Jim Baen's Universe

Salvos Against Big Brother

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Paper books are not going to be joining the dodo any time soon. If ever.

Written by Eric Flint

Beginning with this essay, I’m going to devote several essays in this column to analyzing the impact on publishing as electronic reading continues to expand. So far, for the most part, I’ve concentrated on demonstrating the fallacy of the various arguments in favor of DRM that focus on the impact of electronic so-called piracy on the sales of paper books.

If we plant our feet on the real world, that was quite reasonable. Outside of some specialty areas like encyclopedia publishing, the overwhelming bulk of publishing—whether you measure that in terms of income generated, number of titles produced, or number of readers—has remained traditional paper publishing. Except for those specialty areas, electronic publishing is still a tiny sliver of the market.

But what if—or when—that changes? What if—or when—electronic publishing becomes the dominant form of publishing? Perhaps even the exclusive form of publishing?

It would seem self-evident, the argument goes, that at that point the problem of electronic piracy would become paramount. Whatever income the expanded sales of paper editions might get from free electronic copies would obviously no longer offset the losses. It would vanish altogether—or, at the very least, become picayune.

From that time on, so the argument goes, doom is upon us. The moment pirate editions of electronic books—and there are no other kind of books, any longer—start reaching the top of the list in search engines, authors will starve to death and publishers will go bankrupt.

Everything about this argument is wrong, from the letter A to the letter Z. And it’s wrong on all levels. It will take me several essays to dismantle the argument, because it’s based on a pile of errors, each of which lays the premise for the next.

I will take up the following issues:

1) Is it true, to begin with, that electronic publishing is on the verge—or even within a decade or two—of replacing paper publishing as the dominant form of publishing?

2) Will the relationship between traditional paper publishing and electronic publishing be one of replacement? Or will it, instead, be a supplemental one? And, within that range, what are the most likely outcomes? Should we use as a past historical model the relationship between:

a) typewriters and computers—complete substitution;

b) manual transmissions and automatic transmissions—a division of the market;

c) ground personal transport and air personal transport—supplemental, with both old and new technologies used by almost everyone;

d) kitchen knives and home food processors—the old technology remains dominant, with the new one purely supplemental and used by relatively few people.

3) Assuming the most likely variant—which is somewhere between “b” and “c,” to prefigure my analysis—how significant will be the impact of electronic copyright infringement? To put it another way, what policies would be best to follow concerning DRM and fair use?

4) Assuming the “worst” possible variant—the complete substitution of paper publishing by electronic publication, and the relegation of paper books to historical curiosities—would those policies need to be drastically changed or modified?

In this essay, I’m going to concentrate on the first issue: How close are we to seeing the advent of the “electronic age” in reading books? And how rapidly is the change going to take place?

I’ll start with the simple version of the answer. We are not even close to the point where, outside of some specialty areas, we will be seeing electronic publishing become the dominant form of publishing. In fact, in those areas of publishing which are and always have been the mainstay of book publishing—fiction of all sorts, and popular non-fiction titles—electronic publishing will remain a sideline for many years to come.

Why? For the good and simple reason that while electronic publishing presents some advantages for publishers and readers (and authors, for that matter), compared to traditional publishing, the advantages simply aren’t great enough for most people to offset either the disadvantages or the sheer cultural inertia of paper books. Analogies between electronic publishing and other technologies which have seen a rapid and explosive growth collapse at the very beginning—because the analogy itself is fallacious.

Whenever you see or hear someone arguing that electronic publishing is about to undergo an explosive development, I urge you to look closely at the structure of the argument. What you will discover—each and every time, with no exceptions—is that the argument is based purely on reasoning by analogy. It is never based on any facts deriving from the actual industry under question, which is the book publishing industry.

That’s because all the facts point in the opposite direction. The facts—which are now based on at least fifteen years of experience—indicate that electronic publishing and reading grow quite slowly, outside of some specialty areas.

Argument by analogy is always suspect. Pointing to the explosive growth of computers, or cell phones, or various forms of electronic copying devices for music and video (VHS, DvDs, etc) as if those phenomena provide any sort of predictive powers for the growth of electronic reading simply begs the question. So do learned arguments about so-called “S-curves” in the development and expansion of technological innovations.

The reason it begs the question is that the argument pre-supposes that simply because something is a technological innovation it is predestined to develop a large market.

