Rocket Bomber - article - commentary - publishing - Form - Content - Copies - Rights - and Plato

[with diversions into the worlds of music, arts, publishing, history, wikipedia, and my own life]

Disclaimers & An Introduction

I like books generally and comics specifically, so the focus and argument of this essay will reflect that bias. But it would not be a major stretch to derive from these specifics some generalities that cover all “old” and “new” media, and in fact I will draw liberally from the worlds of music and art to make my point. Also, I went to a tech school — my forté is math, my passion music appreciation, my majors included physics, engineering, and architecture, and my degree… … Dammit! I knew I forgot something.

My friends occasionally joke that I was the first (and last) Liberal Arts major at Georgia Tech. I spent seven years and a lot of money treating a major research university like my personal intellectual buffet — but it was a tech school so even given my proclivities my efforts hit certain natural limits. I didn’t have an opportunity for in-depth studies in Classics or philosophy, my Latin is rudimentary at best, my Greek is worse, and when I cite Plato and Aristotle I’m relying on 15 year old memories, very short introductions and even [gasp] wikipedia. [my math, however, is excellent.] That, and I tend to drink steadily while writing these long-form blog posts, so I make no guarantees as to clarity and coherence, particularly as we approach the end. (to mitigate that this post was actually written in parts over two weeks.)

[addendum: and it seems the worst part of writing blog posts while drunk is not the expected errors of grammar and spelling, but rather an over-reliance on italics and “quotes” — I beg your forgiveness and forbearance on both points.]

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The occasion of this essay is the entry of a major retailer of durable goods into the new world of digital media.

The durable goods are books in this case, and the retailer is Barnes & Noble. Not only has the company launched an e-book store (an appendage on their existing web site) they recently announced a new e-book appliance which promises the moon & stars & everything Kindle does and more — but which hasn’t shipped yet. (and which lacks at least one key feature of the Kindle — but a feature that was being sabotaged by major publishers anyway.)

E-books, and to a lesser extent the nascent digital comics industry (excluding webcomics, which are native digital and hence follow web-rules and also enjoy a different, more casual perception from the intended audience) are seen as either the Great Hope or Great Evil or the Great Unknown by an industry that hasn’t seen this kind of change since Gutenberg re-invented and popularized the Chinese innovation of moveable type. Of course, Gutenberg combined that with the novel invention of the printing press — and the contemporaneous attempts to mass-produce books and sell them at a profit which invented the industry that now finds itself at a loss in the face of change.

That is to say, e-books are the first truly new model in publishing in 569 years.

Many an enthusiastic blogger will tell you as much (often just before trying to sell you on a stock). I think it’s important to discuss the why and how, though — and the answers to these questions will reveal that the so-called revolution is really just an incremental change, the most recent iteration of an ongoing conversation between Creator, Consumer, and Mediator (in the case of books, what we currently call a Publisher). [and this post is more about philosophy than business, law, copyrights, freedom of speech, public domain, orphaned works, copyleft, Creative Commons, the future of publishing, and the concept of ‘content’ generally — but I might just touch on all those points before we’re done.]

“Ya gonna buy that, bub?”

Let’s start with an extended aside on piracy.

Nowadays, any mention of “piracy” almost always devolves into arguments that start with music sharing but spill into worlds of online video & downloads, and even more esoteric topics (torrents, warez, fansubs, & scanlation) and in the end the Official Line is that Sharing is Bad. Illegal copies proliferate on the internet to such an extent that it seems obvious to anyone that the internet must be the font and well of all piracy.

Hold on to that a sec.

I work at a bookstore. Yes, that means I sell books — but I spend at least as much time each day collecting and reshelving the books, magazines and newspapers that patrons pulled off of shelves and displays, took to the far corners of my store to read, and then left in situ just as soon as they were done reading them.

Someone grabs a magazine off the rack; maybe it’s the same title every month, maybe it’s a new title they haven’t read before but this month’s cover is compelling enough to make them pick it up. They read it cover to cover. (or at least, they flip through looking at the ads and skimming the articles and lingering fondly over some few pictorials — but no page passes unlooked-at.)

This magazine reader just made a ‘copy’. It’s not word-for-word perfect, but merely by reading they have a good-enough copy that they don’t feel compelled to buy the actual, physical magazine they’ve just read. This is a type of Piracy that gets no press: thousands of people every day steal magazines and newspapers from retailers.

I could expand that to books, easily, for those patrons who either read a few chapters and decide not to buy, on to folks who read whole books (or work their way through entire study guides one question at a time, but on scratch paper without writing in the source) and then reshelve the books like they never touched them. And yes, actually — this works. Once or twice. But any reading contributes to shop wear — and I should put that in quotes but instead I’ll define it for you: Shop Wear is the degradation of stock as a result of casual browsers (and more intensive use) and while any single customer might object and say there is no way one person reading a book could possibly damage the solid, durable tome — over time all this browsing does in fact degrade the original. (And those of you who crease the spines of brand new paperbacks: you suck, and there is a special level of hell reserved for you. just sayin’.)

Just because we force a reader to go into a store (or library) doesn’t make that copy less valid. After I read a book, I ‘own’ a copy of the book — it exists in my memory. (this is how I can reference Plato and Aristotle in a blog post, as we’ll see later, but also pertains generally to everything I’ve every read, from the age of 4 back in 1977 right up to the business blogs talking about B&N’s Nook that I read yesterday.) Just by reading, one book a day on average every day since I grokked literacy, I’ve made copies of at least 12,000 books.

Since reading is legal (for now), that means I’ve made 12,000+ legal copies of all kinds of books just by keeping my eyes open.

