Electronic rights-, power source or static?However, such a product will be fundamentally unlike a conven-
tional novel. Despite all the high-flown talk, it will actually be more
like a game. And its market will always be small, I imagine, for two
major reasons: (1) people like endings, especially happy ones; and
(2) people would rather be told a story than write one themselves,
even with computer help.
Believers in hypertexts claim that their tomorrow is bound to
dawn because today's children—with their Nintendos and class-
room computers—relate to information in a whole new way. Oh
yeah? Then why does kids' television thrive? And why are children's
books the biggest growth sector in publishing? Reading is a habit,
and today's kids are catching it very young.
Let's look at other electronic book formats that have come along.
CD-ROM. This is the big one. Already this new technology has
made a larger dent in book sales than the PC made in a decade. CD
stands for "compact disk." ROM means "read-only memory." CD-
ROMs are disks that can be inserted into drives in a desktop com-
puter, or sometimes into lightweight handheld units. Whatever the
device, a laser beam inside scans the disks digitally encoded data
and sends images to a screen.
Several handheld CD-ROM players are on the market. The best
known is Sony's Data Discman. As you might expect, the most pop-
ular titles for the Discman are reference works like the Bible, ency-
clopedias, language translators, wine guides, and so forth. Another
proprietary handheld device is Franklin Electronic Publisher's
Digital Book System. Franklin has sent its stock price soaring by
finding niche markets for electronic reference books for doctors,
nurses, lawyers, and so on.
By far the biggest market for CD-ROMs, though, is for those
played on personal computers. PCs have the largest "installed base"
of any electronic platform, in both offices and households. Many
old PCs are already hooked up to CD-ROM drives, and you can hard-
ly find a new PC without one already built in. InfoTech of
Woodstock, Vermont, reports that there are 26.9 million CD-ROM
drives in use around the world; an analyst for Link Resources puts
the U.S. number at 6 million (at the end of 1994). Annual sales of
CD-ROMs in the mid-nineties were around $600 million.