Following up on my earlier post suggesting that publishers include a free copy of an ebook with a sale of a print book, here’s a piece from Publishers Weekly reviewing some of the pros and cons of book bundling as well as a response from a publisher. Both pieces quote Bloomsbury USA sales exec Evan Schnittman, who argues that an e/print bundle could be sold for a higher price than a print book alone. I don’t see that approach making much of a dent in the marketplace (who wants to pay more for a book at this point?); in fact, it might well backfire (by making readers even more sensitive to the price premium of printed books, particularly hard covers, in comparison to ebooks). For bundling to make a strategic difference to publishers, the ebook would need to be a freebie, for the reasons I outlined earlier.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not “to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie.” In one chapter he predicted the creation of a high-speed worldwide communications network (he thought it would be satellite-based) and discussed some of its probable consequences. The physical mail system, he wrote, would be replaced by “an orbital post office,” which “will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future.” The new system will “of course” raise “problems of privacy,” though these “might be solved by robot handling at all stages of the operation.”

The revolution in communication won’t be limited to correspondence, though: “Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling – the orbital newspaper.” News reports would come to be transmitted to video screens in homes. To get “your daily paper,” you’d need only “press the right button.” Moreover, each reader would be able to create a personalized bundle of stories: “We will select what we need, and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have little more than the name in common with the newspaper of today.”

“Nor will the matter end here,” Clarke continued. “Over the same circuits we will be able to conjure up, from central libraries and information banks, copies of any document we desire … Even books may one day be ‘distributed’ in this manner, though their format will have to be changed drastically to make this possible.”

The technology would transform the publishing industry, Clarke warned. “All publishers would do well to contemplate these really staggering prospects. Most affected will be newspapers and pocket-books; practically untouched by the coming revolution will be art volumes and quality magazines, which involve not only fine printing but elaborate manufacturing processes. The dailies may well tremble; the glossy monthlies have little to fear.”

He ended on a jauntily apocalyptic note: “How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilization’s doorstep. It may grow up to be as big a problem child as the one born amid the clicking of Geiger counters beneath the Chicago University squash court, back in 1942.”

After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that “typographical fixity” – to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein’s term – can manifest itself in a book. I’ve been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability – not all of which are typographical in nature – that influence the permanence of a book (or other written work) and that change, sometimes radically, as we shift from print publishing to electronic publishing. I’m sure this isn’t a complete list, but I hope it’s a useful start:

Integrity of the page. At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you’re able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn’t create this type of fixity – it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet – but it did extend it into the modern age. (It’s true that a person armed with an X-acto knife, an eraser, a jar of Wite-Out, and a Sharpie can undermine a page’s fixity, but I’d argue that that’s an exception that proves the rule – and, importantly, the fact that a printed page has been messed with tends to be pretty obvious to the reader.) The integrity of the page has been so intrinsic to the technology of the book (and the book’s predecessors) that most of us assume it to be intrinsic to the very idea of a book. But, as we’re now discovering, it’s not. Page integrity is not an inherent quality in ebooks, particularly when they’re stored on a networked device or in the cloud (as almost all of them are). Because an ebook’s words are composed of software and a page needs to be refreshed each time it’s viewed, the contents of a page can change from one viewing to the next. We can see this loss of integrity already, and on a broad scale, with Amazon’s Popular Highlights and Public Notes features for its Kindle books. If a reader turns on these functions, highlights and notes will be added to a book’s pages automatically, and remotely. The contents of a page can change from one refresh to the next. Technologically, it’s just as easy to change the words on a page as to add notes or highlights.

The introduction of page malleability to the book will have good consequences and bad ones (and in some cases, one person will see a particular consequence as good while another will see it as bad), but however the consequences play out, the loss of page fixity looks like a revolutionary change to our conception of and assumptions about a book.

Integrity of the edition. A second level of fixity – one introduced with the printing press – was the fixity of content across a large edition of a book. This kind of fixity was impossible with the scribal book, when copies were produced one at a time. There has been a great deal of debate, in book history circles, about how quickly books became consistent across editions – printing remained a manual, artisanal craft, with considerable variability, until it was industrialized early in the 19th century – but there’s no doubt that ultimately the printing press introduced far greater standardization across large press runs than had been possible with handwritten books. (The emergence of copyright laws in the 18th century also increased the fixity of a book’s contents by imposing more constraints on who was able to print a book.) This fixity never extended to different editions of the same work, which could include large and small variations – either deliberate revisions or errors. Nevertheless, fixity within editions, often very large editions of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of copies, became a basic characteristic of publishing. If I go out to my local bookstore and buy a copy of John Grisham’s new novel today, and somebody a thousand miles away goes out to their bookstore and buys the same book tomorrow, and somebody else orders a physical copy of the book from Amazon, we can all be reasonably certain that we’ll be reading the same book. (There is the occasional weird exception, but again it only serves to prove the general rule.)

