A Companion to the History of the Book (82 page)

At the beginning of the 1980s these new media both excited and confused book publishers who could see that computerized information could offer entirely new publishing opportunities but had difficulty in seeing how they could be realized. In 1981, the books of Dr. Spock had appeared on both video disc and video cassette, and in 1982 MCA released a video disc containing cooking lessons by Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey. In May 1982, George Rosato, Vice President of Random House’s schools division, speaking about educational software, stated: “One of the very early questions was, ‘Is there business in this field?’ Now it’s ‘How big is this business?’” Robert Dahlin, writing in the
Publishers Weekly Yearbook
(1983), looked back on 1982 and asked “Where is all this leading?” He went on: “The answer is not at all clear, but 1982 explorations underscored the fact that a book is a book and an electronic product is not a book.” He then explained this Zen-like statement, but decades later book publishers are still trying to work out how to publish successfully both books and electronic publications.

One publisher that understood how to use the optical disc was Information Access Corporation (IAC), which published
InfoTrac,
an index of business, technical, and general interest magazines and newspapers for the student market in the US. By 1986, this index on optical disc was in use in three hundred academic and public libraries, and the full text of the articles was also available on companion sets of microfilm. Here was a combination of computerized indexing accessing text on microfilm that Bush would have recognized as a worthy rendering of the Memex concept. Libraries reported overwhelming user acceptance and waiting lines at workstations. It was far from the “priesthood of searchers,” and some librarians were uncomfortable with the way that students abandoned print indexes and bibliographies and seemed to think that
InfoTrac
indexed everything, but librarians also saw that it brought users into the library who had never been there before (Tenopir 1986).

IAC was still using the optical disc in 1986, the year in which the CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) became the exciting new publishing medium. Philips and Sony had announced the CD-ROM in 1984, and in 1985 Grolier brought out
Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopaedia,
advertised as “The Knowledge Disk,” on both video disc and on CD-ROM. Audio CDs were already established and the advantage of the CD-ROM over the optical disc was the large number of mastering and replicating factories that could manufacture CD-ROMs inexpensively. The attraction for publishers was that it was a robust, tamper-proof medium that stored thousands of pages on a single disc.

Apart from Grolier, the first publishers to use the CD-ROM medium were not the large book publishers but Microsoft, the software giant, and hardware manufacturers like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), online providers like Dialog and BRS, and new publishers like SilverPlatter Information Inc. Microsoft made an immediate impact on the consumer market with
Microsoft Bookshelf,
a collection of basic reference books, and
Encarta,
an encyclopedia on CD-ROM based on a print encyclopedia to which were added still images, video clips, and sound, creating something entirely new and immediately attractive to anyone who now had a CD-ROM reader connected to his or her PC.

Grolier had announced its “Knowledge Disk” with the promise “Gone are the hernia-inducing heavy volumes,” and within a few years they were gone. Electronic media took over from print.
Encyclopedia Britannica
was sold and the new owners had to think how to position their electronic version. Yet this destruction of what had seemed an unassailable branch of consumer book publishing was not only due to the new technology but also to aggressive pricing and market domination by an international software giant that used its CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “loss leader” to sell something else.

By 1986, both DEC and SilverPlatter had signed up for publication on CD-ROM for the library market the same bibliographic databases that Dialog and others were already offering online. These included PsycLIT, ERIC, and PAIS. Since none of these were exclusive to one CD-ROM publisher, each publisher had to distinguish its own versions by the quality of its software, by price, and by service and availability. SilverPlatter soon established itself as the market leader with polished branding, good software, and a network of sales agents throughout the world that gave it a much greater international presence than most publishers of a comparable size.

For publishers like University Microfilms in the US (which changed its name to ProQuest in 2001) and Chadwyck-Healey in the UK, for whom microfilm was the principal publishing medium, CD-ROM was new and glamorous with an enthusiastic public acceptance that microfilm had never enjoyed. Unlike SilverPlatter, these publishers shied away from signing up non-exclusive databases and preferred to concentrate on CD-ROM publications that were exclusive to them or contained data that was owned or created by them. In 1986, University Microfilms was testing both optical discs and CD-ROMs, and one of its first products was its own database
Dissertations Abstracts.

