It’s not the reader

In a New York Times op-ed piece in October 2009, Google founder Sergei Brin outlined the reasons for the Google Books project. It was, he argued, a project designed to ‘unlock the wisdom held in an enormous number of out-of-print books’. [1] In a similar vein, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a clearly stated intent for the Kindle: to make available the world’s entire library of books anywhere, any time.[2] They share the vision of a heavenly library, an online repository of the world’s books. And they are not alone. To anyone who has grown up with the joys of the internet, it’s only natural to imagine that books would join the vast repository of knowledge currently available online. Indeed, it’s tempting to suggest that such a heavenly library is inevitable, that within our lifetimes all of bookdom will be at our fingertips, a simple click or touch away.

For the technological determinist, the only hurdle to such an imagined future has been a suitably acceptable reading device, one that readers would embrace just as they embrace printed books. While many are happy to spend hours reading blogs and websites on desktop or notebook computers, there remains a notion that long-form texts require a more accessible environment, a device that resembles the printed book. In recent times, the first such devices have appeared and the cultural habits of readers are slowly changing. They are embracing the convenience of instantaneous book buying, and the pleasures of having their books ‘backed-up’, should their reading device be lost or break. Already, millions are curling up in bed with Kindles (if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, since Amazon does not release sales figures), and publishers are reacting to the demonstrable growth in e-book sales by expanding their digital catalogues.[3] It appears that readers are beginning to be less precious about the book as a physical object.

But the book’s objective qualities are about more than the act of reading. The shift to e-books is dependent on much more than the ability of consumer electronics manufacturers to persuade consumers that screens are as usable as print. Indeed, debates about e-books are no longer about readers, whether one is referring to devices or people. The book’s physical characteristics do more than enable a particular reading experience. They also enable the particular business practices upon which the book industry has been built. For the book trade, the death of the book as object and its associated physical characteristics will prove to be a much larger challenge than persuading readers to read from a screen, and there is ample evidence of that challenge.

The book publishing industry, like other media industries, emerged in an analog age. Its entire business premise is built on a vertically integrated model where publishing companies control the entire book production and distribution process, from author right through to reader. Authors are only published on the say-so of publishers, and on terms largely determined by publishers. Readers have little choice but to buy books from channels authorised by publishers. And for book publishers, the traditional way to do this has been to control the supply of a physical object by ensuring appropriate levels of scarcity—something that has not changed for hundreds of years.

While other media industries have grappled with what might be termed ‘advanced’ analog technologies that disrupted end-to-end control, book publishing has maintained its iron grip until the most recent intrusion of digital technologies. For example, even before the CD, the music industry experienced a shift from printed sheet music to recorded music. Recorded music itself shifted formats several times, with each new format providing new possibilities for reproduction and distribution. Throw in the disruptive effects of radio, and even in the pre-digital age it’s clear that the music industry has had constantly to adapt and reinvent itself. The movie industry has also experienced significant change—grappling with the introduction of television and then the video-recorder. Each change caused the industry significant angst—film lobbyist Jack Valenti once suggested that ‘the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone’.[4] Meanwhile, the book industry continued to publish print on paper books, in a form that has remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Of course, despite prior experience with the challenges of changing technologies and practices, neither the music nor the movie industry has managed to easily negotiate the digital environment. Instead, the transition to digital has been noisy and litigious—partly because there are intrinsic incompatibilities between what digital technologies allow and the business pre-requisites of existing stakeholders. This has been exacerbated by changing cultural practices; new-media users are connected, well informed and more empowered than consumers of the past. And their expectations have changed—echoing what Andrew Shapiro calls a control revolution.[5] In short, for many, the vertically integrated end-to-end control over media products that was the basis for media industries in analog times is no longer acceptable. Add digital’s ease of reproduction and distribution (which essentially eliminates the idea of scarcity) and it’s little wonder that the traditional media industries are still struggling to adapt.

The introduction of e-books is the flashpoint for the book trade—the shift to digital has the potential to undermine the way the book industry has worked for centuries. Just as song downloads disrupted the music business, the emergence of the e-book is provoking questions about the process of creating and selling books. As readers grapple with the new e-book technologies (and many Kindle owners proudly tell me that they’re buying more books than ever), the industry is coming to terms with the new possibilities. Publishers are struggling to maintain standard business models. Traditional booksellers make defensive statements about preserving communities while trying to get a slice of the digital action, and authors are caught in the middle; often sidelined in discussions over money—who gets paid, how much, when and for how long.

