The year is 1949 and a friend has lent you a copy of the recently published Nineteen Eighty-Four – you’re cautiously pessimistic about this fictional future and its oppressive, omniscient dictator, Big Brother - it’s all such a long way off.... Now, jump aboard your time machine (DeLorean recommended) and bypassing the real 1984, travel back to the future to what some might call the digital dystopia we inhabit in 2009: ubiquitous CCTV, surveillance, identity theft and loss of privacy - all standard features of our brave new world. As, increasingly, are, ever more sophisticated mobile phones, PDAs, ebook readers and ebooks themselves: according to the Association of American Publishers, year to date (August 2009) ebooks sales were up 149.3%, and June 2009 saw the highest ever ebook trade sales, $14,000,000 in total. Internationally more than a dozen new eBook readers have been either released or announced, and more are on the way (Barnes & Noble's Nook was launched last month). We’re already well into the next chapter in the history of the book, and how we buy and read them.
Nothing too sinister in this publishing revolution surely?
No, at least not until earlier this year when e-tailer Amazon assumed the role of Big Brother in the now well documented decision to remotely delete Kindle versions of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from customers’ ebook readers, earning them a lot of bad publicity. Amazon took the action after the edition was added to Amazon’s catalogue without the rightsholder’s permission (note: for the uninitiated, the Kindle is Amazon’s ebook reader device which connects readers/book purchasers remotely to the online store.. and, apparently, Amazon back into the customer’s device..). Amazon apologised and acknowledged the error of their ways, but given their Big Brother-style action to remove the Big Brother novel, I was left wondering if it hadn’t all been a most brilliant guerrilla marketing campaign to attract attention to their device and ebooks more broadly. If it wasn’t then we can at least smile smugly at the ironic symmetry of it all.
The episode attracted a lot of media interest and comment, including that of sci-fi novelist, blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow, whose recent novel Little Brother features tales of surveillance and digital intrusion in a near future San Francisco. Publishing industry magazine The Bookseller reported Doctorow saying that publishers who use DRM to tie readers to one ebook device are the ‘real pirates’, contrasting this model with the ownership of a print book and the ability to share it amongst friends and family who in turn recommend it to their friends: word of mouth... the tried and tested approach to get people talking about a book and drive sales.
It’s worth taking a closer look at Doctorow’s unorthodox approach. I interviewed him earlier this year after ‘publishing’ a version of Little Brother in the YUDU format using his Creative Commons License - this also spells out the Doctorow philosophy in more detail. To begin with Doctorow’s view of copyright appears mainstream – it allows him to sell rights to publishers and prevents them taking his stuff and sell it without his permission. But he’s pro the sharing of books and is turned off by the idea that readers have to get involved in the legal end (license agreements etc) which should remain the domain of agents, publishers and authors; a school classroom, for instance, shouldn’t have to talk to a publisher’s lawyer to put on a school play of one of his books. He also draws on the example of the music business in the digital age in which he claims ‘the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders’ ie the biggest fans are likely to be the biggest downloaders, but they’re also the ones going to concerts, borrowing music from the library, buying bootleg and, yes, legal versions of their favourites bands’ music and other merchandise.
Doctorow’s views on lending of books and ebooks goes something like this: if he could loan out all his books without giving up possession of them, then he would; the fact that he can with digital files he views as an excellent feature rather than a bug. He’s nothing if not passionate – the following verges on preciocity.. but the man is in love with books and wants to spread that love around..‘By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.’ I think we get the message.
He does however have a sense of humour about all this: ‘the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." ’. He thinks that many publishers are in fact amenable to a different model – his own editor, the leading sci-fi editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden being a good example, and it may surprise some that Harper Collins allowed a free digital version to be shared in parallel with the for-sale print. At this stage in the market he understands some publishers’ scepticism: ‘time spent in ebook meetings compared with ebook sales is a poor return on investment’, but is keen to stress that the free ebook approach is ‘not an ideology thing’ – it just makes sense to use the technology that way – ‘Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it’s in their nature..’ - and in any case, free things, for example software, ‘are often much better’. So rather than pronouncing a clear position in favour of ebooks and ebook readers, he is prepared to voice his scepticism, particularly about the restrictions and limits they impose: ‘imagine a book made to be read under only one kind of light’. He admits that at this stage they are ‘a marketing tool more than anything else’. I assume that this opinion will be revised if ebook sales continue their upward trajectory.
