It hasn't been so long ago that writing was done laboriously by hand on clay tablets or struck in stone.  The Homers out there singing for their bread could only make a living by traveling the breadth of the land to find new audiences for the manuscripts stored in their head. Playwrights didn't come into their own until the Greece Theatre flourished.  Meanwhile the cunning Chinese coolie put paper to use polishing up reams of philosophy, each one reproduced by hand for new buyers.

Woodcuts were pressed into service until Gutenberg watched wine bottles get their bottoms pressed.  He struggled with the laws of permutation until he produced a movable type press.  What to do with such an innovation?  Why, publish a book, of course.  Very wisely, he chose to print a Bible. 

Sure enough, the first book became a best seller.  The sensation of making a profit was so sensational the publishing industry has sought after best sellers ever since.

Movies cost a dollar or more at that time.   Good movie houses cost three or even four, and the popcorn was higher too.  Radio shows were free and began sapping the book market from two directions:  First by paying writers more to work for radio to create worlds within the theater of the mind, and second by taking away the time available for reading.  Book publishers retaliated by raising prices.

Then came television, bitterly opposed by intellectuals but sucked up by J. Q. Public.  Television took writers away from radio, and from book publishers and before you knew it, people were watching television up to eight hours a day;  Book publishers retaliated by raising prices again.

We won't get it from magazines.  Even with over 1/3 of their pages full of paying ads the owners demand at least $3.95 per single copy price. 

VCRs came out and suddenly J. Q. Public could bring hundreds of blockbuster movies home for as little as a dollar each.  Book publishers retaliated by raising prices one more time so that now we find lowball hard backs going for $19.95 and highball at $99.95.   The fact of the matter is we now pay more taxes on a low cost paperback than we used to get several books for.

We won't get relief from conventional publishing.  We won't get it from the movie moguls.  Television keeps trying, radio has a mental block against it from losing the war to television once already, cable insists on it but can't deliver.

Technology rolls in on tiny little feet.   READERS are coming into view with hand-held apparatus you can take with you to the beach.  These cute little Palm Readers can be READ anywhere you go.

THE FUTURE IS AT HAND

New hand-held devices may bring on the net's "Second Goldrush." Using wireless modems to gain instant access to the internet, hardware manufacturers are building new devices, operating-systems companies are revising platforms, software developers are creating new programs, content providers are making news and information ready and telecoms are preparing bandwidth.

Last year, almost 4 million hand-held computers were sold in the U.S. By the end of the year 2000 predictions proclaim there will be 15 million PDAs in use and by 2003 handhelds will outsell PCs. Soon the whole world really will be in the palm of your hand. Click here for more information. 

Learn How To Bind Your Own Books for just fifty cents each! You can even bind Hardcover Books - Or Notebooks.  NO SEWING REQUIRED!  NO HOT GLUE EITHER.  You'll be saving THOUSANDS of dollars compared to the printing costs of a Digital Editor.  And the results are just as good - or maybe you will get even BETTER results!

Your books will look PERFECT.  You can even produce a professional quality, laminated cover in FULL COLOR.  This is so easy you will be able to do the work right in your own home. 

Free Information shows how YOU can bind your own books for just fifty cents each.

Thus, Internet books are now coming into their own domain.  Just one page of a book I wrote in html would take over two weeks to finish if read in its entirety.   That's because of a thing called LINKS.  

The Reverse Answer Worksheet I invented to make learning any subject fast, easy, and fun will let you look at the answers only when you don't know them, and whiz on through those you do.   Furthermore, you can use the book over and over again without using up ink, lead, or paper and discover you learn more to boot.   If you're a writer like me, the surest way to learn any subject is to write a book about it.  Well, write your book in .html as you go and the whole world can learn with you.

It seems almost silly to pick up a real book when Make Money From the Web, a course for beginners -- a good .html book of the same material is handy.   Substantiation, proof, support, complete articles, amazing sources, legal documents and the other side of the argument can all be linked to from the html "book" for the personally selective total enlightenment of the reader.  Best of all, the cost of production is virtually nil and shipping can be instantaneous and FREE.

Yeah.
But,
Are electronic books -- uh -- you know,,, books?  We can well imagine a similar situation with poor old Moses looking askance at Gutenberg and mumbling, "Are you sure the Books in the Bible will still be sacred when all the words are mass produced instead of scribbled out by hand?"

As with any new advance, the question of heredity rears an ugly head.  A quill and a pen both accomplish the same purpose.   Pens came out as mechanical quills.  They evolved to fountain pens, and now all you ever see is ball point pens and the old secretary bird has flu d coop for safer pulps. 

Mark Twain leaped immediately from the pen in hand to the clanky typewriter even though it was designed to be slow in order to keep the keys from sticking.  For all his eccentricity William Faulkner would have gladly exchanged his clanking typing machine for a word processor he couldn't throw half as far.  Yet here we are with the innate ability to produce better movies than the best producers of 1989 could dream up (not to mention writing directly in html) and we are wondering if we shouldn't revert to the technology of the great bard because "publishers" haven't accepted it yet?

