The Defenders of Literature and Cultural Heritage? Ha!

In the past week, there’s been several long-winded screeds written about the end of days for publishing at the hands of the exploding supernova that is Amazon.  This isn’t altogether a rarity, but I’ve noticed, as print sales continue to decline, ebook sales continue to pick up, and the traditional ways of doing business continue looking more and more like a quaint remnant of a past soon to be forgotten, the bile and vitriol thrown around at those who are at the vanguard of this vast cultural shift have gotten more pressing and severe.  First there was Scott Turow’s “Grim News” letter defending big publishing’s (alleged) collusion and price fixing.  He followed that up with a somewhat more tempered but still massively slanted and misdirected interview on Salon a few days later.  I myself, along with several others, took a swing at the hanging sliders Turow threw into all of our wheelhouses here.  After that, there was Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur’s rant on what he calls the “internet con-men who have ravaged publishing”.   I fully intend to expound upon his comments a little later, as I did find myself agreeing with bits and pieces of what he had to say about the newspaper business’ futile  addiction to elusive web ads, but his overall missive was still very much misplaced.  Finally, I ran across this piece by Bryce Milligan, publisher of Wings Press, on what he calls Amazon’s assault on intellectual freedom.  It’s been a pretty busy week for the dinosaurs of the publishing industry.

None of this is particularly surprising to me.  I’ve seen a lot of this before, watching the legacy newspaper industry’s response when the internet first started to really take a bite out of their once whole-ly locked down apple.  The newcomers were usurpers, illegitimate, doing nothing but stealing their hard-earned positions and work.  The folks heading the industry at that time were so caught up in the belief that the mechanisms they had been in charge of were the pinnacle of their business, and virtually omnipotent, that they failed to see the handwriting on the wall.  It was much easier to lash out and demonize the agents of change than to actually admit to themselves that they had to change as well, or be left on the scrap-heap of history.  So bitch, moan and complain they did.  For years while their revenues shrank, their marketshare plummeted and their customers–both advertisers and readers–moved on to bigger and better things.  The newspaper industry today is roughly 40% the size it was only a half-dozen years ago and still contracting.  Their big plans for the future are website paywalls, an argument that really should have been settled somewhere around 1998.  They slipped, ignored the reality of change by spending too much attention to the quirks of those bringing it right to their doorsteps and, in the process, doomed themselves to a slow, wasting death.  Look closely and you can see the same thing happening to parts of the book publishing segment.

So this isn’t exactly an unheard of development, the disrupted lashing out at the disrupters, and it is more than predictable to see their points of view on the precise business aspects of the issue.  Obviously, they will violently defend the status quo mechanisms while disparaging the strange, new and different ways others have found to achieve the same ends, that being to put written works in the hands of readers.  That, I expected.  It still strikes me as living life with blinders on, but at least it makes sense from a business perspective.  After all, the new digital revolution is barely a few years old.  The legacy bookselling model has existed, pretty much as is, for decades, if not centuries.  You don’t make money that well for that long without developing a nearly-religious belief in your business model.  That faith won’t save them, but it is understandable.

One thing, however, that has begun to emerge in these anti-Amazon (truthfully, more anti-future and anti-change) rants is the notion that legacy publishers, editors, distributors, agents bookstores and the authors entwined with them aren’t simply defending a means of doing business; they are beginning to position their plight on a higher plane.  They aren’t simply disrupted business people, they are pious defenders of literature, heritage and the very culture itself.  Every time I see one of these comments, I can’t help but snort.  I’ve even taken to putting down my drink whenever I get the slightest hint I’m reading one of these for fear of shooting some of said drink out of my nose, a fate I’d like to avoid if at all possible.  It’s one thing to defend your business and how it operates, even if you do so in absence of facts, reason and rationality.  It is quite another to pretend to be martyrs on the cross of literary heritage.  Of course, it’s entirely possible they’re not pretending and that would be telling in and of itself.  I’ve always approached these types of backwards defenses as willful blindness by those so worried about losing their meal tickets that they refuse to acknowledge the validity of the opposing arguments.  But, perhaps, what we are dealing with here are actually “true believers” so indoctrinated by legacy publishing’s dogma that anything challenging its preeminence is immediately treated as heresy.

When a Konrath, an Eisler or any of the other outspoken proponents of the changes that have torn through the industry advocate their positions, is it possible that these true believers don’t see a reasoned argument supported by observation, statistics and facts?  Does Turow look at Konrath the way the Pope looked at Galileo when he challenged the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe?  Did he consider the matter at hand, looking at all the available evidence and make a reasoned judgement or does he simply launch into an inquisition-style defensive assault that twists logic like a Philly soft pretzel to suit his preconceived beliefs?  I sincerely hope it’s the former because, even though I believe he’s wrong, at least he would still retain the possibility that further evidence and reason could have a positive effect.  If it’s the latter, no amount of reason will have any effect, except to make the vitriol even stronger because if there’s any one trait that defines true believers of any stripe, it’s that they almost always double down against things that challenge their faith, no matter how logical or reality-based they are.

