We've written more than a few times about
Scott Turow,
a brilliant author, but an absolute disaster as the Luddite-driven head
of the Authors' Guild. During his tenure, he's done a disservice to
authors around the globe by basically attacking everything new and
modern -- despite any opportunities it might provide -- and talked up
the importance of going back to physical books and bookstores. He's an
often uninformed champion of a past that never really existed and which
has no place in modern society. He once claimed that Shakespeare
wouldn't
have been successful under today's copyright law because of piracy,
ignoring the fact that copyright law didn't even exist in the age of
Shakespeare. His
anti-ebook rants are just kind of wacky.
However, in his latest NY Times op-ed, he's basically
thrown all of his cluelessness together in a rambling mishmash of "and another thing",
combined with his desire to get those nutty technology kids off his
lawn. For the few thousand members of the Authors Guild, it's time you
found someone who was actually a visionary to lead, rather than a
technology-hating reactionary pining for a mythical time in the past.
First up, a confused reaction to the Supreme Court's
protection of first sale rights in Kirtsaeng.
LAST month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and
resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper
than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity
as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to
a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary
market, authors won’t get royalties.
First of all, no, this was not a "change" in US law. Courts had not
forbidden this particular situation in the past, because the specifics
of this hadn't really been tested in the past other than a few recent
cases with somewhat different fact patterns. The point of the Supreme
Court's ruling was to reinforce what most people already believed the
law to be: if you buy a book, you have the right to resell it.
As for the "surge" in cheap imports, let's wait and see. It might
impact markets like textbooks, which are artificially inflated, but for
regular books? It seems like a huge stretch to think that it would be
cost effective to ship in foreign books just for resale. And, of
course, secondary markets have existed for ages, and studies have shown
that they actually
help authors because it makes it
less risky
to buy a new book, since people know they can resell it. Turow admits
that secondary markets have always existed, but then jumps to what this
is all "really" about in his mind:
This may sound like a minor problem; authors already contend with an
enormous domestic market for secondhand books. But it is the latest
example of how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting
authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers,
search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for
position at authors’ expense.
Yes, that's right. The Kirtsaeng decision isn't just about first sale,
it's really about the evil "global electronic marketplace" sucking
authors dry. Of course, Turow fails to mention that Kirtsaeng had next
to nothing to do with the internet. Yes, Kirtsaeng ended up selling his
books via eBay, but tons of books sell on eBay. That had no impact on
the ruling at all. The issue in the ruling was about books legally
purchased abroad, and Kirtsaeng did that without the internet -- he just
had friends and family back in Thailand buying books for him. To blame
that on "the global electronic marketplace" is just completely
random and wrong. It seems like the kind of thing someone says when
they just want to blame technology for everything. Turow has his
anti-technology hammer, but he's got to stop seeing nails in absolutely
everything.
Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the
Constitution, which instructs Congress “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.” The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by
authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened,
is essential to democracy.
Turow is a lawyer. As such, I would expect him not to misrepresent what
the Constitution says, but he's done so here. Authors are not
"directly protected in the Constitution." 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.
Frankly, it's bizarre that Turow would so misrepresent the Constitution,
when he must know what he's saying is untrue. It really calls into
question why the NY Times allows such blatantly false statements to go
out under its name.
That culture is now at risk. 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.
Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce:
there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike
physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book
for full credit.
Note the implicit assumption: only
publishers produce books.
Turow, apparently, ignores the fact that these modern technological
wonders (which he hates so much) have enabled an entire new world of
massively successful self-published authors, who take advantage of this
situation to realize that they don't need publishers, and the lower
costs and ease of distribution makes things much easier. As Clay Shirky
has said in the past,
publishing is a button, not an industry.
And, no, that doesn't mean that authors should all do it by
themselves, but the challenges are in marketing, not in "publishing" or
distribution any more (with respect to ebooks).
Also the idea of a literary culture at risk is laughable.
More books
are being published today than ever before. More people are reading
books today than ever before. More people are writing books than ever
before. Books that would never have been published in the past are
regularly published today. There is an astounding wealth of cultural
diversity in the literary world. Sure, some of it means a lot more
competition for the small group of authors (only about 8,000 or so) that
Turow represents... oh wait, I think we've perhaps touched on the
reason that Turow is all upset by this. But, of course, more
competition for that small group of authors does not mean the culture of
books and literature is at risk at all. Quite the opposite.
But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six
major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the
Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all
rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net
receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.
Best-selling authors have the market power to negotiate a higher
implicit e-book royalty in our advances, even if our publishers won’t
admit it. But writers whose works sell less robustly find their earnings
declining because of the new rate, a process that will accelerate as
the market pivots more toward digital.
Again, this totally ignores the new reality. Authors who don't like this admittedly crappy deal from the big publishers
can go to alternatives.
They can self-publish. Or they can sign up with one of a new crop of
digitally savvy publishers who are much more like partners than
gatekeepers. No surprise that Turow doesn't even seem to know these
things exist. Hell, just last week we were talking about a successful
self-published author who leveraged his massive success into an
extremely
favorable deal
with Simon and Schuster to handle physical book distribution. And a
week later Scott Turow argues that only historical top sellers like
himself can negotiate better rates with the Big 6 Publishers in NY?