Every reader is making a personal ‘copy’. Without paying for it. On the internet, they call this piracy. The bookstore actuality is Worse: while a digital copy is just a missed sale, habitual browsers and readers physically damage merchandise to the extent that eventually, we’re forced to discount it at best, or the item is physically unsalable at worst. We lose both the sale to the “pirate”, and part or all of any future sale.

This is, as they say, just the cost of doing business. It does no good for me complain, because there is no way to change this habit of the shopping public, and I will be denounced as an ogre and tyrant for even suggesting that any of the customers’ behaviors, even those that cost me money, should perhaps be reconsidered and amended. Or even that any of it is in any way the customers’ fault.

Suddenly, though, with the introduction of digital reproduction, this same process — the making of copies — becomes so trivial that it happens even without you realizing it: every web page, once loaded in a browser, is a copy. Every email in your inbox is a copy — and email is distributed hand-over-hand through dozens of servers so there may be dozens of copies made before you read it.

Unlike memories, which are tricky at best, or hard copies, which degrade over time with use (and ever so slowly, also degrade even if never used just because of the second law of thermodynamics), digital copies are perfect (as far as it goes), loss-less, and after the investment in equipment (computer, internet) so cheap as to be almost free, and to an extent “permanent”. So long as the support infrastructure exists (computers, decoding schema, storage media, electrical grids) this copy will persist forever. The ease and “free” cost of making digital copies also means dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of copies are made and stored all over the internet.

It’s a great way to make copies. The trick is, Who Gets Paid?

Ideally, the creator of a work will get both due credit and remuneration for their efforts. This is a good thing, but it is also a relatively new wrinkle in the distribution of knowledge.

America: A Nation of Pirates until 1891

Historically — pre-historically — if you had a song or a story and you wanted to share it, it involved a lot of personal commitment: you had to get out there and sell it. You had to perform it, actually, as there was no other way to make copies past telling another person and putting a copy in their head. And it would take quite a bit of repetition to get even a passable copy — and it also required someone else who liked the story or lyrics enough to memorize your work, and to then perform it themselves.

This is the oral tradition, the first publishing model. (the etymology of publication is from the Latin publicatus: making something public)

With the development of writing systems, the words could be given a more durable form — one now able to communicate across thousands of years. The Transmission of Knowledge™ passes from the bards to the scribes; and suddenly the corpus of all human knowlegde is not just the copies held in collective living memory but also copies (the first back-ups) made laboriously by hand. These copies were limited by the same criteria we have today: scribes (computers) had to know the written languages (decoding schema) and relied on storage media (clay, vellum, papyrus) and support systems (libraries don’t need electricity but they do need to be staffed; it also helps if they are dry, ventilated, and sound — fireproof is a plus but not a given — and stable, tolerant political and religious systems are nice but rare & can’t be counted on).

Every book that we now enjoy is a result of the making of copies. Our knowledge of the classics is dependent on centuries of hand-copies. We only know of most oral traditions because someone took the time to make a copy — to utilize new technology (writing was once new) to preserve the best of the past.

Mechanization in the production of copies is also not new; as noted above some German tosser came up with a hand-operated press that could do as much five centuries ago. In fact, this new ease in making copies (and the commensurate profits for publishers made possible by taking advantage of the new economies of scale) led to the first copyright laws in 1662. These “copy rights” are all about law, and money, and have very little to do with books (and those other works now covered as copyright gets expanded all the time)

There was a tipping point 569 years ago.

Before Gutenberg, the primary concern (and largest problem) of a creator was to be *remembered*. Anything that perpetuated the work was not only accepted, but embraced. The fear wasn’t that a work would be stolen, but that it would be forgotten. After the ability to make copies cheaply and in number, the primary concern of a creator changed: now it was important not only to get credit, but also to get paid. (Piracy is not just the distribution of copies, occasionally it is also plagiarism: the outright theft of a work, stripping its attribution and claiming it as one’s own; also, piracy can be the incorrect attribution of a work to a famous creator to make a forgery more valuable on the open market — playing on the value of a name, rather than the value of a work.) Since it was so easy (for the times) to make copies, it wasn’t the copies themselves that were the problem but the ability of third parties to flood the market with competing copies. [sound familiar?]

Charles Dickens never made a dime off of any of his works sold in America. In fact, publishers had runners to meet the ships from England coming in at the dock, to get the latest works to their offices that much faster, so they could publish their pirated version and get it to market first, ahead of the other pirates publishers. America did not fix this hole in our copyright law until 1891. While the printed books [in America] did nothing for his bottom line, Dickens found it immensely profitable to tour — yes, tour — and sold out theaters to yanks eager to hear him read, among other things, A Christmas Carol. [further readings for the curious] So even pirated copies can lead to profit with the right business model.

It took the law a while to catch up to a new transmission method: in Dickens’s case, it was the trans-Atlantic Clipper. The law also had to catch up to the new production methods: it took 270 years to go from from Gutenberg to codified “Copy Rights“, and another 175 years after that for the idea to sink in and become law in enough countries that the idea of an international treaty and consistent standard could take root. From 1439 to 1886 (and on to 1891 in America) there was something of a free-for-all going on, with illegal copies being produced and distributed all over the place.

For the cost of core equipment and a nominal set-up fee, one could run-off as many copies as the availability of ink, paper, and consumer demand made possible. The equipment these days is different, and we’re quickly moving to a post-paper culture, but the problems and opportunities are the same. If we figure out the new complications introduced by digital media & the internet in less than 4 centuries: hey, we’ll be ahead of the game.

Pause here.