The integrity of an edition, an inherent quality of modern printing technology, is not an inherent quality of the technology of the ebook. Ebooks have no print runs, and the very idea of an “edition” gets fuzzy with an ebook. A publisher, or a self-published writer, is free to change the source file of a ebook at pretty much any time, and there’s no requirement that readers be alerted to the change. Indeed, the self-publishing software offered by Amazon and other companies make such changes a snap. There’s no assurance that the copy of a book I download (or read online) today will match the copy of the same book that someone else downloads tomorrow. Again, this flexibility may have a mix of good and bad consequences, but it substantially changes our assumptions about a book’s stability.

Permanence of the object. Printed books don’t last forever, but, with a modicum of care, they can last a very long time. And as long as a book lasts, it remains readable (assuming the reader knows the language). Because an ebook is not susceptible to the kind of physical decay that can afflict a paper book, it theoretically can last longer. But in this case there is a vast gulf between theory and reality. What we know about computer documents is that, due to rapid changes in computer operating systems, computer media, software applications, and file formats, they don’t tend to have much longevity. I have a box of floppy disks from fifteen or twenty years ago sitting in a closet, and even if I still had a floppy drive (which I don’t) my current computers would be unable to read most of the files on the disks. As software, ebooks will likely suffer from this same impermanence, a problem magnified by the wide range of proprietary and open formats in which ebooks are sold today. A printed book is a printed book is a printed book. An ebook is not an ebook is not an ebook. The good news is that, if we make smart technological choices, we can alleviate this problem in the future. The bad news is that, if history is a guide, we probably won’t make smart choices.

Sense of completeness. Fixity and permanence matter not only as real qualities of technologies and objects, but also as perceived qualities. As the printing and publishing trades matured over the last half millennium, the publication of a book went from being a vague, ongoing process to an event – a date on a publishing calendar – and, in turn, the sense of a book as a final, finished creation strengthened, particularly in the mind of an author but also in the minds of editors, proofreaders, and book designers. This sense of finality, of completeness, was, I believe, essential to the emergence of literary culture in its current form. That doesn’t mean that a particular author might not revise a book for subsequent editions – if you write a “Song of Myself,” you will probably want it to change as you change – but it does mean that each edition was a thing in itself – at best, a work of art aimed at posterity as well as the present day.

Because it lacks the necessity and the fixity of a print run, e-publishing once again can become an ongoing process rather than an event, which is likely to change the perceptions of writers and their collaborators. And when you change your perception of what you’re creating, you will also change how you create it. I think it’s fair to say that these kinds of shifts are subtle and play out over a long time, but in some ways the erosion of the sense of a written work’s completeness and self-containment may ultimately change literature as much as the underlying technological changes.

So there you have four facets of a book’s fixity or stability that are shaped by the prevailing technologies of creation, production, distribution, and reading. The permanence of a book is not just a function of technology, of course. Many other factors – laws, commercial interests, reader preferences and habits – also exert an important influence. But technology matters, and it seems likely that we’ll be celebrating, and rueing, the consequences of today’s epochal shift from printing to electronic publishing for centuries to come.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company’s IPO filing. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Hosanna!

One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people’s pasts – I mean, their timelines – and see what they were doing and thinking way back when. And when you scroll Zuckerberg’s timeline back to Facebook’s formative days, you do indeed see a young man filled with philanthropic fervor, a man without worldly desires who is putting his heart and his soul into a grand social mission.

Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the “hottest.” It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their looks. It’s hard to imagine a more altruistic project. What Zuckerberg had already realized is that, in order to create seamless online connections between people, you have to first turn them into objects.

And then the fledgling humanitarian really spread his wings. He agreed to write the code for a dating site being planned by some classmates even as he was clandestinely pursuing his own plan for a similar social-networking site, then called The Facebook. He struggled mightily with the ethical dilemma raised by this apparent conflict of interest, at one point pouring his heart out in an instant-message exchange with a high school friend named Adam D’Angelo:

Zuckerberg: So you know how I’m making that dating site

Zuckerberg: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing

Zuckerberg: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time

Zuckerberg: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done.

D’Angelo: haha …

Zuckerberg: Like I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating

Zuckerberg: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.

Zuckerberg: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.

Zuckerberg: I wonder what the ideal solution is.

Zuckerberg: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.

Zuckerberg: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win …

Zuckerberg: I also hate the fact that I’m doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I’m supposed to have their thing ready and then be like “look yours isn’t as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.” Or do you think that’s too dick?