Wake up, Scott, there's a whole new world out there that you seem to be
ignoring.
Barry Eisler famously
turned down
a half million dollar contract with a publisher, because he realized
that the economics of going direct were much better. Plenty of authors
are recognizing that they have leverage today where they used to have
none. It seems odd that Turow doesn't even acknowledge this reality at
all, instead assuming that authors are still locked into the system
where the only way they can become published is by taking a bad deal
with a publisher.
And there are many e-books on which authors and publishers, big and
small, earn nothing at all. Numerous pirate sites, supported by
advertising or subscription fees, have grown up offshore, offering new
and old e-books free.
If you're an author earning nothing at all, then you've got bigger
problems than technology. It probably means you're mired in obscurity
and no one knows who the hell you are. On top of that, it means you've
done nothing at all to connect with your fans. Because we've seen
authors who actively
encourage the piracy of their books, but who also work to
connect
with their fans, and have seen their sales go way up, because those
fans want to support the authors. Also, as most people know (why
doesn't Turow seem aware of this?) ebook "piracy" is a
fairly small
part of the market, in part because the initial market was dominated by
the Amazon Kindle, and publishers smartly jumped on board. Yes, there
is ebook piracy, but it's not like the music and movie business where
the official sources basically ceded the entire market to piracy for
years.
The pirates would be a limited menace were it not for search engines
that point users to these rogue sites with no fear of legal consequence,
thanks to a provision inserted into the 1998 copyright laws. A search
for “Scott Turow free e-books” brought up 10 pirate sites out of the
first 10 results on Yahoo, 8 of 8 on Bing and 6 of 10 on Google, with
paid ads decorating the margins of all three pages.
Okay, this is just dumb. First of all,
no one is searching for "Scott Turow free e-books" so this shouldn't be much of a concern. I did a
Google Trends search on "Scott Turow free e-books" vs. "Scott Turow books" and it shows
no one
searches for "Scott Turow free e-books", so he doesn't have much to
worry about. Frankly, he should probably be a hell of a lot more
concerned that not too many people seem to be searching for "Scott Turow
books" either.
But the larger point here is that, even if people
were searching
for "Scott Turow free e-books," how would that matter that much? By the
very fact that they're doing that particular search, they've more or
less self-identified as people not interested in paying money for Scott
Turow books, so they're not the market anyway.
If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy
stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I’d be on my way to jail.
And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like “Don’t be
evil,” they do the same thing.
This is silly on multiple levels. First of all, by his own numbers,
Google (who uses "Don't be evil") had the least number of "bad" sites in
the results according to Turow. I did the same search and actually
found only a couple sites that possibly were infringing. Instead, I did
see links to the Authors Guild, to Amazon, to Turow's Wikipedia page...
and to an old Techdirt article about Turow's cluelessness. That said,
you could argue that if Google is "being evil" here it's actually by
not
giving its users what they're looking for -- which is clearly "free
e-books." If people were actually doing this search (and we've already
shown they're not) then perhaps it really just meant that Turow should
be
offering his own damn free ebooks, since that's what people
are looking for. Why not offer an early work as a free download to get
people interested in his books? Hell if he's really worried about it,
offer up the first five chapters of a book. I've read a few of his
books, and they can really grab you. Let people read the first few
chapters for free and I'd bet lots of people would pay a reasonable
price for the full book.
Instead of understanding any of this, Turow falsely attacks search
engines on multiple levels. First, he suggests they're at fault because
people are looking for free ebooks (even if they're not actually doing
so for his own books). He assumes that because he did that search,
others must. Second, when those search engines actually try to deliver
what these theoretical people want (despite the fact that Turow himself
has
failed to do so) he complains about it. Finally, he falsely
suggests that the search engines are making money doing so. They're
not. Search engines make money if people click on ads. If someone sees
a free ebook and clicks on an organic link, the search engine isn't
making any money. I recognize that Turow hates technology, but that's
no excuse for being blatantly ignorant about it when spewing
misrepresentations in the NY Times.
From there, he attacks Google's book scanning project.
Google says this is a “fair use” of the works, an exception to
copyright, because it shows only snippets of the books in response to
each search. Of course, over the course of thousands of searches, Google
is using the whole book and selling ads each time, while sharing none
of the revenue with the author or publisher.
The second sentence has nothing to do with the first sentence. It is
fair use because they're only showing snippets at a time, and most of
those searches
lead people to places where they can buy the books.
I just did a search on Google Books for "Scott Turow" and the top
links is to an Amazon page listing out all of Turow's books for sale.
You'd think he'd appreciate such things. But, then, he'd have to not be
a technologically illiterate Luddite.
All of this also ignores that Google's book scanning is really just about creating a rather useful
card catalog for books, making them
easier to find. Over and over again, people who have actually looked at the issue (i.e., not Scott Turow) have found that Google books
increases sales of books. Considering he was just complaining about authors not getting any money, you'd think this would be a good thing.