Lest we think copies are evil: The Gutenberg Press and its descendants, and their output, were responsible for a massive increase in public literacy, with resultant gains in both education and innovation, the transmission of knowledge from local centres of learning to the far corners of the globe, the innauguration of a permanent and shared record that not only enabled but one could argue spawned the scientific method, the origination of professional journalism, and a consistent downward pressure on the costs of books (at least to the limits of technology) making the printed word accessable to most. Add on a dedicated cadre of librarians and the charitable impulse and subsequent efforts of one brave, smart man (among others, but Carnegie gets the nod here) and today a goodly chunk of the accumulated knowledge of mankind is available for free (or for a nominal yearly fee) to anyone in the developed world.

This, all because we got better at making copies. Copies are a good thing. Cheap copies are better. And no author, if they’re any good, need worry any more about being forgotten — unless of course they just get lost, over time, in the mountain of printed material that we produce.

The printing press is a hulking monster of metal, and even the new versions with phototypesetting and high speed rotary drums are beasts of machinery (watch your fingers, or arms for that matter) and are definitely part and parcel of the Industrial Age.

The new digital methods and methodologies mean that anyone with a computer, printer, and appropriate software (“the cost of core equipment and a nominal set-up fee”) is now a ‘printer’ and publisher; in fact, one can publish direct to the web without dirtying a single thin slab of pressed wood pulp. The equivalent of the whole of Gutenberg’s shop will fit on my desk, and *I* can print copies of the bible faster.

Where will the new ‘press’ take us?

Ask me in 400 years.

Are you selling plastic, or music?

Downloads are killing the music industry. That’s the RIAA Party line, anyway. The most likely explanation is that the Music Industry is killing music and the kids are deciding to spend their money elsewere: Charles Arthur writing for The Guardian (UK) technology blog tracks down the numbers, back to 1999. — and the results will surprise you. Music sales are down 50% over the decade, but are still more than a £1 Billion — while sales of video games quadrupled.

It’s not like the industry died — a billion is a billion (and are they really suffering?)— and it’s not like the kids stopped spending money. They just don’t like your offerings much, and would rather put their Dollars/Pounds/Euro/Yen where the value is: the video game is the entertainment touchstone of the 90s, and in the early years of the 21st century the Games Industry more and more seems like the New Media much touted for the past 20 years. Your crappy, recycled, over-produced pablum isn’t going to move CDs and past sales are not a guarantor of future profits.

Why buy a $20 CD when all we want is the hit single? — which is available for a dollar online. That’s all you need to explain the drop in record sales revenue. Sure, an illegal download is also available — but I could also tape it off of the radio, or borrow it from a friend, or just not listen to it at all. Sure, heard it once. Kinda catchy. Nah, I don’t think I need a copy, thanks.

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I’ve bought Dark Side of the Moon five times in my short life; in fact, I’m just six months younger than that Pink Floyd album; I have never known a world without it. I’ve heard several of the songs countless times on the radio, saw it performed live in full (Atlanta, 1994, Grant Stadium at Georgia Tech) and heck, even though it is a classic, it’s not like I need a copy. It’s just an album; I’ve heard it so many times I can close my eyes in a quiet room and listen to each song without a stereo: I have a copy in my head.

From a purely business perspective: there’s no way I’d be interested in this album anyway, as I was never part of it’s [1973] demographic and by the time I was making my own purchasing decisions it was 16 years old and I should have been completely taken by whatever was in the Top 40 in 1989. Why would I want Pink Floyd? That’s old. Buy our new stuff, from the new artists who are still on the original (rapine) “standard record contract”.

But this is the triumph of content over form: This one album is good enough that I will buy a copy of it for whatever format, and a new copy with each technological upgrade, from now until I the day I die, or civilization collapses (whichever comes first).

The Dark Side of the Moon is content. It’s music; and a masterpiece, and an exemplar of what the old vinyl LP was capable of as an artform. [and sadly, bound to it’s time: the 50s and 60s were all about singles; the 80s and 90s were all about singles, and the Naughts aparently are all about singles spawned by a crappy reality TV talent show — but in the 70s (discounting disco; and starting in ’69 with Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds) there was a movement toward the album as a complete conceptual work, an effort that rarely is attempted today] When I, as a consumer, talk about a CD — the album of 30+ years ago is what I mean and what I want.

The “CD” that I want has nothing to do with plastic. Or packaging. Or marketing. Sure, you made a lot of money over 27 years selling us 17¢ rounds of plastic with a hole in the middle (at usurious markup), but are you really fooling yourself into thinking that we wanted to buy “CDs”? It’s the current media, but only the current media, and media are changing continuously — from LPs to 8-track to cassette to CD to digital. The record companies have been responsible for all of these changes (save the most recent one) and often promoted one over another even in the face of consumer resistance or a degradation in quality. A victory of Form over Content.

Dear RIAA members & your international counterparts: are you selling plastic?

What happened to the music?

If your audience shows a decided preference for a new format, one with many advantages — physical size [nil], portability, convenience, fidelity [to an extent], and the ability to buy just the singles rather than a whole crap album, 90% of which no one really wants — do you as an industry embrace that format and bend over backwards, racing each other to make your artists’ work available to the public ahead of your competition…

or, just picking the worst, most bass-ackwards solution I can think of…

do you sue your customers for liking your product?

Hell, they like it so much they’ll resort to just about anything to get it in their preferred format even despite your efforts.

