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snarpI have been thinking about how I read and buy books, and the publishing industry, and whether I'll actually make any serious amount of money if I ever actually sell any of these books sitting partly-done on my hard drive, because maybe the angry Luddite men are right and the internet has doomed the publishing industry. Doomed! With capital letters and exclamation points and FOX News.
(Doom is something I think about a lot, actually, but I think that's a personality thing.)
Pre-ebook-revolution, I had a reading process: whenever I bought a book or checked it out from the library, I'd enter it into a log on the computer and note down the purchase or check-out date. When I'd finished it, I'd usually go back and put in a second date. I say "usually" because most of the time these dates were pretty close together - I knew the read-date would be within a week or two of the get-date, so I wasn't very careful about it.
But in 2008 - I suspect that it was in April or May, judging by what I was writing here at the time - I noticed that the number of ebooks easily available for piracy had increased dramatically. Perhaps for reasons related to Amazon's recent behavior! I was in school full-time in Japan at the time and couldn't justify the expense of buying English-language books; thus, I pirated. The habit became more pronounced over year-and-a-half I lived there. I didn't stop buying books, but the way I was doing it shifted.
Because at some point during this time, my attitude towards physical books changed. They had been desirable to me, previously, not only because I wanted to read them, but also because of whatever the mental process is that makes people want things. The acquisitive impulse had been playing a role in my conception of books, and by extension written stories of a certain length. My villainy modified the conception, and transferred extended written narrative into the mental space occupied by blogs, anime, and manga. (Anime and manga were online first for me.*) It was around this time that I really stopped reading books within a couple of weeks of buying them; it no longer felt important to the process.
I feel as if I've started buying books less because of the consumption impulse and more because I want to give the authors money (something that now makes used book stores, formerly the site of all wonders, much less attractive to me). It's now about Being Good rather than Being Whatever Consuming Makes You. It's faster and easier to pirate than to buy, so now I buy books for the same reason I obsessively sort my reycling and try to find charities that'll take old shoes.
I'm not sure whether I think this is a good thing for anyone. I'm buying fewer books now. This is partly because I've actually kinda learned to budget (only kinda, as I still spend than I can afford on books), but I suspect it's also partly because being good takes mental effort, and being greedy feels easy.
I'm not the only person whose impulses work like this. I am unusually neurotic, but probably not, as a consumer, unusual. All available evidence suggests that the consumption impulse is usually more powerful than the social-responsibility impulse. I just happen to act them both out in a rigid, self-analytical manner that grates on even my own nerves, which renders it impossible that I ever stop thinking about the goddamn subject.
So I wonder about what's going to happen with books. When a medium has come uncoupled from the consumption impulse, how profitable is it for the people producing within the medium?
The donation model, which a lot of webcomics and some musicians have adopted, depends on the Being Good impulse. Walled-garden-type environments like the iPhone App Store and Second Life, on the other hand, are able to make use of the consumption impulse because they can function briefly and in a limited sense like the market for physical items. What these environments do is impose unnecessary limitations on a newborn technology, to create an illusion of scarcity where there is none. They're not doing anything new; they're just tricking the human brain into treating digital consumption in the same way it does physical.
Basically, they're engaging their users in a fantasy that the internet doesn't change anything. And that's a temporary strategy, one that becomes untenable when the technology matures. We've already seen it happen for computer software and music, and it happened quickly, in under fifteen years for each by my calendar. The ebook market will look completely different in a decade.
I don't think that publishers are entirely wrong to fear that piracy will hurt sales as digital distribution moves towards the mainstream. If they publish online in exactly the same way that they publish physical books, it certainly will, because people don't relate to digital materials in exactly the same way they do to physical ones. - And I admit that I am extrapolating this from my own experience, but I think that that's a statement to which it's hard to object! We just don't. The ideal here is, probably, to design some social system in which the buzz that the modern human brain gets one gets from the consumption of physical objects is mimicked for data objects.
(Okay, maybe the real ideal is to reform society in such a way that we don't put so much emphasis on wasteful consumption as a measure of our self-worth. But I don't have any specific ideas there, except that I should almost certainly be in charge. Let me know when you guys are ready for that.)
