Publishers Lose Their Shit After Authors Push Back on Their Attack on Libraries

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/03/publishers-lose-their-shit-after-authors-push-back-on-their-attack-on-libraries/

by jacooper • 4 years ago

91 40 4 years ago

g42gregory• 4 years ago

The Association of American Publishers put out a statement falsely claiming that the letter ... was actually “disinformation in the Internet Archive case.”

I think that The Association of American Publishers, together with other players, are in the process of re-defining the meaning of English word "disinformation". These days, the word "disinformation" basically means "something you disagree with" or "something you strongly dislike". I wonder if the online dictionaries would be catching up at some point.

RichardCNormos2• 4 years ago

Labeling something as "disinformation" or "misinformation" isn't an attempt to convince people it's not true, rather, it's an attempt to get tech companies to remove it, and to de-platform the people who post it. It's a bit like calling someone a witch in the 1600s. You only do it because you want someone burned at the stake.

To me, this is a signal that I should pay closer attention to something. Calling something "misinformation" is expressly saying that you want this information suppressed, which is more interesting than the information itself.

bb883• 4 years ago

Just only a year ago, many people believed that taking horse paste was more important than taking a vaccine -- which may or may not have had microchips embedded in it which the CIA could control. People would practically inject bleach rather than question their own belief system.

Participate in our collective objective reality -- or don't. But don't expect social media to spread your lies about the holocaust so you can preach the gospel of hate.

HillRat2• 4 years ago

Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial, so this was not exactly calculated to smooth over the troubled waters between authors and publishers.

ilamont• 4 years ago

There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold.

The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...)

As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists.

So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?

bawolff3• 4 years ago

The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...)

And that's a bad thing because?

i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.

elliekelly2• 4 years ago

I’ve seen several posts and comments claiming the DOJ made the “less than 12 copies” claim but I’ve yet to see any actual evidence the DOJ made that claim. The “source” linked to is always a tweet, or a comment on an article, or occasionally even to an article... that doesn’t even mention the DOJ made the claim in the first place.

Where does the DOJ make this assertion?

jawns2• 4 years ago

I am an author who supports libraries and Controlled Digital Lending, but I vehemently opposed the Internet Archive's uncontrolled digital lending stunt at the start of the pandemic.

The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law.

IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that.

I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work.

So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Lending out digital copies of your physical books - fine.

Working with other libraries to lend out digital copies for ALL their physical books - fine.

Crossing the line into supposedly "justifiable piracy because Covid" - not fine.

At least that's how I see it.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

It was an unpopular opinion at the time and probably still is, but I couldn't help but feel like IA was trying to push something by placing itself in danger during a crisis.

"Now that you need us more than ever, we're going to step in front of a train. Someone better stop it." Something like that. They had to know they were courting trouble, so we have to ask why they did it anyway.

bawolff3• 4 years ago

Idk, i think copyright law has totally broken down with the digital world and none of it makes sense.

Doctrine of first sale does rely on natural friction of physical items to work as a compromise.

To take the CDL thing further, i think the natural extension would be for all the people who own a copy of the book to get together and create a transparent lending market with a reserve of enough copies that all members of this lending co-op can still get a copy whenever they want (think how a fractional reserve bank works). I doubt copyright holders would like that very much.

But then again, my personal politics is copyright abolition...

zozbot234• 4 years ago

IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned.

They had the full support of other physical libraries, which could not loan out their collections at the time because of COVID. The overall amount of copies was never exceeded as you seem to be implying here. For all intents and purposes, the basic principles of CDL remained in effect.

pasquinelli2• 4 years ago

that's a wrinkle i didn't hear about at the time. it's amazing the crucial little details that get drowned out in "the discourse."

jawns2• 4 years ago

I am open to being convinced of this, but could you please provide a source?

As far as I know, the Emergency Library was a unilateral decision by IA, not a partnership with a consortium of shuttered libraries.

