris at the N & O had a slogan, “May the best server win.” The Durham newspapers might not be in the game so far, but Time and brethren were.

Zonker was justifiably proud of the 300,000 or so accesses a week that the N & O’s Web area was enjoying after several months on the Web. But just within a week of start-up in fall 1994, the Time Warner area was drawing more than 80,000 accesses a day. That didn’t mean that the N & O’s efforts were doomed—hardly. But despite all the talk about the Net being nirvana for smaller companies, Fortune 500 corporations arrived with some advantages of their own. Once readers grew comfortable with a certain area of the Web, they might spend less time on other parts of the Net. This wasn’t so much a pattern at the time, but as mass audiences descended on the Net, corporate logos might count far more. Beyond that, Time Warner already offered a daily version of Time—a newspaper in effect. It was just one service among a rackfull of publications. Readers could read up on foreign policy or the latest Star Trek film in Time, take in reviews from Entertainment Weekly, keep up with Ice-T and other hip-hop musicians in Vibe, or fire off questions to authors of best-sellers from Warner Books.

An even greater threat to the N & O, in the long run, was the fact that Time Warner didn’t just own magazines and book publishers. It also owned pipes, including a cable operation in the Raleigh area. And someday it might use cable TV lines to send the Net into homes there, competing with the N & O, which had already been providing Internet services. If no antitrust or other legal boundaries existed, then Time Warner would be remiss in its duties to its stockholders if it did not explore this route. Think what this would mean to users of the World Wide Web. If an article came with fancy photos, they might have to wait several minutes for the whole works to reach them at a speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. But suppose Time Warner used cable TV to bring the Internet to them. Their televisions would still work with cable the usual way. But their computers could share the cable and retrieve Web articles and other material in a fraction of the time. Cable modems sold for hundreds of dollars. But pilot projects were going on with other companies, and the cost could soon drop to a fraction of that amount. More important, big, well-financed corporations might be willing to modify the old cable for these new capabilities.^[4.15] What did this mean for local, N & O-sized companies? Just as high tech had blurred the difference between telephones and televisions, the Net itself was blurring the barriers between local and national. It was unclear whether the public would win or lose.

For better or worse, Time Warner’s area on the Net was part of an evolution in cyberspace. The process had begun with the small academic magazines and hobbyist publications that turned to the Net as a cheap way to find readers. Many if not most still relied on plain text without graphics; they were little more than archived dispatches to mailing lists—which was fine because the words mattered above all. One of the best of these was Adam Engst’s Tidbits. Written for Apple owners, it also appeared on the World Wide Web and bulletin board systems, and Engst claimed more than 100,000 readers—no small feat for a kitchen-table-style publisher. Nonconglomerates still provided most of the magazines on the net, and not all were for techies or sci-fi buffs. International Teletimes was edited by Ian Wojtowicz, a gifted high school student who lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. Teletimes went out over the Web with fetching art, not just text, and some of the prose could have graced Harper’s or the Atlantic. Recounting a winter trip by train, a college student named Paul Gribble wrote: “Every now and then we pass a lake, completely frozen over, flat and white, smooth as a skating rink. I’d love to walk to the center of a big frozen lake like that and just sit there for a while. I’d feel like the first blot of paint on a fresh silk canvas.”

Many steps up from Teletimes, in business terms, was Global Net Navigator. Like the N & O in North Carolina, GNN was trying to use advertising to support its activities, and you could see ads from companies as large as Digital Equipment Corporation. GNN was not just technical. It posted informative, brightly written articles on topics ranging from money to food and travel. Wired magazine was on the Net, too, with an offshoot called HotWired, which itself wandered far from technical topics and attracted lucrative ads from the likes of Volvo and AT&T. None of these publications, of course, happened to be a Household Name like Time Warner’s Time or People. Many experts felt that as a profitable medium for big-time magazines—and let’s not confuse size with quality or lack thereof—the Internet had a long way to go.

Jeffrey Dearth offered at least an interim answer. Teaming up with a small corporation with the grand name of the Internet Company, Dearth offered the Electronic Newsstand. Like the Pathfinder or N & O’s Net edition, the Newsstand was a godsend to browsers. You could wander through sample articles from Business Week; Field & Stream; The Economist; The New Yorker; National Review; Maclean’s, Canada’s largest newsweekly; or The New Republic, of which Dearth himself was publisher. The Time Warner experiment notwithstanding, most of the Names were far behind. Dearth offered them the equivalent of a catch-up course or at least some solid remedial instruction. They could test the waters of the Net to see how much interest their articles drew, before deciding whether to set up their own areas there. Via the Newsstand, magazines could accept subscription orders.

But order taking was a long way from fancier “interactivity”—to use a pet term of media people—and this was where Time Warner’s Pathfinder area would shine. The area didn’t just recycle magazines on the Net, it also offered powerful tools to find old articles by typing in search words or the names of topics. From the start, the searching capability was among the more popular services. Soon Pathfinder would include hypertext links that let you go from an article on a certain topic to an ongoing discussion. Already Time Warner provided special services such as one for gardeners. They could type in their general wishes about flowers and supply their location and other odds and ends, and then Time would offer tips on what to grow. It also allowed inquirers find out how their congressman or senator had voted on certain key issues. And many more applications like this were on the way. What’s more, people could talk back to Time Warner writers and others by way of an advanced bulletin board system designed for the Web. It was much easier to use than the N & O’s.

Not everyone liked the Web area. One woman hated the “overstuffed” artwork—others said it gobbled up too much downloading time. She also chided Time for putting out the online version of Sunset magazine “for Northern Californians still living in their ’50s ranch houses.” I myself, however, enjoyed the kitsch and flashy, busy look of the Web area as a whole. That was the way the real magazines came across; this was pop culture, not the Kenyon Review.