Read each of the four pieces I linked to above and look for the similarities in their arguments.  Far from simply a discussion about the difficulties of transitioning from a print-centric business model to a digital-centric one, they each pine for the glory days of yore, nostalgia for the way things have always been done literally drips from their words.  And they each, at various points, make the proclamation that, as the new digital frontier continues to spread over the old physical one, our culture and even literacy itself will suffer for it.  The literacy point is somewhat inexplicable to me.  How, exactly, can literacy decline through the act of more people reading more than ever?  It’s seems a lot like Barry Eisler excellently pointed out on Turow’s allegation that Amazon is trying to destroy bookselling, apparently, by selling lots of books.  I guess when logic, reason and facts fail to produce a convincing argument, scare tactics are a consistently easy fallback.

“The end is near!  If our business fails, the world will be consumed by hellfire!  The people will become illiterate slugs if we’re no longer around to tell them what’s worthy of reading and spending their money on!  Without us, our culture will collapse into an horrific hodgepodge of things regular people actually enjoy, without having a gatekeeper like us to tell them it’s okay to like it!  What about our heritage?  Won’t somebody think about the children and how they’ll be able to learn of their heritage on their own, god forbid, without the facts they’re exposed to being vetted and approved by we professional keepers of what’s right and just!  It’ll be the end of days!  The horror…the horror…”

Publishing is a business, folks, not a religion.  They operate, as they always have, on a business model that allowed them to make money on the written word.  Technology has changed the ways in which people can access those words, undermining publishing’s long-standing business model.  Now, if they want to survive, they must transition to a model that fits today’s (and tomorrow’s) readers.  That’s all this is.  The world won’t end.  Great masses of people won’t suddenly lose the ability to read.  The written word will continue on as it always has, only now with the means of reaching more people more inexpensively and efficiently than ever before.  Our culture will not suffer.  Our heritage will not evaporate.  In fact, they may well be greatly enhanced by what’s coming.  The fact that a relatively small number of people who used to make a living putting words in ink on blank sheets of paper and selling them could possibly be out of work isn’t going to doom civilization as we know it.

Print publishing has had a good run.  They’ve existed as an industry largely undisturbed for numerous generations, far more fortunate than many, much more successful industries before or after them.  Change in life is inevitable.  How we deal with that change is what separates the people who keep moving forward, whatever the obstacles and the people who just whine about how much better things were back in their day.  Some of these old-guard folks sound to me like they’re desperately in need of a rocking chair, a tall glass of lemonade, a quilt to keep the evening chill away and a nice front porch to retire to.  Put enough of them together, and they should have plenty of tales to share amongst themselves about how great things were back in the good ol’ days.

As for the rest of us?  We’ve got things to do.  There’s a disruption going on, don’t you know?

MacArthur: Print shall return!

In following the plight of the newspaper industry over the past few years, I’ve seen many, many illogical defenses of the fading print segment from people often with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. However, the one I read last week from Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur may well take the cake. It wasn’t so much that he was totally and completely wrong about everything. He wasn’t. In fact, there were entire sections that echoed sentiments I, myself, have voiced numerous times. No, the problem I found was in his tone.

MacArthur’s pontificating came across as certainty. In his mind, it’s a settled issue that print has been proven far superior to the internet, and that this whole web craze will blow over soon enough, returning print to its rightful position at the top of the communication food chain. While some of his points have merit, particularly with regards to publications giving away the farm with no specific plan on how to monetize that, and the very real problems with web ads on newspaper sites, the notion that print isn’t really failing and that digital doesn’t possess some very strong and pertinent advantages over print seems extraordinarily naive. If anyone hasn’t caught on just yet, digital is very much a replacement-type of technology for print, not a supplemental one, and readers in consistent, vastly increasing numbers know it.

Here are a few of the comments from MacArthur, starting with his anecdote of a conversation he had with a group of internet folks he met in a restaurant one day. When asked how they, too, could get in on the internet boom, here’s his description of the exchange:

“It depends,” one of them said smoothly, “on what kind of platform you want to establish, how you want to present your content.” I said that I wanted to publish a magazine filled with sentences, not build a tree house, and the conversation came to an abrupt halt.

I wonder why? Here you are discussing the future with some people clearly excited about the possibilities of the web, and when they make a very pointed inquiry about how you’d want to exploit your material online, you reply with a dismissive crack that shows not only arrogance but ignorance of some of the fundamental points of internet media. If I was discussing the possibilities of online content and was faced with a similar attitude, I don’t think I’d continue the conversation either.

MacArthur may well believe his crack about “platforms” was pretty clever. In fact, later on he notes how much he hates the term “platform” when he mentions that Harper’s is available across several of them. Of course, his obstinance makes me want to run right out and sign up for the internet experience from a publication run by a man with such an obvious contempt for the medium. I’ve got news for him, though. Your beloved print magazine is a type of platform, too. Always has been, and was long before anyone even imagined the transistor, let alone a computer, smartphone or tablet. Magazines, newspapers, catalogs, fliers, etc, etc are all types of platforms, no different than websites, blogs, ebooks, apps or anything else someone can dream up as a means of communicating with people.

