End of Books Debate: Ewan Morrison’s ‘Short lives in the Long Tail’

The Edinburgh International Book Festival Debate entitled: The end of Books took place on Saturday 20th August 2011 at 8pm.

Printed books seemed to enjoy a shot in the arm this year with the success of World Book Night in March. But the increasingly difficult state of high street book retailing and the surge of ebooks suggest that when it comes to books, the revolution may indeed be digitised. What’s more, we are getting to the point of Peak Culture, as the world’s current wellsprings of artistic ideas are threatening to run dry.

That’s what novelist Ewan Morrison argued in this event’s Provocation, while in his Response the literary critic Ray Ryan contended that the novel is in rude health, and the death of high street bookshops won’t kill off our thirst for ink-on-paper.

Today, exclusively here on EdinburghFestival.org, author Ewan Morrison presents the full, unexpurgated text of his argument, which includes a wealth of detail and facts that had to be excised from his more concise verbal argument delivered at the live debate. This content is not available anywhere else.

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SHORT LIVES IN THE LONG TAIL

The end of Books? Are books nearing their end? Yes, absolutely, within twenty five years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and epublishing will mean the end of ‘writer’ as a profession. Ebooks in the future will be written by first timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers, or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

Generation Y and the End of Paper

First of all I’d like to clear up the question: ‘The end of Books?’ This is mis-leading as it seems purely technical – a question of the paper mill versus the hard drive. Of course the paper book will survive, you may say; it will reinvent itself as it did before. Haven’t future projections been wrong before? Didn’t they say Penguin paperbacks would destroy the print industry in 1939? That printing press would overthrow Catholicism after 1440? That home videos would destroy cinema?

On the paper front, depending on who you listen to, statistics vary wildy. Barnes and Noble claim that their ebook market is already over 50% of their sales. Amazon claim they have crossed the tipping point and that they sell 242 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks, while Richard Sarnoff, CEO of Bertelsman claims that by 2015, 1?4 of the book market will be digital, while acknowledging that his competitors claim it will be closer to 50%. At the same time he admits that the paper book is tied to a generation: the baby boomers, and that Generation Y (the children of the boomers) already consume almost the entirety of their textual material digitally. Interpreting Sarnoff’s calculation, the paper book has a generation years left.

Studies in GenY consumption behaviour show that already only 19% consume newspaper content in paper form, while 78% consume it on smart phone or digitally, for free. Are books a separate case or do we simply wish them to be so?

The future of printed media is not tied to the wishes of the boomers and generation x but to the consumption patterns of Generation Y. They are a vast market and before we are dead and gone we will watch the consumption patterns of GenY drive the paper book into extinction.

But let’s leave the survival of the paper book alone, and ask the more important question: Will writers survive in the digital era? The digital publishing industry could, after all, simply repackage its existing books as ebooks for a new generation. Similair things have been done in film, music and home video with re-runs, remakes and re-formatting. Most publishers are now investing in getting their back catalogues onto ebook and expanded ebook, against investing in new writing.

Well of course, you might say, but there has to be new content; audiences love variety, ‘the cult of the new’. Already in publishing the cult of the new is rendering the long-term vocation of ‘writer’ obsolete. Authors are being asked by publishers to write books under pseudonyms, so they can ‘start again’. So lets re-formulate the question – Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era? The reason why this is an important question is that every industry that has become digital has seen a dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings for those who create ‘content’.

Why pay writers at all? But first lets clear up the question behind this – Why should we expect writers to make a living from their work in the first place?

There is a concept – dating from the era of romanticism – that writers and artists should live a life of penury and suffering and that only through overcoming insurmountable obstacles they can achieve greatness, universality and transcendence – writing in the garret, in obscurity and so on. In defence of this proposal, several key writers in the history of the book worked in this way, for absolutely no financial return. Emily Dickinson and Kafka being the most notable. But they are also exceptions to the rule. The life of writers is in fact very much more practical, entrenched in the economics of survival. Banal as it may seem, writers have, historically, been reimbursed or subsidised for their work in different ways.

• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866.
• Charles Dickens, wrote six of his novels in serialised form for magazines and was paid on delivery of each section.
• William Shakespeare was paid a wage of £8 per play; an amount equivalent in our contemporary currency to between £18,000 and £22,000.

If the structure for payment for labour had not been in place for these authors, the world would never have met Lady Macbeth, Raskalnikov or Oliver Twist.

The Advance as living wage

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century with the growth of large publishing houses a system of payment for writers came into being which provided a living wage. This was advances and royalties. This was a better way to run an industry as it did not depend on the time-consuming risk of discovering obscure geniuses; instead writers could be hot-housed and made more productive.

Royalties are a percentage (usually between 8% to 12%) of the publishers profit, after the publishers costs and the author’s advance have been subtracted. This amount is then paid to the author quarterly or half yearly.

Advances are a payment to the author for work yet to be done, or, in most cases, already completed. An advance is usually split over a three year period, payable on (1) submission of manuscript (2) First publication and (3) Paperback publication.

Most authors never pay back their advances but publishers have made enough of a profit to keep this system in place. The royalty system that became established in the post war period allowed writers to become full-time workers; producing a large body of unified work; developing an audience for their writing and a market for their publishers by becoming household names; allowing them to develop and experiment; to mature stylistically and gain accolade and prestigious awards for their work. This system of investment by publishers allowed writers to have ‘a job for life’, and in turn the system validated the status of mainstream publishers who’s authors appeared again and again on the prize winner lists.

A random sample of the some of the authors who have thrived under this system of investment are as follows:

Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, J.M Coetze, Joan Didion, Milan Kundera, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Philp Roth, Anita Shreve, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, John Fowles.

To ask whether the International Man Booker Award Winner Philip Roth could have written twenty-four novels and the award winning American trilogy without author advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework which supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.

And this is what is happening now.

The Retreat of Advances

With the era of digital publishing and digital distribution the age of advances is coming to an end. Advances are about future investment, but as mainstream publishers struggle to survive against digital competitors, they are moving increasingly towards maximising short-term profits, betting on the safe bet and the already established, and away from nurturing talent. As the Sunday times stated in 2009: ‘Authors are seeing advances reduced to a quarter of what they could have expected two years ago’. A popular catch-phrase among agents, when discussing advances, is currently ‘10K is the new 50K’. And as one literary editor recently put it: ‘The days of publishing an author, as opposed to publishing a book, seem to be over. I hope we’ll be able to return to old-fashioned principles like editing and nurturing a writer’s career.’

Traditionally, publishers have kept a pool of ‘mid list’ writers, who are effectively the Research and Development department of a publishing house. It was within the mid list that future bestsellers could be spotted, supported and tested. Don Delillo, for example, was mid list throughout the six years in which he produced a series of underperforming novels before the multi award winning Underworld.

The payment of a living wage to mid list authors was, historically, a mainstream investment strategy – a gamble that paid off. But now, when publishers are slashing advances to mid listers, they are effectively banking on two strategies. 1) First time immediate hits. 2) Consolidating existing bestseller lists. Both strategies involve cutting back on their lists of writers. In effect firing them.

In reaction to the tightening of the purse strings, writers and agents have started decoupling themselves from publishers, in some cases – like the controversial one with agent Andrew Wylie – publishers have been sidestepped entirely and deals have been done directly with digital distributors.

Authors have started to ask – what is a publishing house anyway? Isn’t it just a corrupt system of warehouses and middle men? Can’t I do better by myself? I may not get an advance but I can strike a deal with Amazon for a higher royalty. Or self publish and set my own royalty level as high as 70%.

So the author goes from someone who was paid an advance to work for a year to someone who will, hopefully, live on the profits of their future book sales. Through self-epublishing this new kind of writer does everything by and for themselves: from editing and proof reading to marketing and promotion. They are forced to become entrepreneurs.

