Let the meteors fall where they may? The pitfalls of Jon Evans' publishing scenario

In 2005 a Canadian novelist named Jon Evans ended up with the Arthur Ellis Award for his first novel, Dark Places. He enjoyed good sales and even snagged a movie option after HarperCollins-related imprints bought the book.

But demand for Dark Places has fallen off despite mostly upbeat reviews in places such as Publishers Weekly. How to rescue the novel, which, at least in one paperback edition, ranks at 1,857,707 among Amazon books? In fact, you can’t buy the edition through Amazon, just through used bookstores, E and P. Not too surprisingly, Jon Evans wants to put his novel online for free, and toward this goal he has just written commentary for Walrus Magazine:

Wealthy patrons: Good scenario?

“If enough people grow accustomed to reading without paying, then authors will have to go back to being financed by wealthy patrons, publishers will wither away, and readers will find themselves trying to sift gems from an ever-growing mountain of self-published dreck. If readers do choose to pay, they will be able to send their money directly to authors, cutting out publishers entirely, and encouraging successful writers to self-publish rather than settle for a percentage. Either way, a revolution is on the horizon.

“A new industry will eventually emerge from the chaos. Books aren’t going away, and even bound sheaves of paper will survive in some form. Readership may actually increase—I think it’s safe to say the digital generation doesn’t read as many books as the paper generation, and e-books might change that. But the oncoming digital meteor will hit today’s publishing industry hard, and its dinosaurs are going to die.”

Behind Evans’ feelings toward the dinos

I’d love to be able to read the minds of Evans’ publishers—presumably among his dinos. According to him, they “are resolutely opposed” to his freebie idea, which I myself like even though I’d hate for “free” to be a writer’s only choice. Evans’ publishers fear it will “‘devalue the brand’ and set a dangerous precedent.'” I’m curious if HarpersCollins Canada and William Morrow, his U.S. publishers along with the conglomerate’s paperback side, still control rights in some fashion. A Dark Places page on Amazon refers to a “remainder account” (see Wikipeda for more on the R word).

So why does Evans want a free e-book of DP posted to the Web with “no charge, no hook, no catch”? “My motivation,” he writes near the start of the commentary, “is simple: greed.” Evans, as I see it, doesn’t just allude to his challenge to the publishing industry to be helpful to readers and writers. An online book ideally will create a market for print-on-demand editions or maybe even others for sale from the HarperCollins conglomerate. If that’s among his objectives, if a “catch” exists in that respect, as it does (he wants to go “free” while this is still novel enough to command attention), I won’t mind if his inner Gekko prevails.

Pros and cons of the Evans scenario—well, the cons

But how about his grand scenario for the publishing industry? Is it entirely desirable to take a laissez-faire approach of, “Let the meteors fall where they may?”

Wealthy patrons, yes, have paid for masterpieces, but they have also financed junk and encouraged novelists and and other writers to prostitute themselves. “In the midst of the intellectual enthusiasm of the 1960s,” writes Louis H. Lapham in Money and Class in America, chillingly on the mark even after its publication almost twenty years ago, “I remember engaging in a heated argument with a Texas oil entrepreneur who held the New York literary crowd in open contempt. ‘How much do you think it would cost,’ he said, ‘to change them all into obedient hounds? Fifty thousand dollars a year? One hundred thousand a year? Seventy-five thousand dollars a year and guaranteed invitations to the White House?’ At the time I thought the gentleman both a Philistine and a fool. Not many years later, having seen an impressive number of soi-disant liberals transform themselves into conservatives for the sake of tenure, a foundation grant or their names in the literary press, I still thought the gentleman a Philistine, but not a stupid or unobservant Philistine.”

At least a Rupert Murdoch or a Holtzbrinck family will give us a more transparent capitalism on the whole than will the patron-centered variety; a little sensitivity to marketplace pressures; and more than a few interesting surprises. Sometimes the results will be good, sometimes not—although I notice that many advocates of “free” tend to prefer the best-sellers that a Murdoch-style marketplace brings about. What’s more, to get more literary, are foundations prepared to buy out and run the Holtzbrinck owned Farrar, Straus and Giroux? Oh, God, don’t get me started on foundation bureaucrats, the smug hired hands of the patrons; Ivy-educated drones, too many of them, who, despite the hoary verbiage on their sites, giving the impression of Solomonic impartiality, have the game rigged for their tennis partners! I can recall wasting months on proposals for a former Bush neighbor on one hand and the tech guy for a liberal philanthropist on the other, in connection with the financing of a digital library project—only to see both of them walk away without anything close to meaningful explanations. The rich are different from you and me. A higher percentage of them are jerks. Same for their flunkies.

Needed: Less apocalypse, more balance

My own ideal future would be less apocalyptic than Evans’, with a balanced mix of business models, patrons included, yes, as well as much more money spent on content, through well-stocked national digital library systems in the United States and elsewhere.

Billionaires’ charitable drippings and reader donations are not enough to support the publishing industry, including the production of best-sellers, which can cost a pretty penny to research and in some cases take years to write. If Wikipedia is correct, Evans “frequently travels the world to research the locations of his novels.” Talk about the need for incentives and sustainable business models! Yes, I’m heartened by the possibilities of the Creative Common scenario, under which, for example, free e-books could inspire people to shell out money for p-books. But let’s not make it the only one available.

