However, there is a subtler time problem with e-mail -- a synchronization problem. If User Able log on every day and User Betty logs on once a week, it peculiarly affects the nature of their online relationship. For Betty, Able is a steadying, constant presence, someone who "always sends me mail," while for Able, Betty is a spasmodic interloper who always wants to talk about last week's stale news.
The synchrony problem intensifies if User Cecil is widely distributing text files with his e-mail address attached. Now Cecil will get e-mail from all over the world eager to discuss matters he distributed weeks, months, even years ago. This lack of timeliness on the part of the reader is not the readers' fault. Once released, Cecil's texts can be redistributed again and again by anyone who stumbles across them. Worse yet, any clues about the date of their creation are often lost or edited somewhere in the spidery tatters of the distribution network. Cecil's supposedly lightning-swift electronic texts can travel as slowly, unexpectedly and randomly as a messages in bottles.
Another basic temporal difficulty is the performance crunch. If User Betty has to answer 50 pieces of e-mail in an hour and User Able handles only five, no amount of goodwill or eloquence will allow Able and Betty to communicate on equal terms. Able will feel neglected by Betty's brusque and hasty replies; Betty will feel smothered by Able's discursive, insistent meanderings. Eventually they will come to regard one another as exploitative attention-vampires.
Over the past three years, I've made increasing use of the Internet as a vanity press. My CATSCAN columns are available online; so are my F&SF Science columns. I deliberately pitched them overboard into the seas of cyberspace, and the results have been intriguing. While many people online read the CATSCAN columns -- or at least, I know that they download them off the WELL gopher -- I get little direct response from them. Except, that is, for Catscan Ten, "A Statement of Principle," which involved the computer underground. The online response to that particular article was frantic, with e-mail pouring in from Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain and every techie campus in the USA; all in all, I must have gotten five hundred responses.
The response to the Science columns seems to vary in direct proportion to their relevance to computer science. A column about the space program, which got a lot of printed response, aroused very tepid interest online. But my column "Internet" provoked scores of replies, and seems to have an electronic reprint life entirely its own. It keeps re-surfacing again and again, under a variety of titles and often annoyingly "edited."
On New Years Day 1994, I released the entire text of HACKER CRACKDOWN electronically, including a new foreword and afterword.
At first, very little happened, except for large numbers of timid queries from people who wanted to reproduce the text electronically and were anxious not to be crushed by my publisher. After a month, several of the larger systems had HACKER CRACKDOWN up online and people began to lose their fear. It's now available on the WELL, tic.com, ftp.eff.org., from the Gutenberg Project, and is widely available in Europe. There's a Hypercard version, and a Newton version, and various compacted versions in different data formats, and so forth.
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.