NYT Op-Ed on ebooks and publishers

[edercito]

Found an interesting article in the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/op...alassi.html?hp

I see most ebooks these days as simply a different edition of a book that was originally produced in paper. However, I expect them in the future to move towards that first category presented in the article of a new frontier in publishing - I agree that there will still be a need for publishers then, but I feel most publishers fear otherwise and are reluctant to embrace this transition.

I hadn't given much thought to this scenario before, but if a work that was produced in paper by X publisher and then the rights to publish an ebook are given to Y publisher, this instance does not sound entirely "alright" to me given the contributions from X to the original print version.

[kennyc]

Thanks for that.

I for the most part agree, I think a new form of publishing will emerge once we navigate the stormy waters we are current in.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by edercito

I hadn't given much thought to this scenario before, but if a work that was produced in paper by X publisher and then the rights to publish an ebook are given to Y publisher, this instance does not sound entirely "alright" to me given the contributions from X to the original print version.

This would never happen at a major publisher today, because they get all the rights for new works (perhaps limited to some countries, but not otherwise limited). However, for older works the publisher got exactly what they contracted for and have had decades to extract revenue from the work. They have also been sitting on their hands about ebooks. If Random House had produced an ebook version ten years ago I doubt William Styron would have objected. Now they winge that they put in all that work 40 years ago and even though they were well compensated they want more.

See Authors Guild to Random House head: What's in the water over there?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

This would never happen at a major publisher today, because they get all the rights for new works (perhaps limited to some countries, but not otherwise limited). However, for older works the publisher got exactly what they contracted for and have had decades to extract revenue from the work. They have also been sitting on their hands about ebooks. If Random House had produced an ebook version ten years ago I doubt William Styron would have objected. Now they winge that they put in all that work 40 years ago and even though they were well compensated they want more.

See Authors Guild to Random House head: What's in the water over there?

Not quite true. The publisher gets the rights specified in the contract with the author. SOMETIMES this is all rights, but not normally.

[jasonkchapman]

While I agree that editors are, and probably always will be, needed. I don't necessarily agree with the implication (or maybe it's just my inference) that the original publisher is somehow owed something for those contributions beyond the terms of the contract.

I've been through rewrites. The editor suggests changes, the author makes them, or not, or makes some variation on them. Yes, it's an important step in the process, and yes, it sometimes turns good work into excellent work--but it's still the author's work.

[fugazied]

Editors won't be going away anytime soon, they are an essential filter mechanism.

I think that's why a lot of indie works falter - they lack the quality assurance of a good editor going over the work before release. Some of the these editors are very smart people who have extensive literary knowledge.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by fugazied

Editors won't be going away anytime soon, they are an essential filter mechanism.

I think that's why a lot of indie works falter - they lack the quality assurance of a good editor going over the work before release. Some of the these editors are very smart people who have extensive literary knowledge.

The filter mechanism has been clogged up with Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer of late, they said they were going to get a guy in Thursday week to clean out the filter, but he didn't turn up

Joking aside, I don't think book publishing will be here in 20 years time from now, not in any significant way. I believe what happened to poetry in the public consciousness will also happen to the novel and the short story. They'll be reminders of a time that used to be, not of anything that could ever happen again. You're never going to see another 'beat' poetry movement. There's never going to be another 'Grapes of Wrath' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' moment in fiction. Those moments will be reserved for video games and whatever follows the video game as a mass entertainment.

I don't say any of this lightly. I love fiction, I love writing and the way words fit together, but I'm a member of one of the last generations to enjoy such a pastime. Our readers now are a stepping stone to something far more powerful and interactive. An infant technology that will mature over the next few years until it reaches critical mass. But it will be the few, not the many who read works of fiction on their 'readers'.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I don't say any of this lightly. I love fiction, I love writing and the way words fit together, but I'm a member of one of the last generations to enjoy such a pastime. Our readers now are a stepping stone to something far more powerful and interactive. An infant technology that will mature over the next few years until it reaches critical mass. But it will be the few, not the many who read works of fiction on their 'readers'.

I humbly disagree. Books (printing) have been around a long time through many "technological" changes and we're still reading fiction.

And I think great novel can be and are still being written. Orwell's 1984, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (yes, I think it's a great novel).

Not that I *don't* think that ebooks are going to bring about changes that the publishing industry is not going to like.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I don't think book publishing will be here in 20 years time from now, not in any significant way. I believe what happened to poetry in the public consciousness will also happen to the novel and the short story....

