Why free reading is important
Neil Gaiman's got some good further ruminations on the nature and reason for free ebooks in a post he called "The nature of free." Bottom line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free. The more barriers there are to reading, the worse the former gets.
During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, "Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books," and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams' publisher, with a 'write in and get your free book' ad in Rolling Stone. They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the best tool for selling books.
the latest
latest episodes
Uh... libraries?
(But seriously, I think free web-publishing of books is great.)
Ha, I can't find half the stuff I want to read at my local library, or any of its sister branches. I've bought more books because of libraries having book #'s 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 - but not book 4 - than for any other reason.
#2: interlibrary loan is your friend. Free and (usually) easy, just ask your librarian!
Free web downloads have led me to at least five new-to-me authors that I've gone on to buy new in the store.
Another reason I don't recall seeing mentioned so far is that you can't grep dead goats. I have a copy of American Gods and the gorgeous Hill House limited edition with the author's preferred text, but if I wanted to find a quote or read the added scene with Jesus I'd have to read through the whole thing or at least skim it linearly.
If I had both versions in electronic form I could compare them easily, search for quotes if I only remember a couple of key words, all sorts of useful things.
So I applaud Harper Collins' first step at providing the book in free electronic form even if it's not in a form useful to me yet, and hope they'll be encouraged to do better, instead of going "ZOMG internet savages circle the wagons and ignore the future!"
Tor's free sample ebooks are in a more useful format, and Harper Collins could learn something from them.
Many roleplaying games are now available in both hardcopy and (usually) PDF, and in some cases you can buy both for one bundled price. I'd love to see that become more common.
I firmly believe that readers want to give money to their favorite authors, but that's hard if you don't know they're your favorite author yet!
I really can't understand how corporate media still don't get or are scared of the internet. They've already had business models that give away their products for free as promotion for further sales for decades and decades, being radio and TV (and in a different way libraries). The internet they should see as the same old business model, just a evolution of the delivery technology.
As a young child I couldn't understand why they sell records when they're all free to listen to on the radio, and I guess it's the media companies are the children now.
low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors
This really struck home for me. When I was young (just after the earth cooled), access to inexpensive paperbacks introduced me to innumerable authors.
I'm also seeing a connection here between Gaiman's ideas and those of Clive Thompson here.
Getting books into people's heads keeps the medium alive - and, let's be honest, keeps the people from turning into drones whose first thought is no longer "Wonder what's on TV?"
"Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books,"
There must be a Boing Boing reader or three with a sociology degree. Aren't there examples of societies built on sharing and cooperation? I specifically mean classical or well-established examples; the current hacker culture is young enough to be dismissed as a fad by the cynical.
Aren't there examples of societies built on sharing and cooperation?
uhh... All of them?
Cory, thanks for posting the update from Neil's comments. I think the Guardian interview referenced in NG's post is worth a read too.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2255877,00.html
Jane Friedman, CEO of Harpers Worldwide, is quoted:
"The advantage of our digital warehouse is that we can securely, quickly and easily change what content is available," she said, "whether it is to meet an author's request, to preview a title before it is on sale, or to promote backlist books. And we believe it's the role of the publisher to develop tools to easily allow authors to promote their work to their communities online."
The word "preview" is telling but it seems like the lizard logic of most publishers is starting to ebb away. In the end, they will do what moves books and if they don't new publishers will.
People are always claiming the death of reading, or nobody reads for pleasure...but my local giant 2-storey bookstores (2 of them within a mile of each other) are always full, and sites like goodreads.com and its ilk prosper.
Maybe it's just that people ain't reading Neil Gaiman for pleasure? ]:->
I am reading Neil Gaiman for immense, ecstatic pleasure, thank you. (He is my favourite!)
Giaman is good but American Gods is not his best book. GOOD OMENS is a much better book.
See my review:
here
Takuan, good point. :-)
So why don't publishers get that? Why are there still people pursuing arm's-length strategies? Why does it still seem like Gordon Gekko is running things?
Hell, why are people so unenlightenedly selfish? How can we maintain the high-complexity, high-technology society we have when the percentage of people who think short-term -- to their own detriment and that of others -- is growing so rapidly?
In short, why are people so remarkably stupid?
The vast majority of books I own I've bought second-hand, specifically because books are a big gamble. A movie can't last more than three hours, or cost more than about ten bucks, but to blow fifteen or twenty dollars on a hardback, and invest ten hours reading, only to be disappointed, is an awful blow. My tastes were shaped by reading that I picked up at garage sales for a quarter a piece. When I see a rack of Dover Classics at the bookstore, I'm all over them, and if a particular volume doesn't work out, I'm out a buck or two.
I'm honestly stumped by the attitude of media publishers towards giveaways. I think its roots are more cynical than even the "screw the consumer/screw the artist" notions that get floated around. I think it has a lot more to do with the fear that they're crap shovelers, and that the role of publishers (of any media, not just books) is to somehow package what's unredeemable.
This is a natural outgrowth of publishing, getting calloused eyeballs from looking over so much dreck in search of the merely acceptable. At the end of the day, all you see are the flaws, and you naturally fall into panic mode when somebody suggests you give it away. When you see your job as packaging crap, it sounds like they're yelling, "the jig is up!".
The problem with getting publishers to embrace different flavors of free is that their objections are rooted much more strongly in human nature than they are in economic reality. If publishers were really serious about their economic interests, not only would they be giving away a lot more, but they'd be aggressively targeting kids the way McDonald's does. But they don't, because they've got a deeply conflicted notion of what they're doing. After all, they wouldn't have gotten into publishing if they didn't love books. Rotted idealism is poisoning the industry as much as anything.
Genzo,
People are so unenlightenedly selfish because that's what the Capitalist system is built on. When your entire financial system is built on the concept of exploiting those with less knowledge/skill/experience than you it shouldn't be a surprise to find short-sighted selfishness in every aspect of business.
"...they wouldn't have gotten into publishing if they didn't love books."
Where on earth did you get this idea? Perhaps in Ye Olden Days people in the publishing industry were there because they loved books, but in Our Modern Era the publishing industry is as much about the insatiable quest for profits as any other.
Plenty of free books are given away at cons by the publishers, too--- no need to go so baroque as the Hitchhiker's Guide example. World Fantasy Con always has a bag of free books for each attendee.
I agree with Will. A good portion of the books that I've picked up to read in the past two or three years come from the used book rack at my local library. At a dollar for hardcovers and 50 cents for paperbacks, the price is hard to beat. Every time I'm at the library, I go through each rack, looking for something that'll catch my eye. That's how I picked out two first edition Ian Flemming James Bond books, and discovered a love for Hemingway. Even if I don't like the book, I know my money went to the library, and I can drop the book off in their used book bin. Part of what makes finding books so difficult for me is that I don't want to put a lot of time into a bad book, and it can be hard to get recommendations you trust. That being said, there's always the classics.
Dr. Pickles,
Editors and publishers are attracted to bookselling because they like books. Bringing a book to market is a tedious, difficult business that takes a lot of energy for a very uncertain and generally small profit. For the same amount of time, effort and brains, they could be making big bucks in any of a dozen other businesses.
Now, the guys at the tip-top are definitely in it for the money. But they're b-school babies, and their mentality is to minimize the difference between different flavors of widget-selling anyway. Obviously, part of the crisis publishing finds itself in nowadays is that it's being expected to conform to the predictable, high-growth models that apply to fungible commodities.
The guys in the middle, that is to say, the vast majority of the people in the book trade, are in it because they like the business, at least in theory. But I think that as the market changes, their attitudes become more and more conflicted. Their self-worth is tied both to the notion of books as art and as commodity. "Free books" undermines their self-worth as breadwinners, while the "bestsellers only" attitude goes against their artistic aspirations.
The solution, I feel, is to grow the freaking market. Carpet-bomb the country with literacy programs, lobby congress to improve education and reading programs in the schools. Fund local libraries, promote more authors, break up the Amazon/Barnes and Nobel/Border's triopoly. Why don't they place their products in more movies? Why didn't No Child Left Behind didn't include a novel-a-month mandate from the industry? It's almost like they weren't even trying.
Also, give away free books. Give them away online, in a nice format. Go into the back catalog, and pull out some likely candidates, and seed them around. See if you can drum up interest. They can't be doing much worse than they have been.
On why people are so unenlightenedly selfish:
I read somewhere on teh Intarweb (in fact, right here on teh Boing of Boings, so it must be true) that while technology has evolved since Day One of humanity, our brain has not. Our brain -- emotions and culture -- is stuck in the Stone Age. Thus, everything we do, think, and feel, is related in some way to living in a small tribe of simians, in danger from both other tribes of simians and the rest of the world.
This is why we (well... THEY) constantly elect leaders who are powerful rather than smart, and why people want to jealously guard the tribe totems (the revenue stream).
It's a theory, anyway.
Why do readers need to read an entire novel online for free? How come short stories and excerpts aren't enough to entice potential readers?
My problem with giving away intellectual property -particularly novels- is that you are fundamentally changing the medium. This is why I think that online giveaways have been more successful with genre fiction than literary or non-fiction.
If you give away a novel then you are really 'buying' publicity and building a brand, and by taking the financial pressure away from writing as a product, publishers and publicists are more apt to focus on brand building at the expense of writing in the long run.
The writers who have succeeded online are selling themselves instead of writing. Doesn't mean their writing isn't good, I just don't see eBooks as making much of a difference to someone like Tobias Wolfe or Charles DeAmbrosio.
How old are you? When will you die? Did you do everything yet? Do you have time? Will there be enough money? If you don't die soon, but you can't work, where will the money come from? How many books do you have left in you? Will they all sell? Will any sell? Should you try to make as much out of your writing while you can? What if the only book you give away turns out to be your best.... or last?
The fact is that as soon as the kids can steal books using P2P then they will. I know two musicians who have moved exclusively to soundtracks and aren't making popular music anymore, because their main audience won't pay for it and these guys are 40 with kids, a house payment and health insurance. If people sell 10% of the amount of mp3s compared to the cds they sold 5-10 years ago, and amongst my friends that's about right, and mp3s pay them $0.25 when they'd get $2.50-5.00 per cd then their income as musicians is about 1/100th of what it used to be. When you're 18 you don't pay attention, but when every tour keeps you out of the house when you're daughter is learning to write her name, you dang well better make some money at it or else stay home.
The rush to free culture is echoed by the rush of talented people OUT of the fields, like music, where it's come in.
Ask yourself this, what happened to poetry after the market abandoned poets? There hasn't been a movement in poetry to equal the Beats since the Beats. Why? Because you can't make a living at it. Adam Smith's theory holds true.
Take the ability to make money out of writing fiction and people who can write will become technical writers, work in public relations, or do anything so they make enough money to buy a condo and pay for medical care. It's as simple as that. Either pay for it, or lose it, but there is no such thing as FREE CULTURE.
Just look around for poets with the quality of the Beats and pine for the good old days when the world wasn't run by internet billionaires trying to obtain free media so they can sell more portable devices.
#23
Who got $5 per CD?
These are indy, do-it-yourself-ers I presume, with no fat-cat overheads.
And of course there is such thing as free culture, I've done the indy diy thing myself, and supplied plenty of free music, art and parties to the world at large (luckily they didn't all turn up at once).
Poetry's strengths have spawned the underground (and to a far lesser extemt the overground) hip hop scene (please don't give me any ignorant attitudes on hip hop or rap, if you don't know the scene you don't know the quality and intelligence of the material and artists out there not being covered by MTV).
DCER- I work at a magazine which runs poetry and reviews of poetry, although the majority of our articles are traditional journalism. On an average day, we get 1-2 books of poetry to review, and about a dozen packages of unsolicited poems. I can't keep up the pace, and I don't know anyone who could. Of course, the majority is crap, but that's the same with every slush pile-- one of the distinctive features of art is that it generally takes decades to puzzle out what was really great from what was dated and faddish, and what was just nonsense.
Just because you like the Beats doesn't mean they were the end of poetry. Indeed, the market hardly abandoned poets- if anything, despite the withdrawal of public support in the 80's, for the first time in a century, poetry got into the business of making money. Arkizzle's point is exactly right- hip-hop, if not to the tastes of the chapbook-buying public (all 100 of them), could be the most lucrative form of versifying ever.
(And sorry for the crack about the chapbooks- poetry readers are actually some of the most astute listeners of hip hop.)
Never the less, poetry reading or writing is not a pastime for the majority of Americans. For on-the-page written poetry, there exists no profitable market. Yet American poets persist.
In fact, from my limited perspective, poetry is doing better now online than fiction. The cost of publishing has finally come into line with the potential profits made from poetry- nearly zero. Poetry boards and chatrooms are jumping nowadays, and the form itself is better suited to the internet than many longer forms of prose.
Now, you may not like the last fifty years of verse. Language Poetry or New Formalism (or East Coast hip-hop) might not be your cup of tea. But give it a couple of decades, and we'll shake it out, and hand you a clutch of classics.
Will,
it's very interesting (and refreshing) to hear hip hop being taken seriously by 'real' (ouch!) poets.
Something I often think about is the slightly improbable (in modern times anyway) partnership of machismo (passion, competition, aggression) and poetry. [insert rant about warrior poets here]
Now I don't at all mean to paint all hip hop as aggressive or all poets as pansies (both are neither, soley), but the mixture of gang violence and poetry just seems, as I said, beautifully improbable. Its almost like they took poetry, injected it with good old american compete-at-everything, tossed in some territorial disputes and wound up with hip hop.
It's great though. If you have ever been around the scene, you will know how much mcs really LIVE rhyme and wordplay and improvisation. It's such a huge part of the life, they are dedicated to poetry much more than some of the people we lable poets.
I challenge any master wordsmith to think as quick and cleverly as some of the great freestyle-battlers, I mean it's truly incredible to witness someone think so fast as to be able to rhyme constantly about the things around them in complex multi-syllable rhymes, let alone making every other bar a punchline about your appearance or a clever metaphor.. all off the top of the head, with no edits or rewrites or undos.
Amazing stuff.
in a very little while, hip hop will be utterly forgotten
Let me clarify myself : "..and wound up with hip hop"
I didn't mean to suggest that gangster rap == hip hop.
It so doesn't.
Tak, why?
It seems sufficiently like singing and yet sufficiently different from singing to be a new form of artistic expression with validity and followers.
I'm certainly not talking about what 90% of people know as hip hop or rap from MTV or commercial radio, I'm taking about hip hop - worldwide.
in a very little while, hip hop will be utterly forgotten
Piffle, sir. At least since the time of the ancient Greeks, spontaneous lyric poetry has spouted from the lips of impassioned youth.
the appeal is minimal, the audience microscopic. The apparent success is an artifact of the marketing of a larger culture that owes nothing to hip hop. Wait and see.
Antinous, when I was about 15 I used to use that exact argument to defend hip hop, before it gained its commercial foothold on the music scene and got some 'commercial validity'.
hip hop was born and died in the early 80s. Run DMC had its flicker of artistic merit, all since has been those with no imagination taking money from those with even less. A musical/poetic footnote.
Good hip hop is good poetry, using the sound of language to paint pictures on the eardrums of the listener. Poetry has largely devolved to a written phenomenon. Hip hop has restored it as a vocal art.
As to its audience being microscopic, I'm a 50 year old yoga teacher and I listen to it. Even my mother, in her 70s, appreciated it when it had something meaningful to say.
And gangsta rap - in what age have angry young men not ranted against society in terms that outraged their elders?
Poetry is not hip-hop.
period.
This is like saying a motorcycle is an automobile. Yes, vaguely, but to say that removes central points defining both.
No one takes this kind of anti-logical stretches seriously, least of all me. Having spoken word lyrics doesn't make something poetry. The news, for instance, could be poetic, but that doesn't make it poetry, it makes it the news. All lyrical music includes words, but that doesn't make it poetry except in the vaguest possible sense. And anyone who wants to trade in those tangential stretches of the imagination is welcome to- without me around.
Lots of bands put out cds for indie record labels and made $5 on cds where the label owner made $3- on a $9 wholesale price in the 1990s. Don't believe the stories that say bands made no money on cds, that's merely rationalization from computer business professionals trying to explain why they don't buy music. $1 per cd was more or less what bands got from majors, but I knew at least one band that negotiated $2 per cd for their major deal during the grunge signing boom. ITunes isn't paying more than $0.25 per song to bands and almost no one I know who is older is selling anything but their hit singles, which is to say, the rip off economy has ripped them off.
"" the appeal is minimal ""
To you. Either you don't appreciate wordplay, metaphor and flow - (or indeed the skills and references of combining bits of old records into interesting new beats with a built-in pedigree for the discerning listener - or the incredible extent to which graffiti, breakdancing and beatboxing have risen as art forms) - or you have chosen to make a great sweeping statement about something you know little about.
"" the audience microscopic ""
Tell that to the countless people who flock to real hip hop festivals, graffiti jams, mc/scratch battles, hip hop clubs, etc etc.
Hip hop is about taking part as much as being a passive experience. Most people I know who love hip hop are involved in some way generating and promoting it, its alive! :)
"" The apparent success is an artifact of the marketing of a larger culture that owes nothing to hip hop ""
Tell that to the publishers of hip hop related books and products, again NOT 50pence or any of that shit, but real stuff for people who love it - graf books and mags, vinyl, turntables, specialist spraypaint, clothes, DVDs, CDs, websites.
And whether I like it or not, I'll admit that commercial rap is a part of hip hop. If people come to the real stuff through delving deeper into the shit they hear on the radio, fair play.
"good" is good. "Bad" is crap. Always precious little good in anything, anywhere. Spoken word is always present, the American culture industry marketing machine happened to glomm onto hip hip as exploitable. Lots of poetry world wide better than hip hop that lost ear-share since it wasn't being shoved for money.
Of the six billion plus souls on the planet, how many ever really shared primary referents with hip hop?
As for gangsta rap, anything that toxic with its hatred of women, gay people, cops (well OK, a pass on that one) and most of what society needs to hold itself together (like responsible fathers) is not a rant against social injustice and ills - it IS a social injustice.
A sorry little scarecrow tarted up to shill for the unscrupulous - not the first time evil has triumphed.
This is like saying a motorcycle is an automobile.
A motorcycle is an automobile. It's self propelling. That's what makes something an automobile.
Having spoken word lyrics doesn't make something poetry.
Agreed. The use of meter, repetition, alliteration, rhyme, etc. make it poetry. It might be really bad poetry at times, but it's still poetry.
DCer.. WTF?
Have you listened to hip hop? ..but again, for the umpteenth, not commercial radio rap.
I'm not even remotely vearing into "tangential stretches of the imagination" when I say lots and lots of hip hop is poetic.
Self-reflection, ideas, place-in-the-universe, life experience, metaphor, stories, prose.. all available on hip hop mixtapes.
literature in metrical form
any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις," poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry
Traditional poetry is language arranged in lines, with a regular rhythm and often a definite rhyme scheme. Nontraditional poetry does away with regular rhythm and rhyme, although is usually is set up in lines.
library.thinkquest.org/23846/library/terms/index.html
Texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama.
www.longman.co.uk/tt_seceng/resources/glosauth.htm
A type of literature in which ideas and feelings are expressed in compact, imaginative, and often musical language. Poets arrange words in ways designed to touch readers’ senses, emotions, and minds. Most poems are written in lines that may contain patterns of rhyme and rhythm.
www.wallkillcsd.k12.ny.us/glt.htm
What am I missing here?
As to its audience being microscopic, I'm a 50 year old yoga teacher and I listen to it. Even my mother, in her 70s, appreciated it when it had something meaningful to say.
---------
How did I know this was the case? How I wish I added in my story about the graying of hip hop prior to you posting this. Hip hop is the music for older people trying to be hip. It is not genuinely hip or meaningful to young people and hasn't been for years now.
There's a white grandpa on my block who saw Grandmaster Flash spin at Danceteria in the 70s/80s and he always bores the African-American kids, who abandoned hip hop 3-5 years ago, with his grandfatherly stories about the hip hop he likes. His daughter is one of those tattoo faux-rockabilly women into the NY Garage/No-Wave revival scene circa 2002. The closest thing my African-American neighbors listen to hip hop is either crunk or reggaeton, but usually gospel or other pop vocal styles.
When I was a kid, grandparents liked to talk about big band jazz. Today, grandparents talk about hip hop to bored teens. We all pine for the lost music of our youth, but I first heard "The Message" in elementary school 27 years ago.
It's self propelling. That's what makes something an automobile.
--------
Hey, you signed your name to that silliness, not me!
How I wish I added in my story about the graying of hip hop prior to you posting this. Hip hop is the music for older people trying to be hip. It is not genuinely hip or meaningful to young people and hasn't been for years now.
I haven't said anything about hip hop being relevant to young people, and yes, I have listened to it since the 70s. I even babysat Tupac once, back before we had air or gravity. With your references to boring grandpas, all that you've proven is that you're ageist. And a bit of a troll.
DCer.. WTF?
Have you listened to hip hop? ..but again, for the umpteenth, not commercial radio rap.
---------
Of course I listened to it. I was a teenager in the 1980s and hip hop is the music of that era. You misunderstand what makes poetry poetry and stop trying to pin your issues on me.
I remember, in a sort of joking fashion, interviewing KRS-One, who really wasn't the nicest guy in the world, and he went on a tangent about hip-hop being "the news" of the Bronx. But, did hip hop follow journalistic ethics? Was it less news than simply gossip? So we discussed that. And, you know, I was really tempted to ask him about how "the news" that Scott La Rock was seeing some girl got Scott killed, but that would have been the cruelest thing possible to say. But to me it illustrates that people like to talk in real vagaries that sometimes don't make much sense.
I like the old Chris Rock show skit where the aging grandmother talks about hip hop as urban poetry and Chris plays the "table dance" sound clip. So, is Chris Rock right that hip hop isn't poetry or are you right that it is? You be the judge, because I have no dog in this fight. I don't need to defend what I can say from an educated perspective is correct. You all can argue to your hearts delight because I seem to have struck a nerve.
Arkizzle,
I'm thinking Rabbit Run.
"" I was a teenager in the 1980s and hip hop is the music of that era ""
That is indeed where it started, but that doesn't mean that is all it can ever be. It left America's shores around the same time the rest of America heard about, and has been taken and shaped worldwide ever since.
And I don't see the relevance of the episode in which you name-dropped KRS. You also said "Poetry is not hip-hop", which is relevant to the conversation I was having.
KRS is back in your memory, so he can't defend his words here.
I'm here, right now, not talking in vagaries.
What do you base "Poetry is not hip-hop" on? or inddeed it's more logical reverse.. hip hop is not poetry.
As to the Chris Rock line, I know it well and see the truth in it every day, but that doesn't mean I don't know what real hip hop is about and mourn for the losses that the commercial bandwagon has reaped on it's artistic merit.
And to answer your question, we are both right. Chris asserts that the hip hop he hears in clubs, and on MTV has gotten ridiculous, and I agree. He doesn't, however, go into a critique of the current state of affairs of underground or international hip hop, and I imagine he enjoys a lot of hip hop besides the stuff he used to make that funny, if generalized, observation.
Gentlemen.
Antinous, I don't know it. Is there a free download available? :D
Off topic train, back on track!
Tak,
Lady.
Madame,
All that you really need to know is that it's about someone whose present has not fulfilled the promise of his past. Bitterness ensues.
Marklar?
wait.. uh oh.. i see what happened.
I'm a chap :)
I was replying to Takuan in kind, but can see how my comment could be misread.. doh!
In other news, your reference seems to be a fitting précis.
Oh, dear. Multiple gender reassignments in one thread.
What ever would the Dalai Lama say about that?
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Now that's just rude!
Or auto-refresh gone horribly wrong.
Or both.
My final post on this topic. I love the mutant posting-plants that grow overnight.
Reading as a pastime is rapidly becoming a minority activity, and it twists people's tits that their primary signifier of cultural fluency is falling out of fashion. If it's poetry, fiction or nonfiction, the act if sitting down with a book is becoming increasingly rare.
Giving books away seems like a good way to reverse this trend. Period. Is it good for the publishing industry? I think it is, for the simple reason that computers haven't yet found a nice way to emulate books. I know I bought Kelly Link's second book after reading her first book online. If anything, giving away free books is undermining not the publisher's business, but the library's.
Writers will write creatively regardless of the market. Anthony Trollope made a mint of his work. Franz Kafka made bupkis. And regardless of your opinion of his work, Jay-Z became a very rich man for his lyrics, while Emily Dickinson made nothing.
The question really is, now that the content writers produce has virtually no protection against infinite reproduction, how do we cultivate a market that will encourage people to do the very difficult thing that is writing? As long as publishers view the web as being something to fight against, all they'll ever do is slow down the inexorable erosion of their market.
They absolutely need to come to an accommodation with the internet. They need to aggressively seek it out, WHATEVER that compromise is, and buy into it. It's obvious to everyone but old people.
Tree, I would suspect you got disemvoweled because the thought that Boing Boing is shilling gadgets is ridiculous. Yes, BB has solidly entered its commercial phase as an out-and-out business, and will slowly undergo the calcification that comes to all life forms, but the idea that the BB gang has ever not loved the cool gadgets for pure geek value, that gadgets were not always part of what's going on here, is completely unjustified. There's a whole gadgets subdomain here.
If I'm paraphrasing correctly, the disemvowelling is for comments likely to incite *ahem* overly impassioned responses. I'm sure BB wants to maintain a certain tone to the forums to be suitable to a broad readership.
I think disemvowelling is counterproductive to a free discussion in the long run. (Of course, free discussion might or might not be part of the agenda; maybe the BB devs just want to post stuff they think is cool to a fun site.) Part of me thinks that the cure for bad speech is good speech, and part of me feels that the only way to determine what is bad speech and what is good speech is by open discussion.
Tree Shapiro, if you don't think that comment of yours was gratuitously rude, I'm not sure what else I can tell you -- except, perhaps, that dragging it into another thread doesn't make it any better.
You're not being censored. Don't give yourself airs. You're being told that we don't have to put up with remarks like that.
Geno (61), the explanation is even simpler than that. You're a courteous man. I'll bet you can't imagine saying something like that remark of Tree Shapiro's to your host at a gathering.
This has nothing to do with censorship, or information wanting to be free, or even the inflammatory potential of the comment. Here's the beginning and end of it: it was a nasty thing to say.
Open discussion is a wonderful ideal, but I can't believe it has hitherto escaped Tree Shapiro's notice that it's very bad manners to publicly accuse someone of dishonesty when it's completely off the topic and you have no grounds to be saying it. This wasn't a misunderstanding. He knew it was gratuitously rude, and he said it anyway. Then, when his remark was disemvowelled, he came to another thread and posted it again.
If it reassures you, please reflect that Tree and I are in fact communicating with each other. He's telling me he wants to go on being rude, and I'm telling him it's not going to work.
Teresa, you missed comment #49.
Wordlings (10), that remark is so self-evidently foolish that I'm just going to let it lie.
Geno (13): First, some publishers understand it very well. This thread is full of mentions of publishers giving books away for free.
Second, the reason they haven't been doing it before is not because "Gordon Gekko is running things." Gordon Gekko wouldn't go near trade publishing. No one who's primarily interested in money would have anything to do with the book industry.
The reason they've previously been hesitant about giving books away is that they have a duty to the authors whose books they have under contract. Authors get little enough money as it is. They didn't want to undercut their authors' sales.
The reason things are changing now is that a few forward-thinking publishers have demonstrated that giving away free copies of books doesn't hurt the author's sales. That's great! It opens the door. But until publishers could be reasonably sure of that outcome, they wouldn't gamble with their authors' earnings and their sales figures.
Pretty villainous of them, eh?
Will (14):
You really don't know what you're talking about.I've worked in trade publishing for a long time. That "screw the consumer/screw the artist" attitude you imagine doesn't exist there. Readers are a touchy lot. You don't screw them. You don't even confuse them if you can help it, because they'll stop buying your books. If they're really ticked, they'll also stop buying books that look like your books.
You don't screw the artist, either. It's hard to make a profit on someone's first book. It's a tough sell. You've got to teach everyone -- the publicity department, the sales force, the distributors, the retailers -- to marginally recognize this author or at least this title. The readers are an even tougher sale, because this is someone they haven't heard of. You can congratulate yourself if the book makes a profit, and look forward to the second book, which won't be quite as much of an uphill climb.
Screw the artist? Whatever for? Authors who can write books that people want to buy and read are rare. You want to keep them around, and build up their audience.
As for packaging "irredeemable crap" -- wrong again. You could get away with that for one month, maybe two. After that, you're dead in the water, and you might as well shut down your imprint, because no one's going to believe a thing you say.
And do you really imagine (oops, of course you can) that editors can't tell whether their books are good? They have to read them over and over again, and explain and summarize and package them. They know their books.
Occasionally, yeah, a stinker does get through the system. That has nothing to do with getting fried eyeballs from reading slush. The commonest reason that happens is that the book was already under contract, and when the manuscript that was delivered deviated significantly from what the house expected, they didn't throw it back at the author and demand a refund. Often, they've tried to fix it, only the fix hasn't worked.
Doctor Pickles (16):
Where do you guys get your Amazing Publishing Facts? Whatever your source is, I have one tip for you: stop believing it.The single most reliable publishing joke I know goes like this:
Everybody laughs, even people who've heard it before."Insatiable quest for profits." Hoo boy. I'm not saying it's impossible that there should be anyone in the publishing industry that's motivated by an insatiable quest for money; I'm just saying that if there is, they're really, really stupid.
In my experience, what editorial departments are insatiable about is trying to publish commercially marginal books that have caught their hearts.
Will again (19):
Oh, him -- the one who'd previously been selling soda pop. He stuck around for some years, then left. Turned out that approach didn't work.I laugh, I roll around on the floor. That's another reliable giggle in the industry: the beancounters who look at the financial records, notice that a few bestsellers make most of the profit, and ask plaintively why we don't just publish the bestsellers and skip all those other titles. It happens again and again.The only way to get predictable high growth out of a publishing company is to sell it and invest the proceeds in something else.
Oooh, I'm conflicted! Free books have undermined my sense of self-worth! That must be why I'm cowering here, weeping softly, instead of laughing at you and telling you you're wrong.Uh-huh, Will. You just keep thinking.Gad! Why, that notion has never occurred to anyone in the industry! What a blessing, sir, that you have come to set us straight!We have. It's called "mass market distribution."No Child Left Behind? They weren't trying. That wasn't the point. Where've you been hiding the last six or seven years?Or did you mean the industry should have mandated a novel a month? We'd love to, but we don't make the laws, and we have precious little clout.
Snipe (21), don't believe everything they tell you about the invisible hand of the marketplace.
DCer (23):
Nope. The subject of pirated books has been studied intensively, and the availability of pirate text doesn't keep people from buying books. If it's a book they want, they'll buy it hardcopy. If it isn't, the availability of downloadable text doesn't matter. The main thing electronic texts can do is sell them on the idea that they want to read (i.e., buy) this book. After that, the biggest single reason someone buys and reads a book is that they've read and enjoyed a previous one by the same author.(1.) Name two. (2.) The music industry is completely different from books. (3.) The only notable rush going on in music is the move to online sales.Buckaroo, it was the poets that abandoned the market. Check out how many major poets make their living off teaching gigs. They don't have to sell their work. The only major branch of poetry that's still subject to market forces is song lyrics. While you're at it, check out how few poets used to make a living at it.DCer, I"m sorry, you're usually more sensible but right now you are so full of it. You can't account for the current state of literature and bookselling via a lame economic theory. Have you even been keeping track of it? You don't sound like you have.Writers write. It's what they do. As I've said before on these boards, the day it becomes legal to publish fanfic, I have graven on my heart a list of writers I'm going to be scrambling to call. They've written work of better-than-publishable quality when there was no hope of ever getting paid for it.
If you've been reading Boing Boing, how is it that you missed the story about very commercial author Steven Brust writing a Serenity novel -- essentially a book-length work of fanfiction -- just because he had it in him?
Oh, boo hoo. There are plenty of excellent poets out there. When was the last time you bought a collection of their work? If you want there to be lots of good poetry, pay people to write it -- and I mean you, personally. It wouldn't take many people resolving to buy one book of poetry every two months to turn that entire field around.Will (25), when you talk about what you know, you're astute as hell. Good comment.
Takuan (27), are you intentionally trolling? Almost all popular art is forgotten fifty years later. (31) The apparent success is an artifact of marketing? And when did someone finally figure out how to get audiences to go along with that? (33) You're sounding like one of those guys who thinks he knows to the minute when Punk became irretrievably corrupt and died. Go here. The article's not about any one form of music; it's about sampling what's out there, so you're getting a reasonable assay. Notice all the sub-variants and foreign language editions. Just in the past few weeks I've seen videos of little Chinese kids and champion Korean breakdancers dancing to hiphop, and on TV I saw a top-ranked Japanese figure skater doing hiphop moves in his routine. The stuff's as live as it can be.
DCer (35):
Oh, malarkey. It's poetry. It can't be anything else. It's just poetry you don't like.Poetry is form, not content. I don't know what kind of faux-genteel notion of poetry you picked up along the way, but if it doesn't include hiphop rhymes, it's wrong. If you want to argue with me, I've got a literary criticism reference editor right over here behind this sign.
Furthermore, if reggaeton isn't an outgrowth of rap and hiphop, I'd love to hear where you think it comes from.
Arkizzle (39), I'll buy you a beer any time.
Will (59): Reading as a pastime is rapidly becoming a minority activity? No. Everyone here is reading as a pastime. Reading is on the rise. So are sales of bound books.
You're right about writers writing no matter what. We'll see what comes of it. This is an interesting world.
Nelson (62), thanks.
"that remark is so self-evidently foolish that I'm just going to let it lie." (grumblegrumble moderators pet! grumble)
Trolling? Moi?! Might as well ask if hagfish exude.
I HATE HIPHOP! It's crap! CRRRAPPP!
Thanks for all the publishing world info, I like to consume but it is good to know where it comes from.
It's actually refreshing to know that all that effortless pleasure I've taken over the years is on the backs of the well intentioned and hardworking. I feel validated. Seriously. I must be important.
mmmm....hagfish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb2EOP3ohnE
ooooh!!! gonna read Matter ASAP!
Of course you're important. You're the reader. Publishing frickin' revolves around you.