Almost immediately the Time board teemed with lively talk on issues ranging from Clintonian stupidities to, yes, the future of the electronic medium. I felt much more comfortable here than in the message area of the N & O; people on the Time board spoke their minds more freely. Some amusing posts showed up. Amazingly, the software let people key in their own identities, and the late Henry Luce, cofounder of Time, arose from the grave as [email protected]. One message appeared, truthfully or not, with the name of a staffer at U.S. News & World Report. He promised that U.S. News would set up an outpost on the Net soon, and someone at Time twitted him for not answering e-mail promptly. Despite my fondness for the reporting in U.S. News, I had to agree. Researching a Net guide for political activists, I’d written U.S. News six months ago and had yet to receive an answer.

Time Warner also showed network savvy by following the example of GNN and similar publications and providing some hypertext pointers to the rest of the Internet, rather than expecting readers to stay within its own area. Time Warner even enlisted some of its household names in the cause. The electronic version of Entertainment Weekly, for example, did not just review Madonna or Springsteen or the latest Hollywood films; it also directed people to popular, entertainment-oriented sites on the Net itself by way of hypertext links. I still wanted to see many, many more links—a strength of GNN. But I suspected that would come in time.

Planning the Pathfinder service, Time Warner had even consulted with the publisher of Wired. “They’re providing real news, not just PR blather or sales areas for their products,” said Chip Bayers, the managing editor of HotWired, the Wired offshoot on the Web. And he was right.

I myself was no cheerleader for Time Warner in some ways—I worried about media concentrations.^[4.16] But here the Suits deserved their due. HotWired offered avant-garde graphics on the Web along with services such as bulletin boards and free archives; I was pleased, yet hardly surprised. Wired, after all, was still a bit of an upstart despite heavy investment from a corporate arm of the powerful Newhouse family.^[4.17] But Time Warner was different—the epitome of the journalistic and Hollywood establishments, a company with many benefits from the status quo. I recalled the upbeat stories that Time had run about the world of 500-channel television. Such articles betrayed far more tolerance of the “one to many” broadcast model, as opposed to the newer, more anarchistic model of the Net. Many in the Time Life tower, especially on the entertainment side, might still harbor these less adventurous visions. And yet the company was now spreading its bets around. That seemed sensible enough, given the chilliness that some test markets had shown interactive TV.

A Time writer named Philip Elmer-DeWitt had grown more and more attuned to the potential of the Net. He was a regular on The WELL, the bulletin board system frequented by many of the elite journalists on the Internet. Again and again Elmer-DeWitt showed up on newsgroups and mailing lists with spunky, opinionated posts on such topics as the media and telecommunications. He lent his name to a successful legal campaign to aid Brock Meeks, a small publisher on the Net who faced a libel suit from a mail-order tycoon in Ohio. What’s more, Elmer-DeWitt was sensitive to the threats from the Clipper chip, which Washington might use someday to invade the privacy of millions of Americans. He clearly represented the interests of his employer, but he did so with a good mix of wit and smarts that endeared him to many on the Internet. His electronic signature said, “Read Time on America Online where we are paid to take abuse.”

Enlivened by posts from Netfolks and WELLfolks whom Elmer-DeWitt had befriended, Time’s message board thrived on America Online. But now, quite correctly, Time had run an article pointing out the advantages of the Internet from the perspective of publishers. Time raised a big question, the same one Frank Daniels had asked. Did publications really have to fork over such a hefty percentage of their online revenue to commercial services, such as America Online, when the Internet existed? Time Warner’s well-stocked area on the Net was itself an answer of sorts. Granted, the company’s outpost on America Online wasn’t about to vanish. Time Warner was testing both interactive TV and computers as transmission vehicles; similarly the company was not committing itself to any single network in cyberspace. I took it for granted that sooner or later Time Warner might end up on the network that Bill Gates was starting. Just as Time reached newsstands everywhere, the electronic equivalent could seek out eyes wherever the phone lines led. Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and People would soon be on CompuServe. And yet Time Warner’s priority in the computer world was clear: the Internet above all else, at least for the moment.

“When we put Time on America Online,” said Walter Isaacson, editor of new media at Time, “it is done on their server, using their software, and only someone subscribing to America Online and using America Online software can access it. On the Web, anyone using public domain software can get to it.” I could just have substituted “News & Observer” for “Time,” an impression only strengthened by the next sentence: “We have a direct relationship to our readers.” Isaacson went on: “There will be massive amounts more content from Time Inc. on the Web than on America Online or CompuServe, which will just feature individual magazines.”

Some twenty-two magazines were to go on the Web. Isaacson said around ten editors would participate full or part time. Total investment in the Web site was to reach the “mid six figures,” and “with advertising it should be in the black within a year.” “There may be a mix of ads and subscription fees,” Isaacson said. Mercifully, the advertising would not be the intrusive Prodigy kind that popped up on the bottom of my screen in a garish, Vegas style.

Jim Kinsella, the ex-newspaper editor who presided over the Web area, said he was pushing for a subscription fee of around $8 a month. I would have wanted the price to be a few dollars lower, but it was fine if I got enough for my money. If nothing else, Kinsella wanted readers to be able to stay online without the time charges that made thousands unplug their hookups with America Online and similar services. A product manager with Microsoft would later say as much to the New York Times in discussing Bill Gates’ new service: “We’re trying to reduce the threshold of pain. We think users hate connect fees.”^[4.18]

Kinsella’s $8 monthly fee—his proposed figure, not Time Warner’s—would be for Pathfinder itself, not for the Internet connection. I did some quick math. Pathfinder could indeed be a competitive possibility if Time Warner were able to lower the cost of using the Internet by way of cable television from the $75-$100 a month that people typically paid for such arrangements.

