Tick Tock

technological changes in publishing since the creation of commercial editorial houses in the 15th century," as Charles C. Mann wrote in the June 2000 Yahoo Internet Life.

That's marvelous. But while we futz around assembling e-book scaffolding, the amount of time young people, especially young adults, spend in an electronic realm is increasing--and that realm is largely devoid of significant fiction and nonfiction, especially titles written just for them.

Poor planning, I'd say. I'm realistic, although impatient, about the inevitability of time needed for development. What concerns me more is the lack of news about emerging teen e-book content--beyond assignment-related material. I heard nothing at BookExpo about immediate plans by any major trade publisher to release young adult books by well-known authors in electronic form. Yet it won't be long before young adults will expect to find pleasure reading where they live--and for many, that's online, instant-messaging friends and simultaneously looking up sports scores.

Right now, e-books for adults are consuming the publishing industry's attention, the shortsightedness of which nearly provokes me to open my office window and scream loud enough to drown out Manhattan's wailing fire trucks. The thinking appears to be that grown-ups--the receding-hairline types who pack Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs and Rocket eBooks--will be the first to raid their wallets to buy e-books.

Stephen King was the first major author to publish an original work exclusively in e-book form this year, when Simon & Schuster released his novella Riding the Bullet. Michael Crichton and Mary Higgins Clark followed with previously published titles. So what's the problem? King, Crichton, and Clark are huge with teens. True, but these writers are but one flavor in a library--think well-stocked gourmet market--that we want kids to experience.

I'm not alone in my concern for teens--and for libraries. "I'm stunned that we're not seeing content for young adults," says Barbara Genco, director of collection development at the Brooklyn Public Library. In its public library pilot project, netLibrary, a major distributor of electronic content to libraries, is offering "Cliff Notes, a book on bee pollen, and OHSA in the Real World," she explains. "I'm very concerned. If we can't provide traditional YA content, [teens are] going to go elsewhere."

As the digital realm becomes more and more a conduit for ideas and communication, we should question whether the only real place for sustained reading is on paper. For some, it may be. Others, once screen resolution improves and the price of e-book readers drops, may find reading traditional books inconvenient--especially if a fair amount of their assigned reading is also online. If you share my concern, please let publishers know that librarians are eager to explore electronic lending. The time is ripe for start-up publishers to challenge the old guard--if they can manage to deal with the huge issue of intellectual property rights. A quicker approach--releasing out-of-print books in e-book form--is the direction that a brand-new endeavor, ipicturebooks.com, is taking. (See Make Way for e-Picture Books.)

We're at the threshold of an extremely fascinating period in publishing, not to mention one that's extremely confusing. It will take time--perhaps not until today's preschoolers reach middle school--to start to grasp how moving books from paper to bytes may change them. "My feeling is that e-books will evolve in a number of directions that publishers are just not yet ready for," says Marc Aronson, a senior editor at Henry Holt. "That is, they will provide an experience that, increasingly, will be different from a book," he says. A book may essentially remain a book, Aronson believes, but another digital form of narrative may develop, much as film evolved away from its parent--the theater--once motion-picture technology had been in place for a while.

What a wild ride we're in for. Just tell me again, when is the plumber supposed to show up?