While I concur that certain art forms wax and wane, I don't see any particular reason why books as a whole will become more or less popular than they are now. For example, the "cell phone books" is a big craze in Japan, despite all the competing media. Social pressures that affect things like what art forms rise and fall in popularity are extremely difficult to predict.

Separately, while there will likely be many convulsions in the existing players in the book biz, I expect there will always be a role for publishers and editors (and reviewers), even if it's not quite the same as it was in the early 20th Century. There is too much poorly edited (and poorly written) junk out there, and filtration will always be needed. In addition, any writer who wants a national (let alone international) presence is going to need resources far beyond what an individual can muster, especially those just starting out.

Originally Posted by Moejoe

You're never going to see another 'beat' poetry movement. There's never going to be another 'Grapes of Wrath' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' moment in fiction.

Why not? Just because other forms of entertainment are more popular?

The rise of TV did not necessarily thwart the cultural import of On the Road, Slaughterhouse Five, All the President's Men, Beloved and so forth. Nor did the rise of radio stunt Grapes of Wrath....

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

I humbly disagree. Books (printing) have been around a long time through many "technological" changes and we're still reading fiction.

And I think great novel can be and are still being written. Orwell's 1984, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (yes, I think it's a great novel).

Not that I *don't* think that ebooks are going to bring about changes that the publishing industry is not going to like.

What 'great' novels, and by great I don't mean literary triumphs (there's plenty of them), have been published in the last 20 years? The novels that have most affected the society we live in have been children's books in both instances - The Twilight Saga and Harry Potter. How many children read as a pastime compared to how many play video games? Which number is growing and which decreasing in that equation?

Print will die out, it's inevitable. Libraries will close, also inevitable. Everything will move into the digital, there's no stopping that now. How does the novel survive in this landscape? The novel, the short-story depend upon a cultural agreement and, let's face it, the paper-bound book to contain the form. The generations that follow us will have more choice than any generation before them. Technology increases far more quickly than anybody could have ever imagined. Ten years from now when we have 3D holographic immersion, why would anybody read a book (apart from a romantic notion)? Why stare at text when you can interact with the story?

Of course, this is all opinion, but as a writer the one place I'd want to be now more than any other is within the game industry. It's where the next classic* story will be told, I believe.

*Heavy Rain looks like a contender (trailer below)

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

While I concur that certain art forms wax and wane, I don't see any particular reason why books as a whole will become more or less popular than they are now. For example, the "cell phone books" is a big craze in Japan, despite all the competing media. Social pressures that affect things like what art forms rise and fall in popularity are extremely difficult to predict.

Separately, while there will likely be many convulsions in the existing players in the book biz, I expect there will always be a role for publishers and editors (and reviewers), even if it's not quite the same as it was in the early 20th Century. There is too much poorly edited (and poorly written) junk out there, and filtration will always be needed. In addition, any writer who wants a national (let alone international) presence is going to need resources far beyond what an individual can muster, especially those just starting out.

Publishers of content, gatekeepers of content, editors of content - yes, I grudgingly agree they will be in place as long as there is a profitable business to be had from making cultural objects available. Publishers of books and novels? Not so much.

The Japan thing is happening 'right-now', but in the future why would anybody read a text-based story? I assume that you, as I, was brought up with books in my immediate culture. There was a library at school, a town library nearby, bookshops and classes in school where books were part of the curriculum. But with the libraries gone, the book shops closed and the schools shifting more and more to a digital based learning experience, where is the exposure to the novel and the short story? Where is the culture that supports the books? Again, let me make this clear, stories will always exist. I just believe the form will change and I believe that form is the video game (or what the video game will eventually become).

Why not? Just because other forms of entertainment are more popular?

The rise of TV did not necessarily thwart the cultural import of On the Road, Slaughterhouse Five, All the President's Men, Beloved and so forth. Nor did the rise of radio stunt Grapes of Wrath....

Not particularly because they're more popular, but because they're evolving at rapid rates beyond what we've seen before. I can only imagine what we'll see in ten years time that will make what we have now look stupid, and what we have now is amazing. The video game is rapidly becoming the best of all worlds - story, visuals, interactivity and branched in meaning, it delivers more hours of entertainment than any entertainment that came before and is rapidly gaining deeper levels of meaning and possible meaning with each iteration.