Mass use might enable Time Warner to undercut the $20 that the N & O presently charged. Typical readers might want to keep reading a local newspaper, and the N & O could drop its own prices, but this was still a good example of how national media just might drain at least some readers away from the local media. Understandably, Kinsella was thinking in mass, national terms, as I would have done. He predicted that within five or ten years half the country might be able to reach the Net in one way or another. Others at Time were similarly optimistic.

Not everyone in late 1994 was so sanguine. Mark Stahlman, for example, a media expert in New York, shrugged off Net publications as “just the latest in a series of fads.” Richard M. Smith, Newsweek’s editor in chief who was running the new-media committee of the Magazine Publishers of America, was skeptical about online services in general: “The people who are making money are the people who are running conferences about it.”^[4.19]

Smith was oversimplifying somewhat, but formidable barriers did exist, of which one of the biggest happened to be the limits of the technology. Reading electronic text for hours on end could be murder on both the back and the eyes. All day long I sat in front of a computer screen; the last thing I wanted was to have to do it while I wandered through magazines or books. Television wouldn’t do: I hated the idea of reading a magazine or novel from ten feet away. Besides, didn’t magazines and books exist to be enjoyed in bed, on the hammock, or at the beach?

Mightn’t Silicon Valley, however, come out with small, tablet-style computers designed for reading? “TeleReaders” could feature optional keyboards for people who wanted to use them as general purpose computers. Screens, needless to say, must be much sharper than today, and without so much flicker. Batteries should last longer. And, ideally, you should be able to dart from place to place in a newspaper or magazine by merely touching a “pen” to the appropriate part of your screen. That was what the magazine, newspaper, and book industries needed, rather than just more conferences. Washington could even encourage this by way of a focused procurement program for schools and libraries; the same machines could even be used for electronic forms for government and commerce.

Roger Fidler of Knight-Ridder had already been experimenting with mockups of tablet-style machines. He was more interested in a newspaper-oriented approach and less in a general one than I was. But the basic idea was the same—words needn’t be captives of the printed page. The real question was this: How soon until the right technology appeared? Electronic magazines such as Time Warner’s would still make money without a TeleRead-style approach, but the full potential would not be reached, especially if more children abandoned words for TV and computer images. That was even truer for the world of books. Even more than magazines and newspapers, e-books suffered from the limits of technology. It wasn’t just a question of the right machine for viewing; at issue were other matters such as copy protection and billing. But at least some partial solutions were on the way, and even with the present difficulties of the medium, online bookstores were sprouting up on the Internet. One of the best was run by Laura Fillmore, an editor in Massachusetts who had once worked for Little, Brown.

Books: Laura Fillmore and
the Online Bookstore

An elderly man owned a charming old store in a southern town with the standard magnolias, wrought iron staircases, and hot, moist summers, and he loved to brag about his shiny new safe. Most customers did not know about it or care. Rather than worrying so much about the protection of his wealth, he might have been better off to imitate his rivals and invest his money in air-conditioning instead of the safe.

The man reminded me of myopic publishers and authors. Not quite grasping the full potential of the Internet, they fretted too much about copyright protection, and not enough about making their wares friendly to shoppers. A pay-per-read company in Virginia was typical here. You could download its books off the Internet, but you did not enjoy such niceties as links to other titles online. Nor could you print more than a page or so at once. Beyond that, you had to clutter up your computer system with a $25 gadget hooked up to the printer port. If you were working on tight deadlines and were rich and desperate enough, you might stomach this copy protection system. But I dreaded the possibility of its adoption by the book industry as a whole; established publishers and writers just might see the world pass them by if they cared too much about cybersafes and not enough about customer amenities. Many megabytes of good, free reading awaited the public on the Web, and not everyone understood the value that professional editors and writers could add.

Nowadays, however, more publishers and hangers-on were catching on to the nuances of the Net. Among them was Laura Fillmore, a publishing consultant who owned the Online BookStore in Rockport, Massachusetts. She must have driven some traditionalists crazy. Fillmore actually had the notion that ASCII—text in a popular format, without italics and the other trimmings—should be free to everyone. She loved Project Gutenberg, which an Illinois academic had started to put classics and other works on the Net at no charge. Fillmore was the antithesis of a techno-geek, the kind of woman who just might read Dickens to her two children on snowy days, and who was a regular on the speaker circuit within her industry. She had majored in English at Barnard College and worked for a publishing company that dated back to the nineteenth century. Fillmore helped bridge the past and the electronic era. Her vision wasn’t quite the same as mine, but it was worlds apart from that of piracy-fixated publishers who saw electronic readers as a criminal class.

The move to the Net was, in her opinion, part of a long evolution toward a new form of decentralized publishing. She recalled when the great houses didn’t farm out editing and other tasks as often as they do today, and when almost every book took nine months to reach the stores. “Back in the late ’70s when I was at Little, Brown,” she said, “we needed to get special permission to use ^Ex. When an author wanted his sales figures, I’d walk up the street to the top floor of a separate building where Rose, the lady with the P & L cards, had been keeping tabs for twenty years, and I’d sign out the neatly penciled card and carefully carry it to my boss, wrapping it in plastic against the weather if necessary. I passed the copyediting department with their well-stocked reference library, a bastion against inaccuracies, and the design department, smelling of wax, hung with rulers, sizing wheels, and X-acto knives.”^[4.20] The industry, though, had changed; now freelancers throughout the country, not just in New York or Boston, were often editing and even publishing books. Fillmore herself had gone into freelance editorial work years before, and she still remembered “the shrinking feeling in my stomach the first time I bought a computer setup back in 1984: $10,000 of the bank’s money for an XT and an HP LaserJet. The salesman left, I was back at the C prompt, and the room grew dark. No matter which buttons I pushed, ‘Abort, Retry, Ignore’ glared back persistently. Finally, I chose none of the above and unplugged the whole thing.”^[4.21] Fillmore overcame her technophobia, but the chaos of change still made her uncomfortable. “Increasing speed and volume have led to high job turnover, a blurring of disciplines. Our computerized tools allow the editor to become a typist, a designer, and a type-setter, the designer becomes a software junkie, a graphic artist, a prepress house. No time for galleys! Straight to pages! No time for pages; straight to film. The drop dead date is bottom line. Sales are needed this quarter.”^[4.22]

