A Unique, New Web Format

SAN FRANCISCO —  Folks on the World Wide Web are apt to disdain the print world, deriding it as painfully slow and old-fashioned. The reign of the dead tree is over, they chortle via e-mail. The printed page will fade away, we are assured, and all information sharing will be instantaneous and two-way.

Case in point: HotWired, among the sharpest of all cutting-edge Web sites, which is the offspring of San Francisco-based Wired Ventures Inc., publisher of the online world’s influential Wired magazine.

Earlier this year, Wired launched that most tired of tired endeavors--a publishing house. For, you know, books.

And not only that, but every digerati worth his silicon is racing to get a book out. Just some of those already out of the gate include Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s famed media lab (Knopf), Steven Johnson, editor of the Web magazine Feed (HarperEdge), HotWired columnist Jon Katz (HardWired) and “cyber-pundit” David Shenk (HarperEdge).

All are writing words to be printed on leaves of dried wood pulp embossed with lampblack. Nondigital. Unelectronic. About as far from interactive as you can get.

So why are all these cyber-brights flocking to one of the oldest mediums? Someone asked Negroponte that very question, noted Peter Rutten, publisher of HardWired, Wired’s book division. “His answer was, ‘Because it’s the interface that my audience has. It’s still the prime interface that people consuming information have.’ ”

It’s the mark of legitimacy. The only way to truly be a part of this country’s intellectual give-and-take. And the hottest thing going.

“The industry that’s really alive right now, that really has an audience and is profitable, is the book industry,” Rutten said. “Book sales in this country have never been as strong. The interactive industry still has to prove that.”

“The Web is producing more heat than light,” agreed Eamon Dolan, the senior editor at HarperCollins’ new line of cyberish books, HarperEdge. “The book is an affirmation of a technology that’s been around for 400 years. This imprint is not about boosting technology. It’s a very nice hammer, but it’s still a hammer.”

Dolan’s imprint is, however, about grabbing some of the hottest names on the Web and having them sit down to write the kind of 50,000-word treatises no one in his or her right mind would ever read online.

Titles like “What Will Be: Our Lives in the 21st Century” by Michael Dertouzos, with a foreword by a software salesman out of Seattle named Bill Gates. Or “The Soul of Cyberspace” by Jeffrey Zaleski, on the spiritual side of virtual reality.

It’s exactly this question of word count, more than anything else, that frames the debate: Long versus short, quick versus slow.

Michael Kinsley of Microsoft’s own Web magazine, Slate, joined the online revolution after years as editor of the most definitely printed magazine, the New Republic. Kinsley acknowledges people just won’t read more than 800 or, at most, 1,000 words on a screen.

And there are things, everyone digitized is willing to admit, that take longer to say. In fact, now that the dust has settled some, David Weir, managing director of programming at HotWired, has the most conciliatory words to offer about the print versus wired showdown.

Each, he believes, enhances the other. “A good book is something the Web will never compete with,” he said. “This is an environment that fosters the quick, current, impulsive and irreverent. Even explosive fights and conflict. Whereas a book is a chance to thoughtfully organize a great deal of information.”

So why all that trashing of the print world? It is, believes Rutten, merely a turf war.

“What you do is say, ‘You’re old, you’re tired, you’re dead.’ You say, ‘We’re new, we’re alive, we’re hip.’ It’s the oldest way of denigrating someone.

“There is no other medium that allows for long, in-depth treatment of a subject. You’re not going to listen to a radio show for 13 hours or browse a Web page forever to really dig into something. There’s something about books. We can never do without them.”

And yet all of these men can imagine the day when technology overcomes 400 years of tradition. Each of them sees some kind of tablet-sized reader in the not-too-distant future that will allow readers the portability of a book with the vast resources of the Internet.

“I expect books will at some point go electronic, except in a way that we can’t quite envision yet,” Rutten said. “I’m sure there are going to be highly flexible media feeding you unerasable or replaceable text and images at the same high quality that print allows now.”

Although technically on the Web site of the fence, Kinsley isn’t so sure anything digital will ever replace the whisper of paper under your fingers. And even a hard-core digerati like Weir sees his point.

“Magazines and books, the long form of writing, can be completely unthreatened by the Internet,” Weir said. “The long form may go up on the Internet in a form of a database, but I can’t imagine a worse way to read a book, sitting in your office before a screen. The way to read a book is to snuggle up in front of a fireplace.”