Last night in the midst of a debate over the value of women’s bodies in modern art, I realized that the debate surrounding digital publishing has isolated itself from discourse that we could trace back for centuries.
I’m not versed in that discourse enough to write all that could be said on the subject. But I have thought enough to riff on it a little, and since this is a blog, that’s exactly what I’ll do.
This debate touched upon the subject of buying a piece of art for your home. One person argued that this is art as object, and another argued that this is living with art, it is an ongoing event. The same argument can be, and has been, made for books. My colleague Bob Stein suggests that the book has a future in two divisions, as art object and as event.
Too frequently we declare the debate about “the future of book publishing.” As though the Kindle is the book, and the book is the scroll. It’s possible that technology could put books out of business, but we don’t have enough evidence of that to merit a well-researched response to this claim.
The main problem with our debate about digital publishing is that we’ve failed to differentiate between books as object and as experience.
The way you approach a piece in an art museum is different than the way you approach one in your own apartment. No one argues that museums will put artists out of business. You don’t buy a piece of art and say you’ll never need to go to a museum again. The difference here is between ownership of art and access to art.
I love reading digital text; what I especially value about it is that I don’t print it out and keep it in a file cabinet in my room. Instead, I use a search engine within my newsfeed or a larger space like Google to find articles if I need them after I’ve read them. There is an incredible archive already available for free, but if someone had asked me ten years ago to pay for that access, I would have done it.
Is the question of marketing access different now? Yes. I still won’t buy the kind of coffee we had in the college dining hall now that I’m in the real world; its market value (at least in my mind) has decreased since I had access to an unlimited supply for four years. This is a strange sense of entitlement that I’m not especially proud of. But it’s an anecdote to explain that the transition from providing free content back to subscription content is not going to be easy for some companies. The New York Times, for example, is a publication I would pay to subscribe to, but I will pay it because I value its content and I am worried about the future of that content; I also want it to continue to be a part of my daily life. (Because I think comments on this blog are valuable, I’d love to hear whether you would subscribe if the Times changed its access policy. What else are you accustomed to reading online that you would pay for?)
On the other hand, no one questions the market value of a well-produced book. We desire them, there is a business built around them, and the book is a perfect technology. It’s user-driven, it’s light, it’s flexible. Pages turn backward and forward and can be dog-eared. A book lasts at least until your apartment is struck by water damage, and it’s generally reasonably priced. If you have deckled pages or an especially nice cover, that helps, too.
We might retain information better if we read it on paper; we may also feel more inclined to finish books if they are sitting in our laps. We may be more likely to investigate related material to online reading; we may also feel more compelled to respond to it using blogs/email/free social networking tools. We may be more likely to share a book if it’s in print or if it’s online – I suppose it depends on the text. We speak too frequently of digital books “replacing” print ones, and my assertion at the moment is that they’re separate and compatible things. This may change in the future, and we’ll debate that as we move forward.
The problem with marketing electronic books is that people assume you’re marketing ownership. Instead, you’re marketing access. This is worth debating this week, since BoingBoing covered a reader whose access was suspended after he returned too many books to Amazon. No one shows up in your apartment and takes away your library when you forget to return your library books, or if you go underground or to a remote location that doesn’t have good reception.
I get frustrated, and I know other literary bloggers do too (even if it’s for April Fools’ Day), when people respond to questions about the experience of books with statements about books as objects. A museum can throw you out if you don’t abide by its rules. A company can suspend your access to books on a Kindle even if you’ve bought them and think you “own” them. Access can make consumers uneasy. It also, as I mentioned above, eliminates the clutter in your physical life – and this is perhaps the main advantage of access over ownership. I don’t know that providers of content realized this fully when they made the decision to allow, let’s say, free online access to their newspapers.
On the other hand, newspapers and magazines use a different publishing model than books. They profit through ad sales – they can charge ad companies more when they gain a lot of readers. It’s in their best interest to gain readers by charging them little or nothing, so long as the ad revenue comes in.
What’s worth mentioning here, though we don’t have the time and space to debate it forever, is that as our economic climate changes, a free content model is less sustainable. Google’s doing layoffs, magazines and newspapers are folding, and book publishers are less likely to take risks on first books by literary authors when their corporations are having stock trouble. We may be at a point where we are required as consumers to put down money to keep certain writers and publications afloat. But it’s the intimacy of our individual reading that makes us feel obligated to a larger community of readers, and to the sources of excellent content, that will make us shell out to keep those writers and publishers around.
But I digress. There is a profound difference between buying a book for your shelf and buying one for a digital device. And I think the digital world needs to find an attractive, exciting way to exhibit content.
For the present time, we need to think about the value of access, and what weight it can carry in the market. If we want digital books to find a substantial place in the market, we need to figure out how to make access at least as important as ownership. It’s difficult to have a debate about digital publishing without debating dozens of other issues. But if we can begin to parse specific aspects of digital publishing, I think our conversations will be better for it.