A Kindle Alternative--& fair compensation for writers
Interesting NYT piece about a Kindle alternative:
Don’t Quit That Kindle Just Yet.
The COOL-ER device sounds not ready for primetime, but I like a lot of where it's going--especially on price.
And most of all, I like the flurry of alternatives. That's likely to juice up the market, build excitement, and act as a testing ground for ideas. Designers at Amazon and Sony will discover good ideas there, and users will too, and demand them.
This is how new devices get good fast: lots of ideas, lots of choices, lots of testing in real users' hands.
I don't, however, share the author's excitement about COOL-ER slackening the rules on allowing the books to be shared more. The author sees it as a big problem that you can't do anything with your Kindle book after you're done.
Kindles are priced much cheaper than paper books, which I think is great, because it means more potential readers. But it also means much less money per book for the writer. Writers are barely staying solvent as it is.
There need to be some tradeoffs, and one per customer seems reasonable.
E files are so easy to share, I think that without controls writers and publishers are going to be left with squat and that's bad news for books in the long run.
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Not sure how this will all shake out. I take some comfort in the adage that "cream will always rise to the top," here's hoping that I'm cream.
We are living in interesting times....
Now, once we can get color e-books, I'll definitely splurge. Graphic Novels on a Kindle-like device? Hell, YES!
Based on a few arbitrarily chosen books on Amazon the price difference between a Kindle and a paperback version so not seem to be too much, and considering the instantenous electronic delivery it may appear to be even smaller from the consumer's point of view.
Do you know from your own practice that "much less money per book for the writer"? Can you give us some idea at least percentage-wise? Like: "the Kindle version pays approximately X% of the paperback price".
I understand it's hard for writers to make a living already. But preventing people from doing what they've done for hundreds of years - SHARE their books - is not the way to approach this problem. That just punishes the consumer. It's stupid, because the nature of an e-book should really drive sales up, if you can get enough market penetration, because it's soooo easy to make impulse purchases from such a convenient device. But taking an adversarial attitude towards consumers is just going to hurt the e-book market (and authors hoping to profit from this new market).
What you need is a reasonable DRM system that allows you to share e-books between readers, so that only one e-reader at a time can hold the book. Heck, you could even charge a small fee (say between $.99 and $1.99) to transfer an e-book from one Kindle to another. That would be more than fair.
DRM drives away readers who want to buy books, and it doesn't really work that well to prevent piracy anyway.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/landmark-study-drm-truly-does-make-pirates-out-of-us-all.ars
galaxy, yes, i do have the %ages, which have already been standardized. but it's tricky. i'll return.
Regarding sharing, that is something I think would be nice, even with a "transfer fee". My husband is thinking of getting a Kindle for himself, but the only way we'd be able to share books would be to swap devices for a while. And what's the chances that we'll both be done reading books on each other's device at the same time?
I'm definitely treating my Kindle as a pre-read type of device. I read a book there, and if I really love it and might want to read it again, I'll buy a paper copy. That way my bookshelves will only be filled with the books I love, instead of books I bought, read, and didn't like and now don't feel right giving away to friends because I think they'll hate it, too.
As for price, I've found that "hardbacks" are $9.99 on Kindle, but paperbacks are in the $6.95 range - about the same as a paperback. Having to pay for two copies of these books (for my husband and I both to read) really undermines the price issue. On the other hand, if you look for classics, they are quite cheap - I paid $0.80 for Moby Dick, for example. I plan to read a lot of classics!
I actually own a very small ebook reader from Sony that used their minidisc format for the books.
I will probably buy a Sony PRS505...
- 15% of the gross/list price on hardcovers. (Roughly $4 per book, if it's priced around $26.) This is where writers of popular work make most of their money. It doesn't matter how much a bookstore (online or brick) sells the book for, the author gets the same $4.
- 25% of NET price on kindles. This is based on the price Amazon pays the publisher for each book. I don't even know what that is, but presumably somewhat less than the $10 they are selling the book for. If Amazon is paying the publisher $8, then the writer gets $2.
That's a pay cut in half.
The story is much better in paperback, where the author gets about $1/book in trade paper, and Amazon drops the price of older editions, too, so it's probably about even.
But writers get much more of their money from the hardcover. (The payout per book is four times as high as on the paperback.)
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Most writers are barely scraping by: stringing together several writing and non-writing jobs together to stay solvent.
Any new system that jacks writers out of even 10-20% of their income is going to have terrible effect on them--and ultimately on the quality of books available for you and me to read.
If the system knocks 50% out of our writing paycheck, that's disastrous.
Typist, the "hundreds of years" concept is precisely my point. We are on the verge of a radical change to the way the whole system has worked for hundreds of years--including the way authors get paid.
What I'm hearing from the author of this piece--and many others, is that most of the fundamentals should change, but certain things we like should stay the same.
We've been reading books on paper for hundreds of years, and we had certain rules accordingly--you could hand the paper book off to anyone you want, or sell it.
That system worked for all parties, because 1) many people wanted to keep their paper books, and 2) paper deteriorates: by the second or third reader, most people don't want a beat up copy, and 3) you had to physically sell the thing, which involved a garage sale or a trip to the used book store, or at least shipping costs for someone.