D’Angelo: I think you should just ditch them

Zuckerberg: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil so he’s rich lol.

D’Angelo: lol

When you’re deeply engaged in pursuing a social mission, and not at all concerned about any sort of crass business interests, you naturally obsess about ways to “fuck over” your competitors so you can get to market first, pour investors’ money into “advertising and stuff,” and “win.” It’s a simple fact: When you’re guided by high social ideals, you can never be “too dick.”

haha

The wisdom of Pudge Fisk, channeled through Jon Udell:

Somewhere in the 2000s, [Roger] Angell asked [Carlton] Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs? No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most-watched clips. You might think that Carlton Fisk has seen that clip a million times. But in fact, he told Roger Angell, he never watches it. That’s because he doesn’t want to overwrite the original memory, which is his alone, recorded from a point of view that was his alone, with a memory we all share that was recorded by a camera up in the stands.

I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I’m no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl – warmer, more nuanced, less shrill – and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I’ve rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.

But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn’t aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that lets you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I’m near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I’m not, I fire up the MP3s.

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right – in tune with the universe, somehow.

There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand – so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

So why give away the bits? Well, traditional book publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers’ arch-frenemy. Bundling bits with atoms helps on all three fronts. First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book. When it comes to paperbacks, in particular, a customer essentially gets the physical and electronic copies for the price they’d pay for an electronic copy alone. That changes the buying equation. Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon. Suddenly, they have a strong new sales pitch. Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn’t handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive, particularly for anyone buying their first e-reader. (Why buy one that’s not going to accept those free ebooks you’re going to get when you decide you want a print edition?) Either Amazon stands firm with its proprietary format, or it retools the Kindle as a general purpose reader that can handle ePub. If it chooses the former course, it loses e-reader market share. If it takes the latter course, it weakens its grip on sales of ebooks and weakens the rationale for subsidizing Kindle purchases. There’s also one other potential benefit for publishers, which could be very important in the long run: By setting up their own site where customers download free ebooks, they open a direct relationship with book readers, something they’ve never really had before.

I’d like to say my plan is a no-brainer, but it’s not. I can see at least three obstacles, and there are probably more. On the commercial side, you’re going to have some cannibalization. There are probably households today who, to get the best of both worlds, buy a book in both print and electronic versions. Give away the ebook, and you sacrifice those ebook sales. I have to believe, though, that that’s not going to amount to that many copies, and if you’re talking about your long-run survival those duplicate sales are trivial. Also on the commercial side is the question of how this would affect Barnes & Noble, the struggling behemoth of physical bookstores which also, with the Nook, is Amazon’s top competitor in the e-reader market. I’m sure there would be both benefits and costs for B&N, but since I don’t know the details of the company’s finances I don’t know what the net effect would be. Still, if you’re losing as much money as B&N is, business-as-usual is not exactly an attractive strategy.

There’s also the technical challenge involved in actually distributing the free ebooks. Vinyl records are sold sealed in plastic. The only way to get the code for the free e-copy (other than engaging in vandalism in a retail store) is to buy the album, crack the seal, and fish out the code. The books on bookstore shelves aren’t sealed in plastic, so how do you prevent creeps from writing down the code in a store and then going home and filching the e-book from your server? I don’t know the answer to that question – I’m thinking maybe you print a code on the sales receipt – but I have to think there’s a geek somewhere who could come up with a boffo solution. Some publishers are already experimenting with physical/digital bundles, including ones that include an ebook download for free, so there are clearly already some test cases to learn from. The good news is that book buyers, as a group, probably aren’t the most criminally minded segment of the population.

Will giving away ebooks secure the future of the printed book, save the corner bookstore, and let publishers go back to enjoying three-martini lunches? No. But I think it would help, and at the very least it would annoy Amazon. When you’re on the receiving end of Massive Disruption, it’s not a bad idea to foment a little disruption yourself.

POSTSCRIPTIVE QUESTION: In that article I link to above, Bosman writes that “sales of older books — the so-called backlist, which has traditionally accounted for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the average big publisher’s sales — would suffer terribly [if physical bookstores disappear].” I had assumed, following Long Tail logic, that online bookstores, which can “stock” far more backlist books than even the largest physical bookstore, would spur more backlist sales than physical stores. I guess I was wrong. Can anybody with inside knowledge of the book trade confirm the truth of what Bosman wrote? And if it is true, what does that say about the power of the Long Tail effect?

Seth Finkelstein, a long-time crusader against online censorship, made what seemed like a jaundiced comment on my recent post Piracy and Privacy. I had raised the possibility that online activists, fresh from their SOPA fight, might now come to the support of efforts to give people more control over the personal information that companies collect and trade online. Will the activists rise up again? I wondered. To which Finkelstein replied:

No. Or maybe, they will rise up AGAINST privacy, because they will be fed a line that this is going to Censor The Net.