I told them the internet wasn’t much more than a gigantic Xerox machine and thus posed the same old threat to copyright and the livelihoods of writers and publishers alike.

This one really got me. His notion of the web as a giant copy machine is simply asanine. Sure, it does have some of that capacity in spades, but it is far more diverse and to label it as such dismisses the massive volume of material created and posted by regular people and professionals alike every minute of every day. Then he went on:

Photocopying had long been the enemy of periodicals…so I had good reason to beware.

Maybe I’m too new to this game, given the fact that I have no recollection of a world before photocopiers, but I have never, ever, not even once, for even the tiniest fleeting second considered copiers as enemies of publishers. I am, apparently, totally incapable of even comprehending such an accusation. I have never, at any point in my life, encountered a situation where I saw a copy machine used as a weapon against publishers. The only possible way this makes sense is if what he really wants here is a world where the only way to access the information in a printed work is to buy a copy. Imagine, for a moment, how incredibly destructive such a practice would be in actual widespread practice. It would also be massively counterproductive to people like MacArthur, too, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that particular point to sink in with him.

Of course, it could be that there’s an enterprising young pirate in MacArthur’s part of town who got himself a copier and runs off copies of each new issue of Harper’s, stapling them together and selling them out of a backpack on street corners. Because, you know, that kind of thing really happens, right? But it does speak to his mindset. Here’s an advancement in technology that has made things infinitely easier and more efficient in so, so many ways, and all he sees is a potential enemy. It explains quite a bit. If this guy still sees copiers as an enemy of publishers, then the web must look to him like a giant, roving, 500 ton beast, spewing fire from its six heads and crushing everything in its path. Somehow, though, I suspect Harper’s offices probably have a copier or two on the premises. And an internet connection, most likely.

It turned out that while web sites might be great for classifieds, they are in general a poor medium for display advertising.

Here is an example of his line of thinking that I actually agree with, to a point. I, too, believe that websites are lousy vehicles for display advertising, particularly when the advertising you’re pushing there is simply a replicated version of the exact type used in printed publications. He’s totally correct that ads like this are very easy to ignore, they’re a waste of time and money for publications to chase after, and, no matter how low the price, they’re not terribly effective for advertisers, either. I have never believed that display ad supported publication websites are the way to go for the long run.

That being said, this doesn’t mean that the web isn’t an effective vehicle for advertising and promotion, it undoubtedly is. Just not for trying to duplicate the exact process and mechanisms that have historically worked in print. The problem with his argument, to me, is that he seems to be saying that, because the one way they’ve tried to generate ad revenue online (the simplest and least imaginative way, not coincidentally) has been largely a failure, that means that ads on the web will never work and they should just give up. That’s the kind of thinking that has greatly contributed to the newspaper industry losing 60% of its revenue in less than a decade. Keep up the good work on that.

As the ever-more-demanding Internet God continues to bleed writers and publishers…the advantages of advertising in print become more obvious.

More obvious to whom? The advertisers who are fleeing print in droves? The readers who are doing likewise? The print salespeople who have increasing trouble earning a living on lessened commissions? I understand that this is what he believes and, in some respects, he’s right about things like inavoidability and adjacencies in printed material. But just because he believes it, doesn’t make it so.

The problem with this is that, even if he’s right, it doesn’t matter. The digital transition is well underway. No matter how great he thinks his print platform is, readers and advertisers are the ultimate judge and they’re speaking with their feet, walking away from print in steadily growing numbers. You simply can’t ignore that fact. While it may be true that he believes print is better, the people ultimately holding his purse strings don’t necessarily agree.

This is the crucial issue with why so many former print titans seem to have lost their way. There is no simple answer to how to generate needed revenue online, and they just can’t understand how something they believe is inferior can continue to grow while they languish. The pool of money is moving to digital, from advertisers and readers alike. We’re past the point of no return. You can have the greatest, most effective print platform in the world, but if all the money isn’t in print any more, you’re doomed to failure. You have to go where the money is and find a way to get people to spend it with you. And nobody cares how great you think print is if that’s not where they want to put their dollars.

Patrick de St. Exupery insists that the internet, whether paid or unpaid, doesn’t just reduce the value of writing, it destroys value. This may stem from a whole generation growing up never learning to distinguish between a blog and an edited, thought-out piece of writing.

Hmmm…maybe I’m suffering from this. Was MacArthur’s piece that I’m talking about here an edited, thought-out piece of writing? Is this? I’m writing on a blog, so does that mean this is simply a slap-dash collection of incoherent sentences? That’s ridiculous. It’s a totally dismissive opinion toward any and all writing that exists outside of the publishing gatekeepers. If your works appears outside of the established publication websites, then it simply must be inferior. Beside that, regular folks are apparently too stupid to distinguish genuinely quality writing approved by the gatekeeper class apart from the ground up mush produced by the rest of us.

