Tomorrow morning at NYU:
http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1210list%20of%20imaginary%20places
Awesome lineup including Aziz Isham from Arcade Sunshine… Probably not worth missing.
The London riots were set off by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, but it rapidly became clear that something deeper was amiss… Personally, I blame ebooks.
Of course, we’re moving into an information society – we’ve been doing it for at least a decade now with the digitalization of the music and film industry, but it’s really picking up steam now that books and journalism are undergoing the transformation. In a recent piece for the Guardian, the writer Ewan Morrison gives authors (and the publishing industry) 25 more years, tops.
The crux of the argument is this: The value of creative information or ‘content’ trends towards zero when it becomes digitally transferable and is no longer contained in something like a paperback book or a CD. Once it becomes free, of course, no body gets paid to produce it. So ends publishing as we know it (and full-time writers, musicians, etc…) The rebuttal to his piece missed the point; when you take the long view, the twenty-five year view, content must always adapt to medium that contains it.
Most of what a developed society produces is content. Especially youth and especially today. We create youtube. We write fanfiction. We write blogs and webcomics and wikipedia… We create the internet every day, and we do it all for free.
And we create all of this because we need it. There was a recent report on Fox News report (citing the US census) about how 99.9% of the ‘poor’ have refrigerators, 65% have cable tv, and so on… Aside from this being a striking example of right-wing callous, it speaks to a very real truth: space is finite, the planet and its resources are finite, and yet capitalism relies on infinite growth. Capitalism works when people need refrigerators… But when everyone already has one (and there’s only enough room in your apartment for one fridge anyways) what do we consume?
Free time is infinite. As societies develop and become more efficient, it’s also growing. And content fills time. Content is the only growth economy. Creativity makes content, but most creativity is not remunerated – and even many traditional forms (music, indy films, books) are trending towards the free. This is not a new concept — Buckminster Fuller called it ephemeralization and saw it happening with the factory assembly line.
It used to be that to fill time, you’d have to buy a CD or a paperback book. Now you download or stream it of find it on facebook – usually for free. Except that we have to pay the service providers for our internet hookup, cell phones, Netflix and such – when all they do is ship our content around. We have created a new system of slavery – expect that instead of free work, we have become creative slaves in the service of ISPs and search engines. The information economy is based on slave labor.
We know how to create an economy based on stuff – do we know how to build one based on time?
Right now, strictly as a business proposition, no one makes a living wage by writing poetry. And yet who could argue that society doesn’t benefit more from poets than it does from the angrily unemployed?
The trick is: creating a set of economic rules that reward creativity. Should it be up to individuals to do this? Corporations? Governments? How do you measure how creative someone is? Should people be paid to write code / music / literature? Should new collectives be formed based on the labor unions that revolutionized the industrial workplace around the turn of the century? I think we’ve got the makings of a few solutions out there – but we also need to define a cohesive ideology to help galvanize the political movements of the early 21st century the way that socialism galvanized those of the 20th: For capitalism be allowed to continue it’s course of infinite growth, human creativity must be financially compensated.
Its not like the rioters were out chanting ‘pay for poetry’ – and I don’t want to trivialize the very real and very moving calls for freedom that have resounded throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the interesting question is: What do the London riots have to do with the Arab spring? Could the underpinnings of both be an expression of the spiritus mundi that something is not quite right with the global economic infrastructure? Could the Tea Party, the most organized American political movement in decades, have similar roots? Egyptian protesters had a despotic government to blame; the Tea Party, with calls to abolish the Fed (an organization that creates money from thin air), default on our debt and return to the Gold Standard, seeks to make capitalism ‘real’ again – despite the fact that the vast majority of economists believe this to be impossible; while the rioters just have their own rage. To oversimplify: In Europe, people feel they should be doing better; in the Arab world, that they can be better; in America, that they deserve better.
So are the three major political movements of the early 21st Century reactions to capitalism’s failure to create growth in these three regions (Europe, America, the Arab Middle East) or are they results of the transition from coin-based (real) to credit-based (virtual) currency, as suggested by Anthropologist David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5000 Years? It almost doesn’t matter – the result is the same – a crisis of faith with the stakes so high is a scary scenario indeed.