This allowed consumers to sell their books, with a reasonable overall limit, without drastically canibalizing the market for authors and publishers to get paid.
Ebooks change all that. There is little point to keep one on the virtual bookshelf, they are incredibly easy to transfer and don't deteriorate.
We've seen it play out with music.
This itself is a huge threat to authors making a living, if the number of shared books rises drastically, and the number sold falls drastically, as we saw with music.
If you combine that with authors also getting paid much less per book sold, you have a really disastrous 1-2 punch for writers.
A reasonable solution might be some reasonable limits, or maybe just that books are no longer resalable: you get them cheaper, but you don't share--which most people are not doing with their paper books anyway.
(The sad truth is that most bought books get read by zero people, not multiple people.)
1woman: it's REALLY tough as a freelancer. i've been there. ugh. do you have an agent for your book? i would work that hard and long first, trying to get an agent who tries to sell the book in paper. if that fails, yes, i would consider an ebook/self-publishing sale. a few books have found an audience that way. usually nonfiction writers sell their books on proposal, before writing, so you have not invested all the time until you have a sale. i'd approach the next one that way.
You make a false comparison between books and music. Traditionally, music was not something you traded often. Music is a product you use over and over again, so retaining it for your own use makes sense. Books, on the other hand, are only a one-time experience (maybe 2-3 times, for a particularly beloved work). You read it, you finish it, you're done with the work. You can then trade it away for a prolonged period of time (even forever).
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have some protection to prevent Hacker McGee from making a copy of a digital work and sharing it on the internet. My point is that DRM in its current form doesn't help you the author and it doesn't help me the consumer. It is in place to protect Amazon's sales of their hardware. The DRM locks you into the Kindle forever. It prevents market competitors from making their own e-readers, since the books sold on Amazon cannot be loaded onto other e-readers.
If authors want more royalties, the correct approach is to get together with the publishers and demand a higher percentage from vendors looking to sell your work in e-book format.
DRM won't protect authors, because it just punishes consumers. I don't see how those are mutually exclusive. Doesn't it do both?
And I don't buy that it "punishes" consumers. It just says that if we're going to have new technology, we'll have different rules on distribution.
I read the link, and the study it was referring to may well have a lot to say, but the piece was just anecdotal, mostly on fringe situations. It didn't add to my understanding.
If authors want more royalties, the correct approach is . . . I'd say that there's more than one correct approach. And the one you suggest has been attempted and failed. I don't think it's reasonable to expect it will happen.
And I'll take sales wherever I can get them, including the Kindle, so thanks for getting it.
Newspaper subscriptions are where you really save money on the Kindle. And if you want to buy just a single issue of a paper or magazine you make out like a bandit.
Books are usually just a dollar or two less on Kindle.
For example, "Gone Tomorrow", by Lee Child, (I picked a popular author, not an endorsement, though I hear he's good), released on May 19th, 2009:
List price 27.00
Amazon price 16.20
Kindle price 14.58
I never pay the list price - I can't afford it when I read 4-5 books a week (drugs would be a cheaper habit). I think most bookstores offer the books at 20-30% off the cover price these days. Before my Kindle I went to the Library and used book stores, which isn't much of a profit for a writer, though I'm told that Librarians are the biggest purchasers. I use my Kindle mostly for magazines, newspapers but I do buy books, just only those that I want to re-read or keep forever.
Right now, buying a book in e-book format means tethering myself to a piece of hardware forever and making it so that I need to pay full price again just to send it to a friend. Most technical people (who you really need to get on-board if you want this technology to really take off) just aren't going to stand for that. We'll either 1) figure out how to "steal" it for free, or 2) stick with the old technology that gives us the freedom to use it in the spirit of how we've always used it. I prefer the classic analog mass distribution system: libraries.
I don't grieve for the music industry because it was always rigged against the artists anyway. The same sort of goes for publishing. If authors were really serious about taking advantage of technology, they'd be better off looking at models like Radiohead and Trent Reznor, who GAVE their stuff away for free in digital format, and relied on a clever mix of deluxe versions and the classic "Please click here to donate" button. I'd rather just PayPal you $4.00 for a PDF of your book with no DRM on it. The reason technological future authors should be striving for is cutting out the middle men completely and marketing directly to customers.
If you punish consumers, you just alienate them and give them no choice but to reject your product completely. It may protect your work from being traded, but it doesn't protect your sales. You won't benefit from the technology driving up sales, because no one will adopt that technology in the first place.
Publishers are the written word world's equivalent of the music company: made irrelevant by technology.
An author need a publisher to actually publish a book--until recently, and certainly, now, the publisher, like the music company, serves only as a marketing tool.
Publishers, like the music companies, will shrink, dwindle, and finally disappear. Authors will self-publish (through ebooks). Royalties will increase. Web sites that review books will become much more important.
It's a new world. You can't fight the future, although you can put your weight behind what you think are the best alternatives.
Not everything's available, which is annoying. And you can't transfer data, which is annoying. In three or so years, I'm sure a better alternative will be available.
