by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Friday, September 30, 2011

The Kindle and freedom of choice

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The direction we should be going toward is toward freedom. We need to remember this at every step, so that when somebody takes us in the wrong direction, we will know it immediately. 
In the contemporary world—the one outside my window—I am free to walk down the street and to drop into any bookstore I pass and buy a book, and if I can read the language the book is written in, I am able to read the book. But that world appears to be ending, and something very different is happening with ereaders and ebooks.
On Wednesday, Amazon introduced four new Kindle models—Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, and Kindle Fire—at a range of prices, from $79 to $199. For Amazon to make money off the Kindle, it has to link each Kindle to its resources in the Kindle store and not let the reader buy his books anywhere else. Amazon makes money off the trapped reader.
Most manufacturers of ebooks do this—link their ereaders to a book store and not let the reader buy his books anywhere else. This is less freedom, not more, than we had under the old publishing.
To get us going in the right direction again, manufacturers have formatted books in ePUB. ePUB is a free and open ebook standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum.This is a significant step in the right direction. But manufacturers add DRM to their ePUB, and now, none of them can read each other’s files. This needs to change. What we want is to be able to buy an ereader that can read a book from any source. We want to have these DRMs removed.
At this moment, a writer can take his or her novel and format it in ePUB without a DRM, sell it on the web, and all ereaders can read it except the Kindle, which will not read ePUB from any source. But purchased books from the big book stores can still only be read on that book store’s  ereader. This is not freedom.
As long as we are not free, it doesn’t matter how many models Kindle brings out, we are still trapped by the Kindle store and the taste of its buyers. Or the iBooks store. Or the Barnes & Noble store. Yesterday I checked these three book stores for the titles of five books I read during the summer of 2010. Even now, a year later, two of the books were not available in any bookstore in any ebook format. Three of the titles were available only on Amazon.com for Kindles. As the print-publishing industry continues to collapse, we are going to be more and more dependent on ereaders and the ereaders’ stores, and the ereaders’ buyers, and instead of being more free—this is what the digital revolution promised, we thought—we will be less free. There will be just us, our ereaders, and our ereaders’ bookstores, and the books their buyers choose for us to read. This is not a situation gay readers want to be caught in.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

This one is gone.

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Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a big one for me. I served in the Army in the late fifties, and I remember condescending sergeants talking about the “pitter patter of little feet in the barracks” and claiming to know everything that happened in their barracks. Other soldiers—a few of them—called me “queer.” When I asked a man I knew where I could go and be homosexual and also be respected, I was told that maybe I ought to go live in Europe. But in any case, I got through my two years without being put out. 
It never did really have to do with unit cohesion. There are too many studies out there telling the Pentagon that unit cohesion would not be affected. What it had to do with was stigma. A certain kind of straight man wanted to keep gay men stigmatized, which put us off limits, and made it seem safe to straight men. I’m a man, and you’re a queer. 
The other great stigma from the post war years was imposed by psychiatrists. That one—that we were mentally ill—was lifted in the early seventies through the action of the Gay Activists Alliance.
The goal of gay liberation since Stonewall has been to lift these stigmas and to make it OK to be gay, and we’ve been doing that, one stigma at a time. The next one, I think, is going to be DOMA, which doesn’t have to do with marriage so much as it has to do with their wanting to assert that we’re unworthy. It’s a way of their saying, I’m worthy, You’re queer. 
The big gay rights organization have been sending out emails today, all saying, there’s a lot left to do. They’re right. There’s still a lot to do, but after today, less than there was yesterday. I feel better, don’t you?
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Thursday, September 15, 2011

“I don’t care what you are, gay or straight, I love you.”

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“Mommy!”
“What? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“What?”
“That you love me, but you don’t care what I am.”
“Well, I do. I love you, and I don’t care whether you like boys or girls.”
“But it’s different, liking boys and liking girls. And if you love me, I want you to know that it’s different and why it’s different.”
“I do. Of course I do.”
“Then you need to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you know how it’s different, and you love that too.”
“Oh, Victoria, you know I do.”
“You tell me you do, but you don’t say it.”
“Say what,Victoria.”
“That you know how it’s different and that you love that too”
“Victoria, you are never satisfied. You are always asking for something else from me. Something more.”
“Mommy. I’m just asking you to say it.”
“Say what?
“That you love what I feel, too.”
“Well, I do.”
“And not say, you don’t care.”
“Victoria, what’s the difference?”
“It’s the way I feel. I’m afraid there’s a difference and that we don’t know what it is, and that we don’t see it and are missing it and that it’s really important.”