I, personally, don’t underestimate readers like that. I wonder if he’s ever considered the possibility that, if readers can’t distinguish between his publication’s work and the work of people like me, maybe that’s an indicator there isn’t actually that large of a gap in relative quality, if one exists at all? Probably not, I’d imagine. Just to clarify things, by the way, I’ve thought out writing this over the past several days. I’ve also copy edited it, something I believe my 15 years of experience working for various publishers as an editor, no less, qualifies me to do. Does that mean I’ve cranked out Pulitzer Prize winning material here, or made certain every last syllable of every word in each sentence of every paragraph is a model of perfection? Of course not. But neither is his self-proclaimed edited, well thought-out piece.

The difference is that I’m not claiming that only pure gold drips off of my keyboard. This is an opinion piece where I’ve used my knowledge, personal experience and beliefs to contest what I believe was a shoddily constructed argument from an old guard print protectionist. His was exactly the same, only from a different point of view. I think his real problem is that his piece and my humble effort exist on the same plane, with the same availability to the same readers, and can have the legitimacy of his positions and mine judged not by editors, publishers or other gatekeepers, but by actual readers on equal footing. It’s an entitlement mentality, truthfully, one that stems from the internet undermining not only publishers’ ability to control who gets on the playing field, but their control of the very field itself.

He claims that the internet is undemocratic and exclusionary, but what institution could be more of those elements than the locked down print world of the recent past? These guys who make arguments like this one ultimately reveal the same bias in the end. They always show a contempt for the capacity of their audience to determine quality of material on their own. I think they secretly fear that the works they push really aren’t that superior and, given increasing opportunity, the readers they depend upon will see through their sham. Otherwise, if you truly trusted your readers to know quality when they see it and gravitate towards it, why would you have any issue with pitting your work against the supposedly inferior ramblings of us outside-the-gates barbarians?

To close, here’s another refutation of MacArthur’s opinions by Alexis Madrigal on The Atlantic’s website. I wonder if MacArthur considers it a well thought-out, edited piece? If I had to guess, I’d say probably not. After all, as he claimed at the very end of his screed, he is planning to translate his piece into a speech which he’s being paid to give later this year, so it must be of higher quality. I wonder if he realizes that paid speaking engagements are a type of platform, too?

Scott Turow, Whitley Streiber And Legacy Authors Quest For That Elusive Clue

The Author’s Guild, a group that theoretically exists to represent the interests of writers, has recently been cranking out a bunch of statements fresh out of the legacy publisher, Amazon is super evil and will destroy the industry, wipe out civilization and eat your children playbook. Guild president Scott Turow, of Presumed Innnocent fame, has himself authored a couple of these disruption-hating diatribes, but perhaps none more clueless than the one that hit the web on Friday. I had to read it twice just to be sure it was real and not an elaborate hoax given the fact that it reads almost like something The Onion would have written. I suppose I expect too much from a group who’s priciple players are steeped in the legacy model of bookselling that’s quickly meeting its demise at the hands of technology and the culture shift we’re all undergoing.

The point of his letter, appropriately titled “Grim News” because what could be more grim than discovering that the president of an organization that represents you has his head buried so far in the sand that only the tips of his toes remain visible, challenged the validity of the Justice Department’s threatened antitrust action against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for their (alleged) pretty obvious illegal collusion in agency pricing for ebooks. By all means, read his full statement. It’s good for a laugh, if nothing else. Of course, if I were actually a dues paying member of the Guild, I certainly wouldn’t be laughing. Maybe asking for a refund, or sobbing uncontrollably, but not laughing.

The entire piece is pretty astounding, honestly, for its shortsightedness, and I could write a full volume reciting its many, many fallacies but I won’t. Plus, there’s the fact that that the web has already been peppered with several long refutations of Turow’s misguided tome. I’ve picked out a half-dozen high spots that seem worthy of addressing. Here goes:

Amazon was using ebook discounting to destroy bookselling

Really? The largest book retailer pretty much on the planet was discounting ebooks to destroy bookselling? A business that dumped tons of money into developing tablets designed to provide a quality reading experience and then sold them at or below cost to increase the pool of potential ebook customers was trying to destroy bookselling? A company that built the best consumer interface for browsing and buying books online wanted to destroy bookselling? The place that essentially created the self publishing boom, making it possible for many, many more writers than ever before to earn from their works was actively trying to destroy bookselling?

I’m giving Turow the benefit of the doubt and say this was just a poorly worded statement. Of course they weren’t trying to destroy bookselling. Trying to grab a bigger marketshare, absolutely, no question. Of course there is also the possibility that his bias is showing a bit here. Amazon’s actions could be seen as an attack on physical bookstore selling. Maybe to Turow, that is the only type of selling that really matters and that digital sales don’t really count as bookselling.

Five of the largest publishers jumped on with Apple’s (agency) model even though it meant those publishers would make less money on every ebook they sold

Here we see that Turow does really understand what publishers were doing with agency pricing, that is using it as a protectionist weapon for the benefit of print against digital sales growth. How else does it make any sense at all for publishers to collude together to force a pricing model where they actually make less money? The entire point was to keep ebook prices high, even at the expense of their own bottom line, to artificially prop up the fading print product against market forces.

