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

[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.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I don't claim it isn't a nice thing if writers don't need a day job. I'd rather like to not need one myself! That doesn't mean it will be possible given the realities of what technology allows in the way of business models. It's really hard to make a living as a blacksmith these days, too.

I agree, re journalism. I really don't see how we can have widespread local journalism without something like a local paper, and those are obviously dead. Some of the stuff that needs to be covered is just too mind-numbingly boring and un-sexy to draw enough of an amateur crowd. It worries me.

[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.

[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.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Patents absolutely inhibit innovation, at least when it comes to software. The only reason I spent close to a $1k on LLC fees for Obsphere was the fear of being sued over some bullshit software patent. On the other hand, they're vital for pharmaceutical research.

[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.

[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.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to make a living as a blacksmith these days, too.

Yeah, but that's because society in general has little need for them, and so no one particularly cares if it's hard to find hand-blacksmithed things, except for the few who go to the trouble of seeking them out.

Admittedly, some people *do* really think that content for money is wrong and evil and should die out and authors should be as rare as blacksmiths. But, unsurprisingly, that means a lot less stuff created.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

My analogy there would be that we do still need metal objects produced, we've just found better (if less fun) ways of doing it than heating up chunks of iron and hitting them with a hammer. And likewise maybe -- maybe -- we've found better, less restrictive ways of encouraging the production and distribution of works than by enforcing an artificial monopoly on the copying of data.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Fishie: Writing - creative or otherwise - is most emphatically not "data." Please see my more extensive note below.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Actually, Random, Google did no such thing. When I went to go "manage" books I had authored (every one of which featured my name in the credits, and two of which were not even out of print), I found nearly a dozen works that had been "acquired" by Googlebooks. I had not been contacted in any way, shape or form by Google before this was done, and as Dami stated above, I was one of the publishers whose work had been "acquired." In this matter, you are wrong.

(I also add that "managing" my work away from Google's "we downloaded it so we own and can sell it" venture took me the better part of a day's worth of deeply frustrating work. Their interface was extremely awkward, time-consuming and labor-intensive. And that was just to "manage" - read: re-acquire rights I had already owned - 10 or 12 books. A more famous or prolific author - like Elizabeth Moon, who alerted us to the Googlebooks fiasco - could easily spend several days doing so.)

As for the history of copyright, it's worth noting that mass recording and distribution technology did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of it did not exist prior to the 20th century. The printing press alone did not suddenly transform the distribution of creative work. Until the mid-1700s, the majority of printed works were bibles, political broadsides (themselves a creative work, but one meant for public distribution) and a handful of scientific works. As the Industrial Revolution made printing and distribution cheaper, the battle between authors and publishers intensified. Many authors saw their labor - and, as I point out below, writing is labor - exploited by anyone with a printing press. The "starving artist" archetype dates to the time when people like Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent van Gough were swindled out of the money their work should have earned because some dude with a printing press thought it'd be nifty to reprint their works without offering compensation or sharing the generated profits. It took authors and artists who had either the resources of nobility (Lord Leighton), the means and willingness to fight for their rights in court (Charles Dickens), or both to make copyright law as we now understand it exist. The "lousy" expansion of "privilege" regarding copyright has involved a hard-fought battle between producers of content (aka writers, artists and musicians) and people who have little or no connection to the labor involved but who merely own the means of replication and distribution. With the current technology, that battle is larger and more important than ever.

By the way, the "privilege" you refer to is no more or less than the right of a person to be compensated for his or her labor.

You say an artist should "charge per job." Random, until the last two centuries, that's exactly what creative professionals did. A tale-teller told her story to the audience, and that audience rewarded her with sustenance. There was no way a mass audience could receive that person's labor without being in her presence. Sure, we have the occasional transcriptions of Classical Greek or Elizabethan plays, but those works were - until the 20th century - the property of a tiny audience that paid dearly for the privilege of acquiring them. Until the combination of printing and recording equipment, mass production, widespread distribution, and cheap materials and manufacture, creative property involved the immediate labor of the artist and the immediate presence of the audience. Even the painters and sculptors whose work adorned palaces and cathedrals were rewarded with patronage; their works could not be reproduced without additional labor (often by apprentices or students, who were likewise rewarded), and even that process was limited to small-scale reproduction. Art was paid for "by the job," and creative professionals were regarded far more highly that we are today because remote access to our work simply didn't exist.

(more)

[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.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

PS: It's also worth noting that the transcriptions we have of stories, plays and songs prior to the 1700s were most often transcribed and published long after the original author's death - often by students, scholars, monks or paid copyists who, again, were compensated in some way for the production of those materials.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

As for your sentiment regarding "the cost to some individuals," sorry, but no. That "cost" is measured in my ability to buy food and pay my rent. To say that my ability to earn a livelihood with my labor should suffer so that you can maintain some abstract principle of your own is, at best, naive.