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Friday, September 9, 2011

Living in the long tail (2)

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The “long tail,” as it applies to the book industry, is described as a graph of the sales of books. If there are twenty-two books for sale, the one with the most sales would be on the left, with a tall bar. And then, stretching out to the right, each of the other books for sale would have their bars, shorter than the first, in a “long tail,” indicating fewer and fewer sales. This graph could describe the business pattern of Amazon.com, which survives on a few sales each of thousands and thousands of books. In the world of digital books, the seller will sell fewer and fewer copies of more and more books. While the publisher may survive in the digital world, a writer probably couldn’t. According to some commentators, the move to digital books means that the economic framework that supports writers is disintegrating. In the long tail, a writer cannot sell enough books to survive economically. Ewan Morrison, in his article “Are Books Dead, and Can Authors Survive?” published in The Guardian, points to the danger in the age of ebooks:  “Every industry that has become digital has seen a dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings for those who create “content.” Morrison says that “writing has already begun its slide towards becoming something produced and consumed for free.”

In what Morrison must know is a demand for Utopia, he says, “Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to ‘go it alone’ in the long tail. In return, publishing houses must take the risk on the long term; supporting writers over years and books, it is only then that books of the standard we have seen in the last half-century can continue to come into being.”

But the cat is already out of the bag. Even if we wanted to, we cannot return to the world of print publishing that existed before epublishing and ebooks. The advance of technology is unstoppable, and there is the very very unprincipled behavior of the print publishing industry before ebooks. Years ago, my agent said of a manuscript I had submitted, “This is a wonderful book, but no publisher in New York will publish it.” What loyalties do I owe to that agent, and to the “publisher in New York” now that times are difficult?

While Morrison’s article in The Guardian raises truly interesting and important questions, we are past the time when his proposals have merit. What faces us now is the need to ascertain the questions we should be addressing now, living as we do, in the “long tail.” What will keep writers writing and readers reading?
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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Living in the long tail

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Last week, Ewan Morrison, writing in The Guardian, asked, “Are books dead?” and “Can authors survive?” He was writing in the context of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and his belief that the “publishing industry is in terminal decline.” It is an interesting article, different from anything else I’ve read, and worth wide distribution for the questions it raises.
Morrison says that big sellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are now selling more ebooks than paper books. What are the consequences of this momentous fact? Morrison notes that the major publishers are all suffering financial straits and not giving writers their accustomed advances. Many writers already are skipping agents and publishers and publishing their ebooks on the internet. He looks down the road a generation and finds “the book” surviving but writers, oddly, not. If, today, a bookseller can sell a million copies of one book, one of the Harry Potter books for example, in the future that same bookseller may be able to make the same amount of money by selling ten books each from one hundred thousand authors, a situation we are now beginning to approach with the small sales of hundreds of thousands of authors on Amazon. This phenomenon is called the “long tail”—those hundreds of thousands of authors each selling ten books, all on the intenet, their sales showing on the “long tail” of the graph. Eventually, he believes, writers will be infinitely numerous and none of them will be paid for their work, a situation which he believes has almost arrived in the music industry.
If he is right, this is as depressing as hell. 
But there are some significant omissions in his argument. He says, “Most notable writers in the history of books were paid a living wage.” This is not true. In our own history, Emily Dickinson was not, Herman Meville was not, and while Morrison scorns the Romantic myth that writers must survive in a garret, I would guess that most American writers are fairly poor people. There are only a few in every generation who actually make a substantial income from their writing. Writers get by on grants, or by teaching creative writing at the local college, or by some other income-producing work. A writer whose career I have followed since 1963 has never earned a living wage from her writing, but she has been a publishing writer for all of those years. The class of people that Morrison seems to be concerned about—professional writers of literary fiction who live on the income from their writing—seems not to have existed as a class until recently, and it may be entirely the creation of the new mega-publishers. 
The questions that Morrison raises—the future of the book and of publishing in the age of the ebook and of epublishing—are important because my blog, the Stonewall Triptych, exists to bring attention to my three ebooks which I have collected under the name, the Stonewall Triptych. Morrison’s essay skips over the extent to which the publishing industry of the last fifty years created the situation in which writers like me are doing what I am doing, that is, using the internet to publish their books.
More on all this in my next posting.
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