Earlier today, on my podcast The Biblio File, I hosted a two and one half hour interview with Dave Howell, the founder of early commercial e-book site Alexandria Digital Literature. We covered a great deal of territory, but here is a summary of some of the more interesting points.
Dave originally had the idea for the Alexlit book recommender application while in high school, but shelved it when he couldn’t think of a way to get enough people around the same PC. Over a decade later, the Internet and the music-recommendation site that later became Firefly inspired him to revisit the idea in conjunction with a business venture of some kind. After the idea of selling paper books on-line was pre-empted by Amazon.com, Dave turned to the “futuristic” idea of selling books electronically and founded Alexlit.
Alexlit originally sold its stories without DRM encryption largely because there were no forms of DRM available at the time; MobiPocket and Peanut Press had yet to come along. Instead, the site featured a “copyright quiz” that prospective customers had to pass successfully in order to be allowed to purchase, and also watermarked downloaded files with the purchaser’s name. Howell noted that over Alexlit’s entire history, he never found any examples of an Alexlit work that was subsequently “pirated.”
E-books and stories purchased from Alexlit could be downloaded in HTML, “Rocket flavored” HTML, Palm AportisDoc, and PDF (in varieties formatted for printing or formatted for screen reading). Howell noted that downloads were pretty evenly distributed among all four formats. This was made possible by the Rosetta Machine, an application which used a single HTML-like parent format (“Nile”) to create alternate versions on the fly. This avoided the time and effort that could potentially be spent converting each new work into every different flavor. And as future-proofing, it could easily be extended to convert into any new format that might come along.
In the years prior to the dot-com bust, Alexlit tried to get venture capital, but was too small to attract the interest of venture capitalists. Venture capitalists who wanted a return on their investment wanted to triple twenty or thirty million dollar investments, not the two or three million that Alexlit needed. And after the dot-com bust, nobody wanted to invest in any Internet company large or small, so Alexlit’s staff dwindled from eleven employees to one and one-half. During this time, the book recommender and website were more or less neglected from a lack of resources necessary to maintain them. Dave notes that he considers it a tribute to Microsoft’s reliability that the system continued working at all for the decade in which it could not be properly maintained. Finally, the system on which Alexlit was limping along crashed for good back in February. (However, all the user and recommendation data is still intact.)
However, hope came more recently when an unnamed e-book publisher contacted Rosetta Solutions (the company which Alexlit had become) with an interest in using the Rosetta Machine to make it easier to convert to the multiple formats they sold. Dave was more than happy to do that, and the company was quite pleased with the results: it cut a task that had formerly taken two days down to taking only thirty minutes. Rosetta Solutions has been applying their expertise to other electronic-book-related tasks as well, such as NetGalley—a system for distributing galleys and advance reader copies that can save publishers a great deal of money and allow them to make advance copies of their works much more widely available.
With the interests these new sidelines have brought about, Dave is working on the site again, planning to restore at least basic functionality for now and hopefully revamping it by the end of the year. He is hesitant to commit to any timeline, but he hopes to have the recommender up soon, and the bookshelves where people’s Alexlit purchases are stored after that. He is hampered in one respect by the server license, which at the moment allows only five users at a time; he is hoping to expand that as soon as possible.
This only touches the surface of what was covered in the interview; there was discussion of the e-book industry, the necessity or lack thereof of DRM, and other matters, especially once we were joined by David Rothman. There were some great stories about people “arguing” with the recommender (and usually discovering it was right and they were wrong), and much much more.
The interview is available for download in three parts at The Biblio File. Enjoy!