Of course, he obviously thinks that’s fine and just, but think about it for a second and you’ll see why the Justice Department is getting involved. Five of the six largest publishers going and the largest technology company in the world collectively designed and implemented a system to keep ebook prices higher than the market had any interest in specifically to stifle the growth of the ebook segment of the industry and hamper digital competition against their preferred print products. That’s not the obvious, good business decision Turow claims, it’s illegal collusion, anti competitive behavior and price fixing to support the quasi monopoly position they maintain on physical print book distribution. Allegedly. I always forget that part, especially when “obviously” or “blatantly” seem much more fitting to this particular situation.

Bookstores are critical to modern bookselling

I guess the meaning in this statement all depends on one’s understanding of the word “modern.” If by modern, he means the post Civil War era then, yes, he may have a point. But anyone who believes physical bookstores are going to be critical entities in the bookselling process from this point forward (how I would define modern) is simply not paying attention to the changes in technology and consumer spending habits.

Bookstores have more in common with CD stores than the Apple stores Turow sites in his piece. Print books aren’t going completely away any time soon, but they are losing ground to digital alternatives every day. Very soon, we will reach the point where there is simply not enough foot traffic to support more than a select few brick-and-morter book retailers. Even Barnes & Noble, legacy publishing’s current most favored son, is being forced into allocating more of its floor space to non-book items like toys and games just to pay the bills. Tablets, increasingly better smartphones and ereader devices are further saturating into the consumer market and more and more people are becoming digital only or primarily digital customers. Another year or two of double digit declines in print book sales, a reality even the most conservative analysts begrudgingly admit is nearly a certainty, and a sizeable number of the remaining bookstores will simply be no more.

Far from being critical to modern bookselling, they are almost certain to become little more than a quaint afterthought or a specialty nook within the industry. What’s actually critical to modern bookselling is for publishers to develop and cultivate online retail replacements for the real-world shelf space they will soon inevitably lose. I can understand being sentimental about bookstores, nostalgic even, but just because you want to believe they are still critical doesn’t make it the case.

In bookstores, readers are open to trying new genres and new authors: it is by far the best way for new works to be discovered

This one has much in common with the previous notion that bookstores are critical to the future of bookselling. Again, just because you really, really want something to be true doesn’t make it so. The notion that physical bookstores are, as Turow put it, “by far” the best way for readers to discover new authors is so absurd that it almost doesn’t need to be refuted. But I’ll try anyway.

The emergence of book superstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, giants helped along greatly by legacy publishers, virtually gutted the independent bookstore ecosystem years ago, wiping out many of the small, eclectic bookshops that genuinely stocked unique and original works outside of the mainstream. Many of the survivors morphed into smaller versions of the superstores, filled with little more than a lesser variety of the works of big name, famous authors. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. The superstores themselves, particularly B&N became basically big publishing’s warehouses where all the biggest, high profile books received every premium spot in the store, and virtually all the promotion. If smaller, little known writers and their works made it into these stores at all, they were packed away like sardines, spine out, on the out of the way rows of shelves, not exactly what I consider prime real estate for discovery.

Online, you can browse through a virtually endless supply of works, grouped by whatever search terms your heart desires; big legacy books, small press books and independent self published books all interspersed together by their content, not who published them. Apparently, Turow missed the study a few weeks ago showing about 2/3 of the top 200 science fiction books were independently published. Most all of them had little or no access to the bookstore sales chain, yet somehow, readers in large numbers managed to discover them. A look at any of the Amazon top seller lists shows them peppered with relatively unknown indie writers, whose works are either ebook only or maybe including a print on demand trade paperback. If Turow is right in his presumption that bookstores are the best place for discovery, where are all the reams of new-found star writers coming out of the legacy system that dominates the bookstore sales space? That’s a rhetorical question because everyone but Turow and his ilk, it seems, already know the answer to that one.

Publishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. They will necessarily focus their capital on what works in an online environment: familiar works by familiar authors

Arrogance bleeding through here a bit, I believe. What works online is only familiar works by familiar authors? Well, that’s pretty obvious because they are familiar, they already have a built in sales hook. But I suspect there are more than a few indie authors collecting regular checks from Amazon and various other online retailers who might argue the point that only familiar authors work in an online world. There was also a distasteful moment in Turow’s piece where he tosses the poor, unwashed hordes of unknown writers a bone by feeling sorry for them and their quest because he’s a big, famous author and his book sales are an inevitability. The only things certain in life are death, taxes and big sales of Scott Turow’s books apparently.

To me, that line came off as detached and somewhat condescending. It seemed to show Turow stating that he, and other name authors, sit above this fray, that the seismic shift in the industry doesn’t apply to them because they’ll sell books regardless of any changes in the industry. To some extent, at this very moment, he has a point, but if he really believes the risks don’t apply to him, he may be in for a very rude awakening. Besides, as publishers’ revenues continue to decline, where does he think they’ll turn to make up those losses and save themselves? Maybe the big name authors under their control who are still bringing in revenue?

