![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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.)
Writing and Publishing Clarification
I agree with you the the current models for publication and protection are broken. The innovations of the Internets and peer-to-peer sharing technology, sampling software, computer replication and modification, and other things besides, have changed the game to unforeseen degrees. The old system is economic dead weight. Trouble is, many of the parties who are trying to fix the problem either have little knowledge about the subject, have vested interests in screwing people, or both.
As someone who has worked in the publishing industry for over 20 years(*), I want to share my personal knowledge about the subject at hand.
To begin with, writing is not information. It is inspiration, often shaped by large amounts of time, learned skills, and physical, mental and often emotional labor. A written work is not composed of atoms or bytes of information, but of human thoughts given shape by human skill and effort. Machines can duplicate written content, but although they can produce text, they cannot produce meaningful writing. This is as true of non-fiction writing as it is for fiction. A tech manual still demands hundreds or thousands of hours of labor on the part of the human beings involved in its production. Beyond the necessary research, fact-checking, proofreading and layout, there remains the necessity of a human being converting thoughts or, yes, data into communications that other people can process and understand.
This sounds much easier than it is.
As I tell my students, art involves a spectrum between expression and communication. The Artist expresses, and the Audience understands. An Artist who doesn't mind having a small Audience can express whatever she wants in whatever form she desires; an Artist who wishes to be understood (maybe even paid!) strives to communicate effectively to a larger Audience. This feat involves an array of skills, intuitions and experiences that go far beyond merely putting fingers to keys or brush to paper. It also involves time, labor, energy and risk. The larger the project, the greater its intended Audience, the more resources, time, skills and risk that work demands.
And writing - fiction or non-fiction, is artistry.
On many levels, writing demands even more artistry than music or visual expression. A visual artist can get by on pretty colors or compelling subjects; a musician can get by with volume and intensity. A writer, though, has nothing but words with which to work. Writing in a creative and coherent manner involves a constant mastery of technology and artistry, plus the time and effort to commit it into words other folks will understand.
(more)
Re: Writing and Publishing Clarification
This is where pop-cultural memes originate. Every show you've watched, series you've followed, cartoon character you've sketched, in-joke you've cracked, every spiritual insight you've drawn from a movie, game, TV show, book, whatever - it all began with someone sitting at a desk using the written language to create something out of nothing. Somewhere along that process, a writer took his or her imagination and drafted an idea into words that other folks could understand. Again, this is not data processing. It is art.
Much of that art - and the effort behind it - remains invisible. When you read a comic book, for example, you don't see the copious notes shared between the writer, artists, editor and publisher; you don't see the bible that guides the setting and character, or the outline of plot the book will follow. You don't see the concept sketches, brainstorming, rejected ideas and revised pages and art. Maybe if you're interested in the process, you might see the scripts, storyboards, a few design sketches and maybe an interview or two with the folks behind the project. What you won't see unless you're one of us is the time and effort this process demands. No matter how much you like Neil Gaiman's stories, you do not wake up with him thinking about the project at hand, sit down with him all those hours he puts in every day at the computer, participate with him as he debates them with his collaborators, toss and turn in the middle of the night with him as he hashes out some problematic issue in the story. You just see the finished result - something you can often polish off in a few hours. As one who does this for a living myself, however, I tell you that the work involved in the creation of even the simplest webcomic demands hours of effort before anything appears before the audience.
Something else you won't see is the mental and emotional process behind each creation. Every book, every character, every sentence a writer writes is drawn - sometimes kicking and screaming - from decades of experience and observation. For the writer, this can be a nerve-wracking process as well as a cathartic one. Behind every idea in the pop-cultural Wonderland sits a writer who dug through his or her life to express it... and who, in the course of expressing it, employed years of refined skill, observation, criticism and raw talent to turn that idea into a broader reality.
And the fact that the idea can then be turned into movies, jokes, tattoos, songs, comic books, action figures, whatever does not negate the writer's role in that process... nor should it negate her rights to earn a living from it, especially not if someone else is, too.
The core of the dispute with Google rests in the idea that imagination is information, and that information should be free and belong to everyone.
Lo, I say unto thee: bullshit.
(more)
Re: Writing and Publishing Clarification
Business models are broken by changes in technology all the time. I think creative production is on its way to becoming one of them. In that light, I wanted to explore where we might be headed. You absolutely have a right to make money from your labor. But there is no guarantee that there will be a market for it -- and I absolutely resist any effort to further twist the legal system in order to ensure such a market. It will only result in as much waste, generational distrust and successful outcomes as the drug war.