IN A WORLD THAT IS INCREASINGLY online, why are writers so wary of websites?

Type in a few well-known names and the results are unexpected and amusing: try Rushdie, and Salman’s Web Site looks promising, but out pops a single line — Under Construction. Martin Amis appears to have no web presence at all, apart from “Allo, les amis”, a French holiday log-in. Smiths Ali and Zadie have plenty of web threads, but A Web of One’s Own they have not.

Hanif Kureishi has a miserable site, which looks as if it’s been generated at an Early Learning Centre based in Wigan, while Ruth Rendell has a publisher’s site harder to navigate than Bugdom Level Eight.

If you want fun, you have to go to Stephen King’s site, which is great — spooky and barmy and informative all at once. At present he’s running an auction where the winner gets to be a character in one of his books. Never a dull moment with horror. Or you could go to Ian Rankin’s site, which includes an interactive map of Rebus’s Edinburgh.

My own site is five years old this month, and just in for a service and respray. Like most writers, I couldn’t have cared less about the wonderful world of the web, until a Cambridge academic (philosophy), bought up 130 writers’ domain names, with a view to getting rich out of making us buy them back, or selling them on to third parties.

Agents, publishers, the Society of Authors, seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about the philosopher-spiv and his credit card purchases; he opined that that he had to sell the names because he was paying 18 per cent APR on his Visa. I decided to take him on myself, and being a bit of a terrier, got the legal beagles involved, and after a nasty fight, the spiv lost.

It turned out to be the landmark case for domain name theft — or wrongful registration, as it is politely called, and the following day, Madonna and Julia Roberts both got their names back. Sadly, they didn’t send me any helpful financial contributions.

For me, it was a turning point. I had got my name back and I had to do something with it. I started the website in 2000, and what made me continue was the response.

I get about 20,000 hits a month, and I don’t flatter myself that this is all to do with me. The new generation has been bred and fed on computers, and that is how they want to find out about writers.

It helps if the site doesn’t look like a scroll-down information sheet for a VD clinic. If the site is stylish and intriguing, people explore and they come back. My webmasters at Pedalo, who have also built sites for Alain de Botton and Sally Vickers among others, update the site each month with new content. We have audio, Flash movies, photos, a regular column, and the ever popular Message Board, where visitors can talk to each other.

Books and the web are perfectly matched, though they are often pitted against each other. V. S. Naipaul and Saul Bellow have both raged against the web as the destroyer of culture and the enemy of serious literature, but such rants are the fears of one generation misunderstanding the innovations of another. There are plenty of things to be worried about in our crazy world of globalisation and corporate power, but the web is about communication and connection, and so are books.

Anything that increases our capacity to reach others is a good thing. A presence on the web can be nothing more than a giant advert, or it can be a real transmission of ideas. To dismiss the web as boring or baleful is to dismiss a huge possibility. For readers and writers alike, websites are valuable ways of enjoying what we know, and discovering what we don’t know.

The British Library has just started a trial archive of various sites, including mine, to try to assess how online content should be stored, managed, and made accessible to others in the future.

It is an interesting experiment, because none of us really knows how much of the future will be on the page or on the screen. Books themselves, I believe, will last for ever, for the simple reason that we want them in our lives. But we can have other things too, and it would be a pity if books and the web can’t both live happily ever after.

www.jeanettewinterson.com

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