Wired Books Words On Paper A Shrinking Part Of Publishing Market As More And More Literature Goes Electronic

If anyone’s worried about the new cyber future, it has to be booksellers. They must be sweating in their dust jackets.

It’s not as if bookstores aren’t hedging their bets - sleeping with the enemy, as it were. Many now have sections devoted to CD-ROMs, software and computer manuals.

These days, a book browser, lost in an aisle somewhere, has to wonder: Am I in Borders - or CompUSA?

But if there’s less and less difference between a bookstore and a software outlet, why does anyone need bookstores? And if enough people get online and can order books by e-mail or download whole novels - again, why would anyone need bookstores?

There’s no question, says Richard Scott, managing director of American Booksellers magazine, that this is an unsettling time for book retailers - despite the ongoing boom in book sales. After centuries in which publishers, libraries and bookstores have been at the forefront of disseminating information, the Information Revolution has turned against them.

“The market for what a bookstore offers is already thoroughly segmented,” Scott says. “And we’re going to see a lot more of that: audio books, CD-ROMs and the like. Eventually, we’ll see the invention of a true electronic novel.”

The industrywide fearfulness reached June’s American Booksellers Association’s convention in Chicago - where Scott moderated a panel, “The Bookstore of the 21st Century: Start Planning Now.” At the same time, on the convention floor, Amazon. Com Inc. demonstrated what it calls the largest bookstore on the Web: 1.1 million titles updated daily. That’s like having the inventory of five superstores at your fingertips.

BookWire, another online service, doesn’t ship hard-copy books as Amazon.Com does. Instead, it provides best-seller lists, book tour calendars and reviews from publications such as The Boston Book Review and the Los Angeles Times. And with the “Reading Room,” you can download several hundred books for free.

What all of this new computerization means, Steve Potash told the panel in Chicago, is that “ink on dead trees will be a lost art very soon.”

Potash is president of OverDrive Systems, whose Electronic Book Aisle site on the World Wide Web offers books for downloading. For a fee, users of the Electronic Book Aisle can download individual chapters or specific recipes. Potash happily demonstrated this in Chicago by calling up a drink menu from “Mr. Boston’s Bartending and Party Guide.” The charge: 25 cents.

So there it was, displayed right in front of bookstore owners: the Death of the Book (and, inevitably, the Bookstore), and on a dollars-and-cents, push-the-button-and-it’s-here level.

Not so fast, says Peter Grenquist, executive director of the American Association of University Presses. The printed word isn’t going to die soon, not just on Bill Gates’ say-so.

In “The Encyclopedia of the Future” (Macmillan), Grenquist writes that print is simply too developed, too well-distributed, too convenient and too effective for countless libraries, school systems, governments, companies and individuals to give it up.

“A thousand years from now,” he says, “all you would need to read the information in a printed text is a good light and a clear eye. That’s it. You can’t beat it.”

What’s much more likely than the Death of the Book is that the two technologies, print and PC, will compete yet thrive together. This is not that unusual. Planes have become the dominant mode of long-distance travel, but trains and ships did not disappear. And there are some trips that trains still handle better than planes: Just ask any subway commuter.

Many college bookstores, for example, already use Docu-Tech, a Xerox terminal that prints books on demand. Typically, a professor will require sample chapters from different textbooks for his course. His students can get this “manufactured” book from the Docu-Tech, which assembles the separate selections, prints and binds them.

And with Muze’s new in-store kiosk - which does for books what its previous kiosk did for music CDs, customers can call up data about the 1.7 million titles in “Books in Print” - plus 200,000 reviews.

But the kind of electronic book-reading future that many people envision involves not Docu-Tech or Muze but some handy, lightweight gizmo that spews out the latest Judith Krantz best seller while they sit whittling by the fire.

The future will arrive at bookstores this fall. Franklin Electronic Publishers, which has been producing its Bookman line of calculator-sized electronic books for 10 years, introduces its first novel: Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”

Thirteen million Bookmen have already been sold, according to Franklin associate manager Larry Teitelbaum, but they’ve all been reference works. The Bookman looks like a personal data organizer (cost $40-$150). The reader slips in a cartridge about the size of a microcassette, and the text scrolls across the screen.

Whether a bookstore sells a book or a Bookman, it still has a future - it’s still a store. In essence, the fate of book outlets, says Scott, is not tied directly to the fate of printed books. Bookstores are in the business of conveying information, he says, in whatever format that may take: CD-ROM, audio tape or other gadget.