Governments are easy targets – but economic systems, like all ideologies, draw strength from collective belief (and its ability to reward that belief). To paraphrase Philip K. Dick: when stop believing in something that isn’t real, it ceases to exist. So if capitalism is to persist, we must devise reasons to keep believing in it, and allow it to reward our creativity. ‘Content’ is the ‘goods and services’ of the information age – and the same way that the post-slavery world financially rewarded work must be done for creativity.
There is growth. Tons of it… Just look at wikipedia. And wealth is being derived from this productivity. Tons of it… Just look at Mark Zukerberg. It’s all make believe, of course, but so is a currency created from thin air. But how do you hold Google hostage? How do you riot against Facebook?
Over the last two-hundred years we have created copyrights and patents to ensure that intellectual work was fairly compensated; worker’s compensation, child labor and the five-day work week to ensure that physical labor was fairly compensated. Casual creativity and virtual work are next on the list.
Of course, that would make life seem even more like we’re living inside a video game. And a lot of people won’t like that, either. But the alternatives look grim: the last time a global economic system unraveled left humanity with a four-hundred year-old dark age. And they hadn’t even wrecked the planet back then…
A Complete Digital Experience
A couple weeks ago I had a meeting with an extremely bright VC at one of the region’s top firms and, about ten minutes into the conversation he said, ‘oh, I get it, you guys provide publishers and authors with a complete digital experience.’ At the time, it seemed a little like newspeak, but I’ve found myself coming back to that phrase again and again – and not just when we speak to publishers, but to broadcasters, authors, non-profits, and anyone else that we find ourselves working with.
Ninety-one percent of broadcast executives say they’re not taking advantage of the opportunities that digital creates. It has ‘got to be mobile and has got to be tablet.’ And that’s true, of course, but there’s a real danger in pointing to the mobile / tablet space and saying: ‘This is our strategy. We’re going to make an app.’ Sure you need an app. But you also need a website. Even more importantly – you need the two to work together – and to tell the same story.
So are we moving towards a moment in the culture where mobile is taken for granted the way that websites are? I was looking for apartments this past weekend in New York and, of course, I turned to craigslist first. But then, a couple hours into the hunt, I looked up apartment-finding apps. Craigslist, broker websites, apps, youtube videos, email lists – this is all part of the digital experience of looking for an apartment. And none of it replaces walking around a neighborhood and bugging my friends to ‘keep their ears open.’
Putting together a digital strategy for a web-series or a cause or a book can be fun, but it’s also full of challenges – most of them financial. From the outset, we have to think multi-platform, not ‘let’s make an app.’ We target alternate distribution channels and niche audiences. Look for viral subject matter. Above all – we must tell good stories, tell them well, and connect them with the audiences who will feel strongest about them. And all of this costs money – especially on the technical end. But for many execs, the complete digital experience is something that exists outside and in opposition to their ‘core business.’ It is something amorphous and with potential, but which hasn’t really been monetized.
I think there’s a bigger picture here, though… Storytelling in general is becoming more holistic. Increasingly, we are blurring the lines that separate the ‘official’ or ‘canon’ release of a book, tv show, or whatever, from the online ‘extras.’ The ‘article’ and the ‘comments’ are becoming one. The behind-the-scenes footage becomes just as much a part of the show as the audience vote, or the user-generated content. When we talk about the complete digital experience, we’re not talking about a website or an app or a marketing campaign that goes along with a story. We’re talking about the story itself.
The idea that ‘Broadcast Executives Say Digital Brings Opportunities’ is great, I guess, but it also misses the point… There is a complete digital experience to everything that these broadcast executives are doing, the only question is whether or not they want to have a say about what that is.
I was looking for something like this everywhere, but couldn’t find one — so decided to put something together myself. I’d like this to be inclusive, so if I’m missing anything, please feel free to add a comment or email me.