Years ago, competition had reached the point where many typesetting jobs left the United States. “We even hired freelancers thirdhand in Singapore and Haiti,” Fillmore recalled in a speech. “The publisher hired me; I hired someone stateside to hire someone in-country to hire the keyboarder and, still, the publisher ended paying maybe half what the job would have cost him at $15 per hour. Our topic today is slavery.”^[4.23]

But in Fillmore’s opinion, this distributed form of publishing, where tasks went every which way, would take a newer and more humane form. In the 1980s books had appeared on computer networking, a kinder technology than the brutal, production-oriented variety of the past. And now Fillmore saw in networks a chance to “elicit life from people” who used computers to communicate. Her own “epiphany” came when a Net-oriented writer, John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, introduced her to “the then alien concept of electronic mail. My assistant would pick up mail from my lone correspondent, the author, print it out, put it in my in box, and I would handwrite responses which she would input and send back in due time. It sounds quaint, but it seemed to make sense to me at the time—in the same way computerized typesetting distributed though unconnected PCs made sense.” On the Net, everyone could publish, not just giant publishing houses. And so Quarterman could forward to her some public messages from students who were defying the Chinese Army in Tiananmen Square. They could speak for themselves; no one edited them. They weren’t like the freelance typists in Haiti: They were not “hidden and voiceless behind four middlemen” and “with no hope of a phone, much less an Internet connection.”^[4.24]

The overlap in Fillmore’s mind, between publishing and communicating via the Net, was entirely natural. When the Haitians typed, they created a digitized version of the book they were working on. They were not just transferring words to paper. Bits and bytes, once created, could go anywhere.

Fillmore, of course, was hardly the first to think of consolidating knowledge. As early as 1945 a scientist had published a preternaturally farsighted Atlantic Monthly article that was to electronic publishing what Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were to inventions in general. Vannevar Bush had proposed a memex, a microfilm-based device that could bring together knowledge from many disciplines—along with the thoughts of the user. It would be, in other words, a cross between a personal file cabinet and a giant library. In a speech, Fillmore quoted a key passage: “The human mind... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails covered by the brain.”^[4.25] Bush might as well have been describing the World Wide Web and its links that allow you to click on “Boeing” and see “Airplanes” or click on “Clinton” and see “Presidents.” Ted Nelson, a dreamer-writer-programmer, was thinking of the memex when he invented hypertext links. That concept, in turn, excited Tim Berners-Lee, a staffer at a physics institute in Berne, Switzerland, who was the father of the Web—the vast network of computers through which I could retrieve the Raleigh News and Observer, Time, and Fillmore’s offerings.

Back in 1992, however, the World Wide Web was a fraction of its present size, and programmers had yet to release easy, graphically oriented browsers such as Mosaic that would help tame the Web. Even more than today, people needed books to fathom the Net. And yet no popular-level guide was in print. So it was entirely fitting that when Fillmore decided to create a book from scratch—rather than just produce it for a publisher—the Internet was the subject. This how-to guide was The Internet Companion, the author was Tracy LaQuey, and the paper publisher was Addison-Wesley. Fillmore kept the network rights and looked forward to distributing the book through her new Online BookStore. Barry Shein of Software Tool & Die, the first commercial service to hook ordinary mortals into the Internet, had offered her space on his bank of hard disks. “He described his operation,” she said, “as basically an electronic store with empty shelves and a cash register at the door. I decided that I’d find electronic properties to fill these shelves.”^[4.26] But the Internet at the time had Acceptable Use Policies that prevented her from making a profit. What to do?

Fillmore hit on a solution that actually rewarded her for an idealistic approach to publishing. She gave away—with great luck in the end—ASCII files from the book in hopes of drumming up interest in the paper version. “Who wants to read hundreds of pages in ASCII anyway?” Fillmore would later ask. Unadorned ASCII by itself wasn’t always that pleasant to read, and many people liked the Net version well enough to shell out money for a paper book. “Even our publisher was supportive of our effort,” Fillmore said, “and happy with the resulting sales figures.”^[4.27] Orders poured in from as far off as Finland and Korea. Netfolks all over the world could learn of Fillmore’s offering immediately rather than waiting for reviews to show up in local magazines and newspapers.

Within two years, Companion had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Al Gore had written the foreword just before his election as vice president, but the freebies on the Net certainly hadn’t hurt. Other publishers also found that free copies could be a boon, not a bane. Zen and the Art of the Internet (Prentice Hall) and The Hacker’s Dictionary (MIT Press) similarly flew off the racks. “Giving something valuable away for free,” Fillmore said, “can make money.”^[4.28]

Of course some would say she hadn’t actually published online. Rather she had used the medium to promote a paper book. Still, the prospect of purely electronic publishing beckoned. “I was seduced by the prospect of the then 10 million people on the Internet—10 million literate people with disposable incomes—attached to the Net. Why not acquire lots of Internet rights to lots of books and put them online at the Online BookStore. Surely some percentage of those people would buy files of a popular author’s books for a reasonable price.”^[4.29] Fillmore was sensible enough to price her offerings for consumers who were spending their own money, not their bosses’. Some commercial databases were charging as much as $200 per hour or more, while Fillmore was thinking more in terms of $5, say, for a short story downloaded from the Net.