Silicon Valley’s wealthy cheapskates

On top of their other failings, wealthy patrons can be myopic scrooges. The millionaires of Silicon Valley care more about wine, wires and WiFi than about directly financing promising writers or even libraries. The Valley crowd is cheap, cheap, cheap in toward “content,” loathsomingly so. If the Valley people disagree, then I invite them to go to LibraryCity.org and act. We’ve got librarians and writers involved, including one close to famous literary heirs.

But who cares? Doesn’t modern 20th century literature count for squat unless it’s in the public domain? Gizmos and databases and snippets ahead of books! Too many numbers-obsessed geeks brag about the quantity of books they’ve read, instead of genuinely seeing them as ways to change young people’s lives or even their own. The applause of some influential Valley people for 14-year copyright terms—almost as abhorrent to me as the opposite abomination, eternal copyright—is just one indication of their contempt toward actual “content.” Let Java programmers churn out literary masterpieces after hours, right? Or maybe wait until they’ve made their killings with new Facebook apps? Sorry. I know that some Java whizzes must exist with Mailer-level literary talents, not just an appreciation of good narrative, and, come to think of it, Mailer himself once wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But a system too reliant on patrons and geek retirees would hardly be paradise.

Capitalism for writers, too, please

Like programmers, then, writers should be rewarded well for successful gambles, just as they should be able to post writings for free, when contractual obligations do not get in the way. I doubt that Evans appreciates that fact sufficiently despite his hopes that readers will recognize good writings, and I see shortcomings in his other arguments as well.

While the Sony Reader may have alerted Evans to the possibilities of e-books, for example, the Reader in some ways is a major step backwards despite its many virtues. He wants search, automatic content updates and annotations, none of which the Reader and similar E Ink machines offer at the moment.

The relationship between technology and business models

For that matter, as a TeleBlog regular named Tamas Simon notes in an e-mail to me, the current IDPF standards don’t cover annotations, although I understand they may be on the way in the the future. Added to the IDPF’s laundry list, in line with Tamas’s wishes, should be auto-content updates—one way by which authors who gave away free books could add value and collect cash later on. Such updates, as I see it, need to include the searchable archives of author-reader forums that readers didn’t choose to keep up with constantly. Perhaps with enough rewards for purchases of books, then the famous razor blade analogy would apply, and many books could be profitable even if given away for free at the start.

You can’t separate technical capabilities, however, from the most exciting of the possible new business models, and good e-book standards are crucial for the razor-blade scenario to succeed. I fervently hope that the IDPF will keep its word and go beyond the current epub standard.

SOS: Listen up, publishers!

Meanwhile, far from blameless, large publishers are going to have to decide if they’re willing to invest in the new electronic infrastructure or just hope e-books will fade away. They won’t. If the Brontosauruses insist on Draconian DRM, then smart little mammals just might take away business, through books with no “protection” or at least less obnoxious approaches such as social DRM.

Tamas, Jon Evans and Jon Noring would most likely disagree with me, but I don’t think it’s too late for the large, established publishers if they’re flexible and listen to uppity alarums in the TeleBlog and elsewhere. That means experimentation with new business models, as noted—for example, advertising in books: something just talked up by Joe Wikert at Wiley in a post deflating Sony Reader hype.

In general, publishing conglomerates need to stop bullying readers. Wikert laudably notes the clash between strict DRM and people’s urge to share books with friends, something that social DRM would allow with friends and family members deemed sufficiently trustworthy. Just when will the giants of publishing understand the hatred of thousands of e-book-buyers toward DRM? The Mobipocket debacle might be just a hint of horrors to come. Why, when publishers are so vehement about their own property rights, can’t e-book readers genuinely own their purchases?

Metaphor from dino history

Will the “dinos” heed me and spare us scenarios like the patroncentric one, or the others that are supposed to be transitions on the way to Evans-style perfection? It’s too early to say, but if they are open-minded, perhaps they can take heart from a recent Discover magazine article that suggested that some dinosaurs may have lived through the aftermath of a six-mile-wide rock smashing into the Yucatan Peninsula. How? Because some may either have been in eggs or perhaps were in Northern areas less affected by the changes in the atmosphere.

Oh, the possibilities for metaphors here! Rather than just taking comfort that e-books are a speck of today’s publishing scene, the large houses need to begin a meaningful migration toward the digital—the kind that a technophobic grandmother can appreciate when she’s downloading her first e-book; not the DRM-infested variety.

Libraries not a panacea, either

While I can see well-stocked digital libraries sending billions in cash toward publishers, in the form of massive acquisitions of publisher- and writer-created titles, libraries are hardly a total solution—given the freedom-of-expression issues, aggravated by the politicians who ultimately control the budgets. Along with society in general, writers and publishers need a variety of business models. For big and small publishers alive, that should mean a spirited embrace of social DRM and other consumer-merciful innovations, restrained ads in books, and other new ways of doing business. Otherwise we’ll see an Evans-style scenario of, “Let the meteors fall where they may.”

Related: The take on Evans from our friends at MobileRead, which also points to The Writer’s article, in the September issue, on piracy and e-books. I use the word “point” loosely since I can’t find a direct link. Does this mean the article isn’t on the Web. Oh, those dinos!