Scott Turow: The Slow Death of the American Author (NYTimes)

[QuantumIguana]

Why would anyone buy a book rather than check one out from the library? If you buy a book, you get it right away, and you get to keep it as long as you want. But if you want a book from the library, you are probably going to wait. And wait. He keeps talking about copyrights being devalued, but copyright has been extended over and over again.

He says "If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I’d be on my way to jail. And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like “Don’t be evil,” they do the same thing." Search engines do not tell you where to find pirate sites. It simply searches for web sites based on your criteria. It's just an index.

If there's a slow death of the author, then why do I have no trouble finding authors who want to sell me books?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

I would like to offer up another hypothesis as to what is depleting authors' income streams:

• too many authors

• too many books

I don't have ten authors that I like. I don't have a hundred. I have hundreds. I can't buy everybody's books, and even if I did I wouldn't have enough time in my life to read them all before I die.

The market is over saturated with reading material.

If there were fewer authors, and fewer books available, those authors would likely be able to make a decent living just by writing. Now that hundreds of thousands of people in this country fancy themselves an author, the book pool just keeps growing; but the pile of discretionary income people have to purchase those books isn't getting any bigger.

The single biggest source of author income depletion are the publisher contracts and the creative accounting that leaves many with essentially zero ebook royalties.

As to the amount of content, from 2003 to 2011 the number of titles published in the US went from around 300k to 3M. That includes a lot of backlist.

A similar explosion in the 50s, due to the emergence of paperback originals, raised the number from 10000 to 100k per year. Lost in the handwringing is that content explosions have historically expanded the market by increasing the number of readers and the number of total books sold.

Turow is mostly whining because the aggregate share of new titles from the BPHs is declining with merger consolidation and backlist expansion.

[fjtorres]

BTW, we've been here recently:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=208521
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=19

[SeaKing]

Too many authors? YES.
The reason? Today it is easier to be a writer than ever before.

No more quills to sharpen, ink to blot, or even typewriters. There are word processors especially for writing books.

No long difficult research in stuffy, dusty libraries that you must travel to.
The knowledge and experience of the world is on your monitor.

Years spent in difficult to enter colleges, to sit at the feet of a master writer are replaced by a series of How To Do Books, Writing for Dummies.

On this blog if nowhere else even I am a writer.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

I think so. So the author doesn't get royalties from the resale of the foreign edition, the same way an author doesn't get paid royalties when you buy a used paperback. This wasn't mentioned in the column. Perhaps Turow is aiming at the wrong target.

Presumably the author gets lower royalties from the foreign publisher who is selling the print books for a substantial discount from the US edition. Even that is being disingenuous because the defendent in the case was importing textbooks, and most textbook authors get a pittance from the book royalties. I'm sure that Turow is mischaracterizing that, too.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I'm not sure I understood the point about the recent ruling:

Doesn't someone (importer) have to purchase the foreign editions and therefore generate royalties for the author?

More important, the publisher has to deliberately print those books in foreign countries for them to be bought there.

That ruling will have very little effect on anyone anywhere. To the extent that it does have an effect, it will result in publishers tending to print books only in the most lucrative markets - the US.

(And I have no idea where he got the idea that such gray market imports have been illegal up until now, unless he's talking about that particular case until it got to SCOTUS - rulings that never were case law, and so far as I know, were never actually in effect because they were being appealed. The publisher in that case reached - beyond their grasp. They lose, and rightly so.)

[taustin]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Turow is mostly whining because the aggregate share of new titles from the BPHs is declining with merger consolidation and backlist expansion.

I suspect he's whining because the world is changing, as it does, and he's gotten too old and set in his ways to keep up. Nothing more.

Hope he's saved whatever he's made, so he can retire comfortably.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by taustin

I suspect he's whining because the world is changing, as it does, and he's gotten too old and set in his ways to keep up. Nothing more.

Yeah, I get that from this guy every time I read something from him.

[sabredog]

Another analysis of Turow's ramblings.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-authors.shtml

Turow is sounding increasingly like the church hierarchy way back when moveable type was invented.

[wizwor]

Cry me a river, Scott. Congress protected Books, maps, and charts for fourteen years. Lobbyists have relentlessly expanded the list of what is protected and extended protection to the life of the author plus 70 years after the author’s death.

Since 1790, the profitability of IP traders has increased exponentially. If anything, the amount of time to public domain should be reduced.

Finally, nothing irks me more than to read that someone got a cease and desist after showing up at a birthday party dressed as a purple dinosaur. No work created with public money should ever enjoy any protection.

Scott's real problem is that technology has made it possible for people who are not as interested in profiting from ideas as sharing them are producing content that is good enough for many people. Time to look for a real job, Scott.

Notable Dates in United States Copyright

May 31, 1790
First copyright law enacted under the new U.S. Constitution. Term of 14 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years. Books, maps, and charts protected. Copyright registration made in the U.S. District Court where the author or proprietor resided.

