Publishing

[gfish]

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.)

Comments

[arjache.livejournal.com]

For editing, it seems like part (but not all) of the work can be shouldered by alpha and beta readers like you see in various online writing communities. I don't think it's sufficient to replace an editor, but it'll get you a good percentage of the improvements needed for a final product. And there's plenty to be motivated by there. Maybe they already know the author personally. Or maybe they don't but get to feel a certain amount of fame-by-proxy by getting to read and comment on it before anyone else does and by getting to communicate with the author in a more direct and professional fashion.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm going to be unpopular and call the baby ugly -- most fen writing is shit, and the editing is atrocious, even with betas. And that's just basic grammar -- how do you replace a New Yorker style fact checker? At absolute best, you get wikipedian levels of accuracy, and that'd be a sad, sad fate for the book.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

People start out writing by living very cheaply, in ways which are frequently unsustainable. They take a risk, the same as someone does when they run a startup. If they don't make money at it, they eventually go get a real job.

Book-length writing takes significant amounts of dedicated time. We don't need a pay-for-content model, but if we value book length content, or more generally content which has had a significant amount of thought and work done, paying authors is non-negotiable. We don't have to pay them superstar wages -- I'm with you there. However, if you want the kind of writing that you get when someone sits down to think about something for a year, you have to make sure they can eat. Free content does not do this on its own, ever.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The other point is that in order to get really good at something, you need a lot of practice. If you have to take time away from the thing in question (writing, say), in order to go do something else to make a living, that seriously cuts into the practice time in a given year. So it takes more years to get good, and good creators (authors, say) produce less work before they die.

I like living in a world where Lois McMaster Bujold doesn't have to go get a job as a fry cook; I'd rather have her writing.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that whole getting-paid-for-writing thing, being partnered with a professional writer as I am.

As he puts it, "do the work, get paid". SO many people want him, and other writers, to Write Stuff For Free. Writing is work. Writing well is hard work which requires hard-won skills which most people, quite frankly, just don't have. Something that is well-written can cause a product to make huge amounts of money for the person selling it ... and that person is usually not the person who did the writing work. So why shouldn't the writer be paid, and paid well for their hours and hours of skilled labor?

A large part of the Google Book Settlement fuss was around the fact that Google was attempting to pirate massive amounts of other people's work and then sell it for a profit, with the very thin excuse that Information Wants To Be Free and They're Doing The World A Service, Really.

Yeah, right. Sorry guys, that just does NOT qualify as not being evil.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

A decent chunk of the stuff Google was attempting to distribute is orphan material: no longer being sold, promoted or made available. The whole point of copyright and patent law is to encourage innovation by giving an incentive for people to make things, with the underlying premise that anything they make is automatically owned by everyone, and they merely have a limited time during which they have the exclusive right to distribute it. We all absorb our society and build things, and those things all belong to society as a whole. As such, it's not possible to pirate or steal it, just to violate someone's limited right to distribute it. If there's nobody distributing it, I think it's ethically not evil to go ahead and distribute it anyway, even if that is against the law.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I see now that my original post was poorly phrased, and many of my subsequent comments have been too caught up in the argumentative spirit. Let me be clear here: I'm all for authors getting paid. If people can make a living doing it, that's really awesome. I also think that will be feasible less and less as a natural side-effect of modern technology. I think the current concept of copyright is doomed in the same way drug prohibition is, and I don't think the legal system should be twisted to guarantee the viability of business models when technology has moved on. The only point of this post was to explore some of the issues creative production would face in a post-copyright world.

[spinnerin-ftw.livejournal.com]

This makes me think of Amanda Palmer's post, even though it's music and not writing: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/200582690/why-i-am-not-afraid-to-take-your-money-by-amanda

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

This this this this this.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Yes, but is her shift key broken?

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

*sniffles pitifully*

I make a living at content creation!

(And I helpfully demonstrate both sides of the statement... it's also clear that I would be making stuff if I wasn't making a living at it, because I was doing it before. However, given the ability to actually make a living, I a) can make BETTER things, because I can spend more time on them and hire people to help make them better and b) am a hell of a lot less stressed-out and depressed, and less likely to go out in a tragic bang.)

I'm not sure what percentage of word-only authors can actually support themselves, though.

