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CURLING UP WITH A GOOD MONITOR: Personal Publishing Finds a Platform in Cyberspace May 1, 1998 Personal publishing, where people use their own funds to publish their writing, is growing fast across a range of genres including novels, essays, and recipe collections. But many of these publications are appearing not on paper but on computer screens. Printing and bookbinding costs are usually enormous, but if a work is written, edited, and read on a computer screen, expenses can be cut dramatically. Recently, new distribution routes using the Internet have begun to appear, and computer classes are even starting to offer courses in digital publishing. Women Find Their Voice No statistics are available, but according to publishers and other companies involved with the vanity press, the annual number of titles produced at the author's expense has increased steadily in recent years and is now estimated at 20,000 or so. About half of them are written by women. Compared to the conventional Japanese publishing world, the number of female writers is quite high. Women have increasingly been entering higher education and becoming more active in society at large. With deeper pockets and a bigger say in things, many have come to feel the need to express themselves. "Previously, many authors were aged men writing their autobiographies and war memoirs," one publisher explains. "But now women from early adulthood to middle age and later appear to be happy to pay for private publishing as a form of self-expression or a platform for publicly airing skills they have acquired." In response to the boom in personal publishing, a bookstore that deals exclusively with privately published works opened late last year in Tokyo. It operates under a system in which the author rents out a display space for 30,000 yen (230 U.S. dollars at 130 yen to the dollar) annually. About 3,000 books are displayed in the shop; about half the writers are women. They write in a wide range of genres, including essays, travelogues, illustrated cookbooks, and hobby books on diverse subjects including embroidery and pressed flowers. Virtual books, therefore, have been growing in popularity. Authors at home input their texts, add photos, illustrations, or whatever else they need, lay it out, and record it onto a floppy disk or CD-ROM for distribution. Buyers can read the work on their personal computers. With virtual books, there are no printing or binding costs. The total cost of this form of publishing has dropped to one-tenth or less of the conventional cost because of the cheapness of floppy disks and other computer media. At a computer show in Chiba Prefecture in February 1998, virtual books were displayed and sold directly. Around 120 works from all over Japan were on display, ranging from travelogues and essays going for 100 yen (80 cents) to CD-ROMS costing several thousand yen. The event was a great success. The exhibiting authors agreed that "virtual books are easy to process and free of formality; Internet home pages, on the other hand, are very difficult for beginners to make, although they are another good vehicle for self-expression." Virtual books have also attracted the attention of organizers of computer classes; a number of courses in virtual-book making have been offered, becoming popular with housewives and students. A representative of the educational division of a major information-equipment maker comments on the trend: "More people are using their PCs for hobbies, so we are shifting the emphasis away from business applications and gearing courses more to individual self-expression." New retail sales channels are also opening up. Previously, virtual books could be bought at only a tiny number of bookshops. But since around 1997, they have been available through the Internet. A virtual bookshop that opened up in April 1997 is reissuing out-of-print quality titles in digital form, and is also providing a forum for own-expense writings. In this forum, the authors set the price for their products. In some cases, the readers can decide whether or not to pay after reading. Publishing in digital format is just now beginning to take off in the conventional industry. In the field of personal publishing, however, virtual books are well-established and have become a major trend.
 Edited by Japan
Echo Inc. based on domestic Japanese news sources. Articles
presented here are offered for reference purposes and do not
necessarily represent the policy or views of the Japanese
Government.
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