Turns out Finkelstein wasn’t being jaundiced. He was being prescient. Shortly after he made his comment, a Harvard Law School blog posted a lathery rant, under the judicious title “More Crap from the E.U.,” by Jane Yakowitz, a professor at the Brooklyn Law School. Yakowitz blasted the European Commission’s new proposal to strengthen online privacy protections. Europe, she wrote, has been “flailing around” with internet regulation. It has enacted “miserable” policies. The EC’s reasoning is “complete and utter hogwash.” Its actions are “regressive.” Its proposed new directive represents “a misguided attack on the information economy.” Goodness. I think Professor Yakowitz must have eaten a bad mussel in Brussels once.

Having ventilated, Yakowitz went on to make her own proposal: “Google and other major Internet companies might want to start coordinating a protest similar to the effective campaign we saw here in the states in response to SOPA. If Google makes every person with the first name ‘John’ ungoogleable for a day, and if online retailers refuse to access cookie data for a day, and if content providers double the amount of advertising for a day, pressure can build before the Directive comes to a vote.” Observes the Register’s Andrew Orlowski: “Not only is this a little presumptuous – she must think Google can turn the fury of the crowd on and off like a tap – she either forgets (or doesn’t know) why people are concerned about privacy in the first place.”

When you get past Yakowitz’s bombast, it’s not all that clear how solid her objections to the E.C.’s proposal really are, or why she would impugn the E.C.’s motives. Her main gripe is that the proposed “right to be forgotten” is too broad, and would require social networks like Facebook to track down a member’s postings and pictures across the Net should that person have a change of heart and ask for the stuff to be deleted. No doubt, wiping the internet slate clean would be extraordinarily difficult as a practical matter – and, more generally, it seems unwise to offer adults a blanket protection from the consequences of their own choices, foolish or otherwise, in posting stuff publicly. But it’s not clear that the proposed directive is so sweeping. It provides for several exceptions to the right to be forgotten, and its main focus is on personal data collected by companies rather than on the information that comes through the public speech of individuals. Moreover, as Ars Technica’s Peter Bright notes, the new rules build on data-management requirements that are already in place. The proposed directive “is not a fundamental shift in the demands placed on data-holding organizations. They must already be able to identify personal data, they must already store it securely, and they must already be able to provide it on-demand. Doing these things requires that systems are designed appropriately, and this can certainly incur costs—but they are costs that should already exist today.”

The Economist’s Babbage blog makes the sensible point that, even if the EC proposal has “rough edges” that need to be ironed out, providing for a right to be forgotten is nonetheless a salutary – and overdue – goal:

Unlike biological memory, … the digitally augmented sort can be tapped by others leaving the rememberer none the wiser. Search companies routinely store users’ queries. Social networks record interactions between people. Ad clicks are logged. Cookies track individuals’ paths through the online wilderness. As a consequence, online data-mongers have unprecendented access to what are, in effect, the thoughts of hundreds of millions of consumers and citizens. They know more about people than people do about themselves. You will have trouble recalling your online searches from a few months back; Google won’t.

This can, of course, be a boon to individuals. It lets them avoid continuous online-form filling or barrages of irrelevant ads, which are replaced by those tailored to their tastes. All this saves precious time and makes for a more seamless and pleasant online experience. And indeed, some people may decide that they value convenience over confidentiality. But in a liberal society those who plump for privacy have every right to expect others, including data handlers, to respect their choice … Having figured out how to remember nearly everything, it is about time people relearned how to forget.

Yakowitz seems to think that companies’ desire to manipulate personal data should outweigh the desire of people to control the data. It’s true that if people choose to withhold their data, or limit the way it’s shared or processed, there will be some useful services that companies will not be able to provide to those people. And a broad movement to withhold data would mean that some useful research that draws on large online data sets would not be possible. But that simply puts the onus on companies, and other organizations, to prove to people that, first, the benefits of allowing them to use their personal data will outweigh the costs and risks, and, second, that they can be trusted to use the information wisely and securely, and not in exploitative ways. The ultimate goal of attempts to strengthen and rationalize privacy controls is not to lock data away; it’s to ensure that data is used in a way that strikes the right balance among commercial benefits, economic benefits, social benefits, and personal well-being. To characterize that as a miserable, regressive attack on the information economy is to peddle FUD.

UPDATE: The FUD deepens, as Google’s chief lawyer warns that the EC proposal could “break the internet.” As the FT’s John Gapper notes, that was “the slogan used by web companies to defeat anti-piracy legislation in the US.”