By E.L. Doctorow’s optimistic timetable, Booknet should have been on the nation’s cable systems this summer, bringing viewers 24 hours of news about books and authors, conversations, readings, workshops and screenings of movies made from famous literary works.
But the entrepreneurial novelist reports that Booknet is no closer to airtime than it was last Aug. 11, when he disclosed his “ambitious and brazen” plans in a Tempo story.
Despite encouraging responses from investors and carriers, Doctorow said that Booknet has been held up by the “unsettled nature of the cable industry.” Among the hangups he mentioned were the changing regulations and rates for cablecasters, the breakdown of telecommunications mergers and the rush by phone companies to get into cable transmission.
All this jockeying and turmoil have blocked the grand opening of the 500-channel “electronic superhighway,” Doctorow says, leaving Booknet and numerous other specialty cable services bottlenecked on an entry ramp, where they’re likely to remain for the immediate future.
But Doctorow and his two partners in Booknet, a media attorney and a TV producer, are upbeat about the prospects for Booknet showing up on cable systems around the country. “I have no doubt that it’ll happen. It’s just a matter of when . . . possibly by next year.”
From all signs, Doctorow’s cable entanglements haven’t stalled his literary production. In the year since he discussed his Booknet connections, he has published two books, “Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution,” a collection of essays, and a novel, “The Waterworks,” currently a national best seller.