Jason Epstein, who was interviewed by NPR for the e-book pricing story we mentioned yesterday, also has a fairly lengthy editorial printed in the New York Review of Books this week in which he looks back to the birth of the printing press, and ahead to digitization’s replacement of its fruits.
(I discovered only after writing this piece that Paul also mentioned Epstein’s editorial back in February, even though it has a date of March 11th. Time travel? But my piece is much longer than Paul’s was, so I’m posting it anyway.)
In digitization, Epstein sees both a blessing and a curse. It will be possible for anyone to become a publisher, “and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping". Publishers will have “imprints” in this digital world, the way they have brand names in bookstores today.
Solitary Creation vs. Collaboration
I find it interesting that Epstein sees literary creation, even in a networked world, as strictly a solitary activity:
The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer’s work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.
I, on the other hand, have participated in writing any number of stories collaboratively—either by working solo in a shared world, or by working together with other writers in shared-workspace editors such as EtherPad.
Epstein should be paying more attention to the on-line writing community that has been going on at least since the mid-to-late 1980s (as covered in my “Paleo E-books” series) because that is where the first signs of innovation in form can be found—writers adapting to the difference in form between the Internet and printed works. We were writing Superguy stories decades before Elizabeth Bear and friends came up with Shadow Unit using a very similar writing formula.
Piracy-Proof Revenue Models for Authors?
Further down in the article, past a discussion of how the business aspects of publishing might change without the overhead of printing facilities acting as a gatekeeper, Epstein addresses the matter of piracy:
Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that "content wants to be free"—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others.
I personally think that the matter of finding a way to “make up for lost royalties” is just a matter of looking and trying different models. Sure, a writer can’t give a “concert”, but there are other things he could try.
For example, the “Storyteller’s Bowl” model used by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller grossed $30,000 for Fledgling and $27,500 for Saltation (1,200 and 1,100 subscriber copies sold, respectively, at $25 each). Even if the books hadn’t been picked up by Baen, and Lee and Miller had to pay for editing, printing, and shipping the books themselves, there would probably have been a respectable amount left over.
And Lee and Miller have also started auctioning off the original marked-up manuscripts for some of their books, serving the dual purpose of getting them a little extra cash and getting those big piles of paper out of their house.
For that matter, maybe some writers could sell T-shirts, or other custom merchandise. Or go on a lecture tour. Who knows? I’m sure other models are out there. It’s just a matter of looking.
Backlist and the Long Tail
A really interesting part comes later in the article where Epstein talks about the economic factors that led to the decline in bookstores and the subsequent erosion of the backlist. Suddenly stores needed to turn over their inventory as rapidly as possible, and as a result publishers dropped more and more older titles that were still selling, but not selling quickly enough.
In the mid-1980s, Epstein says, he launched a catalog store offering 40,000 backlist titles by mail order, but overhead was just too high to make a go of it. It wasn’t until the expansion of the Internet and the growth of Amazon.com that it became feasible for stores to expand to cover the entire backlist.
With digitization, the out-of-print backlist may become entirely a thing of the past, as there will never be a reason for an e-book to be unavailable as long as people want to buy it. Though Epstein does not use the term, what he is describing is the “long tail” effect—since there is virtually no overhead associated with keeping old e-books available, the random occasional sales of thousands of books will add up to a tidy sum in aggregate.
Conclusion
In the end, Epstein thinks that inexpensive multipurpose devices will expand e-books’ share of the book market, and might even lead to new forms of literary expression. He is doubtful that multimedia extras will catch on, though—reading is too focused an activity for most readers to want to deal with such distractions.
This is a very interesting article, and there is certainly more in it than I have had time to discuss.
Related: We covered another look into the future by Jason Epstein back in 2004, but the linked article is now behind a paywall. We also mentioned Epstein’s theory about the decline of the bookstore and backlist in 2006.
Chris writes, “Sure, a writer can’t give a “concert”, but there are other things he could try.”
That’s certainly true, but on the other hand, most musicians I know think of giving concerts as an important part of being a musician.
I’m sure there are important things writers learn from giving lectures, too, but I think learning to give lectures and learning to write novels are pretty different skills.
True, Laura. But every professional ‘job’ is composed of different skills. If writers want to make enough money for it to be their career, they might have to resign themselves to branching out into other skillsets just like the rest of the working stiffs. If they want it to be pure art and to only write, then they might not make enough money to support themselves and their writing will only be a hobby. That’s fine, of course. Many people make that choice about their artistic endeavours. But to me there is a difference between a ‘hobby’ and a ‘career’ and what one has to do for each is not the same.