Dear Mr. Streitfeld,
I am not a doctor, but I can still diagnose you with one of the most acute cases of liberal guilt I have ever seen.
And this is the fault of the internet?
Some comparisons are surely instructive.
Car companies are going bust, and everyone blames the car companies--not so much the car buyers. We feel bad about the factory workers--as you do about the writers. But no one laments the companies themselves--except in a sentimental-nationalistic way. ("America should have a car industry." No one says why. Perhaps the way France needs a cheese industry.)
Is publishing that different? Should we lament a shrinking of publishers--any more or less so than that of car makers? Couldn't even the authors have done something differently?
Old media companies have been ridiculously bad about finding new, effective models in a world in which exchanges of information become easier, faster and cheaper.
People can share music files online. And while everyone was doing it, the music companies fretted, rather than innovating.
I for one would long have bought a lovely CD slipped into a small hardcover book--and paid a premium for it. I still buy opera CD's--for the libretto. And concerts are still big business: many CD's merely promote concert performances. Aren't there opportunities there?
Couldn't Universal have put their whole catalog online for free at AM radio quality? Then once I decided I liked a song, I could buy it--at a much higher quality. They're still not there.
Or compare any other commodity. I assume you're not upset that the engineers at Onkyo are not remunerated when you buy a used amp off Craigslist. But isn't that piece of stereo equipment just as much intellectual property as a book? (And even more so than The Calorie Counter's Guide to Dining Out--and other related literary masterpieces.)
Time was: you couldn't find a book you wanted, or the price was high because the market was small.
Now: the marketplace is international. (Abebooks.com shows me results from the UK, I notice.) The market is larger, and the prices are lower.
Isn't this what economists call a "more rational" market?
And if writers ran to publishers to find an audience or to circulate their work even after they had an audience, aren't they responsible for NOT innovating as well--like car and music companies?
Musical artists like Aimee Mann produce and market their own CD's. They sell in traditional retailers, but they keep a larger share of the profit.
POD (publishing on demand) promises to allow writers to self-publish and cut out the middle man, the screener, the cultural gatekeeper.
Smart writers are developing themselves as brands. They find an audience, blog, write across media, deliver free content, then earn money through advertising. Are writers reponsible only for innovating within the words they write, and not for the way they monetize their enterprise? Surely Dickens, who toured performing his own work, would not have looked down on such self-promotion.
Yes, there are good things about publishing houses. But for every brilliant editor in publishing who applies the pressure to turn carbon into a diamond or cuts a diamond to make it shine, there are ten thousand idiots. (Remember Jerzy Kosinski submitting his own novel to his own publisher years after its initial publication--and getting a rejection letter?)
What is not worth lamenting is publishers who were gatekeepers and always terrible at their jobs being replaced with something better.
Or not being able to find a copy of "84, Charing Cross Road" because you're stuck somewhere no one's ever heard of it.
I would not claim that "something better" is already upon us.
There is truly a Great Shakeout coming to pass.
I for one welcome it.
Now take two downloads, and call me in the morning.
Sincerely,
Edward R. O'Neill, Ph.D.
P.S. And if you'd bought it at a used bookstore--you would have felt better?
0 comments:
Post a Comment