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

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

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.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Yes, but Fish's point, I think, is that digital distribution is the obvious future, and there many models of it that bypass all those hurdles (hence why it is the future).

So, the point is that the old distribution system will largely fall, due to those hurdles you point to, and all the business models based on it will go with it.

So, if someone wants to make money writing, they need to learn how to work within the new upcoming model that will mostly not include those elements. (Although there will always be boutique book stores, selling physical objects, but they will become the exception.)

-B.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I think the problem some large companies (Google, AT&T) are facing is that while the costs of digital distribution approach zero, they're not actually zero, and when multiplied by the increased use of a population that treats the cost to themselves as zero, it can cost a substantial amount to maintain the infrastructure.