Debate: Pixel-Stained Technopeasants Versus Webscabs
I confess that I don't understand Howard's argument -- it seems to be that a world in which free text-files circulate is one in which readers stop paying for printed books. This isn't supported by the facts -- indeed, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the biggest problem writers have is that readers don't go to bookstores, and that books compete with MMORPGs and other networked activities for time. Giving away ebooks puts them on an equal footing with all the other online activities, and puts books in serendipity's way, where non-bookstore-going readers might find them. (Howard also seems to labor under the misapprehension that writers are being pressured to do free online releases, when the reality is that writers have to fight and spit and pitch tantrums to get permission to put their work online)
Part of Howard's argument seems to be that big corporations profit from the free circulation of materials online -- ISPs, telcos, search-engines, hosting companies, etc. This is undoubtedly true, but not endemic to online solely. Bookstores, phone companies, newspapers, publishers, shipping companies, and so on -- they've all profited through the ages from writers' activity. The important question for a writer who cares about writers' economic fortunes isn't "How much money does Google make from a world of free text?" but rather, "Do writers make more money from a world that has Google in it?" The answer to the latter question is an unequivocal yes -- the easier it is for a work to be found, the easier it is for an audience to be found, the better off a writer is.
Finally, Howard characterizes supporters of online distribution as blind techno-optimists who've never heard of the law of unintended consequences. This is an ugly straw-man, visibly untrue. Liberal copyright campaigners are also generally the loudest anti-DRM/pro- Net-Neutrality/ pro- Free-Software voices, people who spend their lives warning everyone who'll listen of the danger of technology in the wrong hands.
The biggest expense a writer bears is search-cost: either directly (writers who self-publish and have to market their work to a diffuse audience) or indirectly (writers who "pay" their publishers 90 percent of the cover price to get their words into the hands of an audience). The lower the search costs are, the more leverage writers have. The net diversifies the ways in which works find audiences and vice-versa, undoing the 20th century's enormous trend to concentration and more bargaining power for fewer media companies. And that is good news for writers indeed. Link (Thanks, Rick!)
See also:
April 23 is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day
Big collection of Pixel-Stained Technopeasant contributions
Pixel-stained technopeasants talk about free online fiction


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"Do writers make more money or less money from a world that has Google in it?"
Um, this isn't phrased as a yes or no question.
So the "yes" (presumably to the "more" money) is kinda equivocal.
Which leads me to ask, do editors make more or less money in a world that has Wikipedia in it?
I kinda thought the "Yes" meant that writers won't make the same amount of money in a world that has Google in it as in a world that does not, without specifying which outcome was being affirmed. "Yes, one or the other. Dunno which."
I think that editors' incomes and the existence of Wikipedia are probably orthogonal, except for editors who stick their heads in the maw of the common-sense crusher that appears to be Wikipedia's current state of operation.
Thanks for the edit, Yamara!
It seems to me that the basic argument being made is very similar to that made by Andrew Keen. If we get rid of the gatekeepers to the public then people will be overwhelmed by bad art and this overwhelming amount of art will drive down the price that people are willing to pay for art.
Now, the real problems with this sort of argument are that:
1) It assumes that consumers cannot separate the good from the bad without the aid of the gatekeepers. This itself contains an assumption that the gatekeepers are doing their job well. But the more questionable idea is that things like blogs or digg or other user-based ratings although they work fine for web pages will not work for novels.
2) It assumes that the presence of large amounts of bad art can drive down the price of good art. There's not really much evidence that this happens.
3) It assumes that giving away electronic art leads to people not wanting physical copies. This is the one assumption which although it doesn't hold now, might hold in the long enough term. However, there are ways to get around this problem, such as making money from advertising or simply giving some things away for free while holding others back for pay.
Keith
Much of the promotional success of free ebooks depends, it seems to me, on the vast majority of people far preferring paper books.
I prefer ebooks. If lots of people get to be like me (give it another generation or two), that effect will come to an end.
I think it's reasonable to worry, though not to panic, about the lack of a financial model that people like for electronic publishing. Possibly, though, the whole thing is simple enough that "something" will be put into place as it's needed.
