Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

I am probably the only one in the Weekly who does not use a computer. And watching the young women and men around me touching their computer keys, I feel antediluvian.

I'm a typewriter man with a reasonable typing speed. In my little niche of an office you can always hear me tapping out my thoughts. I seem to have an aversion to the computer. I don't understand its terms: logging in, loading down and all the lingua franca of the machine.

My aversion goes back to the late 1980s when I was teaching at the University of South Carolina. I noticed that all the teaching staff, professors and lecturers, had a computer in their offices at which they sat for hours.

The university administration decided that I should have one and they gave me a handbook as a help. Somehow it did not work. They even installed a computer in my apartment so that I might learn how to use it away from the maddening crowd? Still it did not work. I bought myself a typewriter which eventually I brought back with me to Cairo.

My feeling of inferiority vis-à-vis the young computer users was alleviated somewhat when I read an interview with Frederick Forsyth. You remember him? He's the author of the thrilling novel The Day of the Jackal. He also describes himself as "a typewriter man"

"I don't understand how you log-in, load down, down load or whatever you do. But I don't need to," he goes on to say. "My job is just to deliver legible text that is then digitalised, encrypted or whatever they do with it."

Well, that's exactly what I do, except that sometimes when the typewriter is not available, I submit a handwritten text which is not always legible.

Paradoxically, Forsyth has just sold his short stories to be used on the Internet. Thus he has stirred up a cyberstorm that has shaken publishing houses and led to predictions of the demise of the book. "To these predictions," he says, "I take the view that the conventional book will be with us for years and possibly forever. Its demise has been predicted so many times."

"It was said," he continued, "that radio would kill newspapers and television would kill radio. Now we have them all -- and more than we ever had."

Forsyth echoes my own opinion, expressed in previous columns, that one cannot read novels on "a green screen" or hand held device. And yet, in spite of his uncomplimentary ideas, he finds three clear advantages to cyber publishing: it is very fast, it does not need printing, stitching, binding or dust jackets, no lorries roaring through the night to booksellers and warehouses, and it's instantly global.

Forsyth has something to say about the inability of the e-publishers to promote their wares.

Conventional publishers, he says, have been doing it for years. They communicate with all the major bookstores weeks in advance. So there's campaign material, with banners and fliers set out. What is difficult is that readers have to find their way to the site, a wearisome and lengthy process. He gives an example of a man asking where he could find his story.

"I used a search engine," the man said, "but there were 500 references to you."

Forsyth brings up an important business issue. For years, authors signed away their e-rights with a merry laugh and now wish they hadn't. Now publishers are scrambling to hop aboard. "They are worried, the Americans particularly. Many are setting up e-divisions to handle e-rights."

It seems the e-publishing epidemic has reached us here, and is creating some problems. But this is another issue, one that I will perhaps return to in a future column. For the time being, though, I think I can safely predict that I will not be scrambling to surf the Net.

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