The test story was “Umney’s Last Case,” a fifty-page Stephen King story from a collection called Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King was among the best-selling writers on the planet. Fillmore dreamed of tens of thousands of dialups even if “Umney” intrigued only 1 percent of the 10 million people on the Net at the time. Fillmore had picked out just the right King story, one where a time traveler gave a Toshiba T-1000 laptop computer to a tough detective around 1939—someone who in turn used his “plastic Buck Rogers steno machine” to write a story within King’s own tale.

Fillmore’s “Umney” project was a sensation at the biggest book fair in the world, the one at Frankfurt; upbeat stories appeared in places ranging from European news programs to the Wall Street Journal. She witnessed “a vast amount of smoke, a tremendous marketing boost for the printed book again, lots of noise—and by extension, lots of profit for the publisher and for the author—but handfuls of per-copy sales.”^[4.30] They didn’t even pay for all the phone calls used to set up the deal.

I was hardly surprised. Enjoying access to many megs of free material on the Net, the typical denizen didn’t want to shell out even $5 for the story even if she or he could simply fax in a credit card number. It wasn’t that King’s work was worthless—quite the opposite. Rather, on the Internet and with this business model, “Umney” at most any realistic price could not compete with free material such as Usenet postings.

Yes, the Net teemed with sci-fi and fantasy fans. But as I saw it, they were too busy talking to each other, and, while they would have been delighted to download “Umney” for free, they balked at spending the $5. You might say that “Umney” was like a typical TV program. The appeal was potentially broad but not deep. Pay-per-view wasn’t that much of a hit on cable TV, and the same principle applied here. “Umney” could enhance a collection of material for subscribers—we go back to the flat-fee example of the News & Observer and Jim Kinsella’s vision for Time Warner—but even a Stephen King story wasn’t strong enough on its own for online use. Part of the problem, I believed, was the medium. The right technology for reading fifty-page short stories just wasn’t out there yet. With the proper equipment, the value would increase.

Besides, even now, Fillmore could use a license or sponsorship model. She sold “Umney” to two computer networks, one of them CompuServe, which gained the right to post the story for a week during a conference on paperless publishing. “Hundreds of people have accessed it,” Fillmore said. The future possibilities were evident now. Corporations someday might sponsor books on computer networks the way they sponsored programs on CBS or NBC. In fact, whole sites on the Net—with the names of companies—could serve as homes for innovative projects. Sun Microsystems was oriented toward UNIX, relied heavily on sales to Net users, and benefited from the goodwill and publicity that its SunSite libraries enjoyed. Fare ranged from presidential speeches to the Internet Underground Music Archive; there could be a place for commercial e-books as well in these high-tech sandboxes, as Fillmore jokingly called such areas.

The sponsorship model wasn’t perfect, of course. Fillmore herself was the first to wonder which corporations would have sponsored writings about the uprising in Tiananmen Square. Big companies often favored upbeat material. As I saw it, fiction and nonfiction books alike might suffer if this model alone prevailed. They differed from newspapers and magazines; book publishers thought more in terms of individual properties, and beyond that, publications such as the N & O and Time already enjoyed strong identities from their paper incarnations. The new media were less a challenge to their editorial integrity. But many sponsored books might degenerate into the Net equivalent of the wretched infomercials on TV, the ones where over-the-hill actors “interviewed” astrologers or memory experts, and where the audiences clapped thunderously on cue.

Wisely, Fillmore did not give up on “Umney” entirely—it was still online when I was writing this chapter—nor did she quit using the Net to promote writings on paper. Even more important, she tried out writings that took advantage of links to other material on the Web.

Bless This Food: Amazing Grace in Praise of Food was an example of prime material for hypertext. The paper book bought together food-related prayers from many times and places. But everything was contained. You couldn’t wander outside the printed pages. Thanks to Fillmore, however, you could click on Buddhist-related material and see a Buddha’s image piped in from the Smithsonian. You could even e-mail the author of Bless, Adrian Butash. Fillmore wasn’t just selling the book itself—she was offering it as a “dashboard” that could take you to related material on the Net. Certainly the Smithsonian hadn’t had Bless in mind when it posted the picture of Buddha. However, through the pointers in the electronic edition, you could learn of this image and view it in just the right context; that, after all, was the splendor of the Web. Quite honestly, then, Fillmore could charge $25 for a book that sold in hardback from Delacorte for $18.95. She was giving you more for your money. Besides, if you proposed new links and she liked them, you would receive some royalties. You, the reader, could be part of the book and the author’s life. We could all be editors.

As a writer, I had somewhat mixed feelings about this. I loved e-mail from readers. But I was already spending too many hours a day on electronic correspondence of one kind or another. I hated the idea of suffering a constant stream of e-mail from Project X when I wanted to move on to Project Y. If this model won out, writers would have to be much choosier about the projects they took on—knowing that publishers expected more commitment.

Given the deluge of 50,000 titles a year that readers face just from U.S. publishers, more than a few people would enjoy such a prospect. But they shouldn’t grow too complacent. With electronic publishing much cheaper than the paper variety, we might eventually see 100,000 commercially published titles a year. I, for one, wouldn’t mind as long as quality and royalties don’t suffer. The problem is not too many books, but rather the need for better software to sort through them—or for more hypertext editors to issue good pointers. That is one reason why I loved the idea of publishers selling pointers as well as actual material.