An exemplum would be the PSOne game 'Silent Hill', which was as satisfying as any horror novel I've ever read and better than most horror movies of that time.

Story is at the heart of my meaning. Story will always exist. But the novel, the short story? These are forms of stories, specifically text-based and I believe that text-based entertainment will be gone within 20 years (a generation give or take) as we cut down our language use and become more heavily reliant on direct audio/visual communication in a digital world.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

There is too much poorly edited (and poorly written) junk out there, and filtration will always be needed. In addition, any writer who wants a national (let alone international) presence is going to need resources far beyond what an individual can muster, especially those just starting out.
.

Let me address this particular point, because it's made so often by so many different people. I believe the publishing companies are directly responsible for the amount of terrible writing that is self-published, and why? Because they publish so much garbage themselves. The absolutely worst written dreck is a the top of the best-seller lists, and all the while the publishing companies foster the grand lie that everybody can be rich and live the life of a best-selling author - how many times have you seen that on a book 'NYT Best-Selling Author'? That tagline is about as meaningful as tagging the book 'Breather of Oxygen.' But it serves, along with all the books on writing, to reinforce a false vision of what a writer is, or what a writer might become. Most damaging of all - what a writer can get away with. That barrier is very low now. Lower than it's ever been.

Our culture is only what we allow it to be and shit rolls downhill, not up. We can still see in through those gates, and what we're seeing is a compost heap for the most part. How can anybody expect greatness, or even competency in the self-published world when we see so little of it in the ivory-towered publishing industry? How is anybody supposed to take the book publishing industry seriously when it gives six-figure advances to TV chefs and silicon-enhanced bimbos while real writers have to work second jobs just to make ends meet?


/end rant

*
/Thinks he might be turning into Harlan Ellison/

[jgaiser]

I still humbly disagree with your premise, and I think you're way too pessimistic
but...

Originally Posted by Moejoe

/Thinks he might be turning into Harlan Ellison/

There's nothing wrong with being a curmudgeon and I kinda like Harlan...

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

I still humbly disagree with your premise, and I think you're way too pessimistic
but...



There's nothing wrong with being a curmudgeon and I kinda like Harlan...

I'm not pessimistic, I just believe that change is inevitable and that, like with music, the underlying cultural exchange will still take place but the delivery method will alter according to technological invention.

I used to really hate Ellison, but I tell you, this last year I've come to really, really understand his rage (maybe it was giving up smoking that did it? )

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I believe the publishing companies are directly responsible for the amount of terrible writing that is self-published, and why? Because they publish so much garbage themselves....

Sorry, that doesn't follow.

The publishers act as a major filter in the process, albeit with their own standards and biases. If you can't get your book published, your next option is to self-publish. Some self-published authors may hire professional editors, but many will not -- either because they misjudge their writing skills, cannot afford an editor, do not have the connections to find a truly great editor, and so forth.

I.e. if your work doesn't appeal a publisher, and you still want your work to be read, you're going to try and self-publish. At a minimum, this is likely to cut you off from critical resources that will improve the quality of your work, e.g. good editors.

I see no particular evidence that literary quality overall is falling; I'd be surprised if a year goes by when someone declares that some media or another is "dead" or "dying." The trope that "humanity is in decay" was thoroughly ingrained by the time of Hesiod (with his Ages of Man, falling from the Gold era to the "Iron" age) or, in Hinduism, that we entered the *cough* Kali Yuga era circa 3000 BC, an age of dissolution in which humanity is as separated as possible from divinity. And works of high literary quality were hardly always best-sellers, nor were the most influential works necessarily those of the highest literary value. We tend to review the past through rose-colored glasses, in part because the mechanisms of evaluating cultural history tend to emphasize works of higher quality (e.g. reviewers, educators etc), and this only reinforces negative evaluations of contemporary quality.

If anything, we are entering an era where people can access far more content, across all kinds of borders, with lower barriers than at any time in history. Even if literature becomes less popular in the short term, there is absolutely no way to know what kind of social pressures will influence various mediums. How many foresaw the cultural impact of music circa 1967, even in the early 1960s? Or the enduring influence of cinema, which was supposed to be utterly demolished by now by TV and/or the Internet? It could even come down to a single individual whose work happens to strike the right chord at the right moment, and voila, a medium can soar in popularity, a rising tide if you will.

So I see no specific reason(s) for a negative evaluation of the medium as a whole.