Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

Pricing will evolve from the cost of materials for the book itself, the costs associated with purchasing, running, and monitoring the machines, and whatever overhead the bookstore will have to recoup. The publisher will no doubt set a base price, but the bookstore will vary it, as is done now, according to its own strategies. If the store is spare and the management efficient, the books will cost less, and if the store offers acrobats and elephants, books will cost more, depending in both cases upon the levels of fixed overhead and the success in moving volume.

Overall, however, books will go down in cost, enabling publishers to take risks, offer more, and perhaps reverse their drift toward the protective reflex of catering to the lowest common denominator. Obscure and out-of-print books will awaken from the dead, suddenly available, a wonderful thing for their authors, their audience (even if it is limited), and culture in general, which is always stronger and healthier if it offers safe harbor and the opportunity of expression to authors and their works that, ill fitting to the times, may sleep long but then emerge in a different world to enjoy a second chance. For those who have been weaned away from paper and ink and are wedded to the electronic interface, the flood of availability will be the same, though the ability to manipulate, search, hold, and copy text will be far greater. But for those who prefer the old form, it will have been freed of its present constraints and cured of its perilous dilemmas, in a synthesis of the best of both worlds.

But as alluring as is the promise of a print-on-demand publishing system, it will never be a paradise. With more or less universal printing on demand, publishers will not need to give advances except to popular authors to lock them in. The more obscure and less commercially promising books will earn royalties as they are sold, changing the system whereby the profits from the whales subsidized the bets made by the publishers on the development of the minnows. And the publishers, not having advanced to the minnows, will not need to protect an investment as they do nowadays with advertising and publicity. This, needless to say, will not be ideal for many.

Even if authors’ revenues would decrease per book as the price of books declined (or perhaps not, as the elimination of middle-men would and should allow an increase in royalty, although no such increase followed the savings realized when writers became their own linotypists), the decline might be made up in greater volume. Whatever the economic consequences, copyright need not be degraded. Although copyright’s opponents argue the burdens and impracticability of keeping track of payments due, in the fast and fluid world in which they live and of which they want more without limit, their concern is suspect given that cell phone companies track calls to the second, the location from which they are made, and exactly to whom, and then bill with apparently no trouble at all. My family’s cell phone statement for October of 2007 contained 4,881 pieces of discrete information logged without apparent effort as we circulated around the country. Yearly, this is a rate of 58,572 discrete figures. The cell phone companies have not yet complained of the complexity of billing me in a process far more daunting than any that copyright opponents commonly claim to be too complex to work, such as the tracing of rights holders or the accounting and division of atomized licensing fees as a result of electronic distribution (I believe this is done routinely by the Copyright Clearance Center.) The power of the technology, in fact, borders on the absurd. Let us say that you write a letter to your sweetheart in Mozambique and send it by Gmail.™ If you happen to mention sponges, she will see, alongside the text, advertisements for sponges, books on sponges, Greek sponge-fishing holidays (vastly overrated), and various sponge exposés.

This power neatly solves the problem of orphan works. These are the copyrighted works, with no apparent claimant, that copyright critics claim are withheld from civilization by the inherent injustice and unworkability of copyright law. But due to the new means of storage, transmission, and tracking, they can easily be kept in print, and the cost of doing so would be virtually nil. If an obscure book (or otherwise) can be found online, it can also have an assigned home—a publisher, or perhaps the copyright holder directly—who can license it to each user much in the way Google charges each time its “AdWords” appear, Apple charges by the song, and phone companies by the second. In the absence of a claimant, a notice could be posted on a universal copyright internet notice board. After a reasonable time and no response, a potential user or publisher could be granted permission to use or publish, with royalties held in escrow for yet another period, until they were claimed. And if they were not claimed, they could be directed to a fund of some sort, or revert to the payer. These simple steps would make orphan works available and protect the copyright holders at the same time.

Why is it that the internet-dizzy anti-copyrightists, proud of their technical savvy, have spent so much energy complaining about orphan works rather than thinking up a system that should have been for them a simple reflex of their mouse fingers? It is because the resistance to paying for copyrighted material, although often characterized as arising from a supposed technical burden or principled concern for the public interest, arises rather from exactly the same segment of the brain that is dominant in shoplifters. And the Espresso Book Machine or any other wonderful devices, syntheses, compromises, or solutions will not stop the assault on copyright, because, among other things, those carrying it out are on automatic and are sustained by motivations that are skew to the point.

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