Now, if you implement minimum guaranteed income, so that I *and the artists I would otherwise have to hire* can survive without selling stuff, I'll happily trickle on making stuff for free.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

There are plenty of people who only write because there's money in it, but there are plenty of people who write purely for fun or because (in my case) they figure it's better for the world as a whole to let other people know possible solutions to problems. It took me a long time to design a reasonably good foundry. I can't make any money selling it, but I might as well put the results of my research into the public so other people don't have to go do the same research again. That's the sort of stuff that free publishing does an amazing job of presenting. Popular music is a lot harder, or particularly film-making, which has some pretty high barriers to entry.
Some of the issues you're discussing remind me of opensource arguments, where technical people can make amazing things, but nobody wants to do the work to integrate them or do usability studies, so we end up with these amazingly powerful tools that are very awkward to use.
There *is* value in the content, even if it's just a reflection of the minuscule cost of the bandwidth required. Maybe micropayments are the future. Maybe we need something similar to the National Endowment for the Arts for editors and fact-checkers.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

...there are plenty of people who write purely for fun or because (in my case) they figure it's better for the world as a whole to let other people know possible solutions to problems.

Just as assembling a snap-together model car does not make one an engineer, typing up 50,000 words does not make one a novelist.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation.

...is there someone somewhere claiming that they *do*?

This is kind of a straw man. Of course people love to create; of course all creation isn't going to cease without money. That's not the point. That's not anybody's point. "Wanting to make a living at one's writing/art/music" is so many miles away from "having to be bribed to be cool" that I don't even have an entertaining metaphor for how far apart they are.

You're only going to be accused of wanting authors to die alone in the snow if you're suggesting that all writing ever should be given away for free... which... I can't actually tell whether you are or not, because you haven't actually *said* that. If you are, then that's just silly; nobody gets to dictate what lines of work people can make a living at and what they can't. Yes, the corporate structure may well be dying; yes, digital may well completely replace physical media. I currently make more money off of digital copies of my CD than I do off of physical ones. Digital does not have to equal free. Efficient does not have to equal free. Nor should it.

Musicians have already been bucking off the massively toxic recording industry system and proving they can make a living without it; if the publishing industry really *is* going to fail, I have faith that authors will find a way just as musicians are doing. Maybe not strictly analogous, but some way. So I don't think we're ready for editing to be the major issue just yet.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

>>I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation.

>...is there someone somewhere claiming that they *do*?

Sony.

It's pretty rare that the content creators make this claim, but boy, the content distributors scream it to the skies.
As Tim O'Reilly has been known to say, "I don't have a piracy problem, I have an obscurity problem."

[gfish.livejournal.com]

People do claim it. Quite a lot, in fact. I agree it's a ridiculous straw man, but it isn't mine.

I'm not claiming anything about how things should be done. I don't care how authors make money from their craft. There are lots of business models, and people are free to try any of them that they like. My sin is that I don't particularly care if they make money either. I'm concerned that interesting, high quality works continue to be produced. The whole point of this post was that, while I'm convinced works would still be made, I would like to look for solutions to ensure they are as high of quality as possible.

It continues to surprise me that music leads the way. It takes far more expensive production equipment and the files are much bigger/harder to trade. Someday I need to devote some real thought as to why that is. But while music is in the forefront on these issues, we haven't reached a stable conclusion yet even there. People still buy CDs, for god's sake. It's probably a generational issue, and we won't know what really works longterm until the majority of consumers grew up with the possibility of trivially trading data for free.

[solarbird]

I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation.
...is there someone somewhere claiming that they *do*?
See here, but the tl;dr is that while money doesn't make me more or less creative, it certainly does affect where I focus these creative energies. I also give examples I think are illustrative.

[solarbird]

Your content creation for reward commentary is reasonable for fiction, but largely inaccurate for non-fiction. You can make a real living in non-fiction dramatically more easily than you can in fiction. There are still lots of writers who make a very good living writing non-fiction, and, in fact, most of them wouldn't be writing if they couldn't make a living at it - at least, certainly not to the degree they write now.

