Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [293]
The computer—and its offspring, the word processor—changed much of that. It did not eliminate copy editors or printers, but at least it had the potential to speed up their work. The author could now hand his book in on a disk, the disk could be corrected and used to set type—the only reason for a hard copy (as the paper manuscript now came to be called) was so that the editor could read it, since the editors remained a nonelectronic link in the process, for the most part, still reading the old-fashioned way and making their changes in pencil. Indexing a book, for example, once a weary matter of reading every page carefully and noting each name down on a three-by-five card, could now be done electronically—and since time is money, the cost inevitably went down. Of course some writers and most editors remained stubborn holdouts, but it quickly became normal to demand that an author produce his or her book on disk, and that part of the business which had hardly changed since Gutenberg set his first Bible into type at last took a great leap forward.
These changes were symbolized, at S&S at any rate, by the appearance of a matte black laptop computer on the polished veneer console behind Dick Snyder’s desk. It was not, to be sure, that Dick himself had any intention of learning how to use a laptop, but he recognized before most of his fellow publishers that the computer was going to change a lot of things in book publishing and that it was crucial to be ahead of the wave. His colleagues were surprised at—and mildly amused by—Dick’s interest in computer technology, since it would be hard to find a man more technologically challenged in ordinary life, but the laptop behind his desk, though a prop, was the symbol of his determination to move S&S into the twenty-first century ahead of schedule.
Dick had always shown a certain interest in technology. Years before, when VCRs were still a novelty and the battle between the VHS and the Sony Betamax format was being fought, Dick had tried to persuade James Beard to do a cooking tape. It was his idea that the S&S sales reps would get a whole package to sell—a book by Beard, a videotape version of the book starring Beard, and perhaps even a line of prepared foods by Beard. (He had in mind a freezer in the trunk of every sales rep’s car.) Nothing came of it (unless you count the fact that I had a delicious meal in Beard’s kitchen while trying to persuade him that his future was on tape rather than in books), but Dick did not forget. In the eighties, he challenged industry wisdom by plunging into the videotape business after discovering to his rage that the people who owned the videotape rights to Jane Fonda’s Workout Book were making even more money out of the tape than S&S was out of the book. Dick abruptly ordered his editors to get video rights every time they bought a book—no exceptions—and promptly set up a new division to exploit these rights. In the event, most agents refused to give up video rights, which went the way of movie rights in the twenties and thirties, and the S&S video division never got off the ground. It had spawned, however, almost as an afterthought, an audio division, which soon expanded into a major business; by the end of the nineties, S&S was the world’s largest publisher of audiotapes.
Thus, it was only natural that Dick should have been fascinated by the computer and determined to makes S&S the leader in a field that had not yet even been defined. Without most of us paying much attention to what was happening, Dick advanced on two fronts, ambitiously as always. He set out, first of all, to integrate the computer into the daily work of everybody at S&S, an enormous investment that after considerable difficulties resulted