THE World of E-Book Is HereMark RevingtonAlan Brooker and Loren Teague are authors who have a book due out soon. 1You probably won't find their titles on the shelves of your local bookstore.Their prose is published in computerized, digital1. They are authors publishing e-books (short for "electronic books" or books published only on the Internet, and not in paper form).2They're not getting big fat advances from publishers2.Not even a small cheque. Instead, Brooker will get 35 percent of each e-book sold, and Teague will get 30 percent. That's way above what either could expect in royalties if their titles were published in the familiar format, as beautifully bound bites of trees.3The usual author royalty is anyway between ten and fifteen percent of a book's selling price. but the large percentage royalty for an e-book will come from a much smaller price—e-books sell online for somewhere between ＄2.50 and ＄7 a copy, compared to the bookstore retail price of between ＄US10 and ＄90 depending on the size and quality of the publication.4But how many e-book copies can the authors expect to sell in an electronic market which is still in its infancy3? The best-selling e-author of 1999, Leta Nolan Childers, sold just over 6,000copies of her book The Best Laid Plans."I'm expecting to sell more than I would in the traditional local market, simply because the US market is so much bigger, "says Teague, whose novel, Jagged Greenstone, was runner-up in the UK Romantic Novelists Association New Writers Award.5Email, e-commerce, e-authors, e-books . . . eeeargh! The whole world is on a technological treadmill4.Surely not books? The pleasure of reading isn’t just in the way it allows escape into other worlds. Physical books are a tactile, visual experience. There’s nothing like the anticipation of a new book inn your hands ,the appeal of a cover, and the smell of ink and paper not to mention a small frission of guilt at all those murdered trees5.You can curl up in an armchair, or in bed, with a good book. But surely it will not be the same with a small electronic device, even if it is the size of a paperback and the weight of a hardback, and has a small button that turns the page. e-book—handheld electronic readers with high resolution screens, the ability to store several books at once, but unless you have the small reading devices, that means reading books on a large computer screen, and that definitely doesn’t lend itself to a late-night reading experience in bed.7So far, those are the two forums for e-publishing, a field still the focus of the technologically infatuated. Teague still meets responses such as that of the librarian in her home town When I told her about them (e-books), she just lookedat me blankly,” says Teague, laughing. Or the response of the unnamed executive from a top publishing house who said of e-book publishing:”Isn’t that for failed authors?”8But the Bigs are moving in. Fatbrain.con, which has partnered with Adobe, will let anyone sell digital books on its website and is negotiating with publishers such as Macmillan and McGraw-Hill to find new ways of packaging their titles.Best-selling authors like mystery thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kelleman are now posting electronic titles on the Internet. The website also displays only e-books that have never been published in paper form.9Recently, top-selling horror story author Stephen King6 wrote and published his first e-book, Riding the Bullet, a 66-page “ghost-story in the grand manner”.It was published only on the Internet on the website of American publishers Simon ＆Schuster who charged visitors ＄2.50 to download it. In the first week, 450,000 people visite the site, before other sites copied it and made it available without charge —it’s typical of the Internet, that something will always be copied for free. Computer giant Microsoft and leading US bookstore chain now plan to create a giant e-bookstore. Microsoft is also leading a push to standardize formats for online books to allow them to be downloaded to any computer. Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes and Noble, can see a time in the near future when there will be an electronic version of virtually every book in print.10For unknown author e-books offer a better chance to get published. Fatbrain allows any would-be author to store a manuscript online for just ＄1 a month.For publishers, it could mean a whole new headache because already established authors could cut out the middleman and release titles straight to their audience, although there will still be a role for the publishing houses in editing and marketing.11 Small book publisher Hazard Press, however, is excited by the possibilities.Managing director Quentin Wilson believes that it will be especially invaluable for selling the company’s back catalogue because it won’t require a print run of thousands just a quick electronic format.12With the kind of heavyweights now backing e-publishing, it’s a matter of when, not if, the phenomenon rolls into town7. Does it mean the death of books as we now know them? What happens when electronic readers are as cheap as dirt, or when media conglomerates give them away to help to sell their vast archives of material? Would you rather pack a box of discs next time you move to a new house, instead of seemingly endless cartons of books? There is still a romance to books that it’s hard to see their electronic cousins replacing.13“I don’t think we’ve reached anything like the version of e-books that will probably come about within a year,”says Wilson. “And I don’t see the actualphysical book disappearing. But I do see the future including the downloading ofa particular book in a formatted file of some kind. It’s inevitable.”14 In the way that horses remained after the advent of the car, books won’tdisappear entirely for book lovers. They will simply become a new form of recreation.15“Nothing beats a beautifully produced book,” says Wilson.1,056 wordsN otes 1.Digital(Paragraph1)→processing, operating on, storing, transmitting, representing,or displaying data in the form of numerical digits, as in a computer2.They're not getting big fat advances from publishers(Paragraph2) →They're notgetting a large amount of money from publishers ahead of time. The publisher signs a written contract with the author specifying the advance and royalties. An advance is a sum of money that the publisher, in effect, loans to the author, while the book is in preparation. The advance is subtracted from the royalties, which are payments that the publisher makes to the author from profits gained from the sale of the book. The publisher pays the author a certain percentage of the price of the book for each copy sold. The contract also names a date for publication.3.In its infancy(Paragraph4) →Something that is in its infancy is just staring to bedeveloped.4.The whole world is on a technological treadmill(Paragraph5) →Moderntechnology is constantly changing the whole world.5.Murdered trees(Paragraph5) →Here it refers to papermaking. Papermakingfibers come from many different plant sources and various woods. Wood is the major source of papermaking fibers.6.Stephen King(Paragraph9) (1947—)→American author, whose horror andfantasy tales enjoy tremendous popular success. His works are known for turning ordinary situation—such as peer pressure or marital stress—into terrifying ones.King’s thrilling plots and prolific output helped reestablish horror fiction as a vital literary genre in the late 20th century. King has also led the way in adopting innovative publishing techniques.7.the phenomenon rolls into town(Paragraph) →E-books become prevalent.Q uestions for discussion1.What are e-books?2.What are the advantages of e-books?3.According to the author, will e-books finally replace traditional printed books?4.What does the author explore in the essay?5.What does the coming of the digital age mean for traditional fields?。
