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本文简介:我们处在技术的包围之中,目前技术已打入图书世界。图书的最新版式是电子书??只在因特网上在线出版的书。电子出版会不会导致我们所了解的那些书籍的终结???编者 Alan Brooker and Loren Teague are au-thors who have a book due out soon. You probably won't find their titles on the shelves of your local book store. Their prose is published in computerised, digital bits. They are authors publishing e-books (short for "electronic books" or books published only on the Internet, and not in paper form). 艾伦?布鲁克和洛伦?蒂格两位作家合写的一本书不久即将问世。在你所在地书店的书架上你可能找不到他们的书。他们的散文是在计算机上以二进数码形式发表的。他们是出版电子书的作家(e-books是"electronic books"的缩写,即只在因特网上而不是以纸张形式出版的书)。 [2] They're not getting big fat advances from publishers. Not even a small cheque. Instead, Brooker will get 35 per cent of each e-book sold, and Teague will get 30 per cent. That's way above what either could expect in royalties if their titles were published in the familiar book format, as beautifully bound bits of trees. 两位作家不会从出版商那里得到优厚的预支报酬。甚至没有一张小额的支票。不过,布鲁克将从出售的每本电子书中得到35%的收入,蒂格将得到 30%。这样的收入将高出两个人所能预料的版税,要是他们的书以通常的形式出版,就好像把几簇树片漂亮地捆绑在一起,他们可拿不着这么多钱。 [3] The usual author royalty is anywhere between ten and fifteen percent of a book's selling price. But the large percentage royalty for an e-book will come from a much smaller price?e-books sell online for somewhere between $US 2.50 and $ US 7 a copy, compared to the bookstore retail price of between $US 10 and $ US 90 depending on the size and quality of the publication. 作家的版税通常是书售价的10%到15%不等。而一本电子书的高额版税来自低得多的书价??在线出售的电子图书每册大约在2.5美元和7美元之间,与之相比,书店的零售价为每册10美元到90美元不等??价格的高低取决于出版物的大小和质量。 [4] But how many e-book copies can authors expect to sell in an electronic market which is still in its infancy? The best-selling e-author of 1999, Leta Nolan Childers, sold just over 6, 000 copies of her book The Best Laid Plans. "I'm expecting to sell more than I would in the traditional local market, simply because the US market is so much bigger," says Teague, whose novel, Jagged Greenstone, was runner-up in the UK Romantic Novelists Association New Writers Award. 但在尚处于初级阶段的电子市场上,作家能够期望卖出多少册电子图书呢?1999年最畅销电子图书的作家利塔?诺兰?奇尔德斯的著作《安排最佳的计划》只售出了6000多册。"我期望能比在传统的地方市场卖得更多,就是因为美国的市场大得很,"蒂格说,她的小说《犬牙交错的绿岩》获得联合王国传奇小说家协会新作家奖第二名。 
电子邮件、电子商务、电子作家、电子图书……说不尽的电子!全世界都处在技术性的单调工作中。想必不包括图书吧?读书的乐趣不仅仅在于它能使你逃避现实世界。有形的书籍让人有摸得到、看得见的感受。没有什么比得上新书一卷在握的期望、封面的吸引力及油墨和纸张的芳香,且不说因对那些被砍伐的树木负疚而有的一丝颤抖。你可以蜷曲在一张有扶手的椅子里或床上看一本好书。而可以肯定的是,用一个小型电子装置来看书感觉将完全不同,即使这个电子装置大小和平装书一样,重量和精装书一样,并且有一个简单的翻书按钮。 [6] Even if you like the idea, you first have to have SoftBook and the Rocket e-book?hand-held electronic readers with high resolution screens, the ability to store several books at once, and a page by page text display. You can download? e-books from various US web sites, but unless you have the small reading devices, that means reading books on a large computer screen, and that definitely doesn't lend itself to a late-night reading experience in bed. 即使你喜欢这种想法,你首先也必须要有"软书"和"火箭"电子书??有高清晰度屏幕的手提式电子阅读器,能够一次存储几部书的内容,并能够一页一页地显示正文。你可以从美国各网站下载电子图书,但是如果你没有小型阅读器,那就意味着你得在大的计算机屏幕上渎书,肯定不适合于体验深夜在床上读书的感觉。 [7] So far, those are the two forums for e-publishing, a field still the focus of the technologically infatuated. Teague still meets responses such as that of the librarian in her home town of Nelson. "When I told her about them (e-books), she just looked at me blankly, says Teague, laughing. Or the response of the unnamed executive from a top publishing house who said of e-book publishing; "Isn't that for failed authors?" 到目前为止,那些"软书"和"火箭"电子书就是电子出版业的两个阵地,电子出版业仍然是技术上热衷的焦点领域。蒂格还遇到这样一些反应,正如她在家乡纳尔逊的图书馆员那里得到的反应。"我告诉她有关电子图书的事情时,她只是茫然地看着我,"蒂格大笑着说。