Tag Archives: book publishing

I Don’t Know What DRM Is, But I’m Against It

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Day Against DRM

Well, OK, I do know what DRM is. But the biggest problem in the fight against it is the term itself. Even if he or she knows that it stands for digital rights management, the average, intelligent, but non-digerati person on the street has no clue what it means.

There are plenty of signs that book publishers are losing their taste for putting locks on the media you buy, just as music publishers have mostly done. But the process could be speeded up, I believe, if we could just come up with a better term for DRM.

As with the similarly opaque term net neutrality, which more people would favor if they understood what it was, DRM—term and practice alike—is protected by its obscurity. I admit that most of the alternatives I can come up with—locked media, restricted use rights, captive e-books—don’t resonate. So here’s an opening for someone out there who has the killer term that will, in fact, kill DRM, once and for all.

In the meantime, why not visit the Day Against DRM website and learn more about why you too should be against DRM?

The Coming Death of Self-Publishing

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It won’t be long before self-publishing as a concept is dead.

Dance Macabre dans l'Imprimerie by Mathias Huss, Lyon 1499That’s not to say that the activity of publishing, whether it’s done by an individual, a small loose-knit group, or a corporation, is in decline. In fact, it’s healthier and growing faster than ever. But as an implicit indicator of quality, the idea inherent in the phrase “self-publishing” increasingly serves no purpose (other than a historical one).

In the book world, at least, it’s been common to distinguish between three types of publishing: traditional publishing, vanity or subsidized publishing, and self-publishing. (As Joel Friedlander notes in his excellent Self Publisher’s Companion, there is a fourth model, cooperative publishing, that blends aspects of traditional and subsidized publishing, but it is relatively rare.)

The traditional model is built around a system of gatekeepers—agents, acquisitions editors, and other publishing professionals whose role is to make judgments about what will and won’t be published. Until recently, the only practical alternative for aspiring authors was vanity publishing: paying a company a large sum of money to produce their book, with little or no marketing or sales assistance.

These distinctions were once a reliable measure of quality. Traditionally published works were probably good; vanity publications were probably bad.

But the rise of self-publishing has complicated the equation. Digital technology has made it possible for authors to produce, market, and distribute their own high-quality, low-cost books, whether in electronic or paper form. And by cutting out the middlemen—all those traditional gatekeepers and their expenses—authors now have the potential to make much more money from their works. It’s a compelling opportunity: all those bad, amateur writers who self-publish are now being joined by hordes of good, professional ones.

As a result, traditional publishers are losing their monopoly on quality. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going the way of the dinosaur—though Joe Konrath might say otherwise. But it does argue that who publishes a book, or how it is published, will ultimately no longer bear on the quality of the book. Traditional publishers produce lots of crappy books. Self-publishers, increasingly, are producing lots of great ones.

It won’t be long before we can safely say, to paraphrase someone or other, that there are no traditional publishers, there are no self-publishers, there are only publishers.

Doubling Down on Print, for Better or Worse

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Photo of book sculpture. Image: Robert Burdock, Flickr

A nice specimen. Photo by Robert Burdock/Flickr

Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Julie Bosman described how book publishers have begun putting extra effort into making their print products more physically and esthetically engaging. Their rationale, says Bosman, is that if “e-books are about ease and expedience,” then print books should “be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning.” The strategy, they hope, will “increase the value of print books and build a healthy, diverse marketplace that includes brick-and-mortar bookstores and is not dominated by Amazon and e-books.”

As a book collector, I’m pleased that books will be more beautiful. As a lover of bookstores, I’m happy for anything that might help preserve them. But as a reader and writer, I’m quite indifferent.

The problem with the strategy is that it won’t, as hoped, “cut into e-book sales” in a significant way. Most readers aren’t antiquarians and don’t value the physical esthetics of the container. They just want the content.

In the same way, unlike book designers, most writers don’t care in a meaningful way about the physical presence of a book. They just want to tell a story, or convey information, or to create works of art out of their words. The physical format is not essential.

There are a few books for which the physical medium of print matters in an essential way. House of Leaves, for instance, just wouldn’t be so mind-blowing in a leafless e-book. And is there any effective e-equivalent of a pop-up book? Moreover, could anyone do this with an e-book?

But these instances and their like are minor eddies of activity that briefly pull print defenders upstream before they are hurtled back down, inevitably, towards the fatal digital waterfall.

The effect is simply amplified when it comes to magazines (and turned up to 11 for newspapers). The physical aspects of magazines can be nice indeed, but they are rarely treasured objects. Inveterate collector though I am, I have gradually whittled down even my set of classic Wired issues from several shelves to one shelf—and only the Neal Stephenson issue is safe.

I’m all for more beautiful books, but let’s be realistic. Like taxidermy, printing beautiful books may preserve glorious specimens, but it does nothing to save the species.