I've done lots of technical writing. I enjoyed it. I've liked writing articles on IMAP4 and spam and financial analysis software and so on. I'd have learned about those topics on my own, probably, but I wouldn't have turned those into my carefully-edited (by me - editors love me because they don't have to do any work) publishable articles without being paid, because the extra work isn't compensated adequately without the dosh. Does that make this work non-creative? I assert it doesn't. While money doesn't make me more or less creative, it certainly does affect where I focus these creative energies. It also affects whether I'll drag my sorry ass off the internet and into a working mode when I don't really feel like it.

You touch upon this in comments, mentioning journalism as useful work that isn't glamourous, But it's also true for a lot of other types of nonfiction. Learning the material needed to write a good nonfiction article or book: awesome. Scrubbing a text together over multiple iterations to the best technical and clarity level it can be: not awesome. It's grinding work, and important, and without some direct reward, won't happen nearly as much as it does now.

All you have to do is look at the crap documentation in open source to see that. There's no money in it and also no glamour, so there is no coherent manual for Jack Audio Server. There is no coherent manual for Ardour. I doubt there's one for Rosegarden, tho' I haven't looked. And so on. People figure out things enough to solve their individual problems and the rest is on message boards, if you're lucky.

Finally, you don't touch upon marketing (or promotion) and the value thereof. Marx said it has none, and that advertising is a leech function reducing productivity. I think 100 or so years of economic reality has contraindicated that, which leads us to the conclusion that promotion matters. And promotion - beyond word-of-mouth, which will never be the be-all and end-all of this activity - happens when there's a monetary reward. You might argue this is better, but I'm not convinced of that at all; really actually good creative talent is rare enough without requiring a double-jackpot in both an artistic field and promotion/advertising/whatever.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm less sure how non-fiction will work. That might well end up in the same queasy situation as journalism, half-assedly covered by blogs. And obviously money serves as an incentive, particularly for focus but also sometimes for output. I was only saying that money isn't the only motivation worth mentioning.

Technical writing definitely falls under the big question mark. On the other hand, it's usually paid for through means other than direct sales of the work. Most companies are pretty happy to give away their manuals, after all.

I know people complain about open source documentation all the time, but I'm not absolutely convinced it's really a problem. I've never really been happy with ANY documentation or support models. It isn't a solved problem to begin with.

I guess, in the end, I really don't care about promotion either way. If all we're left with is word of mouth, that seems really very good with modern communication tools. I can't imagine a good movie coming out that I wouldn't hear about that way, for instance. In fact, that's just about the only way I do hear about them these days. I consume far more material (measured by anything other than total expenditures) because of word of mouth than any other form of advertising.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Perhaps editing is a service the author pays for, to create better work, so as to achieve greater acclaim and fame?

Writing and Publishing Clarification

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Fishie, for bringing up a subject that clearly interests and involves a lot of us - often to an intense degree.

I agree with you the the current models for publication and protection are broken. The innovations of the Internets and peer-to-peer sharing technology, sampling software, computer replication and modification, and other things besides, have changed the game to unforeseen degrees. The old system is economic dead weight. Trouble is, many of the parties who are trying to fix the problem either have little knowledge about the subject, have vested interests in screwing people, or both.

As someone who has worked in the publishing industry for over 20 years(*), I want to share my personal knowledge about the subject at hand.

To begin with, writing is not information. It is inspiration, often shaped by large amounts of time, learned skills, and physical, mental and often emotional labor. A written work is not composed of atoms or bytes of information, but of human thoughts given shape by human skill and effort. Machines can duplicate written content, but although they can produce text, they cannot produce meaningful writing. This is as true of non-fiction writing as it is for fiction. A tech manual still demands hundreds or thousands of hours of labor on the part of the human beings involved in its production. Beyond the necessary research, fact-checking, proofreading and layout, there remains the necessity of a human being converting thoughts or, yes, data into communications that other people can process and understand.

This sounds much easier than it is.

As I tell my students, art involves a spectrum between expression and communication. The Artist expresses, and the Audience understands. An Artist who doesn't mind having a small Audience can express whatever she wants in whatever form she desires; an Artist who wishes to be understood (maybe even paid!) strives to communicate effectively to a larger Audience. This feat involves an array of skills, intuitions and experiences that go far beyond merely putting fingers to keys or brush to paper. It also involves time, labor, energy and risk. The larger the project, the greater its intended Audience, the more resources, time, skills and risk that work demands.

And writing - fiction or non-fiction, is artistry.