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As stated, I’ve bought Dark Side of the Moon five times. I’ll likely buy it 20 times before I kick it, and just in writing this I was inspired to re-buy the original, and also two covers [Dub and A Capella] for digital download, just because I can. (that, and Easy-Star All-Stars’ Dub Side of the Moon Rocks. just sayin’ If you like Pink Floyd, and you like reggae, it’s an easy up.) (Oh yeah, I bought Dub Side of the Moon on CD, too. And yes, I could rip it but I misplaced the CD in the last move & I don’t mind buying it again in a convenient digital format rather than digging through boxes in my closet for the next day and a half)

I guess this means I’ve bought Dark Side six times now. (more if you count the covers.) Record Companies, you’re welcome.

##

Are you selling plastic, or are you selling music? Why not take advantage of the ability of the internet to produce all-but-free copies, and the ability of the internet to distribute those copies almost-instantaneously and at minimal cost, and the capabilities of the internet to market things for “free”, & to empower and mobilize fan groups — and use all that to sell us music?

It’s not the web, or the process of making copies that is the problem. It’s a failing of the industry. Some guy with a laptop, a crappy cam, and a YouTube account is reaching more fans, and eating your lunch. I’ve bought MP3 tracks I discovered via the web, based on the quality of the music

Radiohead is proving you wrong. Reznor is proving you wrong. And for 98% percent of all the other musical acts, the biggest fear isn’t that someone is stealing the music, but that no one is listening. Like our proto-Homer of five millennia past, the problem is not that a work will be stolen, but that it will be forgotten — or just missed in the millions of other alternatives available.

Who Owns the Mona Lisa?

[source: wikimedia commons.]

The original is in a museum, owned by the government of France and displayed behind bulletproof glass. Da Vinci created it, at least initially as a work for hire (never delivered to the man whose wife is pictured, though, as Da Vinci continued to work on it throughout his life and even took it with him when he moved from Italy to France); the Original could also be said to be Lisa del Giocondo, the model who posed for Da Vinci, hers is the face, and hers (presumably) was the subtle smile Da Vinci took a lifetime to capture.

So, Who Owns the Mona Lisa?

It will forever be Da Vinci’s work, but it no longer belongs to him or his heirs, or the heirs of Da Vinci’s Student, Salai, who took possession of the work after Da Vinci’s death. The Louvre in Paris can make some claims, and they certainly ‘own’ the painting in a very real sense — but just about anybody can make a copy of it. I have one; since you’re looking at this page (and assuming the image loaded) you also ‘own’ a copy, and even before I brought the topic up, you likely could picture the painting in your mind: not perfect in every detail but there was a copy in your head already.

If anyone should be pissed it’s Francesco del Giocondo, who asked for a painting of his wife (and paid for it?) but who never received one. His might be the strongest case for ownership — as the Mona Lisa as a work, was in modern terms a work for hire — but there is no way this would ever see the inside of a court room.

No matter who owns the painting itself (a unique artefact) or who might make claims to the use of the image (If Da Vinci had Disney’s lawyers, and a sympathetic legislator like Sonny Bono, we’d be discussing the relative merits of extending copyright for a sixth or seventh century after the death of the creator — while living in a sparse, grey, unadorned dystopia) in fact the Mona Lisa belongs to the world. To all of us. It is part of the culture, part of our collective heritage (a body of knowledge referred to by some as the public domain) and no matter how or how often we use the image, the value of the original isn’t affected — one could even argue that the value is enhanced: If a Mona Lisa smiled in a forest, but no one ever saw it, is it still a valuable work of art?

The Mona Lisa is a special case — not unique so much in that other iconic works are equally valuable: some paintings, some buildings, some plays, some few poems, and even a book or two — but given it’s [disputed] status as “the most valuable painting in the world” and the very recognizable visage & profile, Lisa is a handy shorthand for all “unique” works: The original will always have a value not held by any copy.

And it doesn’t matter who owns it.

Paperbacks didn’t destroy publishing

Go back 120 years — say, to 1890. Books would have been expensive luxuries. Carnegie was just beginning his efforts to open public libraries (having started in 1883) so odds weren’t all that good that your town (or city) had one. In fact, the very idea of a ‘public’ library would have only been 150 years old or so in 1890 (I’m citing Franklin’s Library Company of Philidelphia in this case, 1731, and it was a subscription library — only open to paying members).

In the century since 1890, technology and new business models have pushed the printed word from a luxury for the rich into everyone’s living rooms, bedrooms, and classrooms.

From my first Rethinking the Box column:

100 years ago, if you didn’t live in a city you’d count yourself lucky to be able to buy dime novels at the general store. 80 years ago you could join a book club and get new books in the mail; 70 years ago you’d have been able to pick up a cheap paperback version of many of the same books at the train station newsstand.

Paperbacks moved from newstands into spinner racks at the local drugstore or grocery. The popularity of the format (read: low price) also made it a staple of many of the small, independent booksellers — and 50 years ago the model became established: first a hardcover edition for the libraries, collectors, snooty book critics in New York, and the handful of capital-B Bookstores in the urban centres — and then if it proves popular, you go back to presses for a Book-of-the-Month Club edition, or auction off the paperback publishing rights to the highest bidder.

Paperbacks were and weren’t radical:

Yes, they were cheaper. While initially introduced as value editions of the classics and bestsellers, soon the lower costs of manufacture induced some publishers to create new works (and whole genres) to take advantage of the format. Stories which might never have seen print due to either “lurid” content or lack of a “literary” appeal suddenly found a new home, and mountains of books were printed to feed the pulp market. Some of these were reprints of material previously available in fiction anthology magazines — a format that is, sadly, mostly extinct — the magazines fed a fan base that later bought the books, and the magazines were a crucible that forged not just the fans of the works but also their creators. Mystery, Romance, and Sci-fi all exist today as genres — popular genres that support their own hardcover releases — because of the decades of pulps… but that would be another essay.