With every new development in technology, the art of storytelling has changed… With the rise of mobile devices – that is, an interactive screen that is just as comfortable with text as it is with any other form of media, we can assume that new forms of storytelling will arise. In fact, at Arcade Sunshine, we’re sort of counting on it. The message is always shaped by the container – one reason why, for example, Emily Dickenson wrote such short, pithy poems was because she wrote them all on such small sheets of paper. But despite some seriously good efforts, we haven’t seen the kind of sea-change that accompanied the advent of the printing press or the written word. But maybe these things take time… I’ve heard that there are entire warehouses full of still-untranslated Assyrian clay tablets because for every Epic of Gilgamesh, there are around 10,000 receipts – and no one want to sit around all day translating receipts. Anyways – what are some of the more adventurous efforts out there, and do any of them show more promise than the hypertext novel?
Text Adventures / Interactive Fiction.
These have been around for a long time, but they may be making some type of comeback with the mobile device – as they’ve always been read rather than played. There’s a pretty active online group dedicated to creating and promoting new games, and I definitely recommend checking it out and playing one or two.
These have a history that goes back to the early 80s – I remember Zork, from when I was a kid and, even more fondly, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But I don’t remember finishing either one. I think the audience for these are going to remain pretty small – the problem is that, even when played on a mobile device, they aren’t immersive enough to fall into, the way you would a good book, and they aren’t fun enough to truly play. There’s also a documentary that I’ve been meaning to watch about the golden age of text adventures awesomely called Get Lamp.
Game Books.
Another great throwback to my childhood. Choose Your Own Adventure books, I’d argue, have had a powerful impact on current efforts to experiment with the genre, and mobile devices are perfect for them. Naturally, many of the classics from the 80s have been reissued for the iPad, and are fairly successful. There’ve also been a few attempts to make the format suitable for adults – the fiction book Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar and the non fiction History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist are two of the best examples.
But with both of these attempts, no matter how you begin, you tend to end up returning to a chronological reading – so that you don’t miss any of the story. Maybe with tablets, this won’t be an issue any more, because the machine can keep track of what you’ve read already. Some similar mobile experiments, like the NYPL’s awesome Biblion app suffer from the same issue – they are easy to put down because it’s too easy to lose your place without a clear, chronological progression to the story.
I really want to love this. Neal Stephenson, who has created some great, genre-bending fiction; a communal storytelling atmosphere; optimized for cross-platform and mobile devices; a carefully created business plan… But honestly: I have no idea what this is. I’ve downloaded it, gone to the website, read some of the stories, watched some of the animations – but I’m lost. Now, it just sits on my iPad, occasionally letting me know by virtue of a little red bubble, that somewhere, somehow, something is happening here and that I will probably never understand what that is.
If there are any huge Mongoliad fans out there, or if I’m doing something wrong, let me know. Otherwise: beautiful, strange, fail.
Dating Sims / Visual Novel.
Here’s something that holds some real promise. I heard once that the most populat form of video game in Japan, and by extension some of the best-selling video games in any genre are Japanese dating sims. If you’ve never heard of these, you can check out a few here. For the most part, they’re picture books with music, sometimes spoken dialogue, and the occasional reader-decision. Clearly, the story here is the key – these are meant to be read and experienced more than played.
The subject matter and content of all the ones that I’ve seen, though, are dominated by Manga-type themes… The dating lives and social games of high-school children, angst, and fantasy are all well-represented.
Still, there is clearly an audience for this type of storytelling so maybe it’s just a matter of time before we start to see some fiction and/or non-fiction title made for western audiences.
Transmedia.
Kind of a catch-all for genre-crossing storytelling – usually involves multiple platforms working together to tell a single story, often with a real-world component (go here, look for this, dial a number). So far, there have been a few modest successes – but, because it’s so expensive to produce across multiple platforms, corporate sponsorship tends to play an important role in creating really interesting transmedia stories – especially those that involve real-life ‘Alternate Reality Games‘. Because of this, a cool transmedia story can sometimes seem indiscernible from well-designed advertising campaign. Also, because corporations like to use the same people and companies again and again, there are really only a few people who make a living, full-time, as transmedia producers. But there are a lot of people who would like to. And even more who have written PhD theses about it.