He drones on about Google scanning books for a while, and then... attacks
libraries for wanting to lend out ebooks, insisting that if they can do that, no one will ever buy a book again.
Now many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons
who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library
card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only
incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the
lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks. As a result, many publishers
currently refuse to sell e-books to public libraries.
One might also say "in this new reality," libraries are helping people
access the wealth of information contained in books, just as they've
always done. Who knew Scott Turow was so anti-library? It's kind of
silly that maximalists and luddites keep jumping back to this trope.
The idea that if you can get something for free, no one will ever pay
for it. That's never been true and will never be true. All of the
works that people pay for and download to their Kindles are already
available for free on unauthorized sites. But tons of people pay. All
of the music that people pay for and download to their iPods is already
available for free on unauthorized sites. But tons of people pay.
People will pay all the time for things they can get for free. Just
check out the bottled water industry.
Turow then jumps back to attacking his other technological nemesis,
Amazon, based on random speculation about a patent the company received:
An even more nightmarish version of the same problem emerged last month
with the news that Amazon had a patent to resell e-books. Such a scheme
will likely be ruled illegal. But if it is not, sales of new e-books
will nose-dive, because an e-book, unlike a paper book, suffers no wear
with each reading. Why would anyone ever buy a new book again?
Well, there's that trope again. Also, this ignores the
ReDigi ruling,
which has already said this is illegal, though that will be appealed.
But, again, lots of people will still buy new ebooks, because they
like to support authors.
Also, it's likely that smart authors will embrace new and interesting
business models in which this kind of thing isn't a problem. They can
use Kickstarter to "pre-sell" the books and get support from fans. They
can offer special benefits for fans who buy new books (such as
membership in a fan club with other fans of that author). They can
provide early previews or discounts on future or past works to those who
buy first run copies of their new works. The list goes on and on --
and those are just the ones I came up with in the 30 seconds I spent
thinking about it. Give me a full day to work on it, and the list would
be in the dozens. But Turow, bizarrely, assumes that no one could
possibly come up with any other reason.
And, from there, we go off onto a totally wacky tangent about Russia.
Last October, I visited Moscow and met with a group of authors who
described the sad fate of writing as a livelihood in Russia. There is
only a handful of publishers left, while e-publishing is savaged by
instantaneous piracy that goes almost completely unpoliced. As a result,
in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone
Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly
affects the national conversation.
Note that he names Tolstoy and Chekhov -- two authors who both died
more than a century ago.
Could Turow easily name for us a Russian author from the 1940s who
regularly affected the national conversation? How about the 1960s?
1980s? 1990s? No? Perhaps the problem isn't ebooks and piracy.
Meanwhile, as it so happens, not too long ago, we wrote a report on the
content markets in various countries, including Russia. Turow might
find it helpful, since he seems to be at a loss for actual data and
facts in so many of his public statements on these issues. He can get a
copy of
The Sky is Rising 2
if he'd like. We offer it for free (the horror!). In it, he'd discover
that the Russian book business is on the upswing. In the past fifteen
years, the number of books published has increased by an impressive
266%, from just 33,623 in 1995 to 122,915 in 2011. That rate of growth
exceeded all of the other countries we studied in Europe. It is true
that the Russian market saw a decline in book revenue between 2008 and
2011 as the worldwide recession had an impact, but it has also recently
seen the absolutely massive growth in the sale of ebook readers. As
we've seen elsewhere, growth in ebook readers almost always acts as a
leading indicator for later growth in ebook sales, because most readers
connect easily to various authorized ebook stores, and the convenience
factor leads to sales. One of the issues in Russia has been that many
of the established players have been exceptionally slow in offering up
authorized copies in the Russian market. If there are no authorized
copies to buy, it shouldn't be a huge surprise to find out that people
seek out alternatives.
It should be noted that when famed author Paulo Coelho decided to
pirate his own book in Russia, it was because his publisher refused to offer a Russian translation. And what Coelho discovered was that
sales of his book jumped from around 1,000 books to over 100,000 books
because
of his own decision to seed an unauthorized Russian translation. At
the very least, this suggests that "piracy" isn't the problem and that,
if handled well, authors can absolutely get people to buy, even when
free works are available.
Scott Turow is clearly a smart individual. He's a fantastic author,
whose books I've enjoyed for years. But it boggles my mind that he's so
anti-technology based on ridiculous and ignorant claims, and that
despite being called out on his ignorant statements for years, he
chooses not to learn, but instead doubles down on those same ignorant
statements by saying even more. It's doubly confusing that the NY Times
sullies its own good name by allowing such obviously false statements
to be published under its masthead.
Finally, the 8,000 or so authors (a mere fraction of the number of
actual authors out there) who make up the Authors Guild are not served
well by having someone as technologically reactionary as Turow leading
them. It seems they'd be much better served by having a visionary
leader who looks at ways to embrace new opportunities and who has
realized that they can help to better promote, to connect with fans and
to monetize their works. Having someone just yell about general
progress, and try to ignorantly shoo the "kids" off his lawn over and
over again, does them no favors.
Posts
