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