I worry that the ideas currently floated seem to work mostly for the most popular authors; and not so well for the midlist in their particular field. Well, possibly the career path will change to years of unpaid electronic self-publishing, until you start finding enough in your tip jar to notice. Or some such. But people will try to build redistribution sites and skim off all the money.
keithirwin@4:
(referring to your numbered points)
1) I think the assumption there is not that people can't tell the difference, but merely that they will be overwhelmed by the volume. Imagine if bookstore shelves *also* contained all the slushpile novels submitted during the same period as the published novels present.
2) Professional photographers argue that this is happening right now in both stock photography and wedding and portrait photography. I'm not completely sure they're right, but it's a possible example.
3) I just commented on this in another post, before I saw yours, and I'll leave that to stand on its own.
DDB@5 Well, yes, if ebooks supplant pbooks someday, we'll have to do something else. But this has always been the status-quo in publishing -- the thing that is profitable erodes and some new profitable thing has to be invented. Publishing's "business model" has swung through newsstand distribution, book-clubs, the paperback revolution, the trade paperback revolution, etc and so forth, every 5-10 years, for centuries. IOW: giving away free ebooks to sell pbooks has the same likely longevity as all the other ways that books have ever been sold -- the fact that it may not work for all eternity is not especially damning.
Cory@7: My buyer's experience of publishing looks more stable than the actual ebb and flow of where exactly the money is coming from. I can see why you think of it as a rather dynamic process.
On the other hand, those changes you run through haven't changed the core of the business that much (royalties based on cover price, publishers). Format preferences, distribution methods, and final retail locations seem more peripheral to me.
Hardcovers and paperbacks have been the usual forms of publication through the entire time I've been reading (call it 45 years or a bit), with the hated and despised large-format paperback ("trade paperback", but it's the size I object to not the returnability difference) existing most of this time (Dover books in the 60s, I know) and becoming harder to avoid lately.
I think ebooks, if a substantial number of people come to feel about them the way I do (I prefer them to paper), will make much bigger changes. And, since everybody is of course just like me, I believe this to be inevitable in not too long a timespan :-).
Cory@7: I have a question with regards to your comment: "this has always been the status-quo in publishing -- the thing that is profitable erodes and some new profitable thing has to be invented".
I see this in audio and video publishing, as well as newspapers, but how has the book (specifically, fiction) publishing profitability model changed in the past 200 years? Or is it just slower to become antiquated than 8-track and Betamax tapes?
DD-B@6:
With my first point, I was actually talking about the ability to find the good stuff in a mountain of bad. What is the web itself but one huge slushpile? And yet, there's no difficulty finding quality on the web.
This is because we've invented tools to help us out. Things like Digg or Google or del.icio.us which directly or indirectly reflect the popularity of web pages. Of course, there's a second part to the process which is needed to make this work. We have to also look at how good things gain popularity on the web. What makes that work is a certain transitivity of interest. I tend to be interested in the same things which web sites I'm interested in are interested in. As a result, I'll follow their links. This means that they can elevate the popularity of other things, allowing a certain process of well-liked things propagating to other places and gaining popularity.
For instance, I really like Greece's Low-Bap hip-hop collective, so I was listening to their radio station, Blasphemy.gr and I heard them play an American rapper that I'd never heard before. So I went looking and found out that his name was Virtuoso and found more information about him and bought one of his albums. Now, I didn't go to Blasphemy.gr in order to find this rapper, I went so that I could listen to rappers I already knew about like Sadahzinia and Active Member and other Low Bap artists. But the sort of music that they like is the same sort of music which I like, so I discovered something new. Likewise, I go to Boingboing because I know that I want to see some of the things that they're interested in, but there are also other things which I didn't expect to be interested in that I have been anyway.
This transitivity of interest causes liked things to be able to grow in popularity. And as they grow in popularity, we have tools which make them easier to find. And the nice thing about the way this process works on the web is that it can be applied to other objects beyond the web itself. For instance, Boingboing frequently recommends books (even ones which aren't podcast or can't be downloaded) or gadgets (even ones which aren't open source). This process can work to separate good from bad even with things other than web pages.