Good work if you can get it – but until the costs come down, a tough act for the struggling artist seeking a platform to tell his/her story.
Wikipedia / Collaborative Writing.
Obviously the greatest example of collaborative, non-fiction storytelling is wikipedia. An unmitigated success. Because this is an effort to tell the ‘whole story,’ and because it has enough contributors to create an official story, it may not be duplicable to smaller topics… Although there are, of course, lots of great wikis – wikis for programming codes, wikis for ideologies, and even some fictional world-building wikis – aside from wikipedia itself, and niche-wikis designed for passionate insiders, I don’t know of any that you can really lose a few hours to. But let me know if I’m wrong on this – the wiki format clearly has potential.
I’d also like to see some multimedia wikis – so if there are any good examples out there, let me know.
Highly Narrative Video Games – Like Myst, LA Noire.
Where do you draw the line between playing a video games and listening to / experiencing a story? I don’t know and it’s probably arbitrary. But these examples are on the other side of that line (and I also don’t know much about them other than what I’ve read).
Metaverse / Second Life.
Held so much promise… A new platform for storytelling and user-generated content. I still think there’s something there, but these will probably be remembered as the CD ROM encyclopedia of their day – useful for some people, a harbinger of things to come, but also kinda silly.
Multimedia Books.
Over the past couple years, a few companies like ourselves, 955 Dreams, Push-Pop Press, Gameloft and a couple others have been championing the idea of interactive, multimedia, adult-oriented multimedia books. So far, the best examples have all been non-fiction, but we’re working on a few ideas to expand that as well. There’s a good list of the ten best examples out there over at appadvice, in case you want to check them out. Still young, and the market’s unproven, but showing potential.
Children’s Books
Well here’s where things have just blown wide-open. Multimedia, interactive children’s books are getting better, getting cooler, and threatening to change the entire children’s publishing landscape. But the questions arise: Are these toys or stories? What is the grown-up equivalent to flashy lights and cute sounds? Are these ebooks and apps going to be like pop-up books? Awesome when you’re eight, a little less awesome when you’re eighteen? I look forward to finding out…
or The Start-Ups We’ve Got vs. The Start-Ups We Need
It’s sometime in the late 1950s and Willem de Kooning and John Cage are sitting at a diner having lunch. De Kooning makes a frame with his fingers, he puts it around some breadcrumbs that had spilled onto the counter, and he proposes a thought experiment: “If I put my fingers around these breadcrumbs, it doesn’t make it art,” he says. Cage disagrees. Sixty years later and lets move past the question and continue the thought experiment: If I had those very same breadcrumbs, preserved, in a glass case on my coffee table, how much money would they be worth today? Could anyone question their value or their artistic merit?
The frame is our attention – and it roughly correlates to the size of the audience for a particular piece of art or music or film. So if business models today are only focused on the profitability of two types of frames: the massive mass-market and the and the tiny micro-niche, then there might be some rough waters ahead.
Anyone, anywhere, can listen to Britney Spears, at any time. Culture’s going digital, and as it does, the physical and economic boundaries that once constrained a movie or book or CD – limiting exposure to places where the objects could be bought, and limiting their use to those who can afford them – these boundaries are disappearing. New businesses are being designed to optimize search and to create perfect recommendation engines. By creating a single, massive, interconnected audience, we monetize culture by either connecting huge numbers of people to a few mega-hits – like hollywood blockbusters and Lady Gaga – or by maximizing the profitability of huge amounts of highly-niche ‘long-tail’ materials.
The danger is that we lose the middle. The artistic achievements created by full-time artists and creatives aimed at an audience in the thousands or tens-of-thousands. And these middle-market producers are, possibly, the entire reason that we create.
It’s quite a moment for us in the culture-for-sale factories. The 20th Century culture-pedlar like, say, Random House, could never get off the ground today’s digital markets. Just imagine the pitch: “We want to publish a little of this, a little of that. You know, publish things we like, at random.” Forget the fact that the company would rely on shipping massive amounts of wood pulp, all over the country – the very principle of a randomly curated culture industry is completely ‘unscalable’ in today’s marketplace.