But that’s silly. Technological innovations come in a vast range. Some are so much better that they rapidly and completely replace the pre-existing technology. To use my range of examples above, a computer word processing program is so superior to a typewriter for any purpose that within a very short time, typewriters became purely historical objects.

But, moving down my list, consider what happened with automatic transmissions. They were first introduced into the commercial market by Oldsmobile in 1940—over two-thirds of a century ago. But, on a global scale, they’ve only just begun to finally supplant manual transmissions as the predominant form of automobile transmissions, although they did so in North America several decades ago. Still, even in North America, about seventeen percent of all cars purchased use a manual transmission. And that doesn’t include the use of manual transmissions in commercial-size trucks.

Moving still further down my list, air personal transport—once widely predicted in science fiction to be on the verge of replacing ground personal transport—did indeed enjoy explosive growth since the first airplane specifically designed for passenger flight was introduced by Boeing in 1929. But the growth came entirely as a supplement to ground transport, not a substitute. In the United States, air travel has by now largely supplanted rail travel for the passenger market—but it hasn’t made a dent in automobile travel. And, in most of the world outside of the U.S., rail travel is continuing to do quite well.

Finally, there’s the home food processor. First introduced into the market in France in the late 60s, it spread to the United States in the early 70s. To put it another way, the new technology has had four decades to supplant kitchen knives. And . . .

Kitchen knives are doing just fine, thank you. Even those people—a small share of the potential market—who do buy home food processors, never get rid of their kitchen knives. Food processors have simply become a minor supplement to the traditional technology, and have not replaced that “obsolete” technology at all.

Why? Because while food processors have some advantages over kitchen knives for some purposes on some occasions, they simply don’t provide enough advantages—and have some drawbacks of their own—to replace kitchen knives. Even for people who buy and use home food processors, kitchen knives are still the “default tool” used for most purposes.

To be sarcastic about this, the next time someone lectures you on the S-curve and what it “inevitably” implies for electronic publishing, ask them what the S-curve was for the autogyro.

There’s an old maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And the fact is, the traditional “obsolete and old-fashioned” paper book ain’t broke. Not for most readers, most of the time, for most purposes. And, whatever its limitations, it possesses some enormous advantages over electronic books.

To begin with, like kitchen knives, paper publishing is a technology that has been tested over centuries and has proven itself to be extremely durable and reliable. In contrast, NO software yet developed has demonstrated that it can even last a decade before it gets replaced by something else.

You can buy a paper book and know, for a certainty, that barring a flood or a fire or a bombing raid or an asteroid strike or real carelessness on your part, you will still be able to read the same book half a century from now. If it’s a hardcover, longer than that.

Can anyone say the same about any electronic reading device on the market today—or predicted to be on the market in the foreseeable future?

No. In fact, everyone has dark memories about “inevitable” technologies that bit them on the ass. Can we say . . . eight-track tapes . . . Betamax . . . software programs too numerous to count which became obsolete . . .

There are some absolutely enormous advantages to paper books. The biggest and simplest stem from the very simplicity of the technology.

Here’s what you need to obtain and use a paper book:

Literacy in one or another language. That is the only software required.

A relatively small amount of money. That is the only financial limitation—and you can get around that one easily, by borrowing a book or using a library.

If you can read and have some money, you can own and use a paper book. That book does not require you to agree to an end-user license. That book does not carry any risk of becoming obsolete so long as the paper, ink and binding holds up—and they’ll hold up for decades, even with a cheap paperback.

There is no restriction as to which publisher you buy from. You can buy from any of them—because they all use exactly the same software. The English language. (Or whichever other language you’re reading.) There are no security codes you need to obtain, learn, memorize. No username, no password.

And . . . once you buy that book, you OWN it. No ifs, ands or buts. You can do anything you want with it. Keep it, sell it, lend it to a friend, throw it at the neighbor’s yowling cat or use it for a doorstop. There is no chance at all that you will be subjected to a lawsuit because you violated this or that or the other provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or fell foul of the RIIA.

One universal and standard software. One universal and standard purchasing mechanism. Complete and total ownership.

Those factors alone make the potential market for e-books extremely resistant. All the more so because the only major advantage of electronic text for most readers is simply storage. The one respect in which electronic books and e-book readers are clearly, unequivocally and absolutely superior to paper books is that they don’t take up much space. You can fit an entire bookshelf into one e-book reader. (At least, with certain models.)