Our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition

This may be the most laughable one of all. Illegal collusion amongst the largest publishers and tech company in the world constitutes “real competition”? And the legacy print system Turow so adamantly defends was, need I remind anyone, a long standing ogliopoly that thrived on providing nothing more than the mere appearance of competition itself. Amazon, among others, has brought real and genuine competition to the game for the first time in all of our lifetimes, challenging every aspect of the industry from the way books are written and produced to how they are sold and distributed. There is not a single portion of the industry that hasn’t had to either reassess, adapt or defend its position in the value chain. That has led to more innovation and opportunity in the past two years alone than in the previous two centuries.

Is it a good thing if Amazon becomes a dominating monopoly? Of course not, but legacy publishing’s quasi-monopoly wasn’t a good thing either. Certainly, some like Turow were more fortunate than others, but the vast majority of writers had gradually become nothing more than fodder for a bloated, lazy and entitled industry.

Change is a good thing. But to allow yesterday’s monopoly to blatantly collude illegally in an effort to squash tomorrow’s business model can’t possibly seem like a good idea. Amazon isn’t perfect, and there are very real risks to their ascendancy, but much like they’ve used better products, terms and consumer relations to break legacy publishing’s market stranglehold, I am confident if they go overboard, someone else will emerge very quickly to do the same to them. That’s the nature of the disruption economy we live in today; no one can dominate for long and when the king gets fat and lazy, the lean, strong-willed up and comer will be poised to have him for lunch.

Turow wasn’t alone in his beliefs. After reading the “grim news”, I scrolled down through the comments underneath and found this one from author Whitley Streiber:

I am very much afraid that Justice is pursuing this, and that, if they succeed in proving that publishers colluded in the adoption of the agency model, they could strike a blow that would devastate the publishing industry–unless, of course it compels them to do what they should have done from the outset, which is to hold back ebooks like they do softcovers, which is the one choice that will certainly save our business.

I’m so glad you pointed out the importance of the bookstore to our industry and our livelihoods. The first job of every publisher and every writer is to save the bookstore. Without bookstores, we will spiral down into an entirely different and far less viable part of the culture. In the end, writing will become a hobby.

A simple idea: let’s revise the recommended contract to write in that we will not allow ebooks of our work to be published until at least nine months after hardcovers. If we the writers do this, we will save our livelihoods, our industry and this crucial foundation of our culture. And there is no question of our right to do it. No lawsuits will result.

Now, as with some of Turow’s work, I enjoy some Whitley Streiber on occasion. But this comment really gets me as much or more than Turow’s. First, he also far too easily dismisses the (allegedly) illegal acts commited by publishers to institute Agency in the first place. And he should realize, if Justice finds publishers guilty in this case, they won’t be the one’s responsible for the devastation to the industry he fears. Publishers will be responsible for it by commiting the illegal acts in the first place. Backwards logic, the publishing industry is going to be destroyed because the Justice Department is going to force us to follow the law, who the hell do they think they are?

He also repeats some of the same glorified nostalgia for bookstores and takes it one step farther, claiming that our culture and the very profession of writing will suffer irrevocably without them. And the first job of every publisher should be finding a business model where they’re still relevant in five or ten years, not trying to save another business model that technology has made somewhat obsolete. I always thought the first job of every writer, by the way, is to write the best material you can. The second job of every writer is to find a market for that work. If bookstores are no longer viable, then find somewhere else to hock your wares. Streiber seems to be missing the key point in much of this, that far from bookstores being the end-all, be-all of booksales, there are many, many more potential markets for writers today that ever before, across a variety of mediums.

It’s not the act or prominence of writing that’s changing, it’s simply the medium of delivery. Technology is making it easier, cheaper, more convenient and efficient for readers to acquire, consume and discuss more material across a broader spectrum than ever before. Couple that with a before-impossible ability for readers and writers to interact, and I believe it’s far more likely we’re entering a new golden age of reading rather than the dark age Streiber is describing here.

His suggestion of windowing ebooks for nine months after initial print publication is, bluntly, assinine. He is correct that there would be no lawsuits resulting from such a practice by authors and publishers, unless, of course, you want to count the suits filed by publishers to fight the rampant copyright infringement such a policy would surely instigate. The film industry engages in this behavior all the time, and I feel confident that it will soon be their downfall.

People like to complain that Netflix and similar streaming services don’t have a good enough selection. Well, blame that on the studios who either withhold titles altogether or window their release to support DVD sales in much the same way Streiber is advocating withholding ebooks to support print sales. The flaw in these policies is that technology has irrevocably changed the conditions of the consumer/ content provider relationship. Denying your primary customers what they want, when and how they want it to prop up fading mediums of distribution is a long term loser. Far from saving the industry, as Streiber seems to believe, it could very likely expedite their decline.