Because selling culture is really just putting a frame around it, companies like Random House (or Hollywood Studios, or TV news) could be successful frame-makers simply by controlling the access to distribution, bookstores, critics, printing-presses, bandwidth and so on. Now that those control are eroding, anyone can start a frame-shop… So why aren’t we witnessing an explosion of independent media? Why aren’t, for example, new publishing houses making headlines with the latest bestseller?
‘Scalable’ is a good hot topic worth hating. Every new media business plan seems focused on being the next Facebook, and not the next Shakespeare and Co.. We’re spending countless hours trying to innovate ways for everyone to have access to the same handful of songs, rather than seeking ways to make an economically viable band that has a few thousand fans. Ever since google proclaimed itself a ‘media company’ it been going down hill…
Well, except for music. There, the big companies screwed things up so royally that they forced a regime-change and created some real openings for independent media.
One of the more interesting movements taking place today in the music is to price products that try and take advantage of the entire demand curve and appeal directly to small groups of passionate supporters – often friends and family. Kickstarter may have been one of the first ‘fan sourced’ companies, but my friend (and cousin) Benji Rogers over at Pledge Music has really refined the system for music acts. Basically, the way that such sites work is by creating numerous levels that people can contribute towards a artifact (book, film, record, etc…). For $5 I can get a .pdf or an .mp3 of the final product, for $50 I can get a signed LP, for $500 I can come to the recording session. Originally, they thought the average contribution, per fan, would be somewhere in the $10-$20 range – they have since discovered that its higher. In many cases, much, much higher.
The other interesting thing about fan-sourced culture is that it seems to take us back to a more ancient and possibly authentic place in the history of art. When cavemen drew bisons on their walls, they weren’t doing it for a million strangers all over the planet, but for their friends and families and the few hundred or thousands they imagined would see them there. With Pledge Music, an album is supported by the few hundred or thousand people who are friends, family, and fans of the band. The people who already know the band’s story, and who want to be part of it, contribute. By contributing, I take a part in the creative process.
And I think this is important. I think it might even fulfill some deep evolutionarily derived instinct in human nature. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. After we are healthy, safe, social and psychologically secure, we are programmed to be creative. Perhaps this itch can be scratched by outsourcing – the way that I, for example, outsource my views on Israel/Palestine to my cousin Ali because I can’t possibly keep up with all the material and because he does…
Maybe we can start dreaming up more business models that allow wealthy patrons to subsidize the economic realities of creatives – bring back the patronage model, in a sense. It never really went away (German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein provided sizable stipends to numerous poets and artists to subsidize their work – without his patronage, we might not have Trackl’s poetry or Rodin’s sculptures) but we need new start-ups that allow people with considerable disposable incomes to discover and subsidize those who are engaged in full-time creativity. It would also, incidentally, be good for domestic unemployment.
So we should stop thinking of content as a scaleable enterprise, and start trying to innovate and encourage ways to create conversations (around any kind of culture) that number in the thousands. Digital capitalism has a tendency to aggregate businesses towards the blockbuster and the very niche at the expense of the middle – so we need new, walled markets that promote that center space.
As a warning, think about poetry. For most of human history, poetry was the highest of arts. Today, you can count on one hand the number of working poets who are neither part-time teachers nor independently wealthy. And you probably wouldn’t need your thumb or index-finger.
Poetry is neither niche-enough to be provided for by fringe grants and specialist publications, nor mainstream enough to be ‘scaleable.’ It’s somewhere in the middle – and it’s in trouble.
We’re in danger of loosing that middle. That place where society takes a turn for the weird, tries new things out… The place where subcultures are born. Get too few people involved in a conversation and it’ll turn to inside baseball or discussions of aunt Alice’s pumpkin pie. Too many people, and it’s just becomes vapid. Somewhere in the middle of this demand curve, with just the right number of people involved, and cultural can serve the function that it was evolutionarily designed to serve. It can become more than a song – it becomes a possible future. That is, if it excites the right group of people at the right time, culture can become a subculture, or an ideology, or a movement.
