At Home with John and Debbie

The answer to the question in the title is — for quite a long time to come. But not necessarily forever.

These thoughts were triggered by a cluster of recent high profile blog posts.

First off, Steven Poole, Guardian columnist and author of ‘Trigger Happy’, a book about video games, wrote about giving away content.  I bought Trigger Happy when it first came out. Lately, he republished it as a free download. As an experiment, he put up a PayPal tip jar, but it didn’t get him many tips. Although he goes on to say that the exercise was worthwhile for him (it may sell paper copies, it gets him reputation that could lead to future book sales and press commissions), he argues that giving away content is not a sustainable business model.

This got the attention of David Pogue, author of the popular ‘Missing Manuals’ series of technical books. He basically cites Poole, explains why he doesn’t provide electronic copies of his books, and expresses gratitude that he’s not in the film or music business, ‘where piracy is even easier’.

Then Techdirt’s Mike Masnick got hold of it and wrote a refutation. But either he’s wrong or he’s not clear enough.

So here’s how I see things.

Right now, e-book readers aren’t quite good enough, and printing a book at home isn’t quite cheap or convenient enough, to make reading electronically distributed books a pleasant experience. That works in the book industry’s favour, since right now paying £5 for a paperback of War and Peace is a better value proposition than downloading it for free and getting a headache from reading it on a screen.

But that’s very likely to change. Clever people are working on it, and I don’t doubt that in my lifetime (to be overly conservative) there will be a means to read downloaded text that has an affordable one-off purchase price and a negligible price per document. Whether that’s an ebook reader or a fast cheap printer and binder is not relevant. So let’s put ourselves in a hypothetical future where that’s happened.

The next spanner in the works is piracy. Internet media piracy is here and most experts believe it can’t be stopped. You can construct an argument about perceived value of content around the inevitable existence of piracy (in essence - ’since you’re competing with pirates can provide the content for free, the legitimate price will be driven towards zero’). This throws up so many questions about whether piracy is really inevitable, whether most consumers will be honest if they’re given the change, whether there are technical preventatives for piracy, and so on, that I’d rather not go there. So let’s fine tune our hypothetical future and say that there is no piracy. Everyone pays what they’re asked to pay, or they decline to consume what’s on offer. We can surely agree that if piracy does exist, it’s worse for producers, right?

So, in our futuristic utopia, piracy free, where everyone has a cheap book printer, what happens to the economy of writing, according to laws of supply and demand?

Mike Masnick’s central argument is that when distribution becomes almost free, supply is almost infinite, driving the price to zero. That makes sense, but it’s oversimplified. As soon as Steven Poole finishes his final draft of Trigger Happy, there are potentially an infinite number of digital copies available. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Remember we’ve hypothesised there’s no piracy. As copyright holder, Poole can artificially limit the number he makes available, and he can price the digital copies as he sees fit. There’s only one Steven Poole, and he’s in control of his book. So far, the market cannot push the price of his book down.

But while there is only one Steven Poole, there are - I’m sure - hundreds of writers producing intelligent prose about video games. It only takes a couple to enter into a price war, and in the absence of other limiting factors such as distribution and production costs, Poole ends up with competitors selling their competing product for a negligible price, or giving it away.

Now, even if Poole’s work is of a much higher quality than his competitors, he’s competing with free. By all means, being free doesn’t make up for terrible quality, but if the price is right, people will accept second best. And so Poole is compelled by the market to reduce his price in turn, until it is either free or negligible.

There’s nothing special about Steven Poole here. I could substitute almost any author’s name.

So I believe, that in the absence of printing and distribution costs, the price of a book will be driven to zero.

Now that’s sort of unfortunate for writers, because writing a book takes time, talent and effort, and that shouldn’t go unrewarded. For some, the creative act or having an audience is reward enough; but there’s no doubt that a lot of books wouldn’t get written if the author had to do other things to feed themselves.

Fortunately, we’ve only demonstrated that the price of one transaction is reduced, and that’s a consumer exchanging money for a few hundred pages of words. There are all kinds of other business transactions that can be made, if you own a chunk of text that people want to read:

• Sell adverts. It’s tried and tested. To make a lot of money, a publication needs a lot of readers. Nobody said this would be free money!
• Get patrons. A hefty donation gets patrons a deluxe ‘keepsake’ printed copy of the book, plus their name printed in a list at the front of the book. The author would need to be the kind of writer that enough wealthy people would be proud to be seen to support. Of course a patron needn’t be an individual - it could be a charity, a club or a commercial entity.
• Go periodical. It worked for Dickens. Publish the next installment when donations hit a threshold. Offer donors a refund if publication doesn’t go ahead.
• Many other possibilities - probably great ideas I haven’t thought of.

Just like with the old model, writers are still competing for readers, and if they can’t attract enough of the right kind of readers, they won’t make a living. Advertisers will be looking for readers in a targeted demographic. Patrons will have varying reasons for their donations, but some level of readership will be required. Periodicals are closest to the old model, in that it’s the only example where the end-user pays (I also think it’s the most fragile option given, because these end-users can get their reading fix elsewhere for less).

So my belief is not that content should be free for any idealogical reason (that ideology works for certain kinds of software, but doesn’t carry through to all creative works).  I believe that we’re slowly moving towards an economy where content has to be free to compete. If writers can’t make a profit under those circumstances, they’d better stop writing, or write as a hobby.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 15:53 and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.