They may even play the role of CEO and accountant and strategically decide to reduce their cover prices, to as little as 99p or 99c, to encourage buyers. They then enter a market place which is wide open, in which they receive no promotion or editing, and no support from the existing connections between booksellers, agents and critics as they compete with millions of others. As Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House U.K, recently said. Her ‘idea of hell’ was a website ‘with 80,000 self- published works on it’ – this is a world in which bookshops and publishers are replaced by a global random-access super-slush-pile. When writers choose to enter this open market they embrace a philosophy of the digital marketplace called THE LONG TAIL.

Living in the Long Tail

The Long Tail is best described by digital business adviser, futurologist, guru, and editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson, in his book The Long Tail, or Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The tag line on another edition reads How Endless choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. Anderson has spent the last decade advising the world’s leading digital businesses. In simple terms, the long tail derives its name from graphs of sales against number of products. Whereas throughout the 20th century publishers concentrated on selling only a few heavily promoted ‘hits’ or ‘bestsellers’ in bulk. Digital shopping has meant that what was originally a tail-off in sales, has now become increasingly profitable. Rather than selling say 13 million copies of one Harry Potter book, a long tail provider can make the same profits by selling 13 million different ‘obscure’, ‘failed’ and ‘niche’ books.

The Long Tail is Amazon and iTunes, Netflix, LoveFilm and eBay. It is, arguably, between forty to sixty percent of the market which was hidden and/or simply unavailable before the advent of online shopping.

As more users come online and chose to select content for themselves, the long tail gets longer. It also starts to demolish the old mainstream system of pre- selection, mass marketing and limited shelf space for ‘bestsellers’. Amazon is a successful long tail industry: it has forced publishers into selling their books at 60% discount and driven bookshops out of business. As the Long Tail grows the mainstream mass market shrinks and becomes more conservative. The Long Tail has done this in all other industries that have gone digital.

As a writer you have a choice: either you stay with a mainstream publisher which has slashed your advances, or you take your chances in the growing Long Tail by self-epublishing or going with a small independent publisher.

Myths of the Long Tail

The recent, and much promoted, enthusiasm towards the Long Tail market does however obscure a very basic economic fact: Very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the Long Tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those obscure authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year.

This fact seems to be un-ironically celebrated by advocates of the Long Tail. The following quotation is from the unnamed author (or several) who completed the Wikipedia entry on the Long Tail (offering up their labour freely and without payment):

‘At the end of the Long Tail, the conventional profit-making business model ceases to exist; instead, people tend to come up with products for varied reasons like expression rather than monetary benefit. In this way, the Long Tail opens up a large space for authentic works of creativity.’

It is the service provider of the Long Tail who makes the profit, not the content creator. When you enter the Long Tail; whether as musician, filmmaker or writer, you will make little profit, and will increasingly be expected to work for next to nothing, and ultimately for free.

‘Every industry that becomes Digital will eventually become free.’ – Chris Anderson

In the Free Revolution, why should anyone pay for content?

Anderson’s shocking forecast (which he promotes as a business opportunity) is shared by others at the other extreme of the political spectrum; by, for example, the Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Zizek. In his last book Living in the End Times, Zizek claims that intellectual property, or copyright, is in terminal collapse as the digital era forces it to become the free property of all. The digital commons.

The drastic changes that have occurred within industries that have become digital demonstrate the truth in such claims. When books become wholly digital, publishing will inevitably follow the same pattern. The idea that ebooks are somehow different from all other digital formats is, at best, an idea that the discerning taste of an educated and discerning minority can dictate standards in taste for the majority, and at worst a middle class elitist delusion that bares no relation to the workings of a multi-million pound industry.