By that same principle - again, no more and no less - a farmer should tend land, invest in materials, acquire tools, pay taxes and grow and harvest crops so that people can just walk by and take as much of his crop as they want to walk off with, in whatever quantity they please, and do whatever they want to do with it... including sell it to other folks at a profit they choose not to share with the farmer. Surely, your "socialist" beliefs do not extend to telling farmers that their work should be exploited. Why do you assert the same to me?

(It was, by the way, exactly such exploitation that led to the establishment and popularity of socialist and communist philosophies.)

Yes, Random and Fish, this subject is personal for me. I feel deeply angered by sentiments such as yours. It's already hard enough to get paid for my work without people who clearly do not know what that work entails deciding that my labor should be worth even less. Your ideas and ideals, mistaken as they are, do directly impact on my ability to make a living. With assertions like the ones you make above, you literally de-value my work and its compensation.

Besides, "society at large" does not gain when individuals are exploited by managers of mass production. As "a socialist at heart," you should be aware that uncompensated labor yields diminishing results. And when people with something worthwhile to offer cannot or will not offer it, everybody loses out.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

I absolutely don't think someone else should be distributing for profit.

Distribution involves labor, materials, taxation and risk. Why shouldn't distrubtors also be compensated?

In the book trade, a distributor buys a certain amount of product, warehouses it (which involves personnel overhead and risk, as well as storage rent); the distributor ships it (more labor and expense) to clients (maintained through yet labor), and then attempts to collect and distribute the money involved in that transaction (still more labor and risk). Anything not sold by tax time is then taxed by the state and federal governments. I have no problem with distributors being compensated for all of this - it's the way the system is handled that needs fixing.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Disagree about why intellectual property legally exists. Intellectual property is not real property, and has a shallow history in western culture as a legal concept. It was a fiction created, in industrializing nations, to encourage creative works. It wasn't out of "fairness" to creators per se, it was just presumed that providing economic control of the creations would allow for profit motives, etc.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid it is, in the same way that a customized, hand-forged item is, in fact, atoms. It can be copied like data, it can be transmitted like data. All of the economic and technological forces that work on data work on it, in the same way that mass-production changes the economics of blacksmithing.

I really must emphasize once again that I am not talking about what should be. I am not arguing here that one model is better than the other, or that one it more moral than the other. I am just looking at what I see to be historical inevitability and trying to draw some conclusions. Nowhere did I say authors shouldn't be paid, or don't deserve it, only that I think it will be increasingly less common over the next few decades. Sad, yes, and obviously very personal to you and many others. Business models being invalidated by changes in technology often are.

I see now that the snark I used in the "content creation" section, aimed at the argument that the only way to encourage creative expression is with financial rewards, has been misread to think I was attacking financial rewards for writing in general. This is emphatically not the case and for that I apologize.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Think part of Fish's point is that distribution increasing involves very *little* labor, no materials, and, if for free, no taxation. (And taxation is always a red herring as it's only a <100% of profit, in USA, so that's just a reduction in profit.) Not at all sure where the risk would be in distributed digital distribution.

-B.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Now that's a bit harsh--AFAIK, random never claimed to be a novelist, but his technical writing has been very useful for many folks.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

It continues to surprise me that music leads the way.

This happens because most people cannot sing or play a musical instrument well, and because even those who can do so rarely have the means and expertise to record and distribute their work in a large-scale and/or professional manner.

Meanwhile, anyone with a computer and a high-school English course thinks he or she can write. (See above.)

Musical performance is regarded as a rare and valuable skill. Writing, sadly, is not. But just as the ability to dump seeds on the ground does not make someone into a farmer, so the ability to type words onto a screen and then post them on the Internets does not make someone Cory Doctorow. That reality battles common perception, and that battle spills into the marketplace... where, at the present moments, we writers are losing. That makes fights like the one involving Googlebooks so important to us all.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Seems journalism is very time-sensitive, so writers that provide content directly to a "blog" (or real-time news service) could be compensated by the news-service's advertising revenue. (Yeah, I hate advertising, but it seems inherent in most of the commercial information distribution.) Or, folks pay for the custom-live-news-feed they care about. Etc.

For journalism, a 1-week copyright, would mostly serve.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Who's being harsh? I didn't say that Random's work wasn't being useful, just that the ability to generate text is not the same as being a writer.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

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

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Not all distribution is digital - in fact, the vast majority of it is not. even digital distribution, however, still involves large investments of time, equipment, maintenance and risk (*). Again, why should anyone do this for free?

And - I say as someone who has worked in three publishing companies and two bookstore chains - you are mistaken about taxation. On-shelf inventory is taxed once or twice a year, depending on where your business is based. These taxes are based on estimated retail value of inventory; sales tax is another thing entirely.


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* - Software, hardware, troubleshooting, viruses, site hacking, customer support, server issues, collection of funds, business filing, accounting, the time to maintain all the above... and lots more, besides.

[solarbird]

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.
Not just in this post, but in others, there's been a strong undercurrent that you aren't really all that much for it. I think you're tripping over one of the unstated American cultural assumptions, that creative work (art, music, and so on) isn't really work, and therefore by implication isn't really work compensation. Accordingly, I think you should stress this more often when commenting on this topic, as it does seem to come up a lot.