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.”

In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading:

[David Shields’s] Reality Hunger and [Masha Tupitsyn’s] Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.

Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it portends, in two nicely circuitous longforms: Longform #1 and Longform #2.

Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms of intellectual property. The activists were joined in the cause by many large internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The motivations of the corporations and the activists overlapped to some degree, but there were also important differences. The activists were fighting for the cause of freedom; they worried that the bill would impede the flow of information online, to the detriment of people using the net. The corporations had business interests to protect. They feared a wave of litigation and other operational and legal headaches, as well as the possible rise of obstacles to the development of new products and services.

It will be interesting to watch how internet activists will deploy their considerable power in the future, and it will be particularly interesting to watch how much muscle they’ll flex when their opponents on an issue are the same corporations that joined them in the fight against SOPA. We may actually get a good idea of how the “internet spring” will progress very soon – tomorrow, in fact. That’s when, according to reports, the European Commission will unveil a sweeping proposal to defend people’s right and ability to control the personal information that’s collected about them online by internet businesses, advertising syndicates, and media companies. The proposed law, which if approved would take the place of the current hodgepodge of national privacy regulations throughout the EU, would, according to the BBC, require that companies obtain people’s consent before collecting information about them, notify people when they collect data on them and explain how the data will be used and stored, allow people to easily review the data held about them, and allow people to transfer personal data from one company to another. The law also includes what’s being called a “right to be forgotten,” which means that companies would have to delete personal information they store when people request it. Companies would also have to divulge any breaches or losses of personal data within 24 hours.

Data-hungry companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have yet to weigh in on the proposal, but if history is a guide they are likely to oppose it. Their opposition will be motivated by some of the same business concerns they had about SOPA: the threat of litigation and operational headaches, and the restriction of some types of innovation, in this case ones that require the unfettered use and exchange of personal data for commercial gain. No doubt, they’ll also whine about how difficult it will be, technically, to obey the law. These are companies that can build a car that can drive itself, but making data collection transparent and giving people tools to control it – well, gee, that’s really hard.

Internet executives like Mark Zuckerberg like to argue that “privacy” is an outdated concern. But when people talk about privacy, what they’re really talking about is freedom: the freedom to be in charge of their own information. Guaranteeing the freedom of information online entails not only questions of flow but also questions of control. Frankly, it sometimes seems like Silicon Valley is more interested in the freedom of data than in the freedom of people.

So will internet activists rise up again, this time to protect people’s freedom to control their information online? If Facebook and Twitter don’t get behind individual rights in this case, will activists organize boycotts of their services as they boycotted those of companies that supported SOPA? Will the Google employees who spoke out eloquently against SOPA on their personal blogs and through social network accounts speak out with equal eloquence in support of the protection of personal privacy? Will Wikipedia go dark for another day? When it comes to shaping the future of the Net, fights about privacy are at least as important as fights about piracy.

“Before the printing press,” writes Lawrence Summers in the Times’s Education Life section today, “scholars had to memorize ‘The Canterbury Tales’ to have continuing access to them.” That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came along, and people were writing stuff down – on scrolls, tablets, blocks of wood – long before the book was created. In the 100 or so years between the writing of Chaucer’s masterpiece and the establishment of a printing trade in England, handwritten copies of “The Canterbury Tales” were fairly abundant, particularly for those who would qualify as scholars. It was one of the most popular books of the time. If you wanted “access” to the work, you didn’t have to pull Chaucer’s lines from your memory; you could read them from pages that looked like this:

Maybe Summers was confusing Chaucer with Homer, and the printing press with the alphabet.

Anyway, Summers’ historical howler comes, amusingly, in the service of an argument that students don’t need to learn stuff anymore: “in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.” I’ll leave aside the question of why Summers didn’t whip out his iPhone and google “Canterbury Tales” or “printing press” or “codex” while writing his article. But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts – that we can know without knowing – really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.