
Editorial - The State of the Electronic Publishing Address
by Dave Bealer

The Digital Publishing Association, of which I am proud to be a
member, has declared November 1993 to be "Electronic Publishing
Month."  It seems only fitting, therefore, that I bore you all to
tears with "my own personal vision" of where RAH (and the whole
electronic publishing industry) is, where it came from, where it is
going, what time it got home last night, etc.

A few visionaries, such as N. L. "Jake" Hargrove of New Mexico, have
been touting electronic publishing as a good idea since the middle of
the 1980s.  Precious few people listened to them.  Everyone was too
busy making money and reading the Sharper Image catalog with one
hand.  Some of the visionaries gave up in disgust, while others kept
plugging away.

In the late 1980s, an oasis or two appeared in the electronic
publishing (epub) desert.  One such oasis was ModemNews Magazine,
which eventually became the most popular BBS-based electronic
magazine (emag) ever.  ModemNews is still being published after five
years, but its focus has shifted from being the definitive general
interest emag on the boards.  ModemNews now serves to highlight up
and coming emags like RAH.

This is an important development.  Whole herds of people suddenly had
the same idea, in the early 1990s, that Jake and the other pioneers
had in the middle 1980s; namely, the concept of publishing magazines
and books electronically.  Frankly, much of what has been published
electronically so far is trash.  But more and more of it is not
trash, or at least (like RAH) designer trash.  The fact that Jeff
Green, the editor of ModemNews, has decided that there are emags out
there worth highlighting is encouraging news.

But how far have we actually come in the past decade?  No emag has
established itself as a viable commercial entity.  No electronic book
has become a best seller.  All that happened is that we moved from
the lone pioneer phase (a.k.a. the Daniel Boone phase) to the wagon
train stage.  There are now significant numbers of people trying
this, but it is still far from easy, or safe.

Like the early pioneers, there are small pockets, or settlements, of 
epub people scattered throughout cyberspace.  Because of (believe it
or not) communications difficulties, the epub settlers rarely talk to
others outside their own group.  Much of the problem is due to lack
of knowledge of other groups' existence.  Another major part of the
problem stems from technical incompatibilities between different
factions (nets).  Part of it is simply the verbally violent nature of
much of cyberspace.  Flame wars rage like the range wars of old.
Very few of the parties involved are interested in taking prisoners.

The major overriding problem, though, is one of perception.  Many
folks in the BBS epub arena seem to think that epub success will come
from following the print publishing paradigm.  Mere substitution of
diskettes for books and magazines seems to be the goal of this group.
The Digital Publishing Association started life as the Disktop
Publishing Association.  The main idea was to distribute epubs on
diskette.  In fact, the reason the name was changed was because some
software company had trademarked the word "Disktop."

Another one of those cyberspace epub settlements I have been watching
through my spyglass lately seems to be a lot closer to getting it
right.  The Internet folks have been publishing emags since just
after the third system hooked into the NSFNet backbone.  Again, many
of these emags are pure dreck, but a few are getting there.  The real
edge that Internet epubs enjoy is availability.  An epub on an FTP
server can be accessed by anyone on the planet with an Internet shell
account.  "FTP by Mail" servers extend that reach to anyone with an
Internet e-mail account.  New technology such as the "World Wide Web"
will make hypertext epubs available online to users around the world.

The for-pay BBS systems have run up the white flag and are connecting
to the Internet in droves.  As this wholesale conversion is completed
we will see the Internet become the defacto standard for electronic
communication.  I am in the process of setting up a private UUCP site
for RAH support on the Internet.  Eventually the current one line BBS
I run will be replaced by an Internet-connected multiline board.  In
short, it looks like the Internet's dominance will eventually solve
most of the technical incompatibility problems now rampant in
cyberspace.  Like all communications advances, this will enable folks
to insult and incite their fellows that much better and faster.  What
an achievement.

There are those who claim that the mere act of running a networked
message BBS constitutes electronic publication.  This may indeed be
the case, but that is ultimately something for the lawyers to decide.
But networked conferences have given many people large audiences for
their ideas.  This has great implications for the future of both the
technical sciences and social sciences.  

Governments worldwide are grappling with unprecedented levels of
individual communication.  The days of government officials and media
moguls controlling how people of one country view the people of other
countries are numbered.  This has more than a few people running
scared.  Even now the U.S. government is attempting to make sure they
will be able to tap into, and otherwise try to control, any and all
future means of communications in this country.

Only three things are actually certain at this point:

1) Electronic publishing is here to stay.  It will bring people
   closer together.
2) The ultimately successful epub format will be completely unlike 
   anything anyone currently expects or predicts.
3) Some people will eventually get rich off of electronic publishing.
   My main goal in electronic publishing is to be one of those
   people. 

The complete changeover from publishing as we know it today to the
electronically based publishing paradigm of tomorrow will not happen
overnight.  The only really sure thing is that it will be an
interesting process to watch.
                             - - -
Southern California is well on its way to becoming extra crispy
again.  The residents of that state are regularly struck by earth-
quakes, floods, mud slides, wild fires, locusts, plagues, the Manson
family, humongous Japanese movie monsters, etc.  Does anyone else get
the impression that someone is trying to tell Californians something?
Like maybe they should move to Idaho? 
                             - - -
Greg Borek and I will be travelling to Las Vegas in early November.
There we will render unto Caesar's that which is Caesar's, render
unto Bally's that which is Bally's, render unto Harrah's that which
is Harrah's, and so forth.                                      {RAH}
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Sound Byte:

  Q:  What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

  A:  Make me one with everything.