One thought is a social networking thing where your digital library is visible, but only those parts of it which the producer certifies that you've paid for. If half the appeal of consumption is a personal fear of scarcity - a fear that, for data, is illusory - then the other half is the social desire to prove one's worth as a function of one's wealth. Something like this is already going on in Second Life, World of Warcraft, and in money-eating Facebook games like Mafia Wars. People pay for digital items if those items are given social value.
The trick - and I'm sure there are half a dozen startups working on this problem right now, and a dozen prototypes already floating around on the web and gaming consoles - would be making books, music, movies, video games, etc., into a similar sort of commodity. But it's notable that the versions I listed above are all adjuncts to another service, generally a game. Showing off our stuff can't be the avowed primary motivation for engaging in the process, because for most people it's not a conscious motivation, and regardless we wouldn't want to admit it. Hence the shame associated with playing those Facebook games that are most transparently about consumption. There are a massive variety of culture- and class-based taboos surrounding how openly you can do this, and these games skirt them very closely. Hence all this level of moral indignation about people playing with pretend farms. It is the decline of civilization. (Pokemon is no longer the decline of civilization; it has been voted out.)
If you find this scenario depressing, there is always the dystopian-future alternative, if you're into those. Each nation, according to its own inclination, shall have a War on Piracy, similar to my own proud homeland's excellent War on Drugs, in which we will prosecute only working-class people and ethnic minorities, most of whom will have no legal access to books because they're all digital now and we have shut down most of the libraries due to budget shortfalls, and as Tucker Carlson says, "why do they need libraries? People should go to Barnes and Noble anyway." I offer this scenario freely to Cory Doctorow for use in a work of lifeless, repellent didactic fiction. But for real life I prefer the more Facebookian route.
* And I now have over $2,000 worth of them in my room. This does not count all the stuff I've given to libraries. Piracy = lost sales!
(Doom is something I think about a lot, actually, but I think that's a personality thing.)
Pre-ebook-revolution, I had a reading process: whenever I bought a book or checked it out from the library, I'd enter it into a log on the computer and note down the purchase or check-out date. When I'd finished it, I'd usually go back and put in a second date. I say "usually" because most of the time these dates were pretty close together - I knew the read-date would be within a week or two of the get-date, so I wasn't very careful about it.
But in 2008 - I suspect that it was in April or May, judging by what I was writing here at the time - I noticed that the number of ebooks easily available for piracy had increased dramatically. Perhaps for reasons related to Amazon's recent behavior! I was in school full-time in Japan at the time and couldn't justify the expense of buying English-language books; thus, I pirated. The habit became more pronounced over year-and-a-half I lived there. I didn't stop buying books, but the way I was doing it shifted.
Because at some point during this time, my attitude towards physical books changed. They had been desirable to me, previously, not only because I wanted to read them, but also because of whatever the mental process is that makes people want things. The acquisitive impulse had been playing a role in my conception of books, and by extension written stories of a certain length. My villainy modified the conception, and transferred extended written narrative into the mental space occupied by blogs, anime, and manga. (Anime and manga were online first for me.*) It was around this time that I really stopped reading books within a couple of weeks of buying them; it no longer felt important to the process.
I feel as if I've started buying books less because of the consumption impulse and more because I want to give the authors money (something that now makes used book stores, formerly the site of all wonders, much less attractive to me). It's now about Being Good rather than Being Whatever Consuming Makes You. It's faster and easier to pirate than to buy, so now I buy books for the same reason I obsessively sort my reycling and try to find charities that'll take old shoes.
I'm not sure whether I think this is a good thing for anyone. I'm buying fewer books now. This is partly because I've actually kinda learned to budget (only kinda, as I still spend than I can afford on books), but I suspect it's also partly because being good takes mental effort, and being greedy feels easy.
I'm not the only person whose impulses work like this. I am unusually neurotic, but probably not, as a consumer, unusual. All available evidence suggests that the consumption impulse is usually more powerful than the social-responsibility impulse. I just happen to act them both out in a rigid, self-analytical manner that grates on even my own nerves, which renders it impossible that I ever stop thinking about the goddamn subject.
So I wonder about what's going to happen with books. When a medium has come uncoupled from the consumption impulse, how profitable is it for the people producing within the medium?
