October 21, 1996

The Internet and the World Wide Web continue to spew
forth new businesses at a volcanic rate. And in the
heat of the moment, it is often difficult to know what
shape all that lava might take as it cools.

Most people seem enthralled by the Web, in
particular, as a new, hyperlinked medium that
allows viewers to move through text, sound and visuals.
Unfortunately, they are often displayed at significantly
lower quality than one might see or hear through other
media.

What’s worse, today’s Web requires that we keep
ourselves parked in front of our computers — an
activity that most of us wish we did less of, rather
than more. What we also need, then, is a way to get
high-quality material delivered through our computers
that we can then take away and read or watch or listen
to somewhere else.

But first we need a new breed of devices — call them
network peripherals — that will allow us to do so.

Imagine calling up a popular music site on the Web. Then
imagine, instead of just listening to a clip of an
artist’s new title and ordering the compact disk for
delivery by regular mail, that you could click a button
on your PC screen that says, “I want it now.”

You then copy the title — or your favorite tracks –
onto a recordable CD, connected to your PC or whatever
is the new Internet device du jour. When this is done,
the music site automatically collects a transaction fee.
You, meantime, pop the CD out of the recorder and play
it on your home or car stereo.

Obvious, right? But despite the fact that music sites
are among the most popular on the Internet, such an
application does not yet exist. Recordable CD units that
play back CD-quality audio are on the market, but at
close to $1,000 they are not priced for most consumers.
And though many companies agree that distribution over
the Net is inevitable, none claim to be pursuing it.

Closer to market reality might be opportunities for
print publishers who are intrigued by the Internet’s
cheap distribution capabilities. Hewlett-Packard, for
example, is preparing low-cost color printers for the
home that could make possible a new home publishing
industry.

Blake Miller, Internet hard copy manager for
Hewlett-Packard’s Inkjet Products Group, says thinking
of the Web as a viewing, rather than a distribution,
medium is “a truncated view” of the market, because most
people do not want to read much of anything on a screen.

Hewlett-Packard wants to be able to offer a personalized
version of, say, Newsweek magazine, that will be compiled
and sent directly to your printer. If you dislike George
Will, for example, you would never have to see his
column, and you might choose to forgo all international
coverage, for instance, that does not pertain to Japan.

Anyone who understands the true potential of network
technology considers such applications inevitable. And
yet, most companies that own information and
entertainment products are edgy about the idea of custom
publishing and distribution using the Internet.

The problem, from their perspective, is that if they
make material available digitally over the Net, it will
become worthless — copied illegally in vast batches and
transmitted all over the world for free.

They believe this because the prevailing wisdom,
repeated by many of technology’s leading visionaries and
growing in force, is that like it or not, information on
the Internet will be free. But this simply will not be
true.

People will still give copies of digital media to their
friends, just as they do today with videotapes and
magazine articles. And commercial pirates will continue
to exist, although technologies to “watermark” digital
media — indelibly identifying who owns the copyright –
will help deter them.

But getting people to pay has more to do with utility
than piracy, as an essay by Robert Wright, in the Oct. 3
issue of the Web magazine Slate, explains.

Wright reasons that advances in software for the
Internet — in particular the “microtransaction”
software that will let you pay pennies for an article
that you print on your own paper, using your own
electricity and computer, or maybe a couple of dollars
for a music CD that you press yourself — will make it
easier to pay for information than to steal it.

“Do you think you’ll choose, instead, to call a few
friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy?” he said of
a book he would theoretically sell on his Web site for
$1.25. “And don’t imagine that you can just traipse on
over to the ‘black-market book store’ section of the
Web,” he added. “As in the regular world, the easier it
is for Joe Consumer to track down an illegal
distributor, the easier it is for cops to do the same.
Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up
for this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by
much.”

This reasoning, which is likely to be borne out in the
real world, makes the idea of using the Internet as an
electronic distribution medium one of the few sensible
Net applications, both for consumers and for people
selling information.

The transition from here to there — in essence,
allowing consumers to manufacture the media they want to
consume — is an enormous one, especially for big media
companies whose business models and suppliers and retail
channels are deeply entrenched.

But if the promise of the digital information age is
that I can get what I want, when I want it, and in the
form I choose, then it’s time to see the Net in a new
light: not as some amorphous, one-size-fits-all mass
medium, but as a custom-information pipeline, just for
me.

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company