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Used books blamed in NYT for slump: Meat for Novelists, Inc.? But how about better solutions than resale fees?
December 28, 2008 | 9:41 am
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By David Rothman
“Don’t blame” carnage in the book industry “on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans,” says David Streitfeld, a New Yok Time staff writer, in an opinion piece. “What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.” Particularly the buying of used books, he believes. Excerpt:
“Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s, told me that buying books online ‘was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.’
“Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.”
Unwitting harm to literacy cause
Novelists, Inc., of course, the aptly named outfit behind the proposal to forced used bookstores to pay “Secondary sale” fees to publishers and writers, will love Streitfeld’s thoughts. Much of the rest of world, as TeleRead’s Chris Meadows makes clear, might not. Used books are protected under the first sale doctrine—the right to sell copies of books you acquire. It’s a tricky matter, this business of deciding how perfect copies of digital books would fit in. But Novelists, Inc. wants fees paid even on paper books. So much for helping literacy, eh? Or for enabling readers to limit their their gamble on just-discovered writer, so that can later buy the authors’ works new?
Better solutions
Alas, books are up against such challenges as the dismal American economy and increasing competition for entertainment dollars from media such as video games, the very factors that Streitfeld is downplaying. “According to market researcher NPD Group, U.S. retail sales of video games totaled $2.91 billion in November, a 10 percent jump from a year ago,” reports CNN. “Overall sales this year through November are more than $16 billion, up 22 percent from 2007.” This despite a recession! So much for a repeat of a Great Depression-type scenario where people turned to Gone with the Wind and other books as distractions.
Granted, used book revenue was $2.2 billion in the States in 2004, according to Novelist, Inc.’s citation of a study by the Book Industry Study Group. But that’s still just a fraction of total book sales, and more importantly, I suspect that fees on used book sales would not be substantial enough to revitalize the industry in the long run.
Certainly writers as a group are underpaid in the U.S. and elsewhere. But perhaps Novelists, Inc. should consider other changes that would promote literacy and book-reading, not discourage them, and have more financial potential for the industry than the fees would.
Best Rx: Boosting interest in reading
One possibility, of course, would be the creation of truly well-stocked nationally digital library systems in the TeleRead vein—with fair compensation for writers and publishers. It could work with local schools and libraries to boost interest in reading. And the same gizmos used to read books could be used for such purposes as electronic forms and health care documents, not just e-commerce—thereby helping to cost-justify the program. It could also promote reading of books on hardware such as iPhones and other existing hardware. The government shouldn’t get into the hardware business, but should encourage standards. The IDPF’s ePub format is in part the result of valuable work that the National Institute of Standards and Technology did in cooperation with the private sector.
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I suspect the real reason groups argue in favor of charges for used book sales is that the complexity of the tax will essentially eliminate used book sales. For some, this is seen as a good thing.
I continue to have mixed feelings. Certainly people shouldn’t have to fill their houses with paper or tote them to landfill when there are other willing readers. On the other hand, books are different from cars. The value in a car is in having it. The value of a book is in reading it. Having read it, I retain a significant value. Cars are valuable for their material value, books for their intellectual value.
In pre-internet days, used books were not much of an issue. You bought used books to pick up the back-list of newly discovered authors. Today, though, you can buy used from Amazon sometimes before the book is generally available. This has to hurt new sales.
Yes, eBooks, whether through a teleread model or simply through the type of affordable pricing I promote, offer a better approach–just as downloads and subscriptions are the model the software industry is moving.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
The trouble is that owning copyright isnt the same as owning property since it’s not tied to anything tangible and information can be shared without damaging the original container.
The metaphor worked well when you could tie information to physical objects and trade them as just that it dont when you go digital. Were right now renegotiating the balance the hard way.
We need to rethink the whole system of securing the publics access to sharing information while giving the producers financial compensation, the problem seams to be that the debate is completely histerical with the producers screaming about divine rigts to profit from property and the consumers demanding free stuff.
This is an interesting side effect of the physical book as conveyed to online access. While screen copies of books can be terminated at the end user, physical books can be re-circulated to a sequence of subsequent readers. Print libraries are based this unlimited, linear circumvention of copyright, but no money is involved. Such a streaming circulation is most likely with genres of popular fiction sold for a single reading.
So now we finally know the textual “ipod” counterpart of digital music distribution. It is the print book digitally produced and digitally distributed. The curious aspect is that real money is involved and I would not be surprised if “used” copies are actually new copies transacted through jobbers and bundlers in a parallel universe to financial derivatives.
All this, alas, will come, when all copyright books are in the cloud in lending libraries. Publishers will be making a lot of money on these, and it will surely follow that the various writers’ guilds will demand their piece of the pie.
‘Ah, if only I never had to write another word, but could be paid forever for what I’d already written! Then Paradise would be mine, and all you readers would be my sugar daddies!’
Frankly, all of this shows once again that most of the major book publishers still have not gotten it! Such a fee on used book stores will drive up the prices of used books and drive down the value of selling ones used books (which, of course is what the publishers want) but only in the normal chain of operations. Sooner or later, it is inevitable that users will take advantage of craigslist and other sources that circumvent the used book stores. We will loose a valuable repository for truly older and out of print books while at the same time the publishers and the authors will have gained nothing but will have lost the good will of the readers.
Mind you, such a rule would essentially be impossible to enforce on anyone but used book stores (are you going to have cops trolling every flea market and yard sale making sure the 50 cents of tax is collected?).
Ultimately, actions such as these will only serve to encourage online piracy.
New York is ground zero for print publishing, so is it surprising that coverage of the decline in NYT is alarmist and exaggerated?
The used book issue is not going to matter when a higher percentage of books sold are ebooks.
“Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.”
Um, all of Kant’s work is in the public domain. Why would anyone buy it when they could just download it? If I were an instructor I’d post a PDF of the ‘Critique’ in the course management system being used or point students to a copy at PG or some other online resource.
However, I suspect a different gremlin at work — it’d be interesting to track books being assigned at the college level over time. I doubt many undergraduates are assigned to read anything but a small excerpt of Kant anymore.