Yes, the Net teemed with sci-fi and fantasy fans. But as I saw it, they were too busy talking to each other, and, while they would have been delighted to download “Umney” for free, they balked at spending the $5. You might say that “Umney” was like a typical TV program. The appeal was potentially broad but not deep. Pay-per-view wasn’t that much of a hit on cable TV, and the same principle applied here. “Umney” could enhance a collection of material for subscribers—we go back to the flat-fee example of the _News & Observer_ and Jim Kinsella’s vision for Time Warner—but even a Stephen King story wasn’t strong enough on its own for online use. Part of the problem, I believed, was the medium. The right technology for reading fifty-page short stories just wasn’t out there yet. With the proper equipment, the value would increase. Besides, even now, Fillmore could use a license or sponsorship model. She sold “Umney” to two computer networks, one of them CompuServe, which gained the right to post the story for a week during a conference on paperless publishing. “Hundreds of people have accessed it,” Fillmore said. The future possibilities were evident now. Corporations someday might sponsor books on computer networks the way they sponsored programs on CBS or NBC. In fact, whole sites on the Net—with the names of companies—could serve as homes for innovative projects. Sun Microsystems was oriented toward UNIX, relied heavily on sales to Net users, and benefited from the goodwill and publicity that its SunSite libraries enjoyed. Fare ranged from presidential speeches to the Internet Underground Music Archive; there could be a place for commercial e-books as well in these high-tech sandboxes, as Fillmore jokingly called such areas. The sponsorship model wasn’t perfect, of course. Fillmore herself was the first to wonder which corporations would have sponsored writings about the uprising in Tiananmen Square. Big companies often favored upbeat material. As I saw it, fiction and nonfiction books alike might suffer if this model alone prevailed. They differed from newspapers and magazines; book publishers thought more in terms of individual properties, and beyond that, publications such as the _N & O_ and _Time_ already enjoyed strong identities from their paper incarnations. The new media were less a challenge to their editorial integrity. But many sponsored books might degenerate into the Net equivalent of the wretched infomercials on TV, the ones where over-the-hill actors “interviewed” astrologers or memory experts, and where the audiences clapped thunderously on cue. Wisely, Fillmore did not give up on “Umney” entirely—it was still online when I was writing this chapter—nor did she quit using the Net to promote writings on paper. Even more important, she tried out writings that took advantage of links to other material on the Web.