The Hapless SeedAs I’ve tried to show in previous blue-sky ponderings in this space, the digital age is heaven for consumers, hell for creators. The trick of this moment is figuring out how to continue to support substantial creative effort while we careen toward the digital rapture of Jason Epstein’s (OK, and my) imaginings. In his New York Review essay, Epstein argued that publishing should follow music toward a digital distribution model, but I’d push for publishing to follow the movies. Think of a hardcover novel as the book equivalent of limited theatrical release for a movie. Softcover is the equivalent of “going wide,” when a movie ends up in thousands of multiplexes (and I suppose it’s a sad statement on the cultural value of books that you can borrow almost any new book for free from a library, but when you “borrow” a new movie, it’s called bootlegging). Once the opportunities of printed distribution are used up, the value of most books quickly dissipates, as they gather dust in libraries and used-book stores—they become part of the 75 percent of titles still copyrighted but out of print identified in Lessig’s study. Google Book Search could offer them a whole new life. Under my fantasy scenario, publishers and authors would let Google digitize—in scanned and text form—everything that’s published, allowing that 75 percent of works to be sold via machines like a recently deployed “book ATM.” This machine, called the Espresso (the above-mentioned Jason Epstein is a backer), promises to print and bind on demand, within about four minutes, any book in its digital repository. A beta version sits in the World Bank, and a second machine should be at the New York Public Library by the time you read this. I wouldn’t place bets on the Espresso just yet (a colleague trying to check out the World Bank beta found it closed for repair), but it, or some future iteration, is a viable model for the millions of titles in that 75 percent. Indeed, this would be a case of forward to the past: Until the early 19th century, cloth and paper bindings were temporary solutions for purchasers, who would then pay to have their works permanently bound in leather. The advent of mass cloth binding in the mid-19th century, John Carter noted in his classic ABC for Book Collectors, meant that the publisher assumed a part of the final cost of the book which had in previous centuries been borne by the purchaser, whether on his own binders’ bill or in the extra price charged for copies bound by the retail or wholesale bookseller. Publishing has been a crappy business for even longer than I thought. If the Espresso model is the publishing equivalent of DVDs, subscription lending libraries, built on low-cost printing and binding, could be the publishing version of Netflix. Alternately, e-books could emerge as a real business if millions of titles become available digitally. They could be accessible via an iTunes model or a low-cost subscription fee (like the video-on-demand your cable operator offers). A significant chunk of the money would go to the publishers and authors. On any given work, this is pennies, but over millions of works it’s a plausible business. Why would Google agree to this deal? Here’s why. After, let’s say, 10 years, Google (or Microsoft or anyone else who wants in) gets the unfettered right to offer these works, complete, online. This is a great deal for Google, if it’s taking the long view. Under post-1978 copyright law, the copyright holder maintains control of a work even after it goes out of print, for his lifetime plus 70 years. So Google gets rights a good century or so sooner. And it collects a massive library of content it can monetize through search and through display advertising. As part of the deal, Google presumably would continue to pay content owners, passing along a portion of the proceeds into eternity, just as writers, actors, and directors are paid residuals through their guilds. Clearly there would have to be exceptions to this model: If a work continues to sell in printed form, as Freakonomics has, the publisher could delay the process. Ditto for perennials like The Great Gatsby or A Confederacy of Dunces. Or both sides could agree that it’s fine for works to be digitally accessible even while they continue to be sold in bound form. Roughly speaking, such a deal would both reward the content creators and give Google and Microsoft the access they desperately need to build a real business in digital book distribution. Ultimately, I think, we all win. As information consumers, it’s hard not to wish for a world in which the entirety of humanity’s published output—its most considered and ambitious thinking—is available instantly, anywhere (Shakespeare in Timbuktu, if you will). It’s also hard not to wish for a world where books, and authors, can thrive. Bring on the rapture. Michael Hirschorn is the executive vice president of original programming and production at VH1.
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