What is the author’s role in the age of digital disruption? Will authors who treat books as start-ups be the agents of disruption, or will they be subjected to the whims of this disruption?
Authors Guild president Scott Turow thinks change in the industry will hurt authors in the long run. In his New York Times article “The Slow Death of the American Author,” Turow says that literary culture is at risk because the “value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.” He then goes on to explain that e-books, Google, Yahoo and piracy websites are why authors can’t make it in today’s digital publishing landscape.
According to Turow, publishing will thrive at the expense of the authors, and in the era of digital publishing, there’s no guarantee there will be a viable literary market in a couple of years.
In order to support this point, Turow mentions our constitutionally-supported copyright law (“to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”) and says authorship is “one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution.” By Turow’s logic, if piracy exists in any form, even digitally, then any industry that profits from this piracy at the expense of copyright holders is breaking the law and undermining authorship.
That sounds fine on the surface. I don’t want piracy to destroy an author’s livelihood, especially if this piracy is online and out of control. Just look at what happened to the music industry. According to Turow, it is happening to the book industry.
Sounds very ominous, right? Except Turow is confusing piracy’s existence and the upheaval in publishing with a genuine unraveling of authorship. Turow’s view is misleading and overly simplistic. In fact, he gets many facts wrong in this article.
First, the constitution doesn’t “protect” copyright holders, it just sets a precedent to establish copyright laws. Copyright law has changed significantly since the constitution was written, and quite frankly, copyright is not the issue when it comes to an author’s attempts to show legitimacy in publishing.
According to Mike Masnick at TechDirt, Turow doesn’t get how copyright law works:
The Constitution does not “instruct” Congress to create copyright to promote the progress. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress specific powers concerning what it can do. It does not “instruct” Congress that it must do these things. The same section of the Constitution also gives Congress the ability to “grant letters of marque” to privateers (“pirates” on the high seas) to attack enemies. No one would ever argue that the Constitution “instructs” Congress to authorize pirates on the high seas to “attack and capture enemy vessels.” In fact, Congress has not officially used this power since 1815. Similarly, there is no requirement that Congress “protect” authors in this manner, no matter how much Turow may pretend this is the case.
Even though the constitution talks about copyright law, it doesn’t do much to protect authorship. I expected more from Turow, considering he’s a lawyer and should work on behalf of authors as the Authors Guild president.
Publishing is a carnival, not a museum
What bothers me most about Turow’s approach is that he completely ignores the history of publishing in the United States. This isn’t the first disruption in printing and publishing in America. It has happened many times before. In the early 19th Century, new printing technologies, along with a renewed American nationalism, created a diverse collection of printed materials. People were reading more than ever before in America: pamphlets, newspapers, gift books, and penny papers became the new reading norm.
Many readers during this time were upset that the book would disappear in the midst of all this “low-brow” publishing. The learned gentleman in his study, reading his leather-bound books on philosophy, was aghast that the printing masses could produce so much new material. Equally, the learned gentleman of letters worried that the masses were ripping off his books and reprinting them in throwaway newspapers. This would mark the end of the book itself, according to arguments at the time.*
But the opposite happened. First, in an 1829 decision by the Supreme Court, a distinction was made between a “book” and “everything else.” According to Isabelle Lehuu in her book Carnival on the Page, the Supreme Court decided that the book — i.e. leatherbound, expensive, and for the elite — was distinctly different from all other printed material. The book would stay protected by copyright law, but everything else was considered too ephemeral for copyright protection.
By protecting the “book” but nothing else, the Supreme Court opened up the floodgates of re-printing and redistribution of popular media. The works of authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, spread virally through newspapers, gift books, and other “ephemeral” material. While many authors complained about this, like Turow complains about e-books and digital publishing today, most took advantage of it to gain cultural capital. “Free of the constraints of copyright legislation,” according to Lehuu:
[N]ewspapers and periodicals seized the moment. Their unforseen triumph in altering American textuality over a short lapse of time speaks to the relevance of popular texts to a society deeply affected by industrial capitalism and urbanization. Of course, the irony of the antebellum production and consumption of nonbook publications is that, in spite of their ephemeral and popular character, they made a lasting impression on the formation of American culture in the nineteenth century. (8)
In other words, disruption and change led to cultural progress and new definitions of “the book”.
Most readers do not want the book, or publishing, to never change. If that was the case, we’d still be spending near $200 (in today’s money) for a single leather-bound book. Or worse: we’d be reading on scrolls in abbeys (or, rather, some of us, but not everyone). Progress means allowing for fluctuations in the market and in the production of reading materials. Right now, that means e-books, apps, and digital publishing.
Turow as Captain Ahab, going down with his ship
Scott Turow also goes after supposed book piracy. This is interesting because, unlike the music industry in the late ‘90s, the book industry (for the most part) has avoided book piracy by partnering with e-book distributors. Now, many of us know this hasn’t always meant the book publishers have played nice. Turow mentions the Supreme Court ruling against the big six publishers and Apple for price-fixing, and I agree with him that this was the right decision. But just because the technology for piracy exists, it doesn’t mean that book piracy is rampant.
In the music industry, there was a clear unraveling. Napster and Limewire allowed the average consumer to pirate and trade music. But the music industry missed an opportunity when faced with digital disruption: they sued fans, mismanaged bands and record labels, ignored solutions like creating a digital marketplace, and attempted to block piracy with expensive technologies. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs and Apple forced the industry into a corner with iTunes that average consumers started buying digital music en masse. The point is this: consumers want to pay for entertainment, but on their terms.
Despite its flaws, the e-book industry has allowed authors to thrive without being tied to a publisher. It’s still early days in this process, but it seems that better publishing solutions will create a range of successful authors who have more control. That’s a good thing.
Turow wants to maintain the status quo. He’s willing to put authors in jeopardy in order to maintain this status quo, and he’s doing this because he thinks piracy is rampant. Piracy will always exist, but most consumers want to pay for their entertainment. Readers are paying for digital goods now, and some authors are OK with giving their fans direct access to their literature. What’s wrong with that?
Turow is like Captain Ahab, steering his ship in the wrong direction because he seeks out the wrong reward. He can only see the whale, but he can’t see the swirling eddies overtaking his ship. Turow doesn’t want to admit that the digital disruption of the publishing industry signals progress and growth, not the end of authorship. He thinks the best way forward is to avoid piracy, but he doesn’t understand that piracy is not the problem now. The problem is a publishing industry that can’t accept readers where they are and won’t help authors get to their readers.
That’s why so many writers want to go it alone: they’d rather take on the risks of failure and treat their books like start-ups than be tied to a publishing industry that doesn’t look out for their interests.
*For more information on 19th Century publishing and disruption, check out Isabelle Lehuu’s excellent book Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America and check out my master’s thesis “Fluctuating and Fugitive”: The development of the American Short Story in the Antebellum Periodical Press
Related articles
- Scott Turow and The Zombiefied American Author (criticalmargins.com)
- A few notes on “The Slow Death of the American Author” by Scott Turow (petergalenmassey.com)
- E-book trend doesn’t lessen joy of reading (dailytrojan.com)
- A List of Things Scott Turow Doesn’t Care About (broke-artist.com)
- Scott Turow and the Publishing Marketplace (teleread.com)