A critical question is this: if everyone shared their ebooks with each other, how would authors and publishers make any money?
Doctorow’s answer is that ebooks help to sell print books. While the experience of reading a book on a screen remains unsatisfactory (on a computer) – with a variety of programs running in the background to distract us – then the print version, he claims, will remain the preferred option and so a sale will result. In this sense he feels the ebook may simply be 'a complementary good’.
What happens though once we’ve moved beyond the early adopter stage of ebook readers, when prices come down and the market matures – would there have to be a stage at which only digital extracts were made available rather than the whole book, or just scrap the whole model and charge for all digital versions but allow sharing? New business models will need to emerge if Doctorow’s dream of a world without DRM is to be realised, especially if he is right about a future where ebooks are not just marketing tools:
'In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions’ - http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt
Doctorow may think that's a long way off..in the meantime 3 million ebook readers will be sold in 2009 - Forrester Research - so publishers are going to have to start thinking more creatively about this now. They may not need to focus on working with the current ebook reader providers either. The ebook reader critics who complain that the devices are one-trick ponies are not necessarily advocates of the print as remaining the long term solution. They’re simply saying that devices such as the iPhone will end up catering for an increasing range of activities including reading, even if – in the case of the iPhone – Apple had previously not expressed a strong interest in the book market.
When I ‘published’ Cory Doctorow’s last novel Little Brother last year in the YUDU format, I had neither met nor spoken with the celebrated author-blogger-activitst, and I wasn’t and am not particularly a sci-fi fan. My background in book publishing – which includes a period with O’Reilly ( they run the Tools of Change for Publishing TOC events ) – and subsequent work for internet companies , meant I was aware of Doctorow and his unconventional views on copyright. I had just recently read about his anti DRM stance and of the Creative Commons License accompanying the digital version of his novel Little Brother, allowing people to re-use and share digital versions of the work, partly with the aim of promoting the print version (published by TOR and Harper Collins UK). As I was in the middle of helping to launch YUDU’s digital publishing website for creating digital books, magazines, brochures etc., I thought we’d get some marketing mileage by creating a YUDU format ebook of Little Brother and placing in my YUDU Library of content. I also knew it would be instructive as well as interesting to go through the process of making this book available for sharing online via its Creative Commons licence, adding to the now more than twenty formats in which you can find Little Brother – all these of course in addition to the print version you can buy from bookshops.
So what effect did creating a digital version in a new format have?
As an ebook available for anyone to read on the YUDU website, this version Little Brother has been viewed or read 3,213 times at the time of writing (a fair amount of traffic for an ebook – not least for one item in a library of millions of documents). What I can’t measure or track is how many of these people went on to buy the print version – or for that matter how many didn’t buy the print because they read the ebook. On the other hand, what is undeniable is that all these people will have browsed the book – if not actually read it in its entirety – learned something about it and its author, and ultimately helped spread the word and got people talking. Cory Doctorow kindly thanked me for publishing the novel in the new format - by the way, he wasn't paying me – at the time YUDU.com was, and so I like to think there was a quid pro quo in publishing the YUDU format of his book as it helped drive more people to the website, to browse the huge library of digital content and publish some of their own.
As for Big Brother and the UK in 2009.. EU Telecoms Package, speed cameras and government’s handling of sensitive data aside - we're living in interesting times and witnessing the exciting changes in the publishing industry. Celeb authors and heavy discounting of books by big retailers (Wal Mart etc..not just traditional booksellers) are as pressing issues right now as ebook content licensing. For now I’d be quite sympathetic toward publishers and booksellers who restrict consumers' usage of ebooks – at least to start with – but I'm hoping some brave, new models emerge to keep the industry not just afloat, but growing. You can understand why Amazon and the competition want to protect their investments at this early stage - they’re prepared to stick their necks out and take risks and so they deserve some credit, but they shouldn't ignore the trail being blazed by Doctorow and others with radical and disruptive ideas.