Why does an author need a publisher? I work for a small publisher, publishing nonfiction books in a very specific niche market. So this is a tiny microcosm of the publishing world, but I think my opinion applies to the larger publishing world.
I'm an editor. The writers I work with know their subject area, they understand it thoroughly. With one rare exception, They. Can't. Write. Just can't. They do a decent stab at it, but it's most often not publishable quality. What the publisher does is help them get the manuscript into readable shape for the masses.
Then, even on the Kindle (and we distribute our books on Kindle) there is a certain amount of formatting involved, and you need a little bit of expertise in HTML. Then, we market those books to this particular niche who is interested in them.
Yes, these authors could do this on their own. But what we offer our customers, I believe, is editing, quality, and a "winnowing" process. We put in the work to find authors who are offering something the customer hasn't seen before, not a rehash of everything that's already out there. We edit (a lot). For traditional publishing, we do the layout and the print production, shipping, maintain a web site, provide blurbs and reviews, take the orders, and ship the books.
Most authors are experts in their chosen fields. They write books on the side, and they do their other job (which makes them an expert) 95% of the time. They don't have the time to do what we do (edit, produce, market, and distribute).
Yes, this is a for-profit business, but no one is getting rich off of this. But without the publisher, what you get is a whole lot of un-edited crap, spread from pillar to post on the internet, and you, the consumer, has to sift through it all to find anything worth reading.
I'd be happy to donate my slush pile some day for your bedtime reading, so you could get an idea of what the world of books would look like without publishers.
I think your point about authors not being able to write is specific to certain niches, and not true, of say, novels, or major-market nonfiction. But the point is still well taken:
Publishers do a great deal.
I hear Dr. Smith's refrain frequently--that publishers only exist as marketing tool--but rarely if ever from people who have actually spent time inside publishing.
I'll give my example. About a year before publication, I turned in a solid draft already edited with my agent. In the next year, I know of about three dozen people that worked on that book at Hachette. My editor took me through another brilliant edit, and then we did yet another with his assistant (with my editor commenting on the comments). Then the copy-editor--who does WAY more than find typos--went through and posed approximately 1,000 questions in the margins, in addition to thousands of small corrections and suggestions. The legal team went through it and raised several important points. Then it went through several proofers, who caught all sorts of little things, and the Production Chief went through it after all of those, finding more, raising more questions.
At the same time, a design team of at least three different people were working on the cover and outside packaging. A compositor was laying out the type, and someone was designing the inside layout. (The difference between my Word manuscript and the typeset pages was stunning.)
These are just some of the people involved. They made it a much better book, inside and out.
Also, JUST marketing? Getting books to an audience is crucial. As Froggy said, yes, publishers are winnowers. There are hundreds of thousands of books out there, and any one consumer cannot comb through them all.
One of the chief roles the big publishers play, in practice, is culling that down to a reasonable number for readers to get ahold of. (Many argue that don't cull it down nearly enough.)
One thing I can see that will be a benefit is if they put them in schools so kids won't have to carry around those terribly heavy back backs full of books that weigh up to 5 lbs a piece.
As for making notes. If they would put a version of adobe acrobat on there that has notes and highlighting it might work. I am still waiting a while before I get one. I want them to get less expensive and in a format that is universal before I bother investing. I personally think acrobat files are the way to go.
And to whoever asked: Kindle's internal annotation system is really wonderful and can be uploaded very easily. Same with the highlighting. It's a massive benefit for somebody like me.
i wrote about Elephant this week on a web forum discussing my book. i'll look for the link.
(i really hated the film. there are two really good ones on Columbine, though: "Zero Day" about the killers and "April Showers" (which is new) about the people who lived through it.
Writing is a very demanding line of work: it requires huge amounts of reading and preparation time that non-writers would not tend to view as "work", but without which, the writing itself will not be as good. And good writing requires real freedom of thought, to work on and organize words and thoughts in an original and meaningful way: this takes time, and necessitates some way of getting away from the grind of day-to-day busy-ness.
It is probably true that most writers are involved in some other line of work, in order to pay the bills, but it is also true that there is always a tension between the energy demand that comes from such work and the energy and awareness demands that come from writing. Perhaps we are producing as much good writing as is possible, as a species, but it is undeniably true that writers too often have to fund their own endeavors, and too often are silenced for lack of resources (time, morale, publishing contacts).
So, DRM of some sort really needs to exist. And I don't think it has to be a "punishment" to readers. But it is important to consider that writing worth reading takes time, and talent, and a special focus that doesn't come easily when one is stuffing boxes on the night-shift (or grading hundreds of pages per semester) to pay the bills.
The question is: where do we draw the line? I think ideally, there might be a way to let people transfer electronic files the way people loan actual hard copies of books. A nominal cost for this might or might not impede sharing, which would cut into the market for an author's books, by reducing readership.
Perhaps a time-limit on the lending of ebooks might be an option. So the file expires after a week if it's not paid for. That would allow a kind of paradigmatic bridge between the concrete freedom to share hard copies by lending or gifting and the need to limit the infinite proliferation of cheap digital copies.
So far, DRM has been very strict, because nobody wants to be the publisher, distributor or bookseller who "lets the cat out of the bag", so to speak, so that there's no going back. DRM standards are evolving, and I think consumers and book publishers need to work together to come up with the best system for protecting authors.
