MCI wasn’t just eager to be a pipeline for publishers and others—it wanted to Originate Content. The phone company was already publishing readers’ short stories electronically by way of Gramercy Press. Soon it would release a trade paperback—yes, a book on pulped wood—from a novelist writing under the name of a fictitious Gramercy author. But the Murdoch alliance meant so much more. This global entrepreneur controlled Harper-Collins through News Corps. Would his electronic books enjoy global distribution advantages via MCI’s pipelines, compared to offerings from smaller, less connected publishers? Within the book business itself, the movement toward the Net was accelerating as summer 1995 neared. More and more authors were online, getting feedback from fans—just as the fledgling rockers of IUMA did. It was a great morale booster, but only to a point. The novelist Nicholson Baker, author of the _New Yorker_ article on electronic library catalogues, complained that e-mail had “the problem of promptitude. You have to answer within four days or you’re being rude. I like the stateliness of paper, where you can take six months. You’re still being unforgivably rude, but somehow it’s okay because other people have been rude in this way before.”[4.33] Obscure writers, however, found the fan mail from the Internet to be more helpful. In that way the Net was a _friend_ of diversity. Smaller publishers were also growing more comfortable with the Internet. Bookport, a California-based service, let them post their books on the World Wide Web for Netfolks to read page by page. Alas, a customer could not obtain a whole e-book at once. The idea, of course, was to discourage piracy. I disliked the idea of pay-per-read prevailing; the library model would make books much more popular among the young and actually _help_ good publishers. But the Bookport was well done with oodles of great links to book-related sites on the Web. One of the first titles was _Netiquette_, a guide to manners on the Internet; that was in the community-minded spirit of the traditional Net. Larger publishers, too, pushed ahead on the Web. Time Warner was selling “Quick Reads.” It was a series of reference books, self-help guides, and others that you could download in full and search for, say, the right quote from a famous business executive (_Bartlett’s Book of Business Quotations_) or the appropriate recipe (the _Cooking Library_). I could understand Time Warner’s fondness here for reference books. Most readers didn’t want to gawk at electronic novels hour after hour. The big question, in cases of tech-savvy conglomerates like Time Warner, was not whether the publishers were ready. It was whether the _public_ was; whether enough people would end up soon enough with the proper hardware for reading books in bed or on the sofa.