The problem, however, is that the same clear advantage is also a major disadvantage. The fact is that the great majority of book purchases are done by a small minority of readers. That’s true in every literate country in the world, although the percentages vary from nation to nation. Russians, for instance, have a traditionally book-oriented culture whose adults read a lot of books, whereas Americans do not. Throughout American history—this is not a recent development “caused” by the digital era; it goes back at least three centuries—most adult Americans read few books, and when they do the books will usually be either religious in nature and/or be practical manuals or self-help books of one sort or another.

What that means is that publishers, author and editors have always relied on a relatively small percentage of the population for their income and livelihoods. In the United States, the figure is not more than fifteen percent of the adult population.

The reason this is possible, however, is because—as a rule; there are always exceptions—those people who do read books typically read a lot of them. Go into any household in the Unites States, and with a few exceptions you will always discover the same thing:

There are either no books visible, beyond perhaps the Bible and one or two self-help books (diet books; “How to Get Rich in Ten Easy Steps;” etc, etc) or there is at least one full bookcase.

Those people who assume that the storage advantage of e-books will be enough in itself to cause that technology to soon dominate the market, should really ponder the implications. Because the reality is that paper books are not and never have been simply a tool to read text. A paper book is a cultural artifact whose intellectual, emotional, social—even symbolic—important is deeply rooted in every literate culture in the world.

There’s a reason, y’know, it’s called the Holy Book.

Try to imagine a world whose regular readers will cheerfully give up bookcases full of books.

Go ahead. Try.

Not so easy, is it?

And for what? Ease of storage?

Oh, what a laugh. I do not know one single person who reads regularly who has not, at least once in their lives, gone to well-nigh incredible lengths to figure out a way to store their books. Be it ingenious locations for bookshelves, stashing them in the basement or attic or garage, whatever. With a few exceptions, it’s only with great reluctance that such people finally decide to give away or sell some of their books. (Except the ones they don’t like, of course. But not even the most rabid enthusiast for e-book readers thinks people will buy the gadgets to store books they don’t want to begin with.)

What other real advantages do e-books have over paper books?

For most people . . . none worth talking about.

I stress “for most people,” because there are obviously exceptions—and a fair number of them. The single most important group, for whom electronic reading is definitely superior to paper reading, are those people who suffer one or another physical handicap that makes reading paper books difficult. The most common example are people who are blind or have a severe visual impairment. For them, the advent of electronic reading has been a genuine blessing.

But—yes, I know this is cold-blooded—those people are and always have been a small share of the market.

Beyond that, there are some people for whom the various bells and whistles really matter. I know one regular reader who swears to me—and I believe him—that he actually prefers to read electronic text. But people like that are few and far between.

And that won’t change much, or quickly, because the advantages they point to are simply marginal for most readers.

I can easily bookmark a page electronically!

Uh, yeah . . . and I’ve been doing that with a bookmark or a pencil—or, usually, just a scrap of paper I find somewhere—for half a century. So have and do most people. It’s honestly not the labors of Hercules that’s being saved here. For this, I should spring the money to buy an e-book reader and put myself at the mercy of e-book manufacturers and software developers?

With a backlit screen, I can read in the dark!

Uh, yeah . . . and how many people, except kids staying up past their bedtime and surreptitiously reading under the blankets with a flashlight, really need that particular advantage? Mind you, I hold those youngsters in very high esteem—having been one myself, at times past—but the cold-blooded fact remains that they’re a tiny percentage of the market. The reason they have curfews to violate in the first place is because they are too young to have much in the way of a disposable income.

I can easily search for text!

This is true—and, as I will examine in a later essay, it’s the reason that many people (including me) like to also possess an electronically formatted version of a book. There are times when being able to search for text is indeed handy.

But being able to search for text is a fairly trivial advantage to e-books, all things considered, especially when you factor into the equation a basic reality: By far the two largest sectors of the publishing market are fiction and popular non-fiction. (The latter category includes things like practical manuals—cookbooks, the Idiot’s Guide to everything including idiocy—any and all manner of self-help books, popular biographies and histories, true crime stories, etc.)

Look, let’s be realistic. I dote on Louis L’Amour westerns. I dote on any number of science fiction and fantasy authors. I dote on a smaller but still significant number of mystery authors.