Books as physical objects are easily controlled—they need to be printed, sold and shipped. And the entire book industry is based on that premise of control, extracting revenue at key gateways. Replacing the physical object takes away the existing means to exercise that control, allowing disruptive new possibilities—and non-incumbent players are often better equipped to take advantage of those than traditional stakeholders. Resistance to the introduction of e-books is as much about the struggle for business survival as any romantic notions of ink and paper.

As electronic books become mainstream, it is these challenges that will be the most confronting. Technical changes are easy—the Kindle has demonstrated that we can build perfectly acceptable portable reading devices complete with easy-to-use book distribution mechanisms. Cultural changes are much harder—the e-book does more than just replace a printed tome with a pretty screen and an internet connection. It represents a fundamental challenge to how publishing has always done business, and the continued noisy rejection of electronic books by some stakeholders is nothing less than the inevitable resistance of those used to centuries of a particular cultural practice.

In early 2010, Amazon withdrew the entire Macmillan catalogue from its online bookstore. On 30 January, anyone browsing the US Amazon store could not buy a print or electronic version of a Macmillan title. Amazon had removed one-sixth of its inventory without telling anybody.[6] What’s more, the initial public statement about the removal came from Macmillan, whose CEO outlined the reasons. Amazon remained silent until a relatively obscure Kindle community blog post provided some justifications for the removal, accusing Macmillan of having a monopoly over its authors(!). But the bravado didn’t last and after a weekend of intense internet debate, Amazon did an about-face and began relisting its Macmillan titles.[7]

The dispute between Macmillan and Amazon went to the core of the disruptive potential of e-books. While ostensibly about money, what was really at stake was control over the terms of access to electronic books. Macmillan’s prior e-book arrangement with Amazon mimicked the physical world. Amazon was treated like a retailer and the publisher, as a wholesaler, sold titles to Amazon, which could then resell the title at a price of their own choosing. Most publishers sold e-books to Amazon for between $12 and $15,[8] expecting Amazon to resell them for a profit. Instead, Amazon had been selling many Kindle titles for $9.99 as a loss leader to drive Kindle sales and market share. Arguably, that price point had become the default expectation for the value of e-books, and it had been set by Amazon, a retailer, not the publisher.

Macmillan wanted to move to an agency model—one in which the publisher set the price; and allowed the intermediary to take a fixed percentage cut, thus removing Amazon’s ability to sell at a loss. In the digital retail space, the prime example of this approach is the iphone app store, where software developers set a retail price, and Apple takes a 30 per cent cut, irrespective of the set price. It appears that with the impending introduction of Apple’s iPad, book publishers were offered a similar deal for the new iBooks store.

Not surprisingly, the ability to control pricing appealed. That this approach limited Amazon’s ability to use price as a mechanism to dominate the nascent e-book marketplace (or to dictate future terms to publishers) was also no bad thing. Once Macmillan’s intention became public, Hachette also moved to the agency model[9] and indications are that the five major publishers who have committed to Apple’s program have done the same. The incident sparked a debate over e-book pricing, and highlighted the industry’s desire to set prices at what they call a ‘realistic’ level. There has been much speculation about whether the shift will result in higher or lower book prices and it’s too early to tell how this will pan out for the publishers, the retailers and for consumers. The dispute was more about control than cost. Publishers such as Macmillan wanted their hand back on the tiller—to resume end-to-end control even in the digital realm.

But in the new world, control doesn’t reside with publishers and their official distribution channels. The reality of electronic distribution is that unhappy users bypass legitimate channels. If readers think that e-books are too expensive at Amazon or Apple, they will go elsewhere—and some may end up using peer-to-peer file-sharing sites to source their reading material.