A paperback book has a floppy cover, but was still recognizable as a book. If one weren’t hung up on the literary “value” and “merit” of a Book-as-object, then the opportunity to buy one at a cheaper price because you want to, you know, enjoy it is a no-brainer. Here was the first movement toward books as popular entertainment, and also provided a way “in”, to merge centuries of Pop Culture Trash back into the literary tradition.

And that was a good thing.

Shakespeare was once pop entertainment for the masses — not a printed story but one meant to be performed before a crowd, with ribald (read: sexy & suggestive) jokes and bloodshed and body counts and important commentaries on class, authority, race, religion, and — if one can adjust slightly to the Elizabethan world view — also insightful looks into gender equity and relations.

Nowadays it’s literature; back then it was equivalent to sweeps-week TV sensationalism.

Later generations will cherry-pick the best of romance, mystery, and sci-fi and hold them up as Fine Literature — while either ignoring their base roots as pulp genres printed by the bushel to feed a near-insatiable market, or romanticizing their ‘common’ roots and attempting to make hay out of the fact that previous critics ignored or dismissed them. That’s fine too. (Quick, name another Elizabethan or Jacobian dramatist. Kit Marlowe doesn’t count.)

Pop Culture should eventually become part of not only the canon and corpus but also part of the academic study of literature, story, character, and myth. Not just Shakespeare, but Sherlock, and Snoopy, and Snoop Dog — all popular, all products of their time, and eventually: all grist for the mill that is humanity and the Humanities.

Paperbacks didn’t kill literature, and they not only didn’t kill publishing but expanded it to whole new frontiers. Even comics — “trade paperback” is currently used as a synonym for “collected archives” and if Penguin Books hadn’t started in 1935, and been successful maybe there wouldn’t be a common, established method for re-publishing comics (or an incentive to publish original graphic novels, which often début in the paperback format) and much of what we have now would have been lost, or would exist only in fond memories, flea markets, and collector’s long boxes.

There is no published rule of thumb, and publishers are loathe to release actual sales figures, but a popular book in hardcover will often prompt sales in paperback that are at least triple the original run (in units, not dollars)

Of course, that statistic is out of my ass, but I have close to a decade of experience on the front lines in bookstores, and there are other factors that might even make my estimate too low:

By the time a book merits a paperback release, there have been 6 to 9 months—or a year—for the book to garner reviews, accumulate a sales history, hit best-seller lists, make the rounds of [some] book clubs [many wait for the paperback release before recommending it to their club] and to otherwise register with the market. Given that a paperback is both cheaper than a new hardcover book, and a proven quantity — one that the publisher can pitch, the retailer can sell, and that a few readers have heard of even if they didn’t bother to read it — means the paperback an easy sell.

In the best case.

Not all paperbacks are created equal; some deserving novels go wanting. But by and large bookselling is a meritocratic system and a trade paperback edition is more like a Bonus Stage on a video game: not a given but if you do well enough on the first level you get a chance to rack up more points.

Other books go direct to paperback; someone did an analysis and their best guess is that the book will sell, but not at $25 a pop. Some publishers specialize in paperback originals; some genres (romance, and first-time authors in sci-fi and mystery) depend on them. And this shouldn’t been seen as a slight — for a specialized niche in an overcrowded book market, you do what you have to, to get books out and make the numbers work. For a number of authors, after a string of mass-market paperback first editions, they’ll see the series graduate to a hardcover release (as a consumer this kind of bugs me, as I prefer a matched set of books in a series, but I cannot fault an author for becomming popular)

No matter how successful genre imprints are with their respective fans, all this is just an aside:

Paperbacks didn’t destroy publishing. That is to say, the introduction and success of a cheaper, more accessable format did change the way publishers do business, but the core business remained the same, expanded to new customers and into new fields that once seemed unprofitable — not only were books pushed into new retail markets but the options available to existing book retailers were made more flexible and more responsive to customer demands — while also handing them new tools to compete in the expanded marketplace.

Now: digital books are a different critter from a cheaper format of physical books, if only because it seems that they can only be sold in the new marketplace (the internet) — but paperbacks were originally sold from newsstands (an extinct species of retailer for you readers younger than 30, but once a vital link in the overall publishing world) moved from there to racks in drug stores and grocery stores, and it took time for bookstores to adopt and embrace the format. I don’t know how an indy bookstore will sell e-books*, but if we figure out a way before all the indys go out of business, we’ll all be better off.

*and the extended aside:

there are many alternatives now, but some folks still prefer to shop at independent bookstores — and thank you — and part of that is the knowledge, attitude, and expertise of the independent bookseller. Maybe an indy can’t maintain a physical store in the new digital era, but the expertise doesn’t go away and only becomes more valuable as the number of choices increases. It’s possible that some future combination of blogger/bookseller will fill this gap — if they can wrangle a commission of sorts to compensate the time and effort needed — but this only addresses one aspect of bookselling and leaves in limbo the actual physical-books-on-shelves part of bookstores which is so appealing and compelling. I love the smell of books mingled with fresh brewed coffee and the ever so faint aroma of leather chairs and hardwood shelves. We’ll never get that from e-books unless we take our e-reader appliance into an old school bookstore. Maybe the common consumer doesn’t need this; I may be too nostalgic. But when all books are e- and even more of our work, lives, and reading takes place online, I’d be willing to bet a dollar or ten could be made by opening up a ‘reading room’ — not a place that sells books but a perfect place to read one. And it’ll look a lot like an independent bookstore.