Remember – I’m talking about audience and market-share here – these are the things that culture is made of – and not about any mythical properties of beauty or aesthetics. Cage proved it with his breadcrumbs, and it’s even more elegantly displayed in the youtube clip of his 4’33 performed at the Royal Albert Hall (go check it out – be sure to watch the whole thing). There, silence (or nothing), marketed appropriately, is elevated to the highest of arts. Since all content is more-or-less the same, I’m really talking about the size of the frame that’s in danger – and that our business models need to consider.
Think of the polynesians for a minute. There they are, in this gorgeous island paradise, surrounded by coconuts and dolphins and great surfing and fresh shellfish and a group of them gets together and decides, ‘Fuck it – let’s build some canoes and sail off in some random direction for gods-know how long on the off chance that we just might find another empty, gorgeous island paradise.’ Hundreds of miles, in open outriggers, through shark-infested waters. And they did it again and again – settling almost the entire South Pacific in a few hundred years. A lot of small bands of Polynesians probably died along the way… But imagine if the whole lot of them went in the same direction at the same time (or just one or two)… The result would’ve been pretty different.
If culture is the exploratory arm of human progress, if it builds the frames that we use to understand our possible futures and better appreciate our present, then it may not matter what the contents are as long as we have all different sizes of frames.
In music, the failure of large labels to adapt quickly enough opened a huge opportunity to reverse the trend of the late-nineties and revive numerous mid-frame industries and business models. Independent labels cater to smaller audiences and sell fewer albums, while bands supplement a larger amount of there income through touring. New web-business like Pledge Music are creating other interesting ways to fund mid-framed music. Today, despite album sales that are less than half what they were just ten years ago, we’re experiencing a renaissance of interesting, independent music and musical forms. But will the same hold for books or independent films or any of the smaller culture industries that are yet to undergo the digital transformation?
Although some companies, like O/R Books ,are beginning to rise to the challenge, we haven’t quite figured out how to encourage and support the small- to medium-scale writers. And we certainly haven’t figured out how to save poetry. The human instinct for creativity, combined with our unquenchable need to waste time and talk about it, will always ensure that there is money out there to support independent arts – and it will ensure that there are always artists. Entrepreneurs, however, need to stop trying to be the next Facebook and focus on creating pathways that will allow investors, and those with large amounts of disposable income, to outsource their creativity. To support the middle section of the demand curve, to create new ideas and new subcultures, and to explore our collective future.
Got an idea for an interactive or digital book? Got a story to tell and words alone won’t tell it right? Arcade Sunshine is now open to pitches from independent authors, journalists, documentarians and the like… We’re interested in new forms of narrative, non-fiction storytelling, and experimenting with interactivity — so if you’ve got a cool idea, give us a shout and let’s build a better book together.
This long post is a primer on what’s happening / happened to publishing, and also some models for revenue going forward… The models, of course, are based on the same grey / black market economies that predict most major economic shifts — thus the title.
A friend of mine, an experienced editor at a major New York publishing company is about to go back to school – back to business school – because he doesn’t see any future for himself in book publishing. And while bookstores and print publishing are under assault, digital sales are taking off, and expected to grow 400-500% in the next few years. This rate of change is simply unsustainable for any industry, let alone one as ossified as traditional publishing.
It’s easy to look at the currently collapsed or collapsing culture industries, like music or newspapers, and draw parallels to book publishing. That narrative goes something like this: huge publishing conglomerates will cease to be able to justify the massive advances created by book auctions, they’ll fragment into independent publishing companies, small autonomous imprints, print-on-demand houses, and self-publishing websites. Authors will increasingly be responsible for building and nurturing their own fan bases and ‘brands’ by engaging in social media and lots of touring. Small labels will rise. Prices will fall. Everyone will download their books and everyone will be happy except for the bookstores and the big five. Paper books will still be sold, but mostly in Walmarts and airports – making them just as ephemeral as their digital counterparts – or as expensive, highly-designed objets d’art destined for the glass-topped coffee tables of trendy condos.