It is here that a key resistance to e-books emerges. Authors such as J.K. Rowling refuse to allow electronic editions of their titles, for fear of pirated editions spreading widely online. The parallels with the music industry are stark. Rewind a decade and replace ‘author’ with ‘musician’, ‘Rowling’ with ‘Metallica’, ‘publisher’ with ‘record company’, ‘Scribd’ with ‘Napster’ and the conversations could be the same. The key difference is in the characteristics of the respective music object (the CD) and the book object. The CD is a repository of music that has already been digitised—and anybody with a computer can easily extract the digital files and share them with the world. Books are still analog objects and turning printed books into digital e-books is a time-consuming process that few people have the resources to do properly. However, should a critical mass of e-books become available commercially, some are concerned that the book industry will suffer from the same affliction that plagues the music business. Hence the reluctance of many authors to go digital.

To maintain their control in the e-book space, publishers look to technological solutions, hoping to prevent unauthorised distribution by making it too technically difficult for users to copy and distribute their books. Using digital rights management (DRM) tools, publishers seek to replicate the control afforded by physical objects—to lock down commercial e-books and prevent unauthorised use. They also restrict the movement of the digital files by tying them to particular devices and limit access to certain territories. So e-books bought for Amazon’s Kindle are locked to a particular user’s Amazon account—you cannot lend anyone a Kindle title without sharing access to your entire account. And Amazon’s Australian Kindle store has a far smaller range of titles than its US Kindle store—enforcing territorial rights most effectively. What is possible with DRM goes well beyond the constraints allowed by physical objects—it’s actually easier to buy a physical book from Amazon’s US list than to buy a Kindle title.

Ironically, this lack of availability, higher prices and restrictions on use are the very things that drive users to unauthorised sources, whether it be music, movies or e-books. It doesn’t take much effort to find electronic versions of all seven Harry Potter titles residing in the darker parts of the internet, and while the restrictions of DRM may not yet be apparent to many in the e-books realm, there may be some noisy publicity when all those grandmothers with Kindles realise they can’t move their books to their brand spanking new ipads. (Unless, of course, Amazon ensures that its iphone application works appropriately on the upcoming Apple device).

Although the industry might call these people pirates, they are a necessary counter to ensure an appropriate balance between consumer desires and industry needs. It’s not impossible to find that balance—Apple’s iTunes store is the world’s biggest retailer of music, with (to date) ten billion songs downloaded legitimately since its inception. The removal of DRM restrictions from the bulk of the iTunes catalogue doesn’t appear to have diminished its popularity; despite the availability of music for free elsewhere, many people are happy to pay the right amount for quality, convenience, reliability and usefulness.

After all, readers have been able to borrow books from libraries, lend copies to their friends and generally share their reading material in informal distribution networks for centuries. In locking down e-books and preventing readers from doing what they have always been able to do with their books, publishers run the risk of alienating their customers. Without entering into the complexity of the debate, it is neatly summarised by an exchange that occurred a decade ago. During the music file-sharing disputes in the late 1990s, the heavy-metal band Metallica mounted their own lawsuit against file-sharing software provider Napster. In a moment that could have been scripted by cultural studies academics, an exchange between Lars Uhlrich (Metallica’s drummer) and an anonymous protester outside the Napster offices summed it all up:

Uhlrich: ‘We have the right to control our music!’

Voice from the crowd: ‘Fuck you, Lars. It’s our music too!’[10]

To many in the book trade, the ultimate pirate is Google Book Search. In 2004, Google set out to scan millions of books and make those books available on the internet. As Sergei Brin suggested, the motivation was to make available the vast amount of information locked away in books, many of which were out of print. If the book was in the public domain, then the entire book would be accessible for free. If the book was under copyright, then Google would work with rights holders (primarily publishers) to determine how much of the book would be made available.

However, Google was sued by the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers,[11] which claimed that the very act of scanning a book was a violation of copyright—irrespective of Google’s claim that scanning the book was merely indexing it. Of course, for books in the public domain, there was no dispute. Likewise, for the most part, publishers were happy for Google Books to be a marketing tool for books still in print. (As Larry Lessig notes, most publishers had signed up to be part of the service.) The point of contention was books still under copyright but no longer in print, which comprised the vast majority of the titles in question. Rather than engage in a drawn-out lawsuit, Google chose to settle and proposed a deal that is still awaiting approval from the US courts. That deal (supported by the Authors Guild) proposed non-exclusive rights to digitised titles, enshrined control in titles with content owners and developed a range of revenue-splitting arrangements depending on the status of the book in question.

