[A2k] Digital publishing and the industry rules article

[Manon Ress]

QUOTE
Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will
continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music,
price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to
be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where,
as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not
clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song
they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."

He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book
production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of
the sale price as royalties.

In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will
impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may
think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct,
inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced
books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the
printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and
bookbinders out of business.
END OF QUOTE


Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html?_r=3D1&oref=3Dslogin

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: June 5, 2006

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is
published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes
listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work.
Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the
experimental book, which they're commenting about in a private forum
at Mr. Danielewski's Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new
book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms
Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther:
his entire book is available =97 free =97 as a download from his Web
site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book
electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the
online version.

Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how
books might be in the future." That is one of the hottest debates in
the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple
with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly
and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books
electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do
for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily
downloadable and completely portable.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture
of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently
crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing
industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike
forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of
books and the mixing and matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a
"grisly scenario."

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear
that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval
that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started
to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record
album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total
album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have
dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen
BookScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than
1,700 percent in just two years. What writers think about
technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do with
where they are re sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar,
Anne Fadiman, author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down"
and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," thinks a digital
library of all books would be a "godsend" during research, allowing
her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she
said: "That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in
its entirety and I think there's no substitute for the look and feel
and smell of a real book =97 the magic of the paper and thread and glue."

Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the
author of 13 thrillers, the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde,"
spent four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller
list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each
book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out
"samplers" of a few chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of
these formats are fine with her, she says. Whether its "paper, pulp,
gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the
best stories," she said.

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier
for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly
in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text
is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves
together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr.
Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a
library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated
book."

"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's
blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The
Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It
sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is
precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like
Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms.
Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I
certainly don't want to go to her Web site."

For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy
readers, however, the Web offers an unprecedented way to catapult out
of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who started a political blog,
"Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a
foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and
telecommunications company, to write a book this spring. Mr.
Greenwald promoted the result, called "How Would a Patriot Act?
Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own blog
and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential
bloggers, who helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com
before it was even published. This Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the
New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think people
who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices
entering will be a lot more excited about this technology," Mr.
Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that technology always
has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new authors."


For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book
publishing inevitably leads to the question of how writers will be
paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an advance against royalties,
which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the
cover price of each copy sold.

But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had
pieces put up on Web sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of
thousands of hits, and believe me I sit around thinking 'Boy, if I
got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I wrote,
I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the
forthcoming book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a
memoir about his hunt to discover what happened to relatives who were
killed in the Holocaust.

Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take
time to play out, and that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as
an author who creates texts that people consume, I want my authorship
to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.

Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will
continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music,
price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to
be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where,
as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not
clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song
they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."

He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book
production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of
the sale price as royalties.

In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will
impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may
think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct,
inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced
books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the
printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and
bookbinders out of business.

That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra,
whose 1,000-page novel, "Sacred Games," will be published in January.
Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books
downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in
resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the
fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians
at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys
in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things
in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the
barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful
weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds.

"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid
of skulls."

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as
authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only
Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two
intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of
the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages
to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm
ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The
experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the
space close between the characters until you're exactly at the
halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think
that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further
emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."

************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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