Slimming for the Beach

Photo owned by Dan Strange (cc)

Yeats’ writ­ings are now in the pub­lic domain, it now being sev­enty years from the end of the year of his death year of 1939. Damien Mul­ley, whose blog on the sub­ject alerted me, has some inter­est­ing sug­ges­tions about how they might be used in the dig­i­tal age.

Speak­ing of the dig­i­tal age, David Hewson’s tech­nol­ogy arti­cles in the Sun­day Times were essen­tial read­ing for me for about ten years. I really enjoyed his pugna­cious style.
He’s now a thriller writer and his web­site, blog, etc is here, and reviews con­firm him as a mas­ter stylist.

I re-found him, so to speak on Twit­ter, @david_hewson, retweeted by lit­er­ary agent @caroleagent. He’s writ­ten a series of entries on book theft. eg Book theft myth no 3: Tech­nol­ogy can fix it, (at least I think that’s where you find it. He uses an url short­en­ing ser­vice). By book theft he means the dig­i­tal copy­ing of his work which is then uploaded to tor­rent sites.

It’s a very inter­est­ing ques­tion, espe­cially for authors, but I don’t think it’s a sim­ple cut and dried case.

Nov­el­ist Paulo Coelho takes the oppo­site view, for instance.

“Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share – from food to art. Shar­ing is part of the human con­di­tion.” Paulo Coelho, sup­port­ing The Pirate Bay.

Mr Coelho is world famous, and shar­ing one’s work via bit­tor­rent can actu­ally be very prof­itable for some­one who is as famous as he is.

Pub­lish­ing his books on The Pirate Bay worked out really well for Coelho. He actu­ally sold tens of thou­sands of extra books because he shared them on Bit­Tor­rent. “I do think that when a reader has the pos­si­bil­ity to read some chap­ters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later,” Coelho said, and he is not alone in that assess­ment.

Then there’s Cory Doc­torow, who actively shares and has done so since his first novel.

His nov­els are pub­lished by Tor Books and Harper­Collins UK and simul­ta­ne­ously released on the Inter­net under Cre­ative Com­mons licenses that encour­age their re-use and shar­ing, a move that increases his sales by enlist­ing his read­ers to help pro­mote his work.

Of course, as well as being an author, he is “the co-editor of the pop­u­lar weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a con­trib­u­tor to Wired, Pop­u­lar Sci­ence, Make, the New York Times, and many other news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines and web­sites,” so he had a good base start for a very suc­cess­ful experiment.

For some­what obscure writ­ers like me it prob­a­bly works in more mys­te­ri­ous ways. We’re glad if we’re read at all!

But the more impor­tant point is that books have been shared — or stolen, accord­ing to your point of view — since writ­ing was invented. St Colm­cille is famous because he stole a book with­out a moment’s thought, not hav­ing any con­cept of own­er­ship. The world’s first copy­right deci­sion arose from that — after a lot of blood was spilt. The library in Alexan­dria sought ‘loans’ of books, copied them and gave back the copy. (see Peter Watson’s Ideas: A His­tory)

If it’s a ques­tion of the author’s liveli­hood, what about books that are loaned, or bought second-hand? The author gets no money for that, at least not directly. All he or she can hope for in mon­e­tary terms is that if the reader who has read the book on loan, or has bought it second-hand, likes the work, that they will seek out the author’s other work and gladly pay for a new copy. Or at least buy the author a drink.

Of course no writer minds any­one loan­ing or sell­ing on their books to second-hand book­stores, who often make large prof­its a few years later if the book is sig­nif­i­cant, so why, exactly, do we mind when some­one passes on a dig­i­tal copy to oth­ers with­out a profit motive?

It’s now known that the major­ity of those who down­load pirated music buy more music than those who don’t down­load. Does that work for books? No one knows, at least not to my knowl­edge. We’ll prob­a­bly find out when more books come in dig­i­tal form. Of course if pirates resell the book I’d be the first in line to ham­mer them.

David Hew­son obvi­ously won’t see a bump in his roy­alty cheques because of bit­tor­rents. On the other hand a lot more young peo­ple than before prob­a­bly now know of his work, and if they like it, at least some of them will buy it some­time in the future. I haven’t read thrillers as a rule since my teens (and for the record I’m not young and don’t upload books to bit­tor­rents), but I’ve just bought David Hewson’s Dante’s Num­bers: The Sev­enth Costa Novel ). To prove a point? No, more as a thank you to David Hew­son for all those great tech­nol­ogy arti­cles. But there is the point that I wouldn’t even have known he was now writ­ing nov­els were it not for the bittorrenters.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve every sym­pa­thy with an author who finds his or her book on a Korean tor­rent site with­out their knowl­edge or con­sent. It’s an awful feel­ing. And yes, it’s ille­gal. And yes, it’s steal­ing. Just as news­pa­pers lift­ing infor­ma­tion or news from blogs with­out attri­bu­tion is steal­ing, or indeed, large media cor­po­ra­tions lift­ing bio­graph­i­cal notes from my Irish Writ­ers Online web­site with­out attri­bu­tion, despite the explicit cre­ative com­mons licence which asks only for attri­bu­tion — that’s steal­ing. Which bol­sters David Hewson’s point that it is a cul­tural phenomenon.

But let’s put this in per­spec­tive. Only a com­par­a­tively tiny num­ber of peo­ple, mostly pen­ni­less teenagers, have even heard of the term tor­rent, let alone know how to use tor­rent sites. An even tinier num­ber, even though they could afford to buy the book or song, or video, do it because they can, or out of prin­ci­pal. But teenagers grow up, have to earn a liv­ing, learn how hard it can be. Give them the chance to down­load music, books, films at a rea­son­able price and most of them will.

At the moment, very few peo­ple read a book through on a screen. They sam­ple it, to see if they like it. pretty much like brows­ing through a book in a book­shop. Devel­op­ments like Enhanced Edi­tions, men­tioned by Damien Mul­ley in his Yeats post, could change all of that, and is prob­a­bly the way for­ward for pub­lish­ing. There’s no doubt about it, a book tor­rent will have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent mean­ing in a few years, maybe even in the com­ing year: a tor­rent of read­ers will down­load books — legit­i­mately, because finally, they will be able to do so. One of the rea­sons book chains are fail­ing is that books which are not obvi­ous best sell­ers — obvi­ous to them, that is — are given a few weeks’ shelf-life, if that. Old-style book­shops used to have sell­ers who knew about books. It was a plea­sure to browse, or to speak with the book­seller. Now, with noble excep­tions such as Books Upstairs here in Dublin, staff typ­i­cally know about best­sellers only. Men­tion a great lit­er­ary writer and… As for poetry — for­get it, unless you’re a megas­tar. So read­ers will grate­fully down­load the books they want at their leisure, and be delighted to pay a rea­son­able price. Many of us live in small houses or apart­ments. I’m lucky enough to live in a small ter­raced house, but it’s burst­ing at the seams with books. Moby Dick plus a thou­sand oth­ers on an Android or Nokia/Maemo smart phone with