Was Falling the world’s first ebook?
Did you know this website and the accompanying pages on Amazon, Apple Books and Smashwords where you can buy Falling are actually the second time it’s appeared online for purchase?
Not only that, but my effort to sell it as an ebook happened before the world had heard the term or even considered buying books in digital form?
I’ve always fancied I might, by some historical accident, be one of the first people to have offered a book for sale on the internet to be read on your desktop PC. But as history so often teaches us… not even close.
As this story explains, the first concepts for reading text on electronic machine were from the 30s and 40s. A University of Illinois student got time on a Xerox mainframe machine in 1971, typed out the US Declaration of Independence and uploaded it onto ARPANet. Apparently six people downloaded it.
A computer games company then released an ebook available for purchase on a floppy disk in 1987, part of a larger universe of game content.
Even when the web we know today arrived, a company called BiblioBytes came along in 1993 to sell electronic books. There’s very little information about them left online except for their contribution to a lawsuit heard in the US Supreme Court about anti-indecency provisions.
By the time I got the idea in around 1997, ebooks were – though still relatively little known – definitely a thing.
Although I still like to think I was a bit of a pioneer. A lovely lady I used to work with told a few of us about some author who’d made his book available on the internet, and it was like a flash of lightning.
I’d already written Falling (the original draft anyway) and sent it to some publishers without success. What better way to make it the global bestseller it was destined to be than letting readers find it directly?
Together with a friend of a friend who fancied herself a professional photographer I walked all over Sydney Harbour getting her to take photos to create a hero graphic, I made some graphics for links myself, selected an extract, wrote all the copy and drew up the sitemap, doing everything I do in my day job in content and communications to this day by project managing the whole website.
While I was doing that I sought out and went to see a handful of web design agencies around town, picking the best one to build me a website. And thus, the first online home Falling had was born, which you can see right here;
https://drewturney.com/falling/oldwebsite/
That main image is a composite of two photos taken from The Mary Booth Lookout Reserve, Kirribilli. If you look really closely you can see how the string of streetlights along the Bradfield highway don’t quite line up towards the far end.
The font of the title is Garamond Bold, extended to about 180 percent vertical height, and the fading effect was done with a Photoshop layer mask and that standard blue every text hyperlink used to be in the original HTML architecture (#0000FF if you’re interested).
Because I worked in advertising at the time I knew the media sales people at all the major newspapers and magazines, so I knew how to get editorial and advertising coverage.
That makes it sound like there was a campaign blitz that blanketed the airwaves and had the whole city talking for weeks, but no. I wrote a press release and sent it to a free magazine they used to hand out to workers in the CBD areas of the major capitals in the 90s in their tens of thousands, which resulted in a little column about four paragraphs long.
I also designed a series of evocative little display ads with an ominous tagline (‘See Sydney Fall’, if I remember correctly), a photo of the Sydney Harbour bridge and the URL) and asked an ad guy I knew at the Sydney Morning Herald about getting them placed for cheap.
I intimated that I wanted to pay little to nothing, and could they therefore run them wherever they liked to substitute for house ads, and while he seemed amenable I still ended up with a bill for a bit over two grand. That would indeed have been him doing me a favour, incidentally – legitimately booked and placed display ads in the news sections would have cost a lot more, even in those days.
They all appeared in the same two or three week period and I still have them somewhere. But the word from my web designer/host at the time was that (count ’em) 210 people had gone to the address to take a look. None bought it.
But here’s why I’m still a bit proud of the effort. That was in 1997, and I very clearly remember my next experience of ebooks a few years later at a job where I was the senior designer of a weekly business newspaper.
Stephen King had released an ebook, and try as I might I now can’t find anything online about which of his novels it was. It might have been 1999’s Storm of the Century or maybe an early edition of Dreamcatcher, but hardly any of us even had laptops in those days, let alone smartphones, so the only way to buy and consume an ebook was on a desktop PC. I either bought it or downloaded and read the first chapter free… I can’t remember that detail either.
Years later still I had the pleasure of interviewing the late Bryce Courtenay a few times when I got deeper into writing about books and the publishing industry as a journalist. Several of those stories were about the then-burgeoning field of ebooks, and he referenced King’s initial foray, as well as one he’d made with his own work.
To my surprise he called them both a ‘disaster’ inasmuch as almost nobody bought them. We weren’t at all ready to read novels on a screen on a desk, and thus were a million ‘nobody wants to curl up in bed with a PC’ memes born.
History’s proven that adage utterly wrong now, of course, because people curl up in bed with screens a thousandfold more than anyone ever curled up in bed with a book. But if neither the biggest selling author in America nor his counterpart in Australia could make ebooks a thing in the early 2000s, I certainly couldn’t.
Still, I feel a little frisson of satisfaction to know I was among the generation of first time publishing businesses and writers to take a run at it.
If you still want to order it through the old system you’re welcome to try, by the way. The link from the homepage doesn’t work for some reason but the order page is at;
https://drewturney.com/falling/oldwebsite/order.html
And once you’ve done so, you’ll get a page confirming your order where you can come back to leave feedback about your purchase.
https://drewturney.com/falling/oldwebsite/submitted.html
Of course, you’d be buying the old version that came before several extensive rewrites and polishes, and I have no idea if the download is still on some server somewhere (that host has long since ceased to exist).
And I have no memory of whose fax number that is – probably theirs. And I don’t have that post office box anymore. And you’re also paying $14.95 – I helpfully suggest on the order page that you’d pay upwards of twenty five bucks for the same thing in print. Being the pre-ecommerce era, you can even helpfully send a cheque or money order instead of submitting your credit card number.
You can do all that, but if you go to Amazon or Apple and buy the current version today it’s only $2.99 and you get the old version chucked in for free anyway.
Or just email me and I’ll send you the whole thing just for the review. By this point I’ve long since given up on it ever making me any money.