If DRM is designed only to limit electronic distribution in order to protect big distributors' or mega-conglomerates' current profit projections per sale, the standard developed will not be ideal for authors or readers. We might have to consider that authors and readers could somehow "negotiate" this new standard by channels parallel to what the big players want.
The argument seems to be about DRM. DRM by itself isn't an evil. Every person that creates a 'work' deserves to make what they can off of their handiwork but now that includes the production companies muscling in to extort money and claim ownership and all rights to that work.
Stories abound of musicians that have been driven into bankruptcy by the short end of the stick that they are given from the owners of the rights of their work.
How much longer can artists exist with such a huge animal feeding on their entrails? The problem isn't so much DRM as the outweighing of the rights of the users over those of the corporation claiming the rights to future profits.
I see nothing wrong with copying works for my own personal use. I do not give, sell or lend any copies that I have made. The idea that some corporation can control enough politicians to enforce their warped view and criminalize the 'fair use' of works that people purchase is outrageous to me but somehow fitting based on normal political activity in DC.
The quest for the 'perfect DRM' has proved elusive. One promising method could be 'removed' with a Sharpie marker... It's a sad joke. Make something 'unbreakable' and smarter minds WILL break it.
But anyway...
Rule #2: when planning on a career that relies on defending your intellectual property from all comers, refer to Rule #1.
I sympathize, I really do. But you don't know what you're saying when you say that we must have controls. Books and stories will continue to be written even if nobody can figure out how to make a cent off them. But you lock down the Internet to the point where nobody has a choice but to pay the content creators, and the free flow of information stops. Technology becomes barely useful. The devices you buy stop working for you, and start working for someone else.
I mean, look at the Kindle. If you buy a book, the content owners can retroactively take away the Kindle's ability to read the book aloud, if they think doing so will increase the number of audio books sold. They can do it with a flip of the switch. A few experiences like that, and a pirated PDF starts to sound like a good idea.
To avoid piracy, they need us to run only trusted software, on trusted technology, connected only to trusted servers over trusted connections. And who gets all that trust? The content creators. Microsoft will be trusted. Sony will be trusted. Big book publishers will be trusted. You? Me? We're all just borrowing time on somebody else's system.
If anyone anywhere is able to send so much as a digital photo without the mediation of the big corporations, the whole fragile system breaks down. Because information is information.
I'm not saying that writers should work for free. I'm just saying that some of the contortions we'll put technology through to try and avoid that fate will have huge ramifications in the broader economy. They cannot enforce any bargain, reasonable or not, without lobotomizing every piece of technology you come in contact with.
Pretty much the same argument is made in favor of music companies. So many garage bands, so little time. Someone has to do the job for us.
And, as for writers not being able to write: too true, just as many of those garage bands can't play or write music.
There will always be a place for editors; but that doesn't mean that those editors have to be attached to publishing houses. They'll find work with writers whose work doesn't find favor with the public.
Look: I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm not talking about the future that might happen--I'm talking about the future that will happen. The 'net is in the process of destroying the music industry--as we know it. It will take longer with the book industry, simply because far fewer people read books, and, as yet (pace, Amazon) there's no equivalent to the iPod.
The first place we'll see the change is in the textbook business: we'll see impromptu companies thrown up to do the graphics, clear the copyrights, etc.
Once that market is established, I rather suspect that novels will be next. Finally, serious non-fiction will be given the treatment.
There will still be a business for paper publishers--letterpress work. Just as there's still a market for pressed vinyl.
1) Dead tree nostalgia: Long after it becomes trivial to trade and copy digital books, some people will still want their books in dead tree format, and they'll be willing to pay for them. Books signed by the author will also be valued for their uniqueness.
2) Advertising:
3) Product placement: Nuff said.
3b) Walk-on roles: authors are constantly auctioning off the rights to put someone in their next novel. Usually it's for charity, but more could be done with this.
4) Patronage: Rich bastards have funded the arts since we began carving fertility idols out of mammoth tusks. Individuals could fund individuals, or donate money to foundations that supported the arts.
5) Grants: The public could get in on the act too, either through a government program or a private charity.
6) Pre-sales: The only way to truly protect your work from the grubby hands of pirates is to not create the work in the first place. So an established author could promise to write a book if his fans cough up a certain amount of money. I think Stephen King tried this, and it was a disaster, but tools could be fashioned to streamline payments.
7) Content creation for online games. Blizzard has to have at least a handful of writers and editors building all those quests. I think online worlds will proliferate, and many of them will need writers.
8) Sell tickets to book readings: Right now, book readings are usually free, because the hope is that the author will sell books at them. But if the books are easy to get for free, then it makes sense to charge something for the readings.
It would take a talented and resourceful author to carve out a full time occupation from these suggestions, but I don't think it's impossible.
We're all entitled to opinions here. I do know what I'm saying, Bryce. You just don't happen to agree with it.
Your bias becomes clear, here:
Books and stories will continue to be written even if nobody can figure out how to make a cent off them. But you lock down the Internet . . .
Yes, of course they will be written, but will they be any good? The more great artists you pull away from their art and into a day job doing some BS, the less good work they will be producing.