Not every writer would be open-minded, of course; even Fillmore at first had feared hypertext. When O’Reilly and Associates put one of her papers on the Web through GNN—spreading around her observations on electronic publishing—she saw all kinds of links. By clicking on blue letters, for example, readers would call up material about a founder of Internet. Fillmore felt as if a Philistine had taken her beautiful bowl, her self-contained piece of writing, and turned it into a colander. Some writers might see a parallel in another way: Suppose the colander leaked readers, who, seeing the links, dove off into another area of the Net, and never returned. Fillmore had adjusted to this possibility, and I could, too. Just like Zonker Harris I was of the “May the best server win!” mentality, except that I refused to confuse popularity with merit. Books weren’t like sports servers.

From society’s viewpoint, another issue presented itself here. Both Fillmore and I wondered about the damage that television and computers might be doing to people’s attention spans. “Attention deficit disorder seems to have arisen at the same time that computers have spread to the home and office,” she said, “and I don’t think that’s an accident. How many people age twelve and younger are capable of reading 300 pages of sustained argument about anything?” Another worry arose, too, in my mind. Like Frank Daniels, I realized that an entire generation of children was spending more time gazing at computer and TV screens than they devoted to books and traditional newspapers.

I felt that technology was destiny, that Washington and other governments should promote computers that encouraged the receptive to read e-books hour after hour. Too much of the new-style education, as envisioned by many, would be task oriented—would be training as much as education per se. That was fine for technical matters where, for example, a future factory worker might want to learn the basics of engine design. Hypertext was superb. The student could study a diagram of a diesel engine, click on an individual part, and read and hear a detailed explanation of its function. But I wanted technology that also encouraged people to read and absorb whole books.

If book readers were too small a minority, then countries such as the United States would be less democratic and more oligarchic, with the elite all too able to manipulate the other citizens. Some social critics such as Neil Postman demonized technology as a source of mindless distractions for the masses. I, however, saw opportunity if we acted soon enough before we lost more children to TV. That meant sharp screens, smaller, lighter machines, and other advances—which would come sooner or later, but which could be hastened by the coming of a focused procurement program. Washington should assure the Valley a market for the right hardware. It should also try harder to help schools absorb it, so the machines wouldn’t just sit idle in closets.

A national digital library, not just a digital store leading to commercial collections, was just as essential as better hardware. Today a college student researching the effect of Shakespeare on popular culture is able to find the Bard’s work at the school library. But what about tracking down newer books that the library couldn’t afford to buy? Also, only one student could read a paper copy at a time; suppose a professor wanted many students to compare impressions of a novel, especially one that was out of print and long gone from the bookstores? People on the technical side could benefit even more than those in the humanities. The best and most recent guides to Microsoft Word or Windows, for example, didn’t come from educators; rather they came from the private sector. The faster this knowledge could reach average citizens, the easier it would be to upgrade the labor force.

A national digital library, moreover, would help many businesses market their goods. A food company trying to sell a new line of rice, for example, could instantly call up cookbooks of many ethnic groups and find out the relationship between food and the cultures. In an era of customized products, companies needed to learn quickly about niche markets. That would be especially true as business globalized; corporate planners had to keep on top of conditions in many countries.

So TeleRead-style libraries—which let people look through many kinds of information, everything from books to UN reports—could make real contributions in the United States and elsewhere. If nothing else, governments needed to understand the possible efficiencies. Yes, public and academic librarians would choose books. But innovative, private firms would own the computer banks (well backed up) storing the books and other material; many different contractors, always trying to outdo each other’s technologies, could compete. Other efficiencies would accrue. Pooling the public libraries of rich and poor citizens would help everyone by increasing the variety of books available to all.

Big Brother needn’t run a national digital library. Subject-oriented librarians in many cities might acquire material; in effect they would be putting a public library system online, one that reflected the tastes of, say, Lyons as well as Paris. How much more supple than the overcentralized approach that the French now favored for their national library! The elite librarians could still identify the books they had blessed, but the provincials could have their say as well; and, given the variability of literary tastes over the ages, the latter in some cases might prevail anyway.

What’s more, by gambling money up front to qualify for royalties from TeleRead, writers and commercial publishers could bypass the librarians. Book people such as Laura Fillmore could thrive under this approach. A national library could offer e-books not only to citizens directly but also to independent-minded entrepreneurs such as Fillmore, who could charge for their custom links. I loved the idealism she showed in suggesting that ASCII be free. It was a good model in many cases for today. But I feared that as computers grew better for book reading—and it would happen eventually, with or without a TeleRead program—free ASCII would take away too many paying customers. And if ASCII books weren’t free? Then, more than ever, piracy would occur regardless of various legal and technological precautions. So the answer should be free national digital libraries—well stocked and with fair pay for writers and publishers—to reduce the temptation to bypass copy protection. Use tracking to report dialup counts and pay originators of material, but not for billing. That was the way to take full advantage of the technology and keep market incentives while promoting literacy.

Rich countries would be the first to start libraries of this kind. They could safeguard their intellectual property by helping poorer countries get books online if the latter agreed to honor copyright laws. The time would come for national and international Electronic Peace Corps to make this possible. EPCs could help upgrade Third World phone systems on site and share knowledge via e-books, e-mail, two-way video, and otherwise. To enforce global copyright law, we needed carrots as well as sticks.

What’s more, governments could protect books with technology far less cumbersome than the $25 gadgets that the pay-per-read bookstore in Virginia used. Then e-text stood a chance. I thought of the old merchant down South: Safes were useful, but only if the customers could enjoy an air-conditioner—an easy-to-use digital library for all of a country’s citizens.