The film industry still brings in tons of box office money every year. But look closely. That money isn’t being generated by an increasing audience, it’s coming from a shrinking number of customers paying ever increasing prices. They don’t yet seem to get that there’s a tipping point coming. Nearly everyone has a theater right in their own homes now, with large, affordable high definition screens, more than ample surround sound systems, much more comfortable accommodations and access to refreshments you don’t need a small personal loan to afford. Make no mistake, there is a serious reckoning coming to the film industry very soon. Following their windowing policies will only help make publishing’s current troubles even worse.

Windowing films and DVDs against streaming and print books against ebooks forces your customers to come to you when all signs point to a world where people’s preference is that their entertainment be available to them when and where they want it. Pushing against the desires and capabilities of the folks that pay for your wares is never a good business strategy.

So what we seem to have here are two legacy authors who are unaware, or unwilling to truly see, how things have actually changed. Their combined opinions speak to a protectionist strategy for both print books and physical bookstores at a time when technology is creating legitimate, and in many ways, far superior replacements. I love print books, and I’ve always liked bookstores, but I’m not about to ignore the reality and benefits of what has and has yet to come.

I’m more than a little disturbed that they seem only too willing to excuse what looks, for all the world to be anticompetitive collusion amongst Apple and publishers, shamelessly so in some cases, because it suits their particular interest in rolling back the clock on technology and progress. But when you possess the names and reputations of these guys, they do a great disservice to the industry and writers everywhere, past, present and future, when they make little attempt to inform themselves on reality rather than simply slanting arguments to defend a backward thinking model that is soon to be supplanted.

If I was a member of The Authors Guild, I would demand more from those supposedly representing my interests. Now, perhaps more than any time in a century, the interests of writers and publishers have been disintermediated in many ways. Shilling for legacy publishing does the writers you supposedly represent no real good and, quite possibly, significant harm.

Note: I wrote this in bits and pieces on a fairly busy Saturday. By the time I finally finished, I noticed that a few others have made many of the same points, plus many more, far more eloquently than me. Here is author Kevin McLaughlin’s take. This is David Gaughran on the subject. And here is another wildly entertaining double team from Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler.

Libraries, eBooks and the First Sale Doctrine

In case you haven’t heard, Random House announced last week that it was raising prices on the ebooks they make available to libraries. They didn’t just bump the prices a bit, however. They tripled them across the board. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand publishers, particularly of the Big 6 legacy variety, are lurching toward total annihilation having problems. But this is simply an unconscionable act in my mind.

Libraries are an important public service. They do more to promote literacy than every publisher in this country combined. To soak them so unrepentently, and try to leech a large portion of their limited budgets in this fashion, quite frankly, disgusts me. Read the article I linked to above. Random House spokesperson Stuart Applebaum actually sounds as though libraries should be thanking them for these usury-level price hikes. After all, they’re still selling to libraries in a relatively unrestricted manner, unlike any of the other Big 6 gang of thugs publishers. He also makes a threat in the guise of a polite suggestion that prices could change yet again if libraries don’t share patron borrowing data with publishers. So not only are they extorting crucial monies from hard-hit library budgets, they also want those same libraries to perform and turn over what amounts to unpaid market research they hope to profit from. It just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside with the level of altruism coming from Random House on this.

Realistically, publishers are a business and are behaving thusly, albeit in my mind, in a short sighted and profiteering manner. Nothing requires them to make their products available to libraries. Well, except for that pesky little thing called the first sale doctrine that allows libraries to buy print books, often from wholesalers, then do whatever the hell they want with them. But the first sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital works, which is why some publishers can withhold their works altogether, severely restrict the ways in which libraries can use them even after paying up, or charge prices 10 times or more what those files are actually worth. And don’t give me the argument that they’re worth more because of the agency model. The Justice Department is about to come down hard and nasty on that little slice of illegal collusion. What Random House is doing here is price gouging what they perceive as a captive audience, plain and simple.

A while ago, I wrote a bit about how I believe we need to develop an aftermarket for digital wares. Part of my reasoning is that the loss of the first sale doctrine is a serious loss of value on the consumer side. Without the possibility of resale or full freedom of use, digital goods should be significantly cheaper than their physical counterparts simply because consumers are getting a product of significantly lesser value than they were. And that says nothing about the fact that reproduction and distribution costs linger in the neighborhood of zero, another quite fine justification for much cheaper prices. A legit aftermarket and a reinstitution of the first sale doctrine would benefit everyone in the long run, from authors to publishers (although don’t expect them to realize this) to readers, and especially libraries. What it doesn’t benefit are publishers like Random House who want to severely overcharge libraries just because they can.

In order for an aftermarket to happen, we need some manner of reining in the potential for unlimited copying on the consumer end. I don’t think that’s an insurmountable technical obstacle, some current DRM already does that. It can be done. The only problem is that big media doesn’t want it to happen. They’re perfectly content to try and reap the whirlwind restablish a monopolistic control over distribution through the various perversions of copyright law they’ve pushed through over the years. And make no mistake, if they could get rid of the first sale doctrine on physical goods, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Meanwhile, we all suffer for their obsolete delusions. Access to books is cut off or seriously limited by playing hardball with libraries, agency pricing adds 50% or more to the cost of ebooks to consumers, authors suffer from decreased exposure, and the industry on the whole is hampered at a time when a new golden age of reading could possibly be dawning by powerful legacy businesses too short-sighted to get out of their own way.