Talk and Type software.   *  Piggyback the Hollidays for Free book publicity.   *  Create a bottomless notebook to spark new story ideas any time you need them.  *  Using Description to Drag your readers into your story.  *  Break into a Food Writing Career.  *  The Secret of Success, according to Lucy Goosey.  *  Just The Writer... when the movie makers take over the book, where does the writer go?  *  800 words and phrases that SELL!  *  How To Write Powerful Speeches

I know I'm not the only author with dozens of letters back from editors saying:  "This brought tears to my eyes, but I just can't use it, anywhere.   It doesn't fit."

Editors are always asking for something that "fits."  Well, I'm sorry, but original writers do not write like that.   They don't sit down at the keyboard and say, "Okay, I'm going to write a story for shoe salesmen of this world."  No, and not for well diggers at the North Pole either.

What original writers have to say isn't an imitation.  Very seldom will it slide neatly into some artificial slot bookstores have created for the convenience of book buyers.  As long as their myopic vision rests solely on conventional "book" publishers  -- the situation will not improve very much for original writers.  But let them catch the vision of an unlimited audience any writer can reach as easily as the next, and suddenly the well erupts with a gusher that can't be capped.

It is time for us writers to cut ourselves some relief.

As Kathryn D. Struck, founder of Awe-Struck E-Books explains, "Big publishers sometimes want to print 'formula" romance and other books; one thing the epubbers have been willing to do is break with the old formulas and release unique romances with unusual characters."

Distribution is 90% of the problem, therefore distribution is 90% of the solution.   Conventional publishers do have the upper hand right now.  Their channels are open, and they are getting fatter as the conglomerates assimilate the satellite publishers.

But the web is changing that.  Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes and Noble, et al, are doing their share of the damage to old traditions.  With the web, zipping in place technology, "publishers" can already deliver a whole book in less than five minutes.  Give us another year and there will be stores out there that can print out a book in less than fifteen seconds -- or you can print it out at home in fifteen minutes.

"Wait a cotton-picking minute!" I've had readers scream at me.  "I'm not about to buy a book that I have to PRINT OUT myself."

Okay, be that way.  My book is also printed out for you by a conventional publisher.  It costs twice as much as my electronic book, and it was already a year old before the day it got published -- and now it is three years old.  My electronic version has been new and improved fourteen times since then as the industries change.  You can print it out in the size and shape you want to see it.  You can make the fonts bigger, or smaller to fit your eyes.  You can print it out one chapter at a time, or one page at at time, or the whole book at one time.  And, if you read it electronically you can connect with the internet for THOUSANDS of pages of more material that I couldn't legally include in my book, but can legally show you how to find.     

As an author, my only real investment to write a book is one of time and brains.   Like the trusty six-gun of the old west, Electronic books, and html books can be the great equalizers for writers.  All an electronic book publisher needs do is post the book on the web in a restricted area and customers can download (or ask for a printed copy) with no problem -- after they ante up. 

Books like Water, Water and Make Money From the Web, a course for beginners are downloadable directly to the client's computer.  Not only are these books FREE, readers are invited to send copies to all their friends.  Where does the remuneration come from?  The ads inside.

Sample chapters of your books can be posted on the web for reader evaluation.  Updates can be made in seconds, and mistakes straightened out in a little less than no time at all.  Shopping carts can facilitate sales automatically.   Credit card orders can be made secure.  Checks can be taken right over the web.

We still have to come back to distribution. . . marketing, or in another word, SALES.  Until an html publisher can find the customers that want the books, your books will still be dead in the water.  The good news is, a small publisher like Browzer Books has the same opportunity of sales on the web as a major publisher. 

"Okay, so now we know what the future will hold?" 

No.  We don't know what kind of bull the future will be riding into the sunset.   There are in fact, only two things we do know about the future: that it is getting here faster every day, and we'd better be ready for it if we expect to profit.  However, for the first time in history, the lonely writer at home has a sporting chance of competing with the Putnams and both kinds of publishers are better off for it.

Why should you write in html?  
An ever expanding market, for one thing. Unlike electronic books which require special software, html software is already invented and being used extensively.  Not only that, the software is getting better each year.  It can also be read by Macs as easily as IBM clones.

There are over 80 million prospective buyers on the web now with browsers of one kind or another.  Each of them can "read" books on the web produced in html.

So, yes.  I'm putting my money and my time and my brains into writing html books and publishing them on the web.  I love the freedom.  I love the tool selection.  I love the creativity afforded -- the animations, the photos, the colors, the sounds; why I can even add video if it makes the book work better. 

Go to any library or bookstore and look at the rows and rows of books with black ink on white paper. 

Every author sitting there dead in the water longed to be read.  And now their tomes sit on the dusty shelves.  Meanwhile, the number of people reading what I write is constantly increasing. 

With big screen monitors just a mile away and remote control switches already here it is only a matter of time before the whole family can lounge comfortably behind their popcorn bowls and read the same book, together.   "Let's read that paragraph again, Daddy!  I loved the music."

Let the good times roll.  J. Q. Public will be the winner, no matter what happens.

Browzer Books
414 North 8th Street
Noble, OK 73068
405 872 5556