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The Google book search settlement is raising yet another fuss over digital distribution, so I've been thinking about it recently. Base assumption: our goal as a society is to encourage quality creative production, but the exact method is irrelevant. I think everyone is focusing on the wrong things. What follows applies to just about everything, but books serve as a convenient example. Let's break it down vaguely in order of controversy...
Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.
Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.
Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.
Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.
In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.
(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)
Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.
Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.
Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.
Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.
In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.
(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)