[but that. . . is another essay]

I’d also like to make the point that

The ability to make lots of copies did (and does) benefit “pirates” — but for the first time also benefits consumers, as they can pirate it themselves without paying a professional “pirate” for an illegal copy.

So there is no economic incentive for old-business-model-piracy: even if you’d like to charge, someone else will undercut you by offering the same thing for free.

In the past, the ability to make more, cheaper copies almost always benefitted the creators and owners — after a period of adjustment. Mechanically Printed copies meant books could be sold by a publisher/creator for the first time (before that all copies were ‘illegal’ ‘pirated’ hand-copies of works) and the advent of the paperback (a cheaper, more convenient copy) lead to greater book sales overall. The first blush of online sales (Powells.com in 1994, Amazon in 1995) was a revolution in the sales and distribution of physical books, to the point where even if Amazon doesn’t claim to be the world largest bookseller, there is no other reasonable candidate for the title who doesn’t also sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of books online

Fifteen years later we’re still trying to figure out what online sales really means to publishers and publishing — and that’s in sales and distribution of physical books — digital copies of the same damn books are even more of a mystery.

But none of this is new. And I’d make the argument that the ability to make cheaper copies of a book has always, in the end, benefitted authors and publishers.

Before the printing press there were no ‘publishers’. Authors could achieve fame but could never make money off of their work. The technology changed that. Yes, after the introduction of mechanical printing, there were pirates. Yes, money was lost, and for centuries — but attribution remained intact (there was in fact money to be made in ensuring the author got proper credit, even as you steal his or her works) and eventually, creators got paid. (The companies set up to take advantage of creators got paid more, but maybe that is something we can fix this time ‘round.)

Before commercial printing: No Author Ever Got Paid. Everyone, from a first-time published novelist to Patterson, King, and Roberts, and on to the publishers that represent them, needs to double-check that fact — centuries ago, the only extant versions of a work were all pirated, hand-copied editions. No One got paid; the only impetus was the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.

If digital publication can be made to pay, in any way and in any small fraction, then it’s a vast improvement over 1400’s technology and even a damn sight better than the technology of 1850. No one got paid until the technology to make copies became so fast and cheap that guilt over the theft (with just a few laws also founded on guilt) finally overpowered the desire to read new works.

Dickens proved that touring is a valid profit model — not just for musicians but for authors. Twain made a fortune off of his writings, but also lost it, and to pay his debts also toured extensively. Both showed that a life of letters, and publication, has rewards that can be tapped for financial gain even if no money is made (or after money is made) in the initial sales of popular works. That is to say: both Dickens and Twain were able to cash in on their status as creators.

In this, at least, the new digital age makes attribution a core of the new piracy: sure, it’s a free copy but almost all pirates are most careful to properly tag and credit a file with the creator, year of publication or release, and technical info on how the file was encoded and compressed — else, the file has no ‘value’ to the sponges who are looking to download it for free. It’s perverse, when one actually considers it, but the long (and getting longer) file names on sharing sites speak to the need of a downloader to find “authentic” copies even when they know they are stealing.

So an illegal download is a lost sale, but also adds to one’s status as an author/creator of popular works — so popular that people steal them.

Eventually, the law (or more likely, a combination of law and new business models) will catch up to this new ability to make cheap copies. And eventually, as has happened before, we’ll all get paid.

And the best known (or creative) creators of works will still be able to make money on older publishing models, even as free copies predominate. Webcomics still sell print versions, even though the content is free. Bands tour, even though the songs are available on LimeWire, or for anyone to listen to on the radio. Even after we download a text file, occasionally we still print it out in hardcopy for convenience (or buy a book even after we’ve read the PDF).

The consumers’ use of works is complex, and takes into account more than just ‘free’. The consumers’ appreciation of works goes way past complex, to the point that we buy some content in multiple formats, pay good money for a one-time performance of works that we already know and own just because it’s ‘live’ (not always an improvement) and will buy other works by the same creator, even if they are inferior, because we loved the first one and hold out hope that eventually they will meet our expectations.

Touring is, in fact, the oldest publication model. [*ahem*] “Historically — pre-historically —if you had a song or a story and you wanted to share it, it involved a lot of personal commitment: you had to get out there and sell it. You had to perform it, actually, as there was no other way to make copies past telling another person and putting a copy in their head.”

Some current musical acts make all their profits from tours; record companies soak up so much of the profits from sales of recordings that the only way to make a living is to fall back on a 10,000 year old model, get out there, and perform.

Advertising isn’t a constitutionally guaranteed right, and it isn’t publishing either

Some of the problems with digital distribution of content (particularly video that was once broadcast over the public airwaves) are merely temporary, transitory disputes over ads.

Let Me State Here: Ads have nothing to do with distribution. Advertising is not a necessary part of publishing, and sponsors have no guaranteed rights of broadcast or access in any publishing, transmission, or distribution model — and even if some historical models were dependent on ads, that means nothing.

All Ads Are Spam. They persist only so far as the audience (us) are willing to forbear them. Yes, they seem ubiquitous, but that’s just because folks like money; advertisers extend money to creators, to place their message in places where their message would otherwise be grossly inappropriate.

Advertising was necessary to provide free (or significantly discounted) content back when there was no other way around the physical costs of producing, say, magazines and newspapers. One didn’t often find ads in paperbacks (except for publishers’ blurbs for other books) and if any literary press ever dared put an ad in a hardcover book this would be the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

The consumer was willing to pay full price for an ad-free book. So there wasn’t a need to sell ad space.