还有一位高级出版社的不知其名的管理人员在谈及电子图书的出版时说:"那不是为失败的作家准备的吗?" [8] But the Bigs are moving in. Fatbrain. com, which has partnered with Adobe, will let anyone sell digital books on its website and is negotiating with publishers such as Macmillan and McGraw-Hill to find new ways of packaging their tides. Best-selling authors like mystery thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman are now posting electronic tides on the Internet. The website www.original-sonline.com also displays only e-books that have never been published in paper form. 然而比格兄弟正接手此项工作。与Adobe合作的Fat- brain.com网站将让任何人在该网站出售数码图书,并且正在和诸如麦克米伦和麦格劳-希尔这样的出版商洽谈以寻求图书包装的新办法。像推理惊险小说作者帕特里夏?康韦尔和乔纳森?凯勒曼等畅销书作家目前正在因特网上披露电子书目。网站www.originalsonline.com也只显示从未用纸张形式出版过的电子图书。 [9] Recently, top-selling horror story author Stephen King wrote and published his first e-book, Riding the Bullet, a 66-page "ghost-story in the grand manner". It was published only on the Internet on the website of American publishers Simon & Schuster who charged visitors $US 2.50 to download it. In the first week, 450,000 people visited the site, before other sites copied it and made it available without charge?it's typical of the Internet, that something will always be copied for free. Computer giant Microsoft and leading US bookstore chain barnesandnoble.com now plan to create a giant e-book store. Microsoft is also leading a push to standardise formats for online books to allow them to be downloaded to any computer. Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes and Noble, can see a time in the near future when there will be an electronic version of virtually every book in print. 近来,最畅销的恐怖小说作家斯蒂芬?金撰写并出版了他的第一部电子书《驾驭子弹》,一本66页的"风格庄重的鬼怪故事"。这本鬼怪故事只在美国出版商西蒙和舒斯特的网站上出版,该网站仅向下载该书的访问者收取2.5美元。第一周有45万人访问了该网站,这是在其他网站复制该书并使其可以免费获得之前??因特网的特点就是总有些东西会被免费复制。计算机巨子微软公司和主要的美国连锁书店barnesandnoble.com目前计划创建一家大型电子书店。微软还在领导一场推动在线图书版式标准化的运动,以使这些书可以被下载到任柯计算机上。巴尼斯和诺布尔公司副主席斯蒂夫?里季欧能够预见到,在不久的将来的某个时候,几乎每本印刷的图书都将有一个电子版本。 
对于不知名的作家来说,电子图书提供了一次出版其作品的较好机会。Fatbrain公司允许任何想成为作家的人在线存储手稿,每月只收费1美元。对出版商来说,这可能是件完全没有碰到过的令人头痛的事,因为已成名的作家可能甩掉经纪人并直接把书目发放给他们的读者,虽然出版社仍将在编辑和经销图书方面发挥作用。 [11] Small book publisher Hazard Press, however, is excited by the possibilities. Managing director Quentin Wilson believes that it will be especially invaluable for selling the company's back catalogue because it won't require a print run13 of thousands just a quick electronic format. 然而,小出版商哈泽德出版社因为看到了机会而兴奋不已。总经理昆廷?威尔逊相信出售公司的过期图书将是件极有价值的事,因为那不需要大量的印刷时间,只需快捷的电子版式就行了。 [12] With the kind of heavyweights now backing14 e-publishing, it's a matter of when, not if, the phenomenon rolls into town. Does it mean the death of books as we now know them? What happens when electronic readers are as cheap as dirt15, or when media conglomerates give them away to help to sell their vast archives of material? Would you rather pack a box of discs next time you move to a new house, instead of seemingly endless cartons of books? There is still a romance to books that it's hard to see their electronic cousins1 replacing. 由于目前有特别重要的人物或公司支持电子出版事业,这种现象发展到城镇只是时间的问题,而不是假设的问题。这是不是意味着我们现在所了解的那些书籍的毁灭呢?当电子阅读器便宜透顶,或者当媒体集团赠送阅读器以推动出售他们的大量档案资料时,会发生什么情况呢?你下次搬到新住宅时,也许宁愿装一盒磁盘,而不愿装那些似乎装不完的书籍吧?对书籍还有一种浪漫想法,认为书籍很难被电子同类物所取代。 [13] "I don't think we've reached anything like the version of e-books that will probably come about18 within a year, " says Wilson. "And I don't see the actual physical book disappearing. But I do see the future including the downloading of a particular book in a formatted file of some kind. It's inevitable." 我认为我们还没有发展到可能在一年之内产生电子图书版本这样的地步,"威尔逊说。"我也不认为有形的书籍正在消失。但是我确实可以预见到未来,包括下载某种格式化文本形式的特殊的书。这是不可避免的。" [14] In the way that horses remained after the advent of the car, books won't disappear entirely for book lovers. They will simply become a new form of recreation. 就像汽车出现之后马匹仍然保留着,因为有书籍的爱好者,书籍不会完全消失。书籍将单纯成为一种新的娱乐形式。 
什么东西也比不上一本精心制作的书籍,"威尔逊说。
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