However, not everyone was convinced, with many arguing that the proposed settlement still gives Google too much control over e-book titles, particularly for orphan works whose owners cannot be found.[12] Above all else, Google’s pragmatic approach of ‘scan first, ask later’ has angered some, with prominent authors rejecting the settlement. While there is a long list in support,[13] others are vocal in their opposition—a group led by Ursula Le Guin has an online petition, claiming that the ‘opt-out’ approach inverts the traditional requirements of copyright law. For those authors, the principle at stake is that of control—and the implicit requirement in copyright law that: ‘Google, like any other publisher or entity, should be required to obtain permission from the owner to purchase or use copyrighted material, item by item.’[14] Lack of space precludes a detailed examination of copyright law, but we may reiterate the suggestion that with digitisation, the key means (the cumbersome nature of the physical object) for enforcing that law are removed.

Those who embrace the Google project argue that the key principle of copyright is the ‘progress of society’, with authorial rights being secondary. In that view the greater good of Google Books outweighs more mundane concerns. In many respects that summarises the shift to e-books. There is an overwhelming idea, embraced by many, that digitising the world’s books will unlock their content from the silos of print, making them more accessible and enabling exciting new possibilities.

The technical hurdles are rapidly being addressed, and readers are slowly being weaned off the necessity for a printed object. But the object’s attributes are not solely about reading pleasure. Rather, the book as object provides an opportunity for controlling and monetising books that has long been the basis of the book trade. In that context, the urge to slow down, or prevent, the shift to digital is entirely rational. Until recently, the lack of viable e-book technologies has allowed the traditional industry to maintain its stranglehold on the book trade. As readers become more convinced of the attractions of e-books and their possibilities are explored more widely, this will become more difficult. The examples above indicate the emerging tensions as stakeholders are slowly stripped of that control, and other actors emerge—such as Amazon, Apple, Google and users themselves—whose lack of entrenched practices enables them to rapidly reconfigure the marketplace for books.

Notes

1. Sergei Brin, A Library to Last Forever’, New York Times, 9 October 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print, accessed 10 February 2010. Back to article

2. Om Malik, ‘Jeff Bezos on the State of the Kindle’, Gigaom, http://gigaom.com/2009/03/10/jeff-bezos-on-Kindle-its-future/, accessed 25 November 2009. Back to article

3. Richard Curtis, ‘November 09 E-book sales Triple over 09’, E-Reads, http://www.ereads.com/2010/01/november-09-e-book-sales-triple-over-09.html, accessed 10 February 2010. Back to article

4. Declan McCullagh, ‘Tech Activists Protest Anti-Copying on C-Net News’ (2002), http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-944668.html, accessed 19 February 2010. Back to article

5. Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution, Perseus Books, New York, 1999. Back to article

6. John Scalzi, ‘All the Many Ways Amazon so Very Failed the Weekend’, on Whatever http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/all-the-many-ways-amazon-so-very-failed-the-weekend/, accessed 19 February 2010. Back to article

7. Charlie Stross, ‘Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight—Charlie’s Diary on Antipope’, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html, accessed 19 February 2010. Back to article

8. David Pakman, ‘Weighing in on Amazon/Macmillan Pricing Debate’, on Pakman’s blog: Disruption, http://dpakman.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/wading-in-on-amazonmacmillan-pricing-debate/, accessed 19 February 2010. Back to article

9. Greg Bensinger and Joseph Galante, ‘Hachette to Change E-book Pricing, Joining Macmillan’, Businessweek, http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-05/hachette-seeks-to-change-e-book-pricing-joining-macmillan.html, accessed 10 February 2010. Back to article

10. As reported in Charles Mann, ‘The Heavenly Jukebox’, Atlantic Monthly, September 2000, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/09/mann.htm, accessed 18 October 2000. Back to article

11. Lawrence Lessig, ‘For the Love of Culture’, New Republic, 26 January 2010. Back to article

12. Cecilia Kang, ‘Critics tell judge to reject Google books settlement’, Washington Post, 27 January 2010, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/01/public_comment_today_on_google.htm, accessed 10 February 2010. Back to article

13. Authors Guild, ‘Authors line up to support Google book settlement’, 9 September 2009, http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/authors-line-up.html, accessed 10 February 2010. Back to article

14. Petition concerning the Google book settlement, http://www.ursulakleguin.com/GS-Petition.html, accessed 4 March 2010. Back to article