National digital libraries, of course, could link up with each other and form an official world library someday. But, given the many cultural differences, that was impossible now. National libraries, then, were the way to go—with opportunities for citizens in different countries to read each other’s books when governments allowed this. I pitied the censors. In an era of international computer networks, national libraries would end up anyway as one big global library for citizens of open societies and for the more resourceful people of countries such as Iran. Simply put, national digital libraries would make it so much easier to market or shop for books internationally. When a Swedish anarchist heard about TeleRead, his big question wasn’t, “Isn’t this an opportunity for cultural imperialism?” Instead it was, “Will I be able to read American best-sellers as quickly as people there can?” Whatever the kind of book—a Tom Clancy thriller or an anarchistic tract—TeleRead libraries would allow easy global distribution.

In rich countries such as the United States and Sweden, the need for national digital libraries would only grow with the introduction of better televisions and video games, not to mention the distractions of the Net itself—including virtual reality, at some point. Even in wealthy nations, people had only so much disposable income. How much of it would be left for online books? Mightn’t we use e-forms and digital libraries to transfer resources from paperwork to knowledge? As much as I applauded the good work that Frank Daniels was doing with the third graders in Raleigh, I was a little put off by the online questionnaire for adults and children using his BBS. It asked about favorite TV programs, physical appearance, sports, and other activities, but a simple question was missing—one that I felt certain would have been on the list twenty years ago: “What are your favorite books?”

Spring 1995: An (Interim) Afterword

Whatever the medium—newspapers, books, or magazines—many Netfolks saw the Internet as a path to diversity. That was partly why I liked seeing The News & Observer online with A. C. Snow et al. Maybe the Internet could rescue locally owned newspapers before they all tumbled down the maws of conglomerates. On May 17, 1995, however, The NandO Times, the Webbed newspaper of the N & O, ran a story that I’d never wanted to read. A chain was buying up the company. For perhaps the first time, a Net daily reported on the sale of it and its pulped-wood siblings.

A color photo showed Frank Daniels III briefing his staff. What really caught my eye, however, was a revelation that I saw later in the New York Times: “Frank Daniels III said he was convinced that the paper needed to find a larger parent in part to give the paper the resources necessary to nurture those new electronic efforts.” More than a few of us newspaper junkies had hoped that the new technology would help keep the N & O local. I recalled one reason why Daniels had not dumped his N & O stock in the 1980s in favor of an investment in an online service. “The relationship between a newspaper and a community,” he had said, “has such a richness and history that communities shouldn’t lose that.” Now, however, after 101 years in the Daniels family, the N & O and trimmings were going to a California chain for $373 million. The buyer was McClatchy Newspapers Inc., the former employer of George Schlukbier, the Daniels’s new-media guru.

No wicked corporate conspiracies existed here. The Danielses simply felt comfortable with McClatchy, which not only shared the N & O’s still basically liberal politics but also enjoyed a good reputation in the newspaper business.

Run out of Sacramento, McClatchy Newspapers was a family-owned chain with just twelve dailies. It allowed much more leeway to local editors than many others did, and I might well have reacted just as the Daniels family did when the McClatchy people came calling. The N & O mustn’t end up in the hands of some skinflint chain; McClatchy Newspapers could be an excellent alternative.

Still, the sale did not delight me. The Net, after all, was supposed to be good for small guys, including, presumably, family-owned enterprises. Josephus Daniels had bought the N & O at that bankruptcy auction in 1894, seen it through the Roaring Twenties, the stockmarket crash, and the heyday of his friend FDR. He must have died thinking that the Daniels name would forever grace the masthead. From a portrait in the boardroom, he looked out at his progeny announcing the transaction. Just why couldn’t all the computers and cables and videocams have helped strengthen the family business, not force its sale?

I could see how the latter may have happened. The Daniels had had to invest in both the printing press and the new media, with an emphasis on the plural. A story on newsprint, an Internet audio, and a video would cost more than just an old-fashioned version. Network-related expenses of the N & O may have been smaller than the investment in new press, but they would only grow in the future. No-frills Web areas cost next to nothing to set up. But net.papers with the very flashiest graphics and full-motion video would need programmers and designers and other specialists, not all of them cheap. At the same time the Daniels wanted to cover their circulation area well, and that meant a big, expensive staff of reporters, too.

Just as important, however, the N & O faced strong competition for advertisers and readers. Yes, the Net shrank distances and gave smaller companies some new marketing opportunities. But as shown by Time Warner’s giant electronic newsstand, it could also create some good synergies for media conglomerates offering package deals to national advertisers. In certain respects—hardly all—readers also benefited. I could key in “Carly Simon,” for example, and see any stories that might have appeared about her, not only in Time but also in Entertainment Weekly or People. Frank Daniels could bring together wire service news and offbeat items from technical publications and others. But in the future he couldn’t match the brand appeal of corporations such as Time Warner.

Daniels had a right to be proud of his technological accomplishments, of course. But from now on, assuming that he stayed, as he apparently would for the moment, he would be an employee rather than a member of the owning family. Forget the Third Wave talk of Net saving us all from conglomerates. We could all have our own home pages on the World Wide Web, of course, and maybe put out little magazines; and IUMA-style startups could always use the new technology to startle the Goliaths—and in the end, exceptions notwithstanding, the Internet did foster diversity. Clearly, though, it was far from an all-purpose savior for the N & Os of the world. However powerful in North Carolina, the Raleigh newspaper was hardly on an equal footing when it competed against the very largest media organizations.