In 1989, Chadwyck-Healey with Her Majesty’s Stationery Office published
UKOP,
the first complete catalogue of British government publications, issued bi-monthly on CD-ROM, and then with Saztec published a CD-ROM edition of the world’s most famous library catalogue,
The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books.
It cost £9,000, half the price of the last print edition, which had only been completed in 1987, and, unlike the latter, every element in the catalogue record could be searched. It was a spin-off from the costly conversion of the catalogue in its old guard-book format into a Public Access Online Catalogue (OPAC) which had become a requirement for all large libraries. In 1990, Chadwyck-Healey started to create its own databases by the manual keying of printed texts. By 1994, it had published all of English poetry from the Middle Ages to 1900 on five CD-ROMs sold to libraries for £25,000. To be able to search for any word or phrase in all of English poetry was revolutionary, but it also meant that a library would now have a more comprehensive collection of poetry than it could ever have in print; every title was already catalogued, and it took up no shelf space.

Large-scale electronic text-creation was only possible because of the existence of companies in India, Singapore, China, and the Philippines that carried out “data capture” by manually keying texts twice (for accuracy) at a very low cost. Of equal significance had been the development of Standard Generalized Mark Up Language (SGML), an encoding system that gave form and structure to ASCII files so that they appeared on the screen in a format similar to that of a printed page. SGML coding was software independent and was flexible: editors could draw up their own coding to suit each body of text, and this enabled Chadwyck-Healey to convert complex foreign-language texts, including the
Patrologia Latina,
a larger body of text than English Poetry, and the Weimar Edition of the works of Goethe in 143 volumes. Both were published in 1995.

Almost every major publisher started a multimedia department to publish CD-ROMs. The British publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), already famous for its well-designed, fully illustrated, nonfiction books aimed at younger readers, was more successful than others. Microsoft bought a 25 percent stake in the company because it liked DK’s clean graphical images which suited the limited resolution of the computer screens of the time. DK’s first CD-ROM was on musical instruments with text, images, and sound. The DK CD-ROM list grew rapidly, fostered by the enthusiasm of its founder, Peter Kindersley. Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, was also interested and personally reviewed CD-ROM publishing ideas. The bestselling title,
The Way Things Work,
sold 1.25 million copies, and at its peak in the mid-1990s CD-ROM publications had annual sales of £25 million. By the late 1990s, DK’s CD-ROM sales began to decline. Difficulties of distribution and a downward pressure on prices were the main reasons. The CD-ROM became a devalued consumer product as free CD-ROMs were increasingly used as promotional tools. The most enduring DK CD-ROM titles were those with the greatest practical use, the “Drilling Discs” – curriculum cramming and testing CD-ROMs.
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“The New Papyrus,” as the CD-ROM has been called (Lambert and Ropiequet 1986), was the catalyst that enabled print publishers to become electronic publishers, but was then consumed in the process. In 1991, there were 1,200 CD-ROM titles worldwide. By 1993–4, there were 18,000 titles
⁵
and librarians began to tell publishers that they no longer wanted their databases on CD-ROMs; they wanted the publishers to maintain them and deliver them online. The CD-ROM had become an unmanageable medium in the larger library. There were too many different kinds of software, and a CD-ROM could not be widely networked because of limitations on the speed at which the laser beam head moved across the disc.

Online delivery required the publisher to invest in expensive proprietary client-server software, but there was now the Internet and a new universal “client” software (the software that sits on the customer’s computer and enables it to access the publisher’s database) called the “browser”, and it was free. Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, had had an inspired vision of the Internet as a network of distributed information. In 1990, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that enabled hypertext documents to be sent over the Internet with addresses from which they originated, now known as “URLs.” The pages of documents were formatted using his Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and he also wrote a “browser”, which he called the “World Wide Web” (W3), to retrieve and view hypertext documents. In 1993, Berners-Lee and Michael Dertouzos (1936–2001) founded the World Wide Web Consortium, which coordinates W3 development internationally.