On many levels, writing demands even more artistry than music or visual expression. A visual artist can get by on pretty colors or compelling subjects; a musician can get by with volume and intensity. A writer, though, has nothing but words with which to work. Writing in a creative and coherent manner involves a constant mastery of technology and artistry, plus the time and effort to commit it into words other folks will understand.

(more)

Re: Writing and Publishing Clarification

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Beyond that, there's the realm of intellectual property (IP): the creation of something from nothing which goes on to assume a broader reality.

This is where pop-cultural memes originate. Every show you've watched, series you've followed, cartoon character you've sketched, in-joke you've cracked, every spiritual insight you've drawn from a movie, game, TV show, book, whatever - it all began with someone sitting at a desk using the written language to create something out of nothing. Somewhere along that process, a writer took his or her imagination and drafted an idea into words that other folks could understand. Again, this is not data processing. It is art.

Much of that art - and the effort behind it - remains invisible. When you read a comic book, for example, you don't see the copious notes shared between the writer, artists, editor and publisher; you don't see the bible that guides the setting and character, or the outline of plot the book will follow. You don't see the concept sketches, brainstorming, rejected ideas and revised pages and art. Maybe if you're interested in the process, you might see the scripts, storyboards, a few design sketches and maybe an interview or two with the folks behind the project. What you won't see unless you're one of us is the time and effort this process demands. No matter how much you like Neil Gaiman's stories, you do not wake up with him thinking about the project at hand, sit down with him all those hours he puts in every day at the computer, participate with him as he debates them with his collaborators, toss and turn in the middle of the night with him as he hashes out some problematic issue in the story. You just see the finished result - something you can often polish off in a few hours. As one who does this for a living myself, however, I tell you that the work involved in the creation of even the simplest webcomic demands hours of effort before anything appears before the audience.

Something else you won't see is the mental and emotional process behind each creation. Every book, every character, every sentence a writer writes is drawn - sometimes kicking and screaming - from decades of experience and observation. For the writer, this can be a nerve-wracking process as well as a cathartic one. Behind every idea in the pop-cultural Wonderland sits a writer who dug through his or her life to express it... and who, in the course of expressing it, employed years of refined skill, observation, criticism and raw talent to turn that idea into a broader reality.

And the fact that the idea can then be turned into movies, jokes, tattoos, songs, comic books, action figures, whatever does not negate the writer's role in that process... nor should it negate her rights to earn a living from it, especially not if someone else is, too.

The core of the dispute with Google rests in the idea that imagination is information, and that information should be free and belong to everyone.

Lo, I say unto thee: bullshit.

(more)

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, writing involves time and labor. Writing well also involves a level of skill refined through training, learning and experience. Again, this effort remains invisible until you try to do it. But, as many NANOWRIMO authors (or readers) can attest, there's a galaxy of difference between typing 50,000 words and writing a good (or even adequate) novel.

Writing is an art and a technology. Just as the ability to snap a model kit together does not make someone an engineer, so too the ability to generate text does not make someone an author.

Writing is skilled labor, too. It can be shared, but it should not be taken from granted. As I asked elsewhere, would you expect a farmer to purchase land, tend it, acquire tools, and then spend resources, work and time to grow and harvest a crop, only to have other people walk off with it and hand it off to still more people (often at a profit), and then expect that farmer to get little or nothing for his work? I don't think so.

So what makes a writer different?

I'm all in favor of small-scale sharing. As anyone who reads my blog knows, I recently invited people to write NANO projects based around my own intellectual property, Deliria. That, however, was an invitation I extended to a small number of people whom I trust, within certain legal and creative parameters. If, say, Warner Brothers were to suddenly base a movie off of Deliria and assume that I'd given up my rights to profit off my creation just because the book is out of print, I would not, shall we say, be flattered. Nor would I accept Google scanning that same book (which they did) and then selling it (which they tried to do) without approval from, or payment to, me.

I tended that land. I raised that crop. What's done with it is my business, not Googlebooks' profit.

(more)

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Finally, I'd like to clarify the way the publication media business currently works.

* Composition: We've covered this step. An author (perhaps with collaborators) creates something from nothing.