But, as attractive as this scenario is (unless you’re a major publishing house or Barnes-and-Noble executive), there’s a fundamental flaw with this line of reasoning. Margaret Atwood put it best: No one goes to a show to see an author dressed like a half-nude alien explode out of a giant egg and read their latest work. Music is performative; reading is solitary.
Or is it? Richard Nash, the former editor of Soft Skull Press, points out that we know more about reading thanks to Oprah than we like to admit. Oprah showed us that reading is, fundamentally (and like most things that humans do) a social activity. The quality or content of the book itself is secondary to the community and the conversation that exists around that book. Which is not to say you don’t need to read to take part – the experience of reading is still, fundamentally, having another person’s voice inside of your head for fifteen hours plus. But once you’ve had that voice in you for so long, you want to share it, discuss it, tell your own stories about it. Just as you can listen to music when you’re alone, you can read with others.
And yet, how do you remunerate authors if they can’t expect to go on tour and make thousands from live shows? When CD sales began to plummet, musicians were able to stay in business through a combination of singles sales and live shows. A book takes at least as long to create as a record does, but singles don’t exist, and good luck getting folks to pay for live author shows. Combine these grim realities with the fact that ebook piracy makes it so easy to download books that, in just fifteen minutes, I downloaded, for free, the complete University Press (Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, etc…) catalogs – over 2,500 books – onto my laptop. Is the golden age of the 100,000 word narrative coming to a close?
Interestingly enough, people who have tablet PCs actually spend more time reading than those who do not. Furthermore, people with tablets read longer pieces – the internet shrunk our attention span for long-form journalism, presumably because no one liked to read on a screen. Turns out the screen wasn’t the problem – the desk was.
Movie studios and publishing houses also operate with a surprisingly marxist bent – creating a shared-risk environment for creative products: A movie studio can release ten stinkers, so long as they have a mega-blockbuster to offset all those losses. Ditto with publishing houses and bestselling books. And since these companies have extensive backlists of IP, old works also subsidize the new. But, at least with literature, we’re moving towards a more ‘democratic’ landscape exemplified by the self-publishing scene. Top-selling self-published writers can make over $200,000 / month, while others make just a few bucks.
What do we do with all these data points? The means of distribution for written works is available to anyone, not just publishers. Books are social artifacts. The music industry model will not work to pay authors. The movie industry model will not work to pay authors. People who read digitally read more, and read longer pieces (so demand is up). People won’t pay $25 / book in digital form. Everyone I know still wants to write a book…
So let’s consider porn, cyberterrorism and the Russian Mob.
‘Business is ‘just business’: a scramble for profit. Right? Well that might describe crime; it certainly doesn’t describe business. Ethics aren’t just important in business. They are the whole point of business.’ (Richard Branson, 2008). And while porn isn’t crime, it is a ‘less encumbered’ business – and, along with travel agencies, it was one of the internet’s first true victims. Also, unlike other culture industries, there’s less pretentiousness around ‘good porn’ vs. ‘bad porn’… To most of us, porn is porn. And that’s how the industry has been transformed – the studios were scared that with all the free porn on the internet, people would stop paying for porn. What they discovered, was that people who pay for porn, still pay for porn. Enthusiasts, fetishists, collectors – that same ten percent of the population or so who was paying for porn before it became free and ubiquitous. It’s just that now, people who didn’t (and still don’t) pay for porn have access to it, too.
Is this the model for literature? People spend, on average, seven minutes watching a porno. They spend fifteen hours with a book. For most people who consume free porn, it’s fairly interchangeable – it’s only the enthusiasts who really have carefully defined tastes. The experience is solitary or perhaps shared with one other. Maybe the most popular porn sites, the ‘tube sites’ like youporn and porntube, could be a model for genre fiction – free, mostly interchangeable trade paperbacks or romance novels. Books sorted by popularity and ratings, maybe even prefaced by a quick, twenty-second video review. All these books would be free, but if you’re a real collector, if you want the good stuff – the Italo Calvino or Steven King stuff – for that you must pay a premium. Publishing companies would become even more dependent on blockbusters – but everything else would be free.
