A non-blogging, non-twittering, meatspace friend asked me for my thoughts on the parallels between music and books in the digital age.
This is a part of my response to him:
On the one hand, it is somewhat misleading to discuss parallels between the music industry and the publishing industry, because such a discussion, by ignoring the fact that the music publishing industry is part of the publishing industry, blunts a rather dangerous edge. These discussions tend to end up asking “How can we keep the fox out?” when the fox is already in the hen house. What the book publishing industry should be asking is “How can we keep him from eating our hens?”
On the other hand, there are some valid comparisons being drawn, although what they mean and to whom is open to interpretation. There are two points that concern me, as an independent author.
The first one is the odd fact, insulting but otherwise harmless, that bands or musicians who are using current technologies to produce, record, and release their music are proud, free, and “indie” while an author who does the same thing is deluded and arrogant, and may be criminally insane.
The second issue is that the accepted way to “combat” piracy in the music industry is to simply assume it is going to happen, and to try to make money, anyway. We are constantly told that DRM won’t work, at all, in any way, because “people want to be able to read the book/listen to the music they just bought in any way, on any machine, any time, anywhere.” You can’t fight piracy, the argument goes. You have to try to undercut them. Most people will pay a tiny amount for legal music, rather than take the illegal route, but they won’t pay a real price, so just sell your tracks for 99 cents each. The money you lose on sales you can make up on concert tickets and tee shirts.
This carries over into the publishing world as what has become an increasingly common mantra: “Piracy is not the biggest problem you face, obscurity is.” We are told to give our work away, in order to become known and attract readers. We’re told that piracy is just another form of marketing. We’re told that DRM will never work, in any form, in any way, and that it is absolutely vital to let our e-books go out without it.
Well, novelists can’t make much money on concert tickets and tee shirts. The solid existence of a stack-of-paper book is a form of DRM. You buy one book, and you have one book. If you want one for every car, one for every bathroom, one for the living room, and one for the office, you buy more than one. If you give one to a friend, you have given it away. If you loan one to a friend, you have to wait until it gets returned in order to finish reading it. This is the way fiction will have to work.
If a real, workable, usable, unobtrusive but powerful system of DRM can be created and adopted, then well-written, quality fiction will survive into the digital age. If it cannot, then fiction as we know it is dead. If I can’t make a living as a writer, if I can’t devote the time and energy to it that it needs, then I will simply stop writing, and so will every other writer worth reading. Without the most basic protections that intellectual property needs in order to thrive, fiction cannot be a paying profession. It will become just another hobby.
Go to any one of the dozens of online writers’ communities that exist on the web. Spend some time poking through the archives there. The 95% that Sturgeon’s Law calls “crud” will be what survives, while the 5%, the part that took skills and talents and nurturing, will disappear. This is the future of fiction.
This is herd-sourced fiction.
I have to disagree with the notion that DRM-free fiction will kill the industry. It can’t, at least not for a good while. As you pointed out, a book in physical format is a form of DRM in itself, and people will still pay for that. The advent of ebook readers has only made a small dent in the market. People still want pieces of paper bound together inside a cover. Music is very different, in that the medium is totally irrelevant to enjoying the content. Whether it’s on an LP, a tape, an 8-track, a CD, or a hard drive, people just want to experience it. That’s what makes music uniquely prone to copying: you can copy it so many different ways and get more or less the same experience.
With books, the vast majority of people still want it in a physical form. Very few people will download an illegal copy, then print it out. The cost of printing for the home user has come down, but not enough to make that sort of activity practical.
If you think strong DRM is necessary to save the fiction industry, then it is already dead. DRM doesn’t work–period. It never has, and it never will. The nature of open hardware and software platforms precludes it. If you can see the words with your eyes, there will be software that can extract them. In that sense, books are absolutely as vulnerable as music and movies.
Any form of DRM will work for a short time, but it is quite contingent on the medium and the nature of the content. Books just aren’t that big–a few megabytes at the most. If you encrypt it, the key to decrypt it has to be stored somewhere, and it will be found by those with enough determination. Some companies keep the keys on their servers so that the end user never has access to them. The result? Cases like this: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/08/ebook-drm-provider-g.html
So, if I can say nothing else for DRM, the fact that it is generally so onerous to the customer should help ensure the survival of dead-tree books. But DRM itself is an arms race, and those who create and utilize it must strike a balance between usability and difficulty of circumvention. Problem is, those two are almost always at odds. The more usable and accessible it is, the easier it is to crack. The opposite is also true.
.-= gorzek´s last blog ..The Journeyman #0 =-.
I have a lock on my front door. It’s a fairly simple device. It came from the local branch of a big national hardware chain, and I have no doubt it would be laughed at by any professional crook. But if I thought a professional crook would want into my house, I’d get a different lock. The lock isn’t to keep the pros out, it’s to keep the amateurs out.
It’s somewhat irrelevant to say that DRM doesn’t work, and then use the simple fact that it CAN be cracked to demonstrate that it WILL be. Since the dawn of written language, theft of intellectual property has been possible, but when you had to have a room full of monks to pirate a book, it wasn’t something amateurs were going to do much of.
I see it as a simple matter of economics. That which the consumer will not pay for will not be produced. When a book is a file that can be freely copied, installed on unlimited machines and devices, passed on to friends without losing the original, and replicated virally, readers will simply lose the incentive to pay for fiction. Why should they, if they can get it free? People still pay for books only because that’s the way fiction comes to them. When (not if, but when) the majority of fiction is in digital form, then the lack of DRM will mean the lack of scarcity. Every reader of Dan Brown’s seventeenth novel will become a publisher for all of his or her friends. How, then, will Dan get paid?
We don’t need DRM that keeps the wholesale pirates from operating, any more than we all need locks on our doors that will keep out Stéphane Breitwieser. We have other ways to deal with professional crooks, and we have other ways to deal with professional piracy.
All we need is something that will ensure authors can continue to be paid for the time and energy they put into fiction.
Levi