Newspapers, on the other hand, wanted to sell the evening edition for a nickel (or a penny) (in either case, a severe discount) so they had to accept advertising, and all sorts of ads: not just a full page or a half-page or a column, but all the way down to just 2 or 3 carefully abbreviated lines, sold to thousands of individuals and placed in a whole section by themselves.

The newspaper didn’t want to print classified ads, per se, but they certainly needed the revenue. And your local department store wasn’t interested necessarily in funding the Paris Bureau or making sure the city desk could send a reporter to every town hall, zoning meeting, education board, and political rally — but they wanted to get their ad in front of eyeballs and for a time newspapers were the most cost effective and locally-ubiquitous place to do that. Even after television, which was fine as a national platform, local advertisers still had few alternatives.

Just because the ad-dependent business model worked, and for decades, doesn’t mean it was the best business model. And now the internet is proving that the model has serious flaws. Moderately priced ads, and cheap copies for readers, were made possible by certain economies of scale. If you lose too many readers and lose that revenue source (even at close-to-free, all those nickels and pennies add up) then you have to make it up by charging both readers and advertisers more. But advertisers will balk at paying more for ads that reach fewer readers, and some readers will pause before spending $2 on a paper even though the cost (in real terms) is still nominal and likely closer to the inflation-adjusted dime or quarter they (or their grandfather) would have paid decades ago.

I pick on Newspapers because they seem furthest behind on adjusting to new technology. Yes, their role in our society is vital. Yes, we need an independent press and the comparative costs of print still make it cheaper than either radio and television, and the medium of print is still the most information-dense of any of the mass media…

At least it was, before, you know, hyper-text marked up pages where any word or image can in fact be a link to definitions, clarifications, asides & editorials, and more information (some of it free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer) on any topic that anyone else has bothered to write about. Don’t get that from newsprint.

Yes, journalistic intergrity and ethics in reporting are vital. Yes, editorial guidance and oversight in filtering all the world’s news into just what was most relevant given limited time on the part of readers was important. But now we can act as our own filters and editors. And integrity and ethics aren’t bound to the printed page, or guaranteed by it. The newspaper is important, and I hope they can adapt, but I’d also like to note that all papers were born of a time when a printing press was an investment one man could afford on his own, and the first publishers were also their own reporters — today, any blogger is just as entitled to assume the role of journalist. After a couple of centuries, our first publishing efforts may lead to a new public institution just as vital as the newspaper has become, but to completely discard out of hand the efforts of internet writers as amateurish and non-professional (which, admittedly a lot of it is) is the same as only looking at the history of newspapers from 1605 to 1700.

I’ve digressed a bit. To sum up: the combination of ads-plus-reportage worked for centuries but that doesn’t mean that journalism is dependent upon advertising, or that advertising is somehow vital to the delivery of news. It’s vital to some business models, but these models are not guaranteed. And there is nothing holy about cheap pulp broadsheets stained with soy-based inks. Something new, cheaper, and more versitile is coming — hell, it’s already here — and your old ad- and subscription-supported business may not work.

On the one hand, the new e-reader appliances could be the saving grace for some newspapers, as quite a few of us will be willing to pay for a newspaper-minus-the-paper that we can read on-screen, and that are delivered direct without the need to bookmark-and-click-and-navigate. In this case, yes, the editorial expertise and fine reporting is still worth money (I’ll even pay a premium for the London and other foreign english-language papers). But if I’m subscribing via this method, the very last thing I want is the ads. Dear Newspaper Owners: you needed ads to support massive presses, physical distribution, and other costs. I’m willing to forgo all that, if you are, and will pay more for what is an essentially free digital copy. But if an e-reader version of the paper I purchase has these old-business-model ads still embedded in it, you and your old business model can go rot. I won’t be buying.

The Illusion of Permanence, the Illusion of Ownership

You buy a book, it’s ‘permanent’; you ‘own’ it. But books degrade, over time. If you bought a cheap paperback printed on last-century’s pulp, the clock is already ticking — the paper itself was insufficiently processed, so trace amounts of acidic lignin remain, which is why the pages of many books yellow and grow brittle over time. You can pass your library down, and your grandchildren will be able to still read them, but their grandchildren will not. The book will fall apart.

Ironically, books from four centuries past (printed on vellum or parchment) will last longer and will in fact survive after the vast majority of books — those from the industrial age, printed on mass-produced pulp paper — have crumbled to dust.

Does this put Google’s effort to scan every last book they can get their hands on in a new light for you? It’s not about copyright; it shouldn’t be about who gets paid. Let’s get the damn things scanned as fast as we can before they’re *gone*. We can figure out who owns the digital copy, and who is owed what later. There are millions of books that are old enough that they may only survive being opened and read one last time; can we do our best to make sure that ‘last time’ also produces a new copy?

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After I die — friendless, childless, drunk & alone — my vast collection of manga and other comics (and other books, too) will either be forgotten, or sold in bulk to a used bookstore, or sold at an estate auction to a least partially pay a lifetime of bar tabs, or perhaps donated to a library if I can plan that far ahead and can find a library that wants them. Yes, I owned [will own] them throughout my life, but after I am gone they will be released back into the public market — or left boxed and forgotten in some attic, or boxed and ruined in some leaky basement.

At best, my lifetime of reading will become part of a library collection, to live on, to enrich others in some very small, very fractional way. At worst, it’s all just so much landfill.

Every dollar I’ve spent has certainly enriched my life, though, and I regret none of it. I will stand proudly by my colection of books, and it will both succour and sustain me in my old age — thousands of fondly-remembered friends and stories, the physical artefacts serving as reminders of the tens of thousands of copies stored in my head, and occasionally pulled down and re-read to reinforce those memories.