But your lens seems to be that there are plenty of artists, we don't need to worry about that or them, but the technology is sacred, and mess with that and the sky will fall.
I have worked in both fields, and I see it the opposite. Technology will survive just fine, and will work its way around little hindrances. But most art is mediocre and I'll keep as much as I can get of the good stuff, thank you. And that means keeping the artists fed.
Any technology strong enough to truly enforce a system like that would have to be able to keep the user from copying the material off their device. Which means they can't run anything but trusted software on their readers.
Google "iPhone jailbreak" to see just how doomed such a strategy is. People are constantly unlocking their iPhones, to allow them to run unauthorized apps . The lock mostly just inconveniences novice users, by taking away their ability to run the software of their choosing.
Imagine if everything were like that; imagine that your computer would only run code vetted and approved by Microsoft. It would turn your computer into a glorified appliance that only did those things that the corporation allowed. Not only would people not be able to run the software of their choosing, but they couldn't write software for it without approval.
It would be especially bad for small timers with legitimate content to sell. Imagine if everybody had a Kindle, but you had to pay Amazon for the privilege of transforming your book into a format that the Kindle accepts. Imagine if they could refuse to distribute it altogether, unless you signed an exclusive deal with them?
Innovation would die, all to protect the interests of big content publishers. It's fortunate that it's essentially impossible to build the world the way you're asking.
I'm not making a judgment here. I'm just pointing out some facts.
Fact 1: Technology IS more important than the entertainment industry. Just compare the GDP figures for books, movies, and music to the GDP that can be attributed to the rise of information technology. There simply isn't any comparison. Letting copyright holders determine the technology that is allowed to enter the marketplace (because that's exactly what it would require) would be shortsighted in the extreme.
Fact 2: The DRM scheme that would be required to make sure that authors get paid requires that every device you interact with be a trusted device that can only run publisher-approved code.
Fact 3: DRM schemes that don't get broken are DRM schemes that protect content that nobody wants. DRM suffers from one simple and unavoidable problem: cryptography is based on delivering the message to a recipient, regardless of the best efforts of an outside attacker. But with DRM, the attacker and the recipient are the same person.
I want artists to get paid, and I agree that the best art comes from full time practitioners. I just don't think technology should be lobotomized to make that happen.
I also agree that technology will work around little hindrances. But the little hindrances are going to be the ones put up by copyright holders.
When I say that you have to lobotomize the Internet to protect copyright holders, here's what I mean. There are, on the Internet, plans for making a book scanner for under $300, that can scan a book into a PDF about as fast as you can flip the pages. The only way to stop the distribution of such a PDF is to ban the exchange of user-generated content.
The free rider problem cannot be solved without rewriting the market. I suggested a few ways, but I think that so long as we leave it to the free market, the writers will become chronically malnourished. I'd be fine with a system where most authors make their living through artistic grants from the government, and their works are freely and legally traded.
Think about the benefits of such a system to the greater society. Any book, any time, in a format that is easy to search and excerpt. I find a particularly moving passage on a Kindle, that I'd like to share with my friends to show them how wonderful your book is, and what do I have to do? Go to my computer, read off the Kindle, and type in the passage! That's technology acting against its owner, and a great example of how technology will evolve if guided by the needs of the content industries.
As Cory Doctorow (a talented author and outstanding technology guy) says, "Bits will never get harder to copy." He actually puts his books under the Creative Commons license, and they still sell like mad. Because people can freely trade his books, he has an army of unpaid publicists promoting his work.
I'm rooting for your success. But the current business model is doomed.
However, there are ways of "embedding" content that do not actually download it, but only access it. A streaming access system could allow for this sort of flexible protection of authors' rights, without the risk of download and wildfire propagation. I think the most thoughtful solutions will have to find a way to balance the ideal of openness with the human need for fair compensation.
Fact 1: Technology IS more important than the entertainment industry.
bryce, you are quite a character. you really don't know the difference between a fact and your own opinion, do you?
dude, i don't think you get art. that's my opinion, after listening to you, but i guess i should follow your lead and state it as a fact.
@DaveC : In my defense, I did give an objective measure for "importance" (which you didn't quote, probably because quoting it would have made me sound less stupid).
Movie industry: $10B/year.
TV industry: $20B/year.
Music industry: $14B/year (at the 1999 peak).
Book industry: $34B/year
Video game industry: $32B/year.
I couldn't tell if those last two figures were gross or net.
Not bad figures to be pulling down, but $110B/year is about 1% of Gross National Product. There are lots of things going on in the economy that have nothing to do with the content industries, and just about everything is being made more efficient by the use of information technology. I would guess 20% of GDP is due to information technology, at an absolute minimum.
Meanwhile, Microsoft directly nets about $12B/year, Intel about $8B/year, Google $5B/year. Note that those are single companies racking up those numbers. Also note that, at least in Google's case, they're only pulling in a tiny fraction of the value they create. I mean, Google makes me much more efficient at just about everything I do, and I don't pay them a cent for it.
When I say that the technology industries are more important than the content industries, I'm expressing a quantifiable fact, not a preference. If you want to make the argument that books have an influence on society disproportionate to the number of people employed by the book industry, go right ahead.