The announcement did mentioned receiving support from other libraries, but it didn't indicate that those libraries owned sufficient copies to cover all CDL usage.

Indeed, if that were the case, I would expect the language to have been very different -- something like "expanded access" versus "suspending all waitlists," the latter of which only makes sense if lending is unlimited and thus not CDL.

lxgr2• 4 years ago

The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned.

As far as I know, even "wear" of physical copies is simulated in this model: After 30-ish lendings, the digital copy "breaks", requiring the library to "buy" (really: license) a "fresh" one. (And for physical copies, reinforcing a book's binding seems to be prohibited as well, all to keep the number of acceptable lendings per copy predictably low!)

I get that it's effectively the only compromise many publishers and libraries have been able to achieve, but after taking a step back, it should hopefully become apparent that it's completely ridiculous.

Not even digital video streaming works that way – I find it scary to believe that publishers are being more complicated than the movie/TV industry! Count how many people are lending a given book and pay the authors accordingly, crunch some numbers about physical library lending and extrapolate from there, etc. There has to be a better way to still pay authors, but to isolate library patrons from this absurdity.

Here's hoping that this tacky skeuomorphism will age about as well as brushed metal.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

(And for physical copies, reinforcing a book's binding seems to be prohibited as well, all to keep the number of acceptable lendings per copy predictably low!)

This is awful! Where's the exact wording of this prohibition available at?

Mathnerd3142• 4 years ago

Per https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/04/major-publishers-sue-int..., the IA lawsuit is for CDL as a whole, not just the emergency lending.

CatWChainsaw• 4 years ago

I am a big fan of the cosmere built by Brandon Sanderson, and his achievement in pulling off the most popular Kickstarter to date, publishing four novels independent of the big publishers, should have them nervous.

elliekelly2• 4 years ago

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of books written are complete crap. And that’s true even among the select few books that actually manage to get published. Crowd funded novels would have a terrible return on investment. And unlike the VC model where one unicorn can make up for hundreds of garbage investments the same strategy won’t work when allocating you’re limited lifetime reading hours.

raspyberr• 4 years ago

Why are we all walking around with clown make up on but pretending to one another like we're not. The cat is out of the bag. All of human literature can be stored on something that fits in a bag I can carry. Why are we so adamant to live 100 years in the past?

Tao33002• 4 years ago

Speak for yourself, my nose looks like this naturally.

dontsayfree• 4 years ago

because of the possibility (a dream for most) that you too will be able to live off the rent genereated by your artistic creations for up to 70 years after you die.

sacrosancty4• 4 years ago

You can also murder someone with a hammer. Why are we all walking around pretending we can't? Laws exist to serve the interests of people, not to reflect natural laws. Copyright is no different. If you don't like it, make the case for why it doesn't benefit people.

pasquinelli2• 4 years ago

laws exist to serve the intrests of money first, that's why people are expected to act like copyright still makes sense.

ghusto• 4 years ago

I see much use of the word "piracy" in the comments as an unquestionably derogatory term. I'd like to question it.

In terms of the current capitalist model, we're agreed, piracy is a bad thing: People pirate media, the industry suffers monetary losses, the media producers don't get paid enough to keep producing, and as a result of all this there is less media. I'm with you.

What if the entire premise that this was a bad thing was wrong though?

The only thing that would go away is _this iteration_ of media creation and distribution.

"In the old days", things like music and stories were _meant_ to be copied, shared, and even expanded, by everyone. I'd argue this was a better system because it's literally what "culture" means:

"the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively" — my Apple dictionary, don't know it's source ;)

The standards were high, because the motivation was in great part the art itself, not as much the monetary gains (compared to today). Of course the artist has to earn money to live, but they used to before too! This part is a whole argument in itself, so I won't expand on it here.

My point — and believe it or not, I have a point — is that technology seems to be naturally supporting my world view on this, and we're trying to artificially cripple it not to.

Publishers Lose Their Shit After Authors Push Back on Their Attack on Libraries

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