Do I own the book? So long as I remember it, do I ‘own’ the story? Which is the real copy: the one on the shelf, or the one in memory? If the ‘hard-copy’ backup is a digital file rather than a bound collection of leaves, does that make my remembered version less valid?

Summing up

• “Piracy”, as presently understood, has not only always been with us but at one point in time was also the primary publishing model: Hand-written copies of manuscripts in abbey libraries and private collections were once the only versions of printed works. Everything was in the Public Domain, every copy was either pirated or ‘fair use’ and the only one making money was the bookseller: if you had a copy and could distribute it, by walking around with it, then you might be able to sell it to someone who had never seen it before — maybe you parted with the original, maybe you rented out your copy so someone else could make another copy.
• “Copy Rights” only followed when it became possible for a creator (or his agents, the first publishers) to make their own cheap copies. When every copy was expensive and dear, there was no market. No market = no business = no ‘right’ to make money on a non-existant business.
• Cheaper and cheaper means of reproduction didn’t lead to the death of the industry; in fact cheap copies were at first the genesis of the book market, and later the introduction of even cheaper paperbacks lead to books reaching new markets, new genres getting publication for the first time, many non-book general retailers carrying books as part of their product mix, and eventually: the emergence in print of multiple formats of the same book at different price points, to reach the widest audience possible, and also greatly expanded book ownership in general. Books went from prized possessions (a single reader might own only a dozen) to a mass commodity so widespread that for many of us storage of excess books becomes a problem. They are no longer treasured, but instead are boxed and stored. And This Is a Good Thing, in my opinion.
• Original works still have value. When we pay for a copy, we want an authentic version. Even if it’s a pirated copy, we want the “official” version, one that is as true to the original as possible.
• Some works (i.e. the Mona Lisa) will always have value as a unique artefact no matter how many copies exist
• Ads suck, and are an evil to be borne, not a business model to be emulated, and certainly not a guaranteed part of the transmission of knowledge in either the historical or business sense.
• For the first time ever: “piracy”, that is the say the sharing and distribution of copies, is now free to the end consumer without the need to pay a fee to an intermediary.

Wait, did I say for the first time?

Well, sure, only if we exclude those who read magazines and newspapers in bookstores without paying for them (and who have done so for decades), those who lend books (and who have lent books for centuries), and those who visited libraries to do research and read the transmitted knowledge of the past, a practice that has been both legal, free (after the not-insubstantial transportation costs), and encouraged for millennia. We all carry copies of works in memory; a ‘good enough’ copy in our head. What is called piracy in some circles is called use — not always fair use, but use all the same — in most others. My point is not to defend piracy as piracy — but to point out that historically, and more importantly, sharing is usually a good thing.

Until the music industry can stop people from reading magazines in the bookstore without paying for them — affecting my bottom line, as a bookseller — I don’t want to hear jack from the RIAA about how piracy is ruining their business. Boo hoo, people steal music.

You guys have had twelve decades to figure this out: from sheet music to player piano rolls to wax cylinders to radio broadcasts to cassette tapes to digital downloads — and each time some engineer comes up with a new way to transmit copies of music you go into an apoplectic fit and insist it’ll kill your business, and you sue the hell out of anyone and everyone, and each time you rebound and make even more money. Just shut up.

Print media is facing the same issue now, and while some may claim that digital copies (e-books and their close cousins) are brand new and present brand new challenges — it’s all still about copies, and distribution, and readers.

Distribution used to mean caravan & pack mule, or trireme & caravel, or clipper ships & windjammers, or steam ship & rails, or newsboys & horse-drawn carts, or delivery van & the postal service, or some combination of all of these that got a book or newspaper to your door. The cost of print copies (like the cost of all goods that can be mass produced) has always gone down. While the cost of distribution has decreased less steadily, there are also downward pressures that have brought transit costs incrementally down as well.

The internet combines the two and dials it up to eleven: now the cost of making a copy and distributing it world-wide is little more than the price of admission: once you’re on the internet the rest seems free.

This is the new bit. Past that, it’s all just publishing, and by that I don’t mean 1960s business models but the whole world and historical context of publishing from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Franklin to Dickens to Twain to Hearst to Lane to Bezos — and yeah, I’m mixing my metaphors & models freely — but what’s so different from a poet of pre-Hellenic Greece (i.e. a reporter of his day) relating a battle that even in his time occurred centuries past, and a modern blogger writing an essay on, say, the difference between ownership, authorship, and the illusion of business models in publishing in relation to the contemporary profligation of works:

We both do what we can to get the word out. Neither looks to make a buck; both just want to be read, and remembered.

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And now, the sticky bit. I’ll admit: I pulled Plato into the subject line just because it sounded good, and I thought I’d be able to make some profound statements about Form vs. Content vs. Original Works vs. Copies. And maybe I have. I lack the chops to push the point past a drive-by reference.

But there are problems, not least of which is that what Plato called Form I’d define in modern terms as Content, and the concept of perfect copies likely never occurred to any of the ancient Greeks; in fact their ‘copies’ are almost always depicted as imperfect iterations of an exemplary, philosophical Ideal.

If there is an Ideal, I can copy it and have it up on usenet, p2p networks, and as a torrent in 5 minutes flat.

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The world has changed: There are six billion of us where there used to be a scant six million, and more folks are on the internet today than were even alive when the poet known to us as Homer first started talking about Helen, Paris, Hector and Achilles.

Old models have broken. New models are being found.

Past that, I can’t say — but maybe I’ve been able to lend you some perspective you didn’t have before.