The following are facts about the digital industries:

(1) Home videos - originally the industry started off with consumers having to buy expensive equipment (VHS, Laserdisk etc) – which was superseded then by DVD, then by online video streaming. Over and above the possibility of ripping pirate videos (according to a 2010 study by OVN, 69% of the population do this already), the price of watching a feature film or TV show is now trending towards zero. Sites like Netflix and Love Film have and thousands of films available to watch entirely for free or with subscriber packages for a few pounds a month. The film industry, globally, now spends more on attempting to stop illegal downloads than it does on film production and distribution.

(2) Music - New moves to make consumers pay for product and to shut down illegal file sharing include the Digital Economy Act of 2010 (a new law to protect musicians and artists revenue) have had little effect. The industry has largely surrendered by doing deals with online music sites such as Spotify. A statistical study on Information is Beautiful shows that for a musician to earn the minimum wage in the US – per month, he or she would have to sell either 143 self pressed CDs; 1,161 retail album CDs or 4,053,110 plays on Spotify (with a 0.0016 percent royalty). Martin Hodkinson in an article in The Author states that ‘Hundreds of people have ‘downed their tools’ in the music business, through no choice of their own. The total income of the industry dropped by 25% between 1999 and 2008 and is expected to fall by 75% by 2013.’

(3) Porn - The adult entertainment business, which was previously in the vanguard of home video, satellite, cable television and digital distribution is in acute crisis due to file sharing and free sites. According to the LA Times ‘Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined from 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply’. One top porn star, Savannah Stern has cited that, on par with most of her colleagues, her earnings fell in 2010, from $150K a year to $50K. As Bill Asher, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, states. “We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK,” “It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

(4) Computer games - According to the NPD (the leading global provider of consumer and retail market research) the loss of revenue from game piracy is $13.6 billion. China and Korea introduced Free to play on games like World of Warcraft and Lineage. Free-to-play is now becoming the dominant game model with extras offered for a small fee as the only way for manufacturers to make a profit.

(5) Newspapers – Across the board, UK readership fell by 20% to 27% in 2010. News International lost half of its value in Q1 of 2009. As newspapers lay off staff to cut costs they confront the fact that newspaper readership is tied to an aging demographic slice. The costs of paper printing are now seen as liability. A recent add, claimed ‘Printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a new Kindle.’

(6) Photography - Staff photographers at newspapers have been laid off over the last five years and many freelancers have abandoned their field of work. Picture desks now use amateur online photo archives instead of commissioning new images and get pictures for a fraction of previous costs or entirely for free.

(7) Telecommunications – In the 1980s the price of a call to India from the UK was £2 a minute; now, with fiber optic cable, it is 7 cents. With Skype it is absolutely free. As concerns handsets, generally, within two years of manufacture a phone’s price tends towards zero. New packages give free phones in return for small monthly payments. This impacts all other digital industries as new smart phones lower their costs on the promise of access to a world of increasingly free digital content.

(8) The internet - Many of the largest growth industries in the last decade provide an entirely free service to the consumer: Google, Yahoo, Youtube. These have facilitated other sites made by consumers for consumers, for free: the Blogosphere, open source, social networks, Wikipedia. All of these, to quote Anderson, are ‘produced by entirely free labour, consumed with no expectation of payment or monetary exchange’. As Anderson says: ‘‘Free’ is the gift of silicon valley to the world’.

The Free revolution – So who is selling what to who?

Before we go back to books lets look at what all this means. For all its digital-friendly rhetoric and the adoption or co-option of the radical jargon, surely the people at Google, Yahoo and Youtube aren’t working for free. These companies are making a profit big enough to place them on the fortune 500. So if the future of digital media is ‘free’, where does the money come from?

While providers like Yahoo and Google provide free content, at the same time, on every screen they sell advertising space. The culture (the books, films and music) that you find for free on the sites, is not the product, it has no monetary value. The real product Yahoo and Google are selling is something less tangible – it is you.

Your profile and that of millions of other consumers are being sold to advertisers. Your hits and clicks make them money.