* Editing & Layout: Someone else (often a publisher) has people refine the original work. This can range from fact-checking to legal footwork, stylistic polishing and so forth. Eventually, the text (and perhaps illustrations) are handed off to a graphic designer, who then formats the work into a digestible and enjoyable medium. From experience, I can tell you that one person cannot and should not attempt to do all these steps alone - the results, even for the best authors, are disastrous. Now, someone has to compensate these editors, illustrators and graphic designers for their own time, skill and effort. That "someone" is usually the publisher.

Publication & Distribution: Here's where I've seen the biggest misconceptions appear on this thread.

To start with, digital/ virtual media is still a new and exclusive technology. Many people do not have computers at all; still others lack the hardware, software, Internet connection or desire to process virtual media. Hell, I have all those things, and although I buy most of my music in MP3 format these days (note, please, that I said BUY), I hate reading stuff off a screen. I don't plan to ever get a Kindle, I like books, and when I need to read a PDF, I print the damn thing out. So although many of us are looking toward the virtual future, most human beings (and hence, most audience members) are still using hardcopy media.

And hardcopy media costs money to produce. Money to store. Money to ship. Money to stock and return. Every step of the way, people must process, track and sell that media; those people cost money. The media occupy space; that space costs money. State and federal governments tax that inventory, whether or not it sells, once or twice a year. Add more money. Finally, units of media get stolen, damaged, lost or given away as promotional items... and every unit lost takes money away from the bottom line. Add to this the risk that customers will not pay for media they've acquired, due to bankruptcy, refused charges, bounced checks and so forth.

Why would anyone do all this work and spend all this money if there was no compensation to be had?

(As I noted in another thread above, digital media are not exempt from this process. Virtual media distribution still involves server space, hardware and software, maintenance, updating, troubleshooting, virus protection, site hacking, bank transactions, marketing, customer service, accounting and more. All of these steps cost time and money. It is not a free process; as I know from experience, it can be expensive in all kinds of ways.)

So yeah - someone's gotta do all this. Why should they do it for free, and how many do you think would do so if they had to?

(more)

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Publishers, distributors and retails get a lot of heat - some of it justified. Thing is, without these parties, the risks they take and the work and resources they invest, there'd be a huge gulf between Artist and Audience. Even with virtual media, that gulf's still there. It's smaller, but when you get to the practical process of creating something and gaining compensation for it, the gulf between Artist and Audience remains. Just ask Lauren or K about the work involved in filling it even on a virtual-medium level(**)!

Finally (*whew!*), there are ancillary rights - a creator's ability to profit from things tht are based on the original work. In the Media Age, this is the wild frontier because - again, as I mentioned in an earlier thread - mass-culture technology didn't even exist when many of the current laws were drafted.

In our era, ideas are commodities. Mickey Mouse is a multi-billon dollar commodity, if only because so many people find him appealing. (Ironically, Mickey was created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks because they'd just been screwed out of the rights to everything else they had produced, including Disney's original studio itself.) Beyond the arguments over content ownership, there's a potent war being waged over concept ownership. Where do the lines get drawn between the parties responsible for creating a popular concept and the audience members who are inspired - perhaps in their own creations - to create new things based on the old ones?

I wish there was a simple or reasonable answer to this question. At the moment, there isn't one. I could spend all week writing my thoughts on the subject, but right now, I have a living to make.

As someone who works in the publishing business, though, I know that the solution starts with education. The Googlebooks decision was handed down by a judge who clearly did not understand how writing, publishing and ancilliary rights work. Google, on the other end, knew exactly what the company was doing. As a multi-billion dollar corporation, Google had a board of directors and a legal department that signed off on a blatant, massive copyright violation, then spent millions of dollars defending it in court.

Sorry, but hell fucking no.

We need people who do understand what's involved. People who know all the steps of the process, and who understand where and how the decisions impact real human beings, not abstract philosophies and pithy slogans.

That's why I spent so much time on this post today.

I want people to know what's involved. Because it impacts not only on the value of my own work, but on the work value given to work by people we all cherish.

Thanks again for raising the topic!

- Satyr



----------------
NOTES
----------------

* - I've been a professional writer, editor, publisher, manager and bookseller since the late 1980s. The business has been my primary source of income since 1993.

** Did you know that at least $1.30 of each copy of Ravens in the Library sold on our site went to Paypal, just for processing the bank transactions? That expense sucked, but we could not have processed over 1400 orders without them!