As if to underscore that point, eight huge newspaper publishers had banded together earlier that spring to form New Century Network, a club for the big boys on the Net. Some people wondered if the giants might lose out in the end—readers wanted to tour the Web themselves, not just confine themselves to material favored by newspaper coalitions. And maybe New Century wouldn’t end up so exclusive after all. Also, advertisers might prefer to sprinkle their cash around the Web rather than focus it on newspaper chains—they could pay for links to their pages from many sites without much ado. The natural economies of the Net might yet win out over the business plans of the giants. Still, for the moment, publishers such as Gannett and the Washington Post Company were apparently setting the tone of New Century itself. The 185 New Century papers claimed more than 23 million paying readers.

“New Century might raise antitrust questions,” wrote Rory O’Connor, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, part of Knight-Ridder, a chain in New Century. Peter Winter, interim chief executive of New Century, said the publishers were “comfortable with our conformance to antitrust statutes.”^[4.31]

Antitrust was the talk of the newspaper and online industries. In early June the U.S. Justice Department said it was studying the network that Microsoft aimed to launch in August. Just by clicking on the proper icon available through the Windows 95 operating system, people could join the Microsoft Network. And some newspapers and other online services feared that Microsoft could stifle the competition. In a year Windows might sell 20-40 million copies; what if several million users clicked?

Newspapers worried increasingly about the Microsoft Network and other online services. American Opinion Research of Princeton, N.J., found that almost a fifth of the surveyed editors and publishers thought they might lose more advertising to online services than to television. Nearly three-quarters said the business was in good shape now. Just a half felt the same would be true by the year 2005.^[4.32]

The newspaper chains tried to fight back. Large papers now owned 11 percent of the shares in Netscape Communications, the wizards behind the fastest and best browser on the Web. For the moment things seemed fine for the public. Netscape came up with new wrinkles that other companies didn’t offer, such as the ability for Web pages to sprout color backgrounds without much fuss. But so far it was working with standards-setting bodies rather than saying, “Hey, you guys, these features will be mine alone.” I just hoped that in the future Netscape wouldn’t fashion its software to bind people to specific sources of news from conglomerates such as Knight-Ridder. Perhaps half the people cruising the Web were now using Netscape.

In a buying spree of its own, America Online purchased Internet fixtures such as WAIS Inc., the software company. WAIS had made some of the best publishing tools on the Net. America Online also bought the WebCrawler, a first-rate index to the Web. The company acquired Global Net Navigator, too, the wonderfully Netcentric magazine from O’Reilly and Associates, a guardian of Net culture. Just like Frank Daniels III, Tim O’Reilly alluded to the cost of online services. Explaining the sale, he told a GNN mailing list that “in order to really do justice to the information problem GNN was created to solve, GNN would have to be scaled up beyond our ability to fund it on our own. With many large players entering the Internet information services market, the best way to keep our lead was to team up with one of them.”

The most dramatic—and, some critics might say, ominous—alliance may have happened when MCI teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to form a new partnership that could offer many kinds of material on the Net. It committed as much as $2 billion toward his News Corporation.

MCI wasn’t just eager to be a pipeline for publishers and others—it wanted to Originate Content. The phone company was already publishing readers’ short stories electronically by way of Gramercy Press. Soon it would release a trade paperback—yes, a book on pulped wood—from a novelist writing under the name of a fictitious Gramercy author. But the Murdoch alliance meant so much more. This global entrepreneur controlled Harper-Collins through News Corps. Would his electronic books enjoy global distribution advantages via MCI’s pipelines, compared to offerings from smaller, less connected publishers?

Within the book business itself, the movement toward the Net was accelerating as summer 1995 neared. More and more authors were online, getting feedback from fans—just as the fledgling rockers of IUMA did. It was a great morale booster, but only to a point. The novelist Nicholson Baker, author of the New Yorker article on electronic library catalogues, complained that e-mail had “the problem of promptitude. You have to answer within four days or you’re being rude. I like the stateliness of paper, where you can take six months. You’re still being unforgivably rude, but somehow it’s okay because other people have been rude in this way before.”^[4.33] Obscure writers, however, found the fan mail from the Internet to be more helpful. In that way the Net was a friend of diversity.

Smaller publishers were also growing more comfortable with the Internet. Bookport, a California-based service, let them post their books on the World Wide Web for Netfolks to read page by page. Alas, a customer could not obtain a whole e-book at once. The idea, of course, was to discourage piracy. I disliked the idea of pay-per-read prevailing; the library model would make books much more popular among the young and actually help good publishers. But the Bookport was well done with oodles of great links to book-related sites on the Web. One of the first titles was Netiquette, a guide to manners on the Internet; that was in the community-minded spirit of the traditional Net.

Larger publishers, too, pushed ahead on the Web. Time Warner was selling “Quick Reads.” It was a series of reference books, self-help guides, and others that you could download in full and search for, say, the right quote from a famous business executive (Bartlett’s Book of Business Quotations) or the appropriate recipe (the Cooking Library). I could understand Time Warner’s fondness here for reference books. Most readers didn’t want to gawk at electronic novels hour after hour. The big question, in cases of tech-savvy conglomerates like Time Warner, was not whether the publishers were ready. It was whether the public was; whether enough people would end up soon enough with the proper hardware for reading books in bed or on the sofa.

That, of course, was where TeleRead came in. Whatever their sizes, publishers needed to hook the nonelite in this videocentric era before they gave up on the written word.

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The above is not to suggest that text is the only way to communicate knowledge over the Net. The right graphics certainly can as well. One of the most intriguing examples of the potential here is a remarkable endeavor—the Visible Human Project—in which, so to speak, a murder lives on forever in cyberspace to the benefit of medical education and cancer research. I’ll discuss this in the next chapter.