The Internet was originally limited to research, education, and government. The culture of freedom from commercial pressures, a creators’ and users’ democracy, and a burning desire to keep the “net” out of the hands of publishers have resulted in most of the visible Internet being freely accessible. But library publishers were unconcerned about the anti-establishment culture of the “web” except when copyrights were infringed because their use of the Internet was as an online channel for delivering databases to their customers – who could only gain access to the database if they had paid an annual access fee, up front.

Journal articles, reference books, and bibliographic databases were the first to be delivered via the Internet. Publishers like SilverPlatter and its rival Ovid found that the functionality of their software, which had been their main selling point, could no longer be differentiated because of the limitations of the browser that was now common to all publishers. The lack of a physical delivery medium – a book, a roll of film, or a disc – made librarians even more price-aware. The mid-1990s was a challenging period of transition for library publishers for whom the CD-ROM had been so profitable.

But Internet delivery had enormous benefits in terms of access for users. University students and staff could connect to the Internet from their dormitories, offices, and even homes. Wherever they were, they could access databases subscribed to by their library which had become a buying agent for library users who no longer came to the library. The Internet also had advantages for publishers. Internet software was less expensive to develop than software for CD-ROMs, and there was greater protection against illegal copying because it was difficult to download a complete database from the Internet. Large databases previously published on multiple CD-ROMs were now quicker and easier to access. In 1998, Chadwyck-Healey launched a website called Literature Online (LION), with ten databases of English and American literature previously published as separate CD-ROMs. Biographies, criticism, and bibliographies were added, together with internal hypertext links as well as links to other websites that made the collection into one coherent, fully searchable database. Since its launch, LION has become one of the major teaching and research resources for English and American literature, which would not have happened if it had remained a collection of CD-ROM titles.

But the Internet was also disruptive. It changed the relationship between publishers and libraries. For centuries, libraries had owned outright the books and journals on their shelves. Now, publishers maintained their databases and sold “access” to libraries for a fee. Libraries did not necessarily accept the efficiency of this new paradigm. Each database could be regularly evaluated, dropped if no longer needed, and picked up again when required, in contrast to the library’s capital-intensive practice of investing in books and journals, many of which quickly became redundant. But in 2004, in response to the librarians’ traditional preference to buy outright, publishers introduced “Perpetual Access” to US libraries in which the libraries own the databases but must also pay the publisher a small annual online access fee.

The Internet changed the commercial relationship between libraries and library publishers in another way, a change that had started with CD-ROMs. US libraries formed buying groups or consortia, which would negotiate with a publisher for a supply of CD-ROMs or access to a database on behalf of the entire group for an all-in fee – a single deal could run to millions of dollars. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) bought electronic publications on behalf of UK higher education. By 1999, countries like Denmark and Finland had national buying consortia embracing both public and academic libraries. In 2000, the government of Iceland bought access to LION for all of its 300,000 citizens. By this time, Chadwyck-Healey, the publisher of LION, had been bought by ProQuest.

CD-ROMs had been a rewarding medium for reference-book publishers. Almost every directory benefited from being able to be searched electronically. But much of the information in directories like
The Encyclopedia of Associations
was freely available on the web accessed by search engines. The web was no longer a neutral delivery channel, it was now a competitor. On the other hand, reference books like A. & C. Black’s
Who’s Who,
with proprietary biographical information which could not be found on the web, continued to sell well in print and on CD-ROM, but also generated royalty revenue as part of
KnowUK,
a website launched in 1999 containing core UK reference works. Book publishers like A. & C. Black used aggregators like Chadwyck-Healey, the publisher of
KnowUK,
to experiment with web publishing. Oxford University Press had its own multimedia department in the late 1980s, publishing a wide range of titles including CD-ROMs for children, but used an electronic journals aggregator, the HighWire Press at Stanford University Library, to create and host the online version of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The organic nature of the web in which content can be changed or added at any time suits a big dictionary which is constantly being amended. OUP published a new edition of the
Dictionary of National Biography
in print and online in September 2004. The first online updates were added in January 2005. Already the online edition is more authoritative than the print edition and will continue to grow away from it. It seems unlikely that there will ever be another print edition.