Microsoft created mslit.com, I suppose, to promote the eBooks published in its proprietary .lit file format. On its “Most Popular” download list, 6 out of the 10 titles are free eBooks. To me it’s an indication that most people still expect to get things for free from the Internet (a notion that has caused tremendous anxiety for record company execs and enriched lawyers on their payroll). How can you blame them? If Net citizens of the world can read New York Times for free and download Eminem’s latest hits from Kazaa for nothing, surely they will want more. In some parts of the world, these free offerings literally mean intellectual freedom. Right this moment, quite possibly, some university English majors in Tehran, Damascus, Havana, Beijing are staring into computer screens eagerly awaiting the words of Dickens, Wells, Hardy, Austen to flow through the mighty digital river into their hard drives.

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For those of us who are fans of Virginia Woolf, the absolute delight is knowing that her works are in public domain and many can be downloaded from the Internet for free. However, I could not find a free version of her most influential writing, "The Waves", in Microsoft Reader eBook format. I did find a HTML version of the book in University of Adelaide’s e-library, and proceeded to convert the “.html” file into Microsoft Reader eBook’s “.lit” file.

First, I copied the entire text into Microsoft Word and created a “.doc” file, then it was a one-click operation to turn it into a “.lit” file with Microsoft’s “Read” software. The process took less than 5 minutes. Why do I even bother if I can read the book on Web pages? A couple of reasons: 1) "The Waves" as a Microsoft Reader eBook is a lean and portable 290K file, down from 442K in HTML; 2) MS Reader’s capabilities to bookmark, highlight, take notes, and even doodle are unique and impressive. One drawback: in this particular test with "The Waves", certain formatting like italics and indents got lost in the process of conversion.

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Microsoft has a nifty tool that turns a Word document into a Microsoft Reader eBook. Moreover, it shrinks the Word document down to a truly portable size. "Slipping into Madness" (68,000 words) is 513K in Word; converted into a Microsoft Reader eBook, it turns into a svelte 279K file; in Adobe’s PDF format, however, it grows to a chubby 712K thing.

On the download site, it says that the software works with Word 2002 and 2003, but it also works with Word 2000.

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A fellow blogger points out, correctly, that when we read online we tend to pick out short articles. I browse through dozens of one-pagers a day and do hesitate a little with multiple-pagers.

The question here is: will e-books, with their pages numbered in hundreds and words in thousands, catch the attentions of people who read online habitually and frequently, thereby justifying their digital existence? The easy answer is: if the book is good, people will read it, no matter what the format is. I know; that’s a sloppy, no-answer answer.

For me, e-book is an extra choice with the side benefit of saving some trees. Paper copies of books will never go away. A keen observer of this “blog phenomenon” is likely to notice that there is a generation of youngsters who literally “live” online and whose eyes have more contacts with written words on computer screens than on paper copies, and that is a group of future customers the publishing industry cannot ignore.

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It has occurred to me that certain analogy can be drawn between e-book publishing and electric car manufacturing—both need entrepreneurs with tremendous optimism and determination to produce solid results. Unfortunately, in the case of electric cars, Detroit has decided that it has spent enough money on it and killed the project recently. Fortunately, much less capital is required to bring the e-book publishing enterprise to full maturity, and thankfully the publishing industry has not pronounced e-books dead yet, although it has lost considerable enthusiasm, which is why I think Microsoft has a role to play and a chance to claim another victory in the arena of digital media.

Microsoft has $53 billion cash in the bank; 1% of that equals $530 million. With $530 million, Mr. Gates can, if he chooses to, simultaneously reinvigorate the e-book publishing industry and save thousands of trees.

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A reader of this blog opined that e-books “will not become vital in the near future” because they are “simply no fun to read”.

I agree that book industry’s effort to push e-books has yet to produce the kind of result they had hoped for when they started out. I will point out, however, that our habits of reading written words are changing in the age of Internet.

If you’re reading this, you’re reading written words on a computer screen. Yahoo and Google are basically two giant electronic encyclopedias. Many of us read reviews of music, movies, and games online. I cannot remember the last time I got news from newspapers.

There are people who prefer the intimate smell of paper and the sentimental feel of a book in their hands, not to mention the portability. Although I pity the trees that have to be cut in order to print books that have questionable literary value (and let’s face it, there are tons of those around—just check out the so-called “Best-Seller Lists”).

In 1975, Bill Gates predicted that one day there would be a computer in every home; people laughed at him. In early 90s, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was certain that people would buy books online; many thought he was a nutcase. To improve on the current technology of e-books and make them “fun to read” takes that kind of vision and chutzpah.

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One of my readers informed me the other day that she had printed out all 16 chapters of my novel so she could read them at home. I received the news with minor horror. I would prefer that people read my book online or have the chapters downloaded to their hard drives then read them offline. Nevertheless, I am thankful that anyone would read my book, and I have no intention of pretending that I'm such a tree lover that I cannot bear to see trees cut for the purpose of printing a mere novel.

Then I started to think about the role that publishing industry can play to contribute to the simple principle that less paper products means more trees get to live longer lives and provide better air quality. A-list writers who have significant fan bases should seriously consider publishing some of their works solely in digitized form either online or offline. And there are ways to make the effort profitable. For example, they can sell advertising spaces on the pages of their novels. Prestigious newspapers and magazines are already carrying advertisements alongside their online articles. I know, there might be a “crass” element about reading a novel online while trying to ignore the ads for dating services; however, consider this: when those best-selling novels are adapted into movies which are later shown on television, we have to tolerate the TV ads too.

Think of the trees they can save and the respect they will gain from environmental groups.

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