Publish or Perish on the WWW
A McLuddite Gets Caught in the Net: Part Two

Let's go to the ESL Publisher's digs, and see what's on offer here...Top honors have to go to Heinle & Heinle and Addison Wesley Longman. Both have spectacular sites. H&H is not only current with their latest titles and prices, but they and AWL seem to best understand and utilize the web's potential to interact with customers in a new and highly personal way. There is ample opportunity at both sites to learn about products and to order online. However, at neither site is it possible to request samples directly, though e-mail is available. But the designs and activities are both user-friendly, innovative, and dare I say it, fun. The sites are so much more than advertising billboards. They convey an interest in the field of ESL and provide opportunities for users to develop professionally and get a few laughs as well. There are bulletin boards, discussion groups and lots of neat stuff, like "café's and museums." AWL's site has a number of Britishisms which rubbed me the wrong way because they take on a different meaning in an American English context. There are numerous "competitions" in which visiting teachers and students are invited to participate. After reading the rules, I realized that these were "contests."

Small point but, hey, this is my column and my opinion. I will grant that the internet is international and should be for all nationalities, and not just speakers of American English, but since there has to be one word or another, I prefer "contest." The other thing that irked me about the AWL site is that in cyberspace, at least, RALPH (you remember RALPH - Regents Addison Longman Prentice Hall) does not exist. There isn't a peep about the recent acquisition. Speaking of Prentice Hall Regents, its site is also void of any reference to AWL. The PHR site is competent and big, exposing the full range of PHR product, but that is all it does. It is one huge mega-commercial. Some people have referred to McGraw Hill as the "sleeping giant" of ESL. Well, as far as their ESL web site is concerned, I'm afraid it is still sound asleep and snoring loudly. Though it does contain a few new titles, the site clearly has not been maintained or updated recently. It contains old, and now inaccurate copy, e.g. referring to a major product as if it were not yet published, when it has been out for more than a year.

The ELT divisions of the British University Presses, Oxford and Cambridge, are well represented on the web. OUP concentrates more on the K-12 market and is very colorful. CUP, which is focused on the college ESL market, has a more academic feel.

Houghton Mifflin's college division ESL site was the surprise find on my expedition. Though their list is very small, they have a keen sense of the internet's potential. There is a very nifty feature called XPRESLINK, which is a multi-level web site with viewing activities and ESL exercises for young adults and adults. Surprisingly, you can request samples but you cannot order.

Harcourt Brace and National Textbook/Contemporary, two giant publishers, both have multiple divisions publishing materials. HB has Steck-Vaughn and Holt. NTC and Contemporary are imprints with school and adult ESL respectively. But both companies' sites were a little disappointing as regards ESL. I had to dig real deep to find it and when I did there wasn't much more than product listings.

Hampton-Brown, a relative newcomer to ESL, does a very nice job, design-wise, with their web site. However, it too is mostly promotion. One smaller ESL publisher (Santillana) has a site that is "under construction." In the last issue of ALR I refer-red to Houghton-Mifflin, Mac-Millan/McGraw-Hill, Harcourt Brace, and Scholastic school divisions as the best kept secrets in ESL. Well, the secret is still safe. None of their sites has a hint about their ESL support materials. Distri-butors are not on the chart though they do have rather nice web sites.

The reason for the omission is that it would be comparing kumquats to pomegranates. Publishers and distributors have different agendas and needs regarding the public. But using the same yardstick to measure them, the distributors would have gotten the short end of the yardstick. I did visit the distributors' sites and this is what I saw: Delta is up and running with a newly revamped site though I was sorry to see that they no longer had the chat with CAL (Center for Applied Linguistics) feature. Booklink has a site too and it is fully functional. Alta's site is "under construction." However, if you go there, you will see a sign proclaiming that they are building "ESL Heaven." Since I've already been to ESL Hell, I'm looking forward to visiting it if St. Peter will let me in. Overall, most of the publishers still have a long way to go. They are all on the internet, which is expected these days, but with the few exceptions I noted, they are not much different (or better) than ESL catalogs. My prognosis? Books ain't going away, but neither are computers. As e-commerce gets quicker, easier and safer, the potential savings will be too much to ignore in light of increasing costs of sales force maintenance, and decreasing profits due to bookstore returns and mark-ups. But, and it's a big but, publishers will have to learn to understand the medium and how to make the best use of it. Much in the same way that movies eventually stopped looking like plays, and TV eventually stopped mimicking radio, the commercial internet will eventually stop looking like a catalog and come into its own. Of course, it could all come crashing down in Y2K, or some McLuddite could simply pull the plug.

Andy Martin