At the moment -- mid-February -- I'm getting three or four direct responses a day, about twenty-five e-mail HACKER fanletters a week. Most of them come from people who say they wanted to buy the printed book but couldn't afford it (teenagers, college students) or who wanted the book but couldn't find it anywhere (Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Israelis, vision-impaired online people with electronic readers in their boxes).
I don't know whether distributing the book electronically will damage its commercial prospects as a printed book. People always ask me this question -- as if generating cash-in-hand were my only conceivable reason for writing a book. I doubt there is any real way to judge the effect on sales. The paperback has only been out since November; but even if the print version stopped selling entirely, that wouldn't prove anything. HACKER CRACKDOWN was very topical, involving a contemporary scandal in a community which, though spreading rapidly, is still very limited in scope and influence. Books of that sort tend to have a short shelf-life. In fact, that was the main reason I gave the book away fairly rapidly. There's not much point in giving something away something no longer useful.
I wouldn't recommend that every author should give books away online. It was an experiment on my part, a literateur's way of literarily probing the Net. I do believe that a day must come when online electronic text profoundly changes the structure and economics of print publishing. But I believe that day is still a ways off -- maybe even decades off. The nature of electronic text, and of the networks that distribute it, is so volatile, so full of unknown factors, that I can't make a balanced judgment about the probabilities, and I don't think anyone can. I wouldn't be surprised ten years from now if all books worthy of serious attention were routinely placed on the Internet. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet itself ceased to exist and cypherpunks were being grilled in hearings by the House Unamerican Activities Committee circa 2005. The Net could go any of dozens of ways, and though I have some pretty firm ideas of the ways I would like it to go, I don't flatter myself that I have much influence on the vast amoebic movement of this enormous beast.
In the meanwhile, I haven't given away any of my novels, and have no plans to. I might give away a novel on Internet if it seemed a useful gesture, but it doesn't. Frankly, I doubt whether there is any real interest at all on the Net in science fiction novels, by me or by anyone else -- unless those books are somehow intimately and thoroughly involved with the Net. The Net is interested in the Net -- netspiders are, in that sense, much like ham radio people -- people who bounce signals off the ionosphere all the way to Madagascar so as to ask: "Well - - what kinda hamshack ya got?"
I myself would have next-to-no interest in an SF book online, even if it were free, and the idea of paying for one is ludicrous. I have a free copy of Gibson's Voyager books on disk, and though they're said to be elegant examples of electronic publishing, I can't make the time even to load them into the Macintosh and see how they look. If some other colleague offered a novel online, I'm almost certain that I'd wait for a print version before I read it. I can't say why I feel this peculiar repugnance, really; it may be sheer antiquated nonsense on my part. But it's not a "prejudice" by any means -- it's firmly based on years of hands-on judgement. I don't think novels function as electronic text -- I feel this very strongly, and I think it's a very general opinion. It's something to do with the surround -- with the peculiar sense that while consuming electronic text one is missing certain essential vitamins.
I don't want to read novels while I'm sitting at my desk and staring rigidly into a screen. Laptops are little better; they leave you tethered to a wall and/or worried about your battery. Improving the tech may help -- but enthusiasts have been saying that for years. Better display may only illuminate the deeper discords in the nature of electronic text.
I don't read novels and stories online, but I do scroll through unbelievable amounts of electronic text. The difference is in the material. Electronic text is not literature, it's not even genre literature, it's paraliterature, in the way that electronic "conversation" is a peculiar kind of subsensory perception, a human intercourse so antiseptically safe as to have membraned out the entire human body. Speech and e-text and print are "all words," but only in a very basic sense -- like in the way that ice and steam and water are all H2O.
My relationship to my online readers is a relationship of sorts: a narrow and peculiarly restricted kind of relationship. It's very much like the relationship between an author at a bookstore signing and the line of people with his books. Ninety percent of the people who write me online ask for nothing more than a ritual acknowledgement of their existence. They say "thank you for writing this" and I reply "you're quite welcome" and they depart the electronic premises forever, quite satisfied. It's very much like the bookstore fan who wants his copy of ISLANDS IN THE NET inscribed "To Jim." Not because he expects me to remember that his name is Jim, or even that I ever met him; what he wants is a ritual validation of his personhood by someone he regards as a celebrity. Nothing wrong with this; it's part of the game, part of society, and e-mail serves this function very well. In fact, as an author I'd have to say that e- mail is the best method I've ever found for dealing with the public.
I have a hard time maintaining friendships via e-mail alone. Though I get a lot of e-mail from friends, I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I've met only by and through e-mail. I've heard of this being done, but I've never done it myself. I uncharitably speculate that it's because I already have a life.
I can already sense the nature of my next major online challenge. I will have to deal with the consequences of a spectacularly growing Internet and my slowly growing notoriety within it. Increasing traffic on the Information Highway is slowly but surely overwhelming me. Lately, I have begun logging onto my home system, the WELL, every day; not by choice but by necessity. I've become much better at online research, and my use of my online time is much more efficient. But there are limits, and the limits are visibly approaching.
I'll never forget the strange chill I felt when I once logged onto the WELL after a brief absence and found 115 pieces of mail awaiting me -- *every one of which was interesting.* There was simply *nothing left to skip.* I was captivated by all of it, and it was all there right at my fingertips, and I suddenly understood why certain unlucky souls rupture their wrist tendons at the keyboard.
An hour a day online is hard work, but I feel it's worth it; the stuff I get online is no longer soup, I'm getting real cubes of bouillon online, nuggets of information of intense interest that are unattainable anywhere else. But if this goes on I'll be beaten to a pulp; I'll be pelted into a coma with little croutons of incoming data. Somehow I'm going to have to find a way to make it stop. And it's not just dry data that is getting out of hand, but the socialization, the increasing demands online for my personal attention. As more and more people obtain my net-address, my replies must become briefer and briefer. The crush of the virtual crowd will eventually overwhelm me.
When that happens, I believe I'll have to take stern measures. I could simply ignore unsolicited mail. But that seems a stopgap measure. I'll probably have to drop my current online identity, and go back online incognito. It's a pretty problem in virtual etiquette: who will get my new address and who will have to be dropped? How will I convince people to maintain the secrecy of my new ID when the whole raison d'etre of the infobahn is instant access to anybody anywhere anytime?