The donation model, which a lot of webcomics and some musicians have adopted, depends on the Being Good impulse. Walled-garden-type environments like the iPhone App Store and Second Life, on the other hand, are able to make use of the consumption impulse because they can function briefly and in a limited sense like the market for physical items. What these environments do is impose unnecessary limitations on a newborn technology, to create an illusion of scarcity where there is none. They're not doing anything new; they're just tricking the human brain into treating digital consumption in the same way it does physical.
Basically, they're engaging their users in a fantasy that the internet doesn't change anything. And that's a temporary strategy, one that becomes untenable when the technology matures. We've already seen it happen for computer software and music, and it happened quickly, in under fifteen years for each by my calendar. The ebook market will look completely different in a decade.
I don't think that publishers are entirely wrong to fear that piracy will hurt sales as digital distribution moves towards the mainstream. If they publish online in exactly the same way that they publish physical books, it certainly will, because people don't relate to digital materials in exactly the same way they do to physical ones. - And I admit that I am extrapolating this from my own experience, but I think that that's a statement to which it's hard to object! We just don't. The ideal here is, probably, to design some social system in which the buzz that the modern human brain gets one gets from the consumption of physical objects is mimicked for data objects.
(Okay, maybe the real ideal is to reform society in such a way that we don't put so much emphasis on wasteful consumption as a measure of our self-worth. But I don't have any specific ideas there, except that I should almost certainly be in charge. Let me know when you guys are ready for that.)
One thought is a social networking thing where your digital library is visible, but only those parts of it which the producer certifies that you've paid for. If half the appeal of consumption is a personal fear of scarcity - a fear that, for data, is illusory - then the other half is the social desire to prove one's worth as a function of one's wealth. Something like this is already going on in Second Life, World of Warcraft, and in money-eating Facebook games like Mafia Wars. People pay for digital items if those items are given social value.
The trick - and I'm sure there are half a dozen startups working on this problem right now, and a dozen prototypes already floating around on the web and gaming consoles - would be making books, music, movies, video games, etc., into a similar sort of commodity. But it's notable that the versions I listed above are all adjuncts to another service, generally a game. Showing off our stuff can't be the avowed primary motivation for engaging in the process, because for most people it's not a conscious motivation, and regardless we wouldn't want to admit it. Hence the shame associated with playing those Facebook games that are most transparently about consumption. There are a massive variety of culture- and class-based taboos surrounding how openly you can do this, and these games skirt them very closely. Hence all this level of moral indignation about people playing with pretend farms. It is the decline of civilization. (Pokemon is no longer the decline of civilization; it has been voted out.)
If you find this scenario depressing, there is always the dystopian-future alternative, if you're into those. Each nation, according to its own inclination, shall have a War on Piracy, similar to my own proud homeland's excellent War on Drugs, in which we will prosecute only working-class people and ethnic minorities, most of whom will have no legal access to books because they're all digital now and we have shut down most of the libraries due to budget shortfalls, and as Tucker Carlson says, "why do they need libraries? People should go to Barnes and Noble anyway." I offer this scenario freely to Cory Doctorow for use in a work of lifeless, repellent didactic fiction. But for real life I prefer the more Facebookian route.
* And I now have over $2,000 worth of them in my room. This does not count all the stuff I've given to libraries. Piracy = lost sales!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-19 03:51 am (UTC)Like, I went to my college anime club meetings in old t-shirts and jeans and sometimes a Pikachu hat, and that rendered me pretty acceptable to everyone. A lot of us dressed like that. Some of us had conversations about how little we spent on our clothes to prove that we were People Who Don't Care About That Crap. (Cosplay was, however, mostly exempt from the classification of That Crap.)
But had I gone dressed in an elaborate and expensive goth outfit and makeup that had taken me a lot of time to assemble, it would have been more difficult for me to converse with people. I know this because one girl did do that, and she got kind of left out because of it. She obviously could not join in these group-identity-affirming conversations about our virtuous cheapness. (This was around the time I got a little self-critical about what was behind my own impulses in that direction.) Though she liked anime and was a perfectly nice person, she was not performing the identity of Anime Club Member with the same fidelity as the rest of us, and wasn't interested in doing so; so she stopped coming after two or three meetings.
And something similar would have happened to me if I'd gone to a goth club in my Porco Rosso t-shirt. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here.