Cyberterrorism shows us the opposite approach. Not really cyberterrorism, though – that’s just what the giant copyright conglomerates like the RIAA call it – so determined to criminalize every thirteen year-old for ‘illegally’ downloading the latest Lady Gaga album, they throw around gitmo-worthy sobriquets. I guess ‘pirate’ sounds too cool. It’s incredible that organizations like the RIAA haven’t learned that such criminalization never works – whenever it’s easier to download a movie or an album that’s completely DRM-free and completely shareable then it is to buy it, that’s exactly, no matter how hard you shake your finger at them, what people will do. I wonder what the long-term effects will be of creating a society where almost every single young citizen is, openly and actively, breaking the law.
On the other hand, Netflix has shown us that at the right price point, with the right curation and recommendation technology, people will be more than happy to follow the rules. For the first time this past week, Netflix has eclipsed bit-torrent as the source of most internet traffic. What would a Netflix of reading look like? A place where books could be borrowed, for free and for a limited amount of time, by any member? It would look a lot like a library, actually. But I’ve tried the digital libraries that lend out ebooks and .mobi files – and they’re all pretty lacking. They’re disorganized and suffer from a lack of content. How long before a for-profit digital library emerges, with a great catalog of ebooks, a recommendation system, and a low-cost subscription service? The technology and legalities are already in place, so I think it’s probably months, not years before we see this occur – and it will transform publishing when it does. Will it brutalize the industry or reinforce it? Netflix gives some financial reward to independent filmmakers, but generally not nearly enough to cover even modest production costs…
But all of these ideas and trends are going to be at the mercy of the Russian Mob. The princely, unfettered, free-market capitalism that emerged when the Soviet Union collapsed and that will emerge when publishing does the same. Don’t underestimate its power – it’s made Moscow the most expensive city in the world, after all. And also one of the least egalitarian ones. Russian mob rule says that when literature changes, the new regimes will be controlled by the same people who wielded power in the old, and that public good and decent taste will be replaced by the quickest way to make a few people obscenely wealthy. This model will be fine for celebrity writers, but for the vast majority of interesting or artistic voices, it doesn’t bode well. The best thing about the glorious twentieth-century of literature is not the bestsellers of the 1990s, but all the odd and wonderful margins. The fact that James Salter and Phillip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon can/could pay their bills by writing.
There are stigmas involved, too – ones that ask society to celebrate the novelist and shun the pre-school teacher and that are bad for novelist and teacher alike. These stigmas turn teachers into failed novelists, novelists into barristas, and celebrity autobiographies into viable business plans.
There are six billion people on this planet – and most books find an audience of a few hundred to a few thousand… and what is so bad about that? Why shouldn’t we take a writer seriously if he or she makes even a dozen people smile or laugh or think? Why shouldn’t we support his or her desire to sit, quietly, and compose? Domestic unemployment is a problem – why not try and build a system that pays more people to create? In the last decade, technology has already begun to reshape music, movies and journalism – but now that literature is about to fall, there is a very real opportunity to determine what this new culture industry looks like. Left to its own devices, it will go the way of the Russian mob (probably with a strong side of Netflix and some porn-style genre sites thrown in). Will the ‘shared-risk’ created by 20th Century publishing disappear? Will authors band together and create digital cooperatives of their own? The revolution is coming. And since it coincides with the rise of the tablet – and the dawn of the ‘post pc’ world – it will be simple, accessible and profound.
Emediavitals.com is a cool blog to keep an eye on — they’ve a good knack for grabbing interesting ideas and stories early on — especially in the digital magazine publishing front. Arcade Sunshine was pretty heavily featured in a recent posting on what magazine publishers can learn from filmmaking (and probably vice-versa). Check it out.
Now you can sample the first few chapters of Here on Earth with the ‘Lite’ version. Go check it out here — no more excuses — it’s free!
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