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

[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]

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.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

Devil's advocate: Some would argue that if a farmer is not selling her crops (like, being subsidised to waste food or something) that it is morally correct for people to walk by and take what they can personally use.

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

You also say, "if a farmer is not selling her crops..." I AM selling my crops. Elizabeth Moon was selling her crops. Just because a book goes out of print (which, for the record, not all of the books scanned by Google had even gone out of print), it does not mean that a writer does not or cannot "sell" the labor again. Many books and articles go through multiple editions, through different publishers, because the rights to the work remain the property of the author. Those rights do not end when the presses stop rolling. That fact, among others, rests at the heart of this debate... and allows artists, writers and musicians to earn a living.

Also, in your example a finite number of people walk up and take what they can easily carry away.

With Internet and file-duplication technology, an infinite number of people can replicate an infinite amount of data, without effort.

Your example gets at the heart of the Metallica vs Napster issue. Some people at the time felt that Lars Ulrich and James Hetfeld were hypocrites - that because they, as teenagers, had traded home-recorded tapes of albums they liked, they had no right to prevent people from downloading their albums on Napster.

This argument missed four important factors:

1. To tape an album, you first have to obtain a copy of it. In Ulrich's case, he bought them, often at very high import prices, then...

2. ...shared a copy or two with a small number of friends. He did not burn a copy, put it up on the Internet, and allow thousands of people to get the album for free.

3. Taping an album (and duplicating that tape) takes time, and results in degraded levels of quality. Downloaded files take virtually no time, and result in very little degradation. Therefore, there's little incentive for a "customer" to actually go out and buy the album if she's already downloaded it from, say, Napster.

4. Metallica works hard to make an album. They put in months of hard work, spend years refining the crafts that allow them to make the album, and expend huge amounts of physical and emotional energy in the process of composing and recording the album. Likewise, the band and its label spend thousands, often millions, of dollars obtaining the equipment needed to produce the music, record it, and refine it for release. Expecting them to do all this for nothing is beyond unreasonable.

To expect someone to expend time, energy and money so that you can walk off with the results without effort or cost on your part is THEFT.

In every society in human history, strangers who take the results of someone's work and walk off without paying for it in some way are called "thieves."

In the case of social welfare (like support programs, taxation or the feeding of a community), there's still an expected renumeration. You support the community, the community supports you.

In the case of mass digital piracy, however, there is no support involved. You could download a copy of Master of Puppets in 1998 and never spend a single dime to support Metallica and their efforts. Tens of thousands of people could do the same thing. Tens of thousands of people were doing the same thing (my ex-wife among them), and Metallica, not unreasonably, saw that as theft.

On a small scale, taping an album or sharing a PDF does not affect the artist's ability to make a living. Multiply that by tens of thousands of people, though, and it does.

Your theoretical farmer is now working hard, but thousands of people are walking by and taking her crops while she gets nothing for her work.

Does this make sense now?