Archive - Imperfect Now

Blogs Could Replace Publishers

A few years back, Stephen King began writing a novel where readers each week paid a small fee and received a chapter. The novel itself was not vastly successful, and there hasn’t been a project of that scale since. But perhaps King came before his time.

King began writing the novel back in 2000. He’s is not known for his great skills as a literary master, but instead for his ability to churn out mass market pulp fiction. His notoriety made King the perfect first run online novelist. His name alone would draw in readers, and his ability to write quickly made the actual process possible.

Yet the world was not ready. In 2000, few people kept internet weblogs. Four years later, blogs have become a huge part of the internet. For example, a search of Google for the terms My Homepage reveals a little over 8 million entries. The search My Blog reveals over 9 million. Like it or not, blogs are a huge part of the internet.

As a result of the rise of the blog, internet users have become good readers. That is to say, internet users are now accustomed to reading lengthy manuscripts online. A well written blog is much like a novel. Thoughtful, insightful, meaningful—good blogs and novels alike share these common traits. Now that users are used to reading blogs, the market might actually be ready for online novels.

Concurrent with the rise of blogs is the mass market availability of Project Gutenberg. Named after the first mass printed bible, Project Gutenberg aims to place online out of copyright texts and make them available for free. The new HTML Interface that was built a few months ago has helped make these texts available.

The HTML interface has allowed Project Gutenberg both to reach a wider audience and to make reading e-texts much easier. The development of this project has been taken a step further by the first Print On Demand Bookstore.

Bookends, a local independent bookstore in Ridgewood New Jersey, has put a print-on-demand press inside their retail store. Besides offering self-publishing to authors, Bookends will use e-texts from sources like Project Gutenberg and produce hard copy books.

Blogs have already been used to write novels. It’s a very natural way to go since a novel comes in chapters and thus each entry could be written as a chapter. And November is National Novel Writing Month, with many entrants using blogs as a means of publishing themselves.

Publishers are also beginning to fear piracy of e-texts. Sure, the glory is in stealing MP3’s, but an apparent growing problem is the distribution of popular novels over the internet. In one highly publicized instance, Harry Potter fans began translating into German the fifth book since the official translation was not available immediately.

While the internet revolution changed the way media was delivered to readers, bookstores themselves are changing publishing standards. Barnes and Noble has taken some heat from publishers as it continues to expand its in house publications, the ‘generic’ brand books it sells.

All this means in the in end is that traditional means of earning money from literature are changing. Stephen King was truly onto something with the first pay as you go online novel. He may not wind up in an English literature class a century from now, but certainly economics majors will know who he is.

Earning money from blogs and online publishing is rather tricky. Several sites like those run by Gawker Media have obviously had some success as they expand into increasingly specialized markets. Blogger has encouraged its users to post Google’s adwords in hopes of turning blog entries into profits.

The real big catch to making online publishing pay though is a form of micropayments. Newspapers are grappling with the fact that many of their readers read for free online. They try their best to get registrants to be honest, thus charging more for their online advertising. But many users reject registration in favor of, well, not registering.

Newspapers face a big challenge though. The internet is still seen as largely a free place. Charging a large subscription fee for unfettered access is difficult because users will see anything more than pennies as too much, no matter what the content [except of course, pornography].

Processing and handling micropayments of just pennies is essential to making online publishing pay. Unlike the $25 bookstores can charge for hardcopy books, users perceive digital media as significantly less valued. A digital book cannot cost $25. Or more specifically, a reader will not hand over $25 all at once. By taking micropayments, users can pay as they go and so the initial hurdle of $25 is much less—perhaps only a dollar or less.

Micropayment systems do exist. Poplish.com is one instance of self publishers collecting fees for readers for only $0.10. But this is not a hugely successful platform. Obviously paypal is another form of payment that is electronic and that can be fairly small. But even paypal takes a minimum payment per transaction raising the Micropayment.

Online publication will become a serious business within the next five years. Blogs are already on the way to become the dominate format for publishing both news and literary novels. The consumer base is ready having consumed internet materials for years, and also for the first time ever, pornography is not the dominate use of the internet. The future of literature is the blog.