Publishers continue to find opportunities within the brave new world of the Internet. 
We've already seen whole books go online - JEFFLINE provides several dozen of them already in MD Consult, as well as Harrison's, to name a few. Stephen King has already demonstrated the power of a major author selling a work in digital form. E-book readers are already on the market.
But now, e-publishing is imitating another form of print - customized books. Think "course packs" for everyday life, as well as for academics. What if you only want:
- one recipe for chocolate mousse?
- a walking tour of Boston?
- the foot section of an anatomy atlas?
This fall, you'll be able to order only the pieces you want, to be assembled and delivered as you please, at a fraction of the cost of full works.
Like their journal cousins, from which document supply houses have been selling individual articles for years, books are now being "deconstructed" into databases of discrete data. While the concept may not work for novels, publishers expect that guidebooks, text books, or indeed any kind of factual material could be game for dissection. For that matter, new novels could be serialized for sale by the chapter, much as during the 19th century, Charles Dickens' works appeared in magazines chapter by chapter.
Standard textbook publishers Taylor & Francis, McGraw-Hill and IDG Books all either have or are about to release sites at which piecemeal purchasing is available. Random House has already digitized one quarter of its 20,000 titles, and Simon & Schuster is aiming at 4,000. Once the pieces have been chosen, the customer selects whether to download the material electronically, or have it printed and delivered by mail. NetLibrary's MetaText service is already available online, supporting the customization and adaptation of teaching materials to suit individual instructors and courses.
As a bottom line, this is both attractive and scary. Authors signing contracts with publishers now need to think about the potential for selling their work in smaller units than the whole book. As customers, we will ultimately control more and more aspects of what we buy.
The New York Times has been publishing articles about this topic, recently. They are available online, with your free registration. For further information, see Lisa Guernsey's "Books by the Chapter or Verse Arrive on the Internet This Fall, and Doreen Carvajal's "Racing to Convert Books to Bytes".
Related Links:
