December 30, 1999
Web posted at: 2:19 p.m. EST (1919 GMT)

By Jamie Allen
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- Sure, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble have changed the way we shop for books, taking consumers and their credit cards online. But this change is just the beginning for the publishing industry.

"I think if you go out and talk to publishers, there is very much a sense that digital publishing is the future of the publishing world and we're in a very early, formative stage of it," says Mike Segroves, vice president of marketing and sales for peanutpress.com, a site that offers fiction and nonfiction books to download onto handheld computers.

Few other industries will be so affected in the next 10 years by the burgeoning popularity and potential of the World Wide Web. Changes to digital publishing are occurring at T1 speed.

Author Lisa Scottoline

Two major areas to watch: the way books are marketed, and the way they are presented to the reader.

Power to the author

In marketing circles, the computer age is a marketer's dream come true. An illustration of this came in the spring of 1999 with the release of Lisa Scottoline's latest legal thriller, "Mistaken Identity" (HarperCollins).

The book enjoyed high sales, thanks in part to unique cyber-marketing tactics implemented by Scottoline. While she was still writing the book, she used her Web site to invite readers to edit her first chapter.

She received over 3,500 responses and laid the foundation for later success. After all, who wouldn't want to buy a book they helped edit? And who among those wouldn't tell their friends, beginning the name-recognition snowball?

Scottoline says her effort to market her work is not unusual -- it's the future, a cyber-version of "power to the people," or in this case, the author.

"Authors in the past write the books and publisher promote them," she says. "That's the way it used to be. But it occurred to me that this is my business. I think it's incumbent upon me to do this."

Games and chats

That's not the only way the Web is changing marketing. Publishing companies like Simon & Schuster, Random House, St. Martin's Press, Time Warner, Penguin Putnam, and HarperCollins have leapt into the Internet, hiring online marketing directors, building sites for each author.

HarperCollins, in fact, promoted Patrick Robinson's new techno-thriller "H.M.S. Unseen" earlier this year by creating a Shockwave game that allows players to do battle with ships and airplanes from the not-so-safe confines of a submarine (think "Space Invaders").

"The shockwave game we created serves a variety of purposes," says Sherri Rifkin, the former online marketing director for HarperCollins who moved to Oxygen Media earlier this year. "We wanted to create something cool and fun for people to enjoy ... Secondly, it allows us to add something above and beyond the standard offerings to the site, to invite people to stay and browse."

Online chats, in which the author sits in a cyber-room with fans of their work and discusses their latest novel and anything else that comes to mind, are another popular marketing technique. One of CNN.com's most popular chats to date was with Michael Crichton, author of "Jurassic Park" (Ballantine Books) and "Timeline" (Random House). He enjoyed the chat so much, he asked to come back for a second round.

Turn the screen

Perhaps the most noticeable change to book consumers will be the presentation of books in coming years. In fact, the traditional "book," pages of paper binded together in a colorful package, might become obsolete to new generations of readers, replaced by electronic books.

It's evolution, observers say. Humans started writing on rock, moved to tree leaves and paper. Now computers.

E-books, in fact, are an environmentalist's dream -- no paper. And instead of waiting for B&N or Amazon to ship your book by UPS, all you will have to do is head to a Web site -- B&N, Amazon, ebookcity.com, peanutpress.com -- and download it to your computer, or Palm Pilot.

"I keep a half-dozen books on my Palm Pilot," Segroves says. "Yesterday morning I had a dentist appointment and cruised into my dentist office, whipped out my Palm Pilot and started reading. We get letters from customers telling us about reading on the train, reading on the subway, the grocery checkout line."

Tina Ravitz, with ebookcity.com, which specializes in offering reference and text e-books to consumers, says her company allows you to create your own library on their site, so you don't have to use memory on your computer.

Books are also being presented on CD-ROM and DVD. And new innovations are being experimented with to augment the e-reading experience -- like background music for fiction, or video to accompany nonfiction work.

"It's really amazing to think about how we're going to be educating and informing people in the future and the various ways -- through technology and electronic media -- that we have of enriching the experience," Ravitz says.

'Who knows?'

The cost of e-books is currently less than traditional books, but that might change as they grow more popular.

"You'd think based on the value-added you have, they would eventually cost as much or more depending on the acceptability of the medium, because you do get so much more," says Ravitz.

The big question, of course, is whether or not the public will accept e-books. Will e-books replace those old dusty pages? Will book-lovers head to the bookstore and download a book rather than hold it in their hands?

"Who knows?" says Jim Barnes, managing editor of Independent Publisher Online Magazine. Barnes has been monitoring the digital changes in the publishing industry for the past several years. "Maybe eventually I'll be doing my nightly read with an electronic device. It's hard to imagine, but a lot of things are hard to imagine, but then they come true."

Segroves concurs.

Author Melisse Shapiro, who writes under the pen name M.J. Rose

"I'm over 50 and I think most people my generation are very imprinted on paper books and don't think it will ever happen," Segroves says. "But I think if you talk to people in college today, many of the college students I've spoken with don't have a lot of use for paper books at all. The reality will be somewhere in between."

Paris, online

Another use for the Internet is discovery of new writers.

One example is the story of author Melisse Shapiro (pen name M.J. Rose), who used her own site to sell her erotic thriller "Lip Service," which had already been turned down by publishers. When Shapiro's grassroots Internet campaign started netting results from interested readers, Rose received word that the book club Doubleday Direct wanted to sell it, which led to the book being auctioned to Pocket Books. It was released in August.

Will the next Hemingway find success this way? Instead of heading to Paris, maybe writers should head online. The times are changing.

"I go back to Bill Gates' statement," says Segroves, "that most people tend to overestimate the advances technology will make in the next two to three years and to very grossly underestimate what will happen in the next 10."