These digital providers are not in anyway concerned with or interested in content or what used to be called ‘culture’. To them culture is merely generic content; it is a free service that is provided in the selling of customers to advertisers. Ideally for service providers the customers will even provide the culture themselves, for free. And this is what we do when we write blogs, or free ebooks or upload films of ourselves, at no cost.

Forecasts predict that within ten to fifteen years the largest ‘publishers’ in the world will be Google, Amazon and Apple. Google, as of may 2010 announced that it plans to compete with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple by launching its own online ebook store which requires no ereader and no fees. In August of the same year, Google announced its intention to scan all known books (130 million) by the end of the decade. All of which would be available for free or for a minute one-off payment to authors of around $60 per book. Google is still caught up in legal wrangles, but this change is coming.

Piracy and competitive discounting – the race to the bottom

Back to books. In all of the cases above, digital industries have been pushed towards zero price by two factors: (1) mass piracy and (2) the consumer demand for massive discounts. Book piracy has only just begun but it is now very simple to break through the DRM protection systems set up by publishers and to download 1mg books in less than sixty seconds. The move to piracy moves imperceptibly in the mind of the consumer, as Adrian Hon founder of a leading games company outlined in the Telegraph. It starts in this way: consumers download electronic copies of books that they already own for convenience sake (an activity that the New York times claims is ethical), this then introduces people to ebook torrents. Then they start downloading classics “Tolkein and C. S. Lewis are both dead, so why should I feel bad about pirating their books?’ And since they have enough memory on their ereader to store 3500 books and the ereader came with four preloaded free classics on it to start with what difference will it make? ‘Then you’ll have people downloading ebooks not available in their country yet. Then it’ll be people downloading entire collections, just because it’s quicker. Then they’ll start wondering why they should buy any ebooks at all, when they cost so much.’

The long term against the Long Tail

Is there an alternative to this catastrophe? If so it cannot lie where Chris Anderson recommends, in having what he terms ‘freemium viewing’ (free plus premium) – locked or extra content for subscribers (a system devised for newspapers and computer games). What would this mean for the book? An extra chapter? An author’s commentary? The final chapter if you pay more?

An alternative could lie in authors writing apps and blogs, on both of which, the author would get paid per ten thousand or so hits, by advertisers. Or it could lie in crowd funding – a direction that the indie film industry is now going in. You have enough readers, they pay a dollar or a pound, and en masse they see you through the duration required to write the book, that you then give then for free.

There is no simple solution here, and the baby boomer desire to hold onto the cultural artefacts of their own lifetimes will be quickly erased by the demands of the new younger market. What is clear is that for authors and publishers to abandon each other only accelerates the race towards free content.

Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to ‘go it alone’ in the Long Tail. In return, publishing houses must take the risk on the long term; supporting writers over years and books, it is only then that books of the standard we have seen in the last half century can continue to come into being.

As Finnuala Duggan, Director of Random House Digital Group said recently ‘We need to continue to join forces with other industries both in educating consumers and in lobbying government to support copyright in all its forms, including the right of authors to be paid.’

If the connection between publishers and writers splits completely, if they fail to support and defend each other, then both will separately be subjected to the markets demand for totally free content, and both shall have very short lives in the Long Tail. The writer will become an entrepreneur with a short shelf life, in a world without publishers or book shelves.

But ultimately, any strategy conceived now is just playing for time as the slide towards a totally free digital culture accelerates. How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short term world that will not pay them for their labour.

The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries – quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers.

I ask you to take the long view, to look a generation beyond where we are now, and to express concern for the future of the book. I ask you to vote that the end of ‘the book’ as written by professional writers, is imminent; and not to be placated with short term projections and enthusiasms intended to reduce fear in a confused market. I ask you to leave this place troubled, and to ask yourself and as many others as you can, what you can do if you truly value the work of the people formerly known as writers.

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Ewan Morrison
August 2011