...and on that subject...

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Regarding the "free" distribution of virtual media, Amazon takes a cut as high as 80% of the retail price when handling material for the Kindle. Once again, the gatekeepers of distribution technology take the majority of compensation for the "data" they process. For an issue of Witches & Pagans magazine, by example, that would sell at $1.00 (one-fifth of the hardcopy retail price, which barely covers the magazine's expenses as is), Amazon offered the publisher 20 cents per download. Yeah, right - try publishing a magazine in any format for 20 cents a pop!

Re: ...and on that subject...

[gfish.livejournal.com]

How is that free? People are paying for it. It's still centralized. I was thinking more in terms of bittorrent downloads.

[lumiere.livejournal.com]

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Attributed)

Some roles are becoming obsolete in the move from publication as involving atoms to involving bits; as your example with blacksmithing shows, there will remain, indefinitely, a luxury class of craft book publication involving atoms, but it will become a small niche.

Some roles are being disaggregated from the rest of the process; this includes printing (http://lulu.com), payment (http://paypal.com), and distribution (http://www.bittorrent.com).

The screening role is not just a matter of reviews, advertising, and channels; it's also a matter of authentication: pulling content from authoritative sources is more likely to get you what you thought you were downloading. This is a service that costs money to provide, and is worth paying for.

Roles that were separate--author, fact-checker, copy editor, chief editor--in some cases are skipped--are there any copy-edited Twitter feeds worth following?--or combined--many bloggers do all their own editing--if they are performed at all. It's worth considering the differences across musical genres between the roles of composers and performers: these are very differentiated in classical music and still distinct in some rock genres, where you see specialist composers or song writers or lyricists producing scripts for performers to produce and interpret, while pop music is dominated by performers who compose the bulk of their own works, which can be more passionate and personal but also leads to a lot of terrible works. You get very different kinds of art from these distinct processes, but both result in lots of wonderful art, and we'd be worse off for the loss of either one.

The economic power that comes with exclusive atoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)) break down with non-exclusive bits and nonrival distribution, but artists have been rediscovering how to produce exclusive and/or rival goods, from concert experiences to t-shirts, from autographs to commissioned works, while building fan communities that support them--distributed patronage (http://www.bonepoets.com/adopt.html)--as well as producing secondary goods for those fans--reputation, social signaling, community--through means that go well beyond mere copying of digitized art.

There will still be rock stars in the new world. (http://craphound.com/?p=2360) And the rock stars will pay for editors to the extent that paying for editors helps them be rock stars.

[lumiere.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me I forgot to acknowledge a few sore points. Let me do so on my own, before anyone calls me out on them.

The transition to the future is going to suck for a lot of people who make their living in the old system.

What the new system produces will not be the same goods that the old system produced. We mostly wear mass-produced clothes, for instance, not garments made from hand-woven textiles, even though in some ways the hand-woven textiles are much better.

Final Clarifications About "Orphan Works," OOP, and Googlebooks

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

To wrap up some dangling loose ends:

1. A work that has gone out of print is not an "orphan work." That term refers specifically to works for which the original creator is not named or cannot be found. In most cases, the author and publisher information to a published work can be found on the title, credit and legal pages of a given work. If there are names on those pages, it's not an orphan work.

2. "Out of print" merely means that a publisher has decided that the sales of a work do not create enough profit after the costs of production and distribution are taken out. It does not mean the work, or the rights to that work, have ceased to exist. Books, stories and albums often go through various editions through different publishers. This allows artists and writers to make a living from their work.

3. Googlebooks posts only a portion of the books in their "stock." To obtain a download of the whole book, a customer pays Google for that download.

Until the court case, Google was not sharing that profit with the publishers or authors of the work they were selling.

Thanks to the court decision, they must do so now. To get that money, however, an author or publisher must jump through complicated, time-consuming hoops. I know this. I did it myself. It was not easy, and doing so blew the better part of my day. I should not have to do that in order to retain rights to work that was already mine to begin with.

As an extra kicker, Google "decided" that authors or publishers who do not jump through those hoops have voluntarily given up their rights to that work. In short, if you don't fight for it, they own it.

Oh. Hell. No.

Hence, the continuing court battle.

Just wanted to clarify those things.

Going to do work now.

Thanks!