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

[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.

[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]

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.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

This is a pretty narrow, centralized-publishing point of view. Time was, if you could write your writings had value. The only reason we need a distinction between a writer and someone who can and does write is for things like fame, content valuation, quality control, etc. But it's not a very egalitarian point of view, because there's an appeal to some invisible authority that decides whether one is a writer. Certainly it's a capitalist and western cultural imperialist point of view, too, as there are no shortage of small societies and cultures that encourage participation in all aspects of life from all people, and which do not denigrate the efforts of some as inauthentic or lacking some ineffable quality in particularly envied domains. Your use of the mechanical "generate text" is pretty grotesque and offensive.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I think it's no more elitist than saying, to borrow from another context, that the ability to kill does not make someone a warrior. There's no implication of any central authority, merely the invocation of a meaning that's broadly shared across a culture.

Or, for another example, the ability to add code to my local copy of sched.c does not make me a kernel hacker. I might appear like unto a wizard to those with lesser skill, but those who have progressed far beyond me can look back at me and say that I have not crossed a necessary threshold. And they'd be right.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Your kernel hacker example is a good one, I think. It makes clear that the definitional issues are perspective-dependent and that the speaker usually assumes their definitions are the only ones. And perhaps they're the only useful ones for that person, but there are many. That there is a sense that there is a dividing line may be shared across a culture, but the dividing line itself seldom is. The issue is even more complicated once people bring innate traits into the mix, which is often done with writers but less so kernel hackers; I wonder, was Kirk McKusick a kernel hacker when he told Bill Joy where the race in his (kernel) code might be? He certainly had the mindset, but perhaps not the experience to show for it.