gfish | Publishing

Publishing

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.)

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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.

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.

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.

Most of all writing is shit. You're just exposed to a wider variety now, if you want to ignore user ratings.

Sure. I'm noting that the fen model doesn't do the job of a real editor, and thus seems unlikely as a candidate for replacing traditional editing. Wikipedia's not much better, a lot of the time.

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.

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.

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

That's rather circular. How do you make a full-time living writing before you're good? The fact that every big name author you can name did NOT make a living writing before they were famous shows that people are quite capable of writing and still holding a day job.

In the end, if you like that world (and it certainly has benefits, no argument), find a business model that works under the current and developing technology. I don't think it exists, and I'm certainly not giving up the internet so people can get paid to write. Like I said in the preamble, I'm only interested in the goal of producing high quality works, not the means.

I spend a lot of time fact-checking and editing wikipedia based purely on my feeling of annoyance when it's either wrong (grammar or punctuation) or non-factual (bad reference, no reference.) I can't be the only person doing this, but at the same time, there are so many more people writing than doing what I'm doing, that my efforts are swamped.
With that said, if people who copy-edit effectively use some sort of moderation system to concentrate their efforts on the better material, that might be worth something.

There's a startup service I saw recently that was for exactly this sort of thing, letting people post their work for copyeditors to assist line-by-line, but I can't remember the name or good enough search terms to find it now.

*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.

The fact that every big name author you can name did NOT make a living writing before they were famous shows that people are quite capable of writing and still holding a day job.

A lot of people burn the candle at both ends for a while to try and pursue their dreams. It's generally unsustainable. Either you decide you can do it and make the leap, or you back off, or you burn out and go splat.

There's also the matter of slowly ramping up. It's possible to get lucky and have some success with something you put only a very limited amount of resources into (because that's all you had at the time) and then to use the resources gained from that success to be able to devote a little more to your next try, and so on and so on.

Freeing good writers from their day jobs allows them to write *more* - which means you get more good, less crap.

Historically this has happened through independent wealth and patronage, and there's no reason you couldn't continue that via a more modern model of grant-giving arts orgs. There is still a free rider problem, so in a theoretical sense you will still not get "enough" professional-level content... but if that pushes society away from pure consumption, and towards participation as amateurs, I think it's actually a net win. At least for the arts - journalism is a much more troubling case.

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.

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.

Actually, that's not accurate. First, Google had laid claim to EVERYTHING that has been published--including, f'rinstance, the anthology my partner & I had just published back in March, and which just went out of print a couple weeks ago. They never contacted us to ask about it (or any other author we've talked to, for that matter) despite the fact that our contact info is right there with the copyright information. For that matter, most books have contact information with the copyright info ... which means that most books are NOT orphan works. Being out of print is NOT the same thing as being an orphan work, nor is "I can't be bothered to actually contact the author and/or publisher", which is what went on with Google.

And for the record, even if they had contacted us, we didn't own the rights they wanted to infringe. We only licensed the right to publish those stories in paper form, which is what most publishers do. It would have been illegal for US to publish the book electronically, too.

As for your interpretation of copyright ... um, no. Copyright and patent laws were not created to give society ownership over all creative work, they were created to ensure that the people who did the work were the ones who would profit from their own labor. Intellectual property is *property*, the result of *work* and is often at least partially the creator's livelihood. Copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, not just for a short time. And Google was attempting to violate the copyright of many many many *living* authors, most of whom are still making a livelihood from their copyrighted works.

Think about it this way--if you were a plumber, would society own your ability to do plumbing work? Would you therefore do plumbing for free? And ... how would you eat and pay rent?

Writing isn't any less work, any less a skill, than plumbing is.

And I should note that the book we published was a *benefit* anthology--we did a massive amount of work to raise money to help a friend of ours. NOT to make money for Google's shareholders. The authors and artists weren't paid, they donated their work, as did we, and as did the layout artist. The idea that Google should profit from our labor which we donated to help our friend, *instead* of her benefiting, is just ... obscene.

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.

This this this this this.

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.

I think this principle *might* hold up if the person/entity going ahead and distributing it were doing so for free. That's the only way it would be consistent with your view of what copyright is for. Distributing for profit seems to me to violate what you're saying.

I think the closest we've gotten to getting this right, as a society, is the Creative Commons thing. It seems to satisfy all the perceived purposes of copyright; a) creations are out there for the world to share if they want, b) nobody should claim the work is theirs when it isn't, and c) nobody should make money off something they didn't create (unless the creator says they can). I wish copyright law would be rewritten to be modeled after that.

Creative works are owned by society at large. That's enshrined legally in the Constitution, based on, well, all of history. Copyright, as a legal concept, only started in the time of Queen Anne, if I remember correctly.
Copyright, literally the right to copy, demonstrating in its very name that it is about copying not about property, started out at two years. It was then extended to about 15 years in the 1700's, before it lost its privileged status and became part of the public domain. That privileged time has been extended repeatedly. I think this is a lousy thing, for what it's worth, but that's not really relevant. People who argue patent law claim that current patent law stifles innovation (http://www.patentlawinsights.com/2009/05/articles/patentability-1/do-patents-promote-progress-or-stifle-innovation/). It's possible that copyright does the same thing, insofar as it has a similar structure to patent law, although I'm unaware of any studies showing this.

Google clearly should have made reasonably diligent attempts to contact people. But with that said, if they can't contact people, it is obviously in their financial interest, but also in the public interest, to then decide the material in question is orphaned. But I'm a socialist at heart, so I am big on the gains made by society at large, even at the cost of some individuals.

If I were a plumber I'd charge per job. I wouldn't charge people for use of my plumbing work for the rest of my life + 50 years.

I absolutely don't think someone else should be distributing for profit.
what I'd like to see -- and I swiped this from Boyce@DownMOO -- is distribution right. As long as you're actively distributing a work, you maintain the sole right to continue distributing it. As soon as you stop, it goes into public domain and anyone can have at it.

I like GNU's copyleft, insofar as it not only maintains copyright, but also gives people the ability to make money off their additions to the material as long as they also give away the basic code for free. That gives a lot of incentive to people to build upon what has gone before... but I have no idea how you'd do something like this in works of fiction or music, which isn't particularly intended to be extended.

>>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."

Copyright, as defined by the Constitution, exists to encourage creative production. It is a means to an end, coming out of a specific level of technology. I'm not absolutely convinced it is needed at all any more, much less makes any sense, but that isn't what I was arguing here.

I'm sorry Google handled things poorly, but that isn't really what I was talking about either. That's just details of the messy transition away from the old system. I'm concerned with making the inevitable new system as good as possible.

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