I have read every single Nero Wolfe novel that Rex Stout ever wrote. But the number of times I have even vaguely pondered the advantage of being able to search the text of those novels is . . .

Exactly zero. Same with Louis L’Amour. Same with Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke or Ursula Le Guin.

Granted, I also read a lot of history books, and being able to search for something specific is indeed very handy for someone like me, who needs to use history books professionally. That’s why most history books have something called “indexes.” No, the indexes are not perfect. Yes, sometimes—not always—being able to search for something electronically would be easier.

But . . . but . . .

Only someone whose enthusiasm for electronic publishing borders on sheer solipsism can honestly think that the advantage of being able to do a somewhat quicker search of text for that relatively small percentage of books he or she would want to search in the first place, is enough by itself to cause an ancient and solidly rooted technology like paper publishing to collapse like a deck of cards.

Or that being able to read in the dark would do it, or that being able to bookmark electronically instead of by using a physical device, or that . . .

I could go on, but I’d just be belaboring the point. It’s a simple fact—and no technology foreseen will change this fact, either—that the only QUALITATIVE advantage of ebook reading over book reading is storage for most people, and the ability to get around (better, at least) one or another physical handicap for people who suffer from them.

Thazzit. The rest, being blunt, is just bells and whistles. And no technology in the history of the world has ever supplanted a pre-existing technology simply because it offered some bells and whistles. Certainly not a technology as deeply-ingrained into a society’s culture as paper books.

I can visualize in my mind a number of people reading this essay who, by now, are hopping up and down—figuratively, anyway—and deeply indignant because I’m gliding right over all of the subtleties and complexities involved in this issue.

No, I’m not—but I’ll deal with the subtleties and complexities in later columns. Right now, it’s time for the ax and the bludgeon. I do not for one moment think that electronic reading won’t become increasingly important. Of course it will. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be the editor of this electronic magazine and the publisher of another. (That being the Grantville Gazette, a specialty magazine devoted to my 1632 series.) But, for the moment, what needs to be established is a level-headed sense of what the future holds.

Growth, yes. Expanding significance, certainly. But a new technology that is on the verge of inundating traditional paper publishing?

Oh, hogwash.

And my opinion has the great benefit of being supported—year after year after year—by the facts.

People have been predicting, year after year after year, that “very soon now” electronic reading will take off like a rocket and become to be the dominant form of reading.

And, year after year after year, they are always proven wrong. They remind me of certain religious enthusiasts who keep predicting the end of the world or the return of the messiah “very soon now.” Who are always wrong, year after year after year—but still retain their blind faith.

And that’s what it is. Blind faith. There is no rational reason to believe that e-books and electronic reading will have an explosive growth in the foreseeable future. (Again, outside of some specialty areas.)

The reason I’ve spent time on this is because it’s not simply an interesting intellectual debate. Underlying this issue of how rapidly and to what extent electronic reading will grow is a different issue, and one that has much darker overtones.

With very few exceptions—there are some, but not many—people who insist that electronic reading is about to undergo an explosive growth are also alarmists concerning what that will mean for publishers and authors. They are also people who advocate or at least look sympathetically upon “tough” anti-piracy measures. They are also people who predict that authors will soon be faced with enormous financial pain and challenges because of the advent of electronic reading.

The logic is not hard to grasp. Stripped to its essentials, it goes as follows:

Because traditional paper publishing is on the verge of joining the dodo and the passenger pigeon, rigorous and extensive measures must be put in place very quickly or disaster will befall us.

Right. This is, at best, a recipe for error. It is—at best—guaranteed to produce a lot of half-baked and poorly-thought-through policies and laws. More often than not, it is also a recipe for undermining basic political and civil liberties.

The reality is quite otherwise. Yes, electronic publishing is growing and will continue to grow—not simply in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the publishing market as a whole. But, except for a few areas, the growth is incremental. And—I put a stress here, because I will devote a whole column to this aspect of the problem—the form is predominantly takes is NOT—not not not—that of electronic publishing replacing paper publishing. The principal form it takes is that electronic publishing is increasingly supplementing paper publishing.

The point being, we’ve got plenty of time. Plenty of time to experiment with different measures, and try out a multitude of ways by which publishers and authors can not only withstand the pressure of electronic publishing but actually benefit from it.

What we don’t need is panic. What we don’t need are policies, laws and practices that undermine the long-established traditions, laws and customs surrounding copyright.

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