In fact, I would argue that this process works significantly more efficiently than the process currently commonplace in retail. I don't go into book stores and just browse books. The problem is that the average standard of quality is not so high that I can just grab a random book off the shelf and be assured a good read. So I still must separate good from bad. My best chance of doing this is to judge a book by its cover, which as we all know, often does not work so well. Instead, I use the internet to research and then know ahead of time what book I want, and I just go to a book store to buy it. If I were to just go to a book store without doing research first, I would go to one with a knowledgeable sales staff which I could ask for some guidance, and they could recommend to me what book I should buy.
In neither of these cases does having more books on the shelf of a bookstore make my task significantly harder. Assuming that the books are well organized, it just means that I'll have to walk farther on average. The only thing that it makes harder is browsing, which is not a great way to find books as is, assuming that our goal is to find a book which we will enjoy. We're much better off using the internet to find books. If you follow sites which talk about the sorts of books you like, they will introduce you to other books that you will be likely to like due to the transitivity of interest.
And more to the point, as books themselves become a part of the web, this process is automatically engaged. The only problem with fiction books is that they are a little different from hypertext. They are less likely to be explicitly cross-referential, so we cannot apply a google-like algorithm to find the fiction best loved by other fiction. There are influences and cross-references, but they are rarely explicit enough to apply a popularity algorithm to them. However, we can do this with most non-fiction, and it is already being done with scientific papers. (That was actually the first thing that the Google guys did before they applied it to the web.)
Anyway, my main point is that the tools and processes of the web are all about slush-pile sorting, and they work. They work for web pages, and they work for books too.
Keith
Cory:
The gatekeepers have liked his work better than the readers.Bob W. (2):
I protest. It's not my fault that Will BeBack has gone out of his way to pick fights with a statistically improbable number of science fiction editors.In answer to the question: No. The existence of Wikipedia editors is no threat to professional editors.
Keith Irwin (4): Very astute.
This market model works if you're selling gasoline or cane sugar.Readers can tell good from bad. What they won't do is wade through oceans of crap to find the good stuff.Look at the world outside those gates. I've seen user-based ratings function as a rough filter for fanfic, but that's as far as it goes. The most effective filter for fanfic is recommendations by readers known to have good judgement -- at which point you've reinvented the gatekeeper.You can consult yourself as an expert on this one. Imagine you have half an hour to kill, so on impulse you walk into a bookstore. There are only two new books in the category you like best. One is by a writer you've always enjoyed. The other, by the abysmally bad John Q. Crumbhack, is seventy-five pages longer, and is priced five bucks cheaper. Do you buy the Crumbhack novel because its price is lower? Neither does anyone else.We don't know whether this will always be the case, but right now people like browsing electronic editions and reading hardcopy ones.Publishing is always changing. Someone will come up with a new way to do it.Darren Barefoot (9):
Imagine a 6x9 hardcover, fairly tight type design, say 352 - 384 pages, of which a good twenty pages (not counting the index) are scholarly appurtenance. The cover says But We Make It Up on Volume: A Survey of Book Publishing and Distribution Models from 1800 to the Present.Honestly, I'm not making fun of you. But that's what it would take to answer that question. Just in my own lifetime -- start counting halfway through the previous century -- book production technology has gone through two huge revolutions (offset and digital imaging). In sales and distribution, the starting point is a paucity of bookstores outside big cities, with heavy consumer reliance on library and book club copies, and fiction serialized in magazines. Since then we've had wire racks and the paperback revolution, the democratization of reading, the acquisition of publishing companies by large busines conglomerates, the rise of chain bookstores in malls and then freestanding stores, the acquisition of pulishing companies by large (often European) media conglomerates, the epochal collapse of the old distribution system, online bookselling, and some tentative moves toward online books. Over on the author/editor/reader end of things: Agents. The rise and fall of the paperback. The hard/soft deal. Work for hire vs. advances against royalties. Hardcover genre fiction. Increasingly elaborate covers. Backlist woes. The trade paperback. Graphic novels. Audiobooks. The death and rebirth of the very long novel. Waaaaaay more books getting published. Publishing as a less color- and gender-determined and more sober industry. Readers becoming less hesitant about wearing glasses, and consequently keeping the habit of reading into middle and old age.
And that's just since Kennedy was President.
Enough out of me for now. Let me post this and go on.
That's just the thing. They're concerned only about technology in the wrong hands, meaning not their hands. When abusing their own power, e-Leftists are worse censors and privacy invaders than the government/corporate ("fascist") establishment they seek to overthrow.
I'm a writer and personally, I've always felt that I've benefited greatly from the internet in general. Blogging and other forms of self-publishing have been a great way for me to draw attention to my work and have led to lots of freelance gigs and therefore, cash. Having lots of my work online is also a great way to show prospective clients what I can do.
I agree with the above poster who said that the basic argument was similar to Andrew Keen's (An aside - does his personality just put anyone else off? Regardless of his work or opinions, his sheer distrust of anything created by someone that is not a "professional" or an "expert" gets on my nerves. There are TONS of good sites, good artwork, and good writing created by people who don't necessarily have a degree or mountains of qualifications in those fields. Yes, there are lots of amateurs who are pretty bad, but there are also plenty who just haven't been around long enough or don't have the requisite degrees to be considered experts. Okay, rant over.)
Anyways, look it like the music industry - just because piracy and internet exist doesn't mean people have stopped paying for music - just look at itunes. Also, reading books online not nearly as pleasant as curling up with an actual hard copy (even with a laptop - believe me, I've tried). Honestly, I highly doubt that rise of ebooks and other changes in publishing that result from the eventual worldwide ubiquity of the web will cause the demise of print books. Just look at the commenter who posted all the changes in the publishing world that have occured since Kennedy was president!
However, there is one industry that I think DOES have reason to be very, very worried is print newspapers. Mobile devices (yes, like the iphone) and the speed at which breaking news hits the web pretty much kick the print edition's butt. Also, online you can tailor your news and information to the topics you are most interested in (and advertisers can match this content with ads, and we all know how much they love targeted ads). Just look at all the citizen journalism sites out there (Daily Kos (http://dailykos.com) and such) and what organizations like the Knight Foundation are doing (they have a contest for people who have projects related to online news delivery, local and/or citizen journalism, and cover a specific region) with their news challenge (http://newschallenge.org).
The book publishing world appears to be able to weather the internet storm, in my opinion, but other types of publishing may not be so capable.
Hey, POWEROID, could you maybe clarify that a little?
Both the political left and the political right can be espoused by people with tyrannical tendencies -- Communism and Fascism are the notable examples of the twentieth century. But I think I've seen a lot more censorship, authoritarianism, and general clamping down under Nixon/Reagan/Bush I/Bush II than under Clinton.
My examples would include FBI abuses and the Enemies List, larger fines from the FCC for "bad" language, and funding of art projects which might not meet with widespread popular enthusiasm. What have you got on your side of the discussion?
I think it's important to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction here. When it comes to nonfiction, there is much more potential for readers to find useful material via google searches. My own nonfiction physics textbooks are free online under a CC license, and plenty of people find them. But when it comes to nonfiction, I really don't see any alternative to having someone read slush.
Of course, having slush readers and other gatekeepers also has nothing to do with the issue of whether a particular work is free online in digital form. People like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross routinely make some or all of their work available simultaneously via traditional print publishing and free digital downloads.
BOB W,
My side of the discussion has nothing to do with your side of the discussion. Nixon/Reagan/Bush I/Bush II? Enemies List? I'm not even sure what it is you're talking about, except that you don't like people criticizing the left.
But, okay, you want an example? BoingBoing posted a photograph of an alleged thief this morning. The "fascist" police would never do that, as it's a serious invasion of privacy and infringement of individual rights. e-Leftists (my made-up word for leftwing bloggers, particularly "copyleft" bloggers) have no conception of individual rights to privacy or liberty except when involving their own egocentric pursuits of happiness at the lowest price. When you talk about the ethics and morality of leftwing bloggers, you're talking about--for the most part--mob rule.
The problem here is the same as for software. How do you set a price for a product whose fixed cost is not zero, but where the marginal cost is zero? Simple economic theory tells us that the "normal price" will approach zero. It might start a bit higher than zero, but over time, in a free market, the price will gradually approach zero.
By right, ebooks should cost only a tiny fraction of the printed paper books. But they are not. There is no printing cost. No distribution cost. No loss for unsold copies. No holding cost. No markup by the distributor. No percentage to be take by the retailer. The price needs only be divided between the author and the publisher. Yet we find that the cost for ebooks and paper books are nearly the same.
POWEROID(16)
Thank you for the example. Saying what the hell you're talking about is usually part of having a discussion. That's not a really good example, though: my local police recently published a still from a security video camera along with a police sketch of a man who was in the right general area at the right time to be a suspect for a crime. The person involved was presumably also thought by a crime victim to resemble the man who assaulted her.
In fact, it's quite common for police to publish pictures of criminal suspects from all kinds of non-public sources. The entry in this weblog identified the picture as that of a "presumed" thief.
The picture reproduced on this web site was published on a public web page first, so it's hardly a violation of privacy. A story with enough information to find the picture on Flickr was published in a politically very Right newspaper in Canada this morning.
So that pretty much wraps up a refutation of your one example of how this weblog is an example of the "e-Left" who don't respect rights to privacy and liberty. Got any more? I'd like to find out if it's true, as I suspect, that however many of your examples are defeated, your ignorance will be invincible.
Meanwhile, the FBI have been abusing their privilege of getting private information on US citizens without due process, the (politically Right) government of the US has been grabbing people off the street and imprisoning them without due process, and the TSA can interfere with your freedom of movement and pursuit of happiness without any accountability. Getting a picture uploaded to a Flickr account with at least a stolen password, if not a stolen computer, circulated further and labelled with "presumed thief" and "idiot" seems like a poor reason for inventing a whole new category for people you dislike. Some other kind of grudge behind that?
dainel@17: Re your argument that the price approaches zero when the marginal cost of production and distribution is zero: One obvious caveat to add is that "approaches" doesn't mean "becomes in a certain amount of time." Another big difference between open-source software and a novel is that there are tons of people out there who think open-source coding is fun, and are competent to do it, but there are very few people out there who are capable of writing a novel that a lot of people will want to read.
Publishers clearly blew it the first time around with overpriced, proprietary, DRM-ridden ebooks -- but so what? They didn't lose anything with the experiment. They're like Microsoft in 1990, when Linux didn't exist yet, and BSD was mired in legal problems.
Things are starting to change, but book publishing has been a mature industry for hundreds of years, and is actually pretty efficient. The best example I know of where the traditional paper publishing approach is really feeling marketplace pressure is science fiction magazines. The big three print magazines have circulations that have gotten so small that they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. Meanwhile, Jim Baen's Universe has fired a shot across their bows by putting out an electronic-only magazine, and paying authors two to five times as much. However, they're certainly not offering the magazine for free -- you have to pay for a subscription.
Bob W. is hereby awarded the ears and tail. Formal logic rules OK.
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POWEROID:
Um, I just mentioned an example of a police department circulating a still from a security camera of a suspect. To be absolutely clear, that video footage did not contain ANY material which showed a crime being committed, not at all.
Here's a link to a story from a Wisconsin paper about how a police department released security camera images of a suspect in order to request help in identifying the suspect. The news story indicates that the man was not recorded on video starting the fire for which he is the suspected arsonist.
So, you are factually wrong about that, I think. Do you have any evidence, citations, whatever, to back up your position?
Andrew Keen is a public figure and in the grand tradition of the law in this country, he's fair game for comments and in particular mockery. Andrew Keen, on the flip side, has called the group of which Cory Doctorow is a prominent member "worse than the Nazis" in some respects.
"e-Leftists" don't claim the right to do whatever they want with information online, assuming that I've correctly understood how you mean the term you coined. The claim the right to use information that is either licensed for reuse or in the public domain.
So, anyway, if you have other examples, by all means let us all in on them. In the meantime, please understand that I think that you are unwilling or incapable of using rational thought in the exposition of your opinions. If you are banned, chased off, or ignored, it is probably because you are angry and incoherent.
I think that your statement "...ignorance wants nothing more than to remain ignorant..." applies most specifically and appropriately to you yourself. Good luck with that.
If you accuse someone of engaging in ignorance, he's going to say you're incoherent. Always.
Poweroid, I can believe you're been called "incoherent" often enough that it seems inevitable to you. In the meantime, ad hominem arguments don't make it: never have, never will.
I'm not making an ad hominem argument. I'm not making any argument at all, because argumentation is impossible when dealing with such ignorance.
There are only two options when dealing with ignorance: Ignore it or destroy it. Since I cannot destroy you, I have no choice but to ignore you.
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