February 3, 1831
First general revision of the copyright law. Music added to works protected against unauthorized printing and vending. First term of copyright extended to 28 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years.

January 6, 1897
Music protected against unauthorized public performance.

February 19, 1897
Copyright Office established as a separate department of the Library of Congress. Position of Register of Copyrights created.

July 1, 1909
Effective date of third general revision of the copyright law. Admission of certain classes of unpublished works to copyright registration. Term of statutory protection for a work copyrighted in published form measured from the date of publication of the work. Renewal term extended from 14 to 28 years.

August 24, 1912
Motion pictures, previously registered as photographs, added to classes of protected works.

January 1, 1978
Effective date of principal provisions of the 1976 copyright law. The term of protection for works created on or after this date consists of the life of the author and 50 years after the author's death. Numerous other provisions modernized the law.

May 24, 1982
Section 506(a) amended to provide that persons who infringe copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain shall be punished as provided in Section 2319 of title 18 of the U.S. Code, “Crimes and Criminal Procedure.”

October 4, 1984
Effective date of Record Rental Amendments of 1984. Grants the owner of copyright in a sound recording the right to authorize or prohibit the rental, lease, or lending of phonorecords for direct or indirect commercial purposes.

June 26, 1992
Renewal registration became optional. Works copyrighted between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977, automatically renewed even if registration not made.

October 28, 1992
Digital Audio Home Recording Act required serial copy management systems in digital audio recorders and imposed royalties on sale of digital audio recording devices and media. Royalties are collected, invested, and distributed among the owners of sound recording and musical compositions, certain performing artists and/or their representatives. Clarified legality of home taping of analog and digital sound recordings for private noncommercial use.

December 8, 1993
North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act (NAFTA) extended retroactive copyright protection to certain motion pictures first fixed in Canada or Mexico between January 1, 1978, and March 1, 1989, and published anywhere without a copyright notice; and/or to any work embodied in them; and made permanent the prohibition of sound recordings rental.

November 16, 1997
The No Electronic Theft Act defined “financial gain” in relation to copyright infringement and set penalties for willfully infringing a copyright either for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain or by reproducing or distributing, including by electronic means phonorecords of a certain value.

October 27, 1998
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended the term of copyright protection for most works to the life of the author plus 70 years after the author’s death.

[usuallee]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Why would anyone buy a book rather than check one out from the library? If you buy a book, you get it right away, and you get to keep it as long as you want. But if you want a book from the library, you are probably going to wait. And wait. He keeps talking about copyrights being devalued, but copyright has been extended over and over again. If no more books were made starting now, I'd probably have enough books to keep me going for life.

He says "If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I’d be on my way to jail. And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like “Don’t be evil,” they do the same thing." Search engines do not tell you where to find pirate sites. It simply searches for web sites based on your criteria. It's just an index.

If there's a slow death of the author, then why do I have no trouble finding authors who want to sell me books?

This. There are more books available than ever before (even when you exclude self-published works). At least it seems so to me as a voracious consumer of books. It must be worthwhile for people to produce all these works, or they wouldn't get produced. So money is being made.

I do have a certain level of sympathy for authors in that if their stuff gets pirated, they don't really have the alternative revenue streams like concerts and merchandise that musicians have. They might get some speaking/appearance engagements if they're lucky.

Then again my sympathy is tempered by the fact the in the U.S., authors can continue getting paid for their entire life, and for 70 years afterwards. I get paid for the work I do in a given day, and that's it. I don't get royalties on that work. So a part of me says, "cry me a river".

P.s. It appears I inadvertently stole "cry me a river" phrase from wizwor. Knew I'd read that somewhere. You may now sue me for infringement

[wizwor]

For a limited time, I'm accepting karma in lieu of royalties, usuallee.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by taustin

More important, the publisher has to deliberately print those books in foreign countries for them to be bought there.

That ruling will have very little effect on anyone anywhere. To the extent that it does have an effect, it will result in publishers tending to print books only in the most lucrative markets - the US.

(And I have no idea where he got the idea that such gray market imports have been illegal up until now, unless he's talking about that particular case until it got to SCOTUS - rulings that never were case law, and so far as I know, were never actually in effect because they were being appealed. The publisher in that case reached - beyond their grasp. They lose, and rightly so.)

You are entirely correct; it wasn't previously illegal, it just wasn't that clear and it's a little sad that Scott, a lawyer, doesn't seem to understand that.

[usuallee]

Originally Posted by wizwor

For a limited time, I'm accepting karma in lieu of royalties, usuallee.

Done. Thanks for letting me off the hook

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

You are entirely correct; it wasn't previously illegal, it just wasn't that clear and it's a little sad that Scott, a lawyer, doesn't seem to understand that.

I sometimes get the impression that people really do understand. However, understanding doesn't always suit their purposes and so they have a temporary cerebral bypass and rock on.

Rock on Mr Turow - I guess.