If you want to argue that we need to cripple the IT industry to save the content industry, well, the numbers just don't add up.
I'm sorry I hurt your feelbads by calling writing part of the "entertainment industry." I meant to say the "content industry", but your kneejerk defense is downright hypocritical. In all the fields I mentioned, there are examples of pure artistry and pure boilerplate "plot-by-the-numbers". You wouldn't have objected to calling the music or movie industries part of the "entertainment industry," though I'm sure many actors, directors, and musicians would object to the implication that they're not artists.
In short, I said nothing particularly offensive, and you're being whiny.
Re: Product placement. Yeah, it's schlocky. It's also just one in a litany of suggestions I gave. Is patronage also a schlocky idea? Hell, it was good enough for Shakespeare and DaVinci. What about publicly funded art grants?
I find product placement annoying, but if it helps to get a good film made, I'll live with it. Also, not every book is going to be equally amenable to product placement. Maya Angelou, no. Tom Clancy, yes.
Honestly, I proposed supporting writers with public money, clearly identify writing as an activity that has public value, an activity that should be continued even in a market that makes it unprofitable, and you try to slap me down for not according your profession enough respect? In the words of the immortal Aristophenes, "Dude, that's weak."
I can see one problem with your proposal to have the government fund artists. Who decides then, who gets funded and who doesn't? In a free (or at least free-ish) market, the buying public decides. In a government supported system, some government official or committee would decide. And no, I don't think governments are inherently evil, but there is a potential for a clear conflict of interest.
What if you were writing a book criticizing the government? Should they pay to publish it? Would they? Would the Bush/Cheney government have done so if they'd been given the opportunity to block such publications?
What if you wrote a song making fun of the government committee that decides who gets paid for their music (and who doesn't)?
I don't know what the answer is. I think artists should get paid. I think publishers are not just leeches hanging on the poor writer's coattails--in a good publishing relationship it's a partnership. Each provides essential value. Somehow or other, publishers (or writing or music) need to have some control over their product. I don't know how. But saying "Technology makes everything free" is too simplistic.
That's what copyright law is all about. I can't cook up some cereal in my kitchen, put it in a nicely printed box, call it "Kellogg's Corn Flakes" and sell it in my local grocery. That brand, artwork, and product is registered and protected. Doing that would land me in court. Rightfully so. I can't sew up a shirt in my house, put a swoosh on the front, and sell it for $45 as a Nike brand from a stand in front of my house. I can't sew up those shirts, put swooshes on them, and give them away to all my friends either. We all agree on this for all sorts of other products--it's what makes our system of commerce, trademarking, brand registration, and so forth work.
Somehow, I don't know how, writers, artists, and publishers have to be able to control their products. Saying "they can't because technology won't allow it any more" means saying "this stuff doesn't deserve to be paid for."
Again, I don't know the answer. But I don't think government funding is it. I don't think lifting all copying controls is the answer either.
When I heard of that I thought the person writing about it was delusional. No. It was an actual idea to deal with people copying music and movies. I was horrified... I would then definitely work to kill that off by any means.
I think that copy protection protects corporations the same way that copyrights do and you don't need to look too far to see how they are being misused.
My wife and I have a desktop publishing business doing editorial and book production/prepress work, primarily for the publishing arm of a global not-for-profit organization. They publish 30 or 40 books per year and as such are relatively small in the world of publishing. While their process is probably not quite as thorough and rigorous as Dave described of his publisher, the manuscripts still go through many (professional) hands and pairs of eyes before they ever see a printing press (or PDFing software).
First off, most of their books are written by engineers, university professors, or industry consultants. They are authors but not professional writers—there's a big difference—although many of them have written several to dozens of books. Before the manuscript even hits the publisher it has usually been read through by two to five or more people, usually professional colleagues of the author. The project editor at the publisher reviews the manuscript and sends it to me with any pre-edit suggestions. I then copyedit the manuscript, usually making thousands of minor corrections to spelling, punctuation, usage, formatting, etc., and query or suggest many dozens to hundreds more corrections/changes to the editor and author. The PE then reviews the copyedit and sends it off to the author. The author reviews the ms., accepts or rejects the changes, answers queries, and makes additional changes. The book is then set into type and proofread again by our proofreader who usually makes dozens of additional minor mechanical or substantive corrections and queries/suggests dozens to hundreds more changes/corrections. The PE and author then review the first galley pages and usually mark dozens more of their own changes/corrections. We then input these corrections and submit the second galleys to the publisher for final approval. When things are tied up, files are sent to the printer and PDFs are made for electronic distribution.
Not to belabor the point, but without this iterative process of edit and review most of these books would be literally unpublishable and unreadable. They would be so riddled with errors (grammatical, technical, or formatting) that they would be next to worthless to the reader. I have copyedited close to 100 books so far and have never seen a single one that did not contain hundreds or even thousands of errors, depending on size. Nobody writes that well. Nobody.
As Dave pointed out, publishers also handle many behind-the-scenes tasks that most people aren't even aware of. And with all this, I still constantly read printed books (for pleasure) from large publishing houses that are riddled with errors large and small (one of the hazards of my job, I guess). Yes, the Internet is great, and gives the little guys a lot of freedom to get their stuff out there. But the downside is that the commercial arts (music, books, films) are losing their gatekeepers, which I for one do not think is entirely a good thing. The gatekeepers (publishing houses, record and movie companies) do act as winnowers, as mentioned by others, to try to sort through the huge volume of chaff out there and (hopefully) bring their consumers those few golden grains that are truly worthy of consumption.
Personally, I find that there is so much content out there that it's nearly impossible to sort through it all to find what really interests or pleases me. I appreciate the gatekeepers more now than I ever did. If publishing companies really do start to fade away, we're going to be inundated with semi-literate, error-ridden books that are going to be torturous if not impossible for an intelligent reader to wade through. And the suggestion that the publishing process can be accomplished without publishing companies is misguided at best. That would be like having your auto-worker brother-in-law completely assemble your new Corvette in his garage. We're already drowning in mediocre music and stupid YouTube videos, do we really need to dumb down what we read as well?
Fair points. No, the government cannot be trusted to decide which pieces of art are worthy of funding and which are not.
On the other hand, the argument is just as valid for publicly financed elections. A system where the government decided who got to run for office would implode under the weight of its own contradictions.
Fortunately, the system doesn't work like that. Where public financing exists, the government doesn't decide who gets the money. Anyone who fulfills certain criteria is eligible for the funding.
The best system I've been able to come up with is one where everyone is given some amount (say, $300 a year) which the recipient would be able to put in tip jars of their choice. Like the movie? Leave $5 in the tip jar. Like the album? Leave $3. Like the book, the blog, the poetry slam performance? Leave a bit of money.
People could pay for more tips out of their own pocket if they liked, but everyone would get some say in what is getting rewarded. The incentive to spend the money is great, if the money just expires.
Of course, questions arise. How do keep people from laundering money to themselves? What constitutes a qualified work? I think a work would have to get contributions from a consequential number of people before the author could withdraw the money. It would be even more effective if the payment system had some awareness of our social networks, so that contributions from unrelated people would be given more weight.
There might also be some limit to the tip jar for a given work. After the novel makes the author $60K, only out-of-pocket donations will be accepted. The author is free to monetize the work any other way that the market allows, but the public funding is capped.
But whatever plan actually emerges, it ought to give the decision-making power to the proletariat, not government officials.
@surfink63 : I read your blow-by-blow of the book editing process with a feeling of frustration. It would really speed things along if the author, the reviewers, and the editor all collaborated on a private wiki.
Really. See if you can get a geek to set one up for you, just as an experiment.
Frankly, I think we're already there.
And, one more time: the death of the publishing company is already happening. It's far less advanced than the music industry, but it's coming--whether we like it or not.
And, one more time: the vital process for helping piss-poor writers that most of you are describing is an editorial process, not a publishing process per se. Editing won't necessarily go away, but what publisher do otherwise--it will.
Gatekeeping information as many of you folks describe it (and seem to want it--somebody else figuring out what you should be reading) is dying, too. A new form of gatekeeping will replace it--much as you might listen to Sound Advice to sort out what might be worth listening to from what isn't.
Publishing has been dependent on a kind of economics of scarcity--not enough space on racks, not enough capital to rent or buy a press. Technology has changed those things forever--we're just reacting to it, and sorting out how it will affect us.
My first question for both of you is, Have you ever actually been involved in the writing, production, or publishing of a book? With every comment you post it becomes clearer that you do not understand the publishing process.
Bryce, your seemingly sarcastic suggestion to set up a wiki to "collaborate" on, while it might be an interesting experiment, really wouldn’t save much, if any, time. Easily 98% of the time involved in editing a book is consumed by critically reading the manuscript. The time consumed by the actual handoffs is negligible (think UPS Next Day Air). Using a wiki would not change that. And if what you meant was to have everyone working on the document at once without the controlled "back and forth" of the edit/review process, that would only create total chaos. You misunderstood my point. I was trying to give you an idea of how much work—by a small army of people—goes into even a single book.
Publishing a quality volume is not about speed anyway, it's about getting every detail right. Besides, we already do online edits using Word, but with the state of the tools at this time it is actually more time-consuming, more stressful, less efficient, less reliable, and more costly to our client than doing a traditional paper edit. I could easily fill a page describing the logistical issues and difficulties involved but I don’t want to consume Dave’s blog with all that.
And Dr. Smith, your assertion that book production is merely an editing process is dead wrong. Publishers handle author contracts, legal issues, manuscript development, marketing, advertising, inventory, and fulfillment, not to mention providing authors with advances so they can spend time doing primary research without starving to death. All of this work needs to be done by someone regardless of the final physical format of the book. The publisher also assumes all production costs (copyediting, typesetting, art production, proofreading, file prep, etc.), which on a small volume can easily exceed $5000.00 and on a large, complex project can run into tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s not even counting printing costs, which usually exceed the production cost, that’s just to get the finished, typeset book ready to PDF or port to Kindle. How many freelance writers/authors do you know of who could bear these expenses themselves?
And if you think that authors can simply do this work themselves you’re deluded. This would mean forking over thousands of dollars up front for the software involved, not to mention months, if not years, learning it all well enough to do productive, quality work with it. I have several times seen the results of authors who thought they could lay out their own book and the results weren’t pretty. In both cases, the publisher had to hand off the files to us to try to fix their messes and get the thing into some kind of publishable shape.
What's frustrating to me is to read your flippant comments critiquing a process that you seem to have never been a part of. And I don’t understand your hostility toward and suspicion of publishers. Where is that coming from?
I find amusing the thought that somehow gatekeepers like publishers are "telling us what to read" or keeping us from all those great books they are rejecting. Anyone whose manuscript is rejected by a publisher is free to self-publish on the Internet just as you are advocating. (And we’ll see how well that works out for them.) I have read many excellent conventionally published books that might never have been written at all if a publishing company had not taken the risk and coughed up many dollars in advances and production costs. Rather than holding us back, as you seem to imply, I think most publishers are performing a vital service. And I am already aware of and use alternative gatekeepers, like the Sound Opinions program, so that's irrelevant as well, that's not what I'm talking about here. The music analogy is weak anyway: music generally is about unfettered personal expression. Anyone can create music using any system, without any rules, slap it on a disc or upload it to the Internet and millions of people may enjoy their work. The same can not be said for books, particularly serious nonfiction and technical works.
I am not ignorant nor a Luddite; I'm aware that new technologies will change the industry, and I'm not speaking out of fear since my function will always be necessary even if ultimately every book winds up on the Kindle rather than being printed. What I reject is the idea that publishers are unnecessary parasites who are keeping us all from the freedom to publish or read what we want, which seems implicit in many of the comments here.
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What's frustrating to me is to read your flippant comments critiquing a process that you seem to have never been a part of. And I don’t understand your hostility toward and suspicion of publishers. Where is that coming from? . . . I am not ignorant nor a Luddite; I'm aware that new technologies will change the industry, and I'm not speaking out of fear since my function will always be necessary even if ultimately every book winds up on the Kindle rather than being printed. What I reject is the idea that publishers are unnecessary parasites who are keeping us all from the freedom to publish or read what we want, which seems implicit in many of the comments here."
I agree that change is definitely coming, but I don't find quick generalizations about publishers and how little they add very helpful. They add a great deal, and yes, adding a wiki to the process will not change that.
Luddites who can't see any change coming are foolish. But frankly, in my experience the "everything is changing, the whole world as we know it is over and now it's going to be x" arguments tend to be even further off the mark.
no matter what system evolves, there are always gatekeepers, and there are lots of collaborators involved in good work. none of that ever goes away. i don't see it going away. if we temporarily land in a system that excludes any of those functions, the books will suffer for it during that period.
I'm wondering, though, if there can't be more flexible pricing. "Buy the hardback, get the e-version for free; buy the paperback, get the e-version for half-off." Something. I dunno.
i hope they head in that direction.
Not that I'm a Luddite, I just realize that with the march of technology, something no matter how subtle, is lost...
And the lawyers pick over the entrails...
This story is probably too stale already, so you'll probably never read this. But the comment about the wiki was 100% sincere, not sarcastic at all.
The inefficiencies that would be eliminated wouldn't come from the time spent "handing the book off." Uploading a file just doesn't take that long. It's the elimination of the 'my turn/your turn' paradigm. If you can work together in a shared space that tracks changes and notifies participants of the ones that matter to them, feedback becomes instantaneous, the author can start making the requested changes the moment you request them, and can tell you right away if the changes you're requesting are impractical or misguided.
I can't imagine that, having edited so many books, you've never sent an author a laundry list of unneeded changes, because you thought he was trying to say somethng he wasn't. Perhaps all he needed to do was tweak the introduction to get the reader into the proper frame of mind, but you didn't recognize that because the author failed to get you in the frame she was aiming for. If it takes you two or three handoffs to figure that out, who really wins there?
No, I'm not a writer. I'm a software guy. But there are similarities. In my case, I have people I need to please, people my software needs to communicate with. The interface has to be saying something to the user, and when I fail to get that point across, my software, like the author's text, is lousy.
But we've learned something in the software world that -- if your post is any indication -- the publishing industry hasn't. The more immediately you can integrate feedback from a variety of end users, the faster your software improves.
I just don't see how instantaneous collaboration between the author, the editor, and a domain expert or two could make your job harder.
You say that you don't fear new technologies, but the idea of letting the author participate in your editorial process in a more fine-grained way would result in "total chaos?" Enlighten me, because I really don't see the issue.
I'm absolutely serious. I'm guessing that "wiki" is linked in your mind to "Wikipedia" and therefore the death of expertise and civilization alongside it. Nonetheless, I think it could be a wonderful tool that would enhance your ability to do what you do best.
I'm offering this as a serious suggestion, for your own benefit. You edit so many books, why not experiment with a different process for just a couple of them? If you don't experiment, you don't innovate, and if you don't innovate, the world passes you by.
One of my favorite things about e-readers is that you can import your PDFs to the device and read them anywhere you go. Easily create PDFs from any webpage or document using something like the Best PDF Creator or a similar program.