If I were a cynical man, I’d say publishers’ poor treatment of libraries on ebooks is simply another tool they’re using to prop up their fading print business and slow the adoption of ebooks. Wait, I am cynical, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what’s ultimately behind this. But, for now, libraries really have no choice. They’re going to have to have ebooks available in some fashion sooner than later. For my money, however, barring some kind of miracle lessening of copyright law, I’d like to see them tell Random House exactly what they can do with their price hikes. After all, I’m pretty sure there’s a large and growing contingent of independent publishers who would be thrilled to have access to the library system for their works. Hell, they might even be so happy, they won’t charge for their books at all. That certainly would be something to think about. And to me, it seems much more reasonable than paying $100+ for a limited digital copy of a book that should cost $5 or $10, at the most.

Evereybody Likes Free Stuff! Get a different short story ebook every day during the first week of March

Spring is just about upon us, and I figured as part of my ongoing promotion of my self publishing excursions, I’d offer up a different ebook in my Watershed Tales series of digital short stories for free for the Amazon Kindle every day of the first week of March.  Here’s the run down of what’s available, when, with the obligatory link to the store site.  Enjoy!

Monday, March 5-  The Long Walk

What happens when your conscience is over-ridden by your orders?  Is it better to simply do as you’re told, even when you find the actions abhorrent?  And if you do, despite your better judgment, what kind of consequences will follow, if any?  In The Long Walk, a young cavalryman gets assigned the duty of escorting some particularly violent prisoners to their place of execution.  The manner planned for the  deaths of the condemned is particularly horrible, but no one questions their actions or orders until it’s far too late.  Honor doesn’t supersede duty in the unforgiving desert, and the results are severe.

Get The Long Walk

Tuesday, March 6- Journalistic Integrity

Reporters and war correspondents regularly put themselves in harm’s way all in the name of journalism, ratings and informing the people.  Most times, things work out; sometimes they go horribly wrong.  When a military madman rises to power in a former Russian province after the collapse of the Soviet Union, threatening Moscow and London with some old Soviet nukes he’d managed to get his hands on, it looks like the story of the century.  A bevy of reporters from all the major news agencies in the world make their way through the war-torn countryside in pursuit of an exclusive.  But when they find what they’re looking for, these newsmen discover that instead of covering the story, they are about to become it.

Get Journalistic Integrity

Wednesday, March 7- The Garden

Isolation can do strange things to a person, and there can be no place more alone than in the depths of space.  Duane is an astronaut on a 20-year mission to test technology that could lead to mankind’s greatest exploration ever.  His ship, being fully automated, leaves him with nothing but time to fill.  The large garden that provides his food, water and oxygen for the journey is his only distraction from the tedium.  But several years into his mission, things start to go wrong and he loses contact with Earth.  The constant loneliness begins to dredge up memories of his unhappy past, and the garden that provides not only the elements for his survival but also his sanity, is threatened.  Will Duane find within himself what it takes to survive and make it back home or will he be lost forever?  This edition of Watershed Tales also includes a short bonus tale, Travis Walton Never Had It So Bad, a story of planetary exploration and how very wrong things can go.

Get The Garden

Thursday, March 8- Faded Summer Leaves

You hear so much about the innocence of youth, but in truth, youth isn’t all that innocent.  The same mean-spirited viciousness, rage and emotional trauma adults suffer through exists for the young, as well.  And often, the lack of experience of youth amplifies the problem.  Growing up is a hard row to hoe sometimes, and for a small, scrawny little kid like Tommy, it can be even tougher.  But everyone has their limits, even someone who you wouldn’t think could ever stand up for themselves.  A group of young boys on an afternoon fishing excursion is the stuff of sweet anecdotes and quaint paintings.  That is, until things go sour.  On this particular day, Roy, the town bully, really should have kept his mouth shut.

Get Faded Summer Leaves

Friday, March 9- the Trail

Are you afraid of the dark? What if you find yourself alone in the woods with the sun rapidly setting and darkness falling in all around you?  Would you be afraid then?  That’s the situation Aaron finds himself in as he realizes that his peaceful day of hiking is quickly turning into a nightmare when he underestimates how long it would take to get back to his car.  Alone in the woods, desperately trying to find a way out, he runs across a mysterious hiker who offers his help.  Should Aaron take it or find his own way to safety?  This Watershed Tales edition of The Trail includes the bonus tale, The Tell-Tale Heartache.  Amontillado lives a solitary life, father who ran out on him, mother who died years earlier and no one but the residents of the trailer park he resides in for company.  One Christmas day, a strange thumping sound attracts his attention and he goes on a quest to find its source.  The odd noise leads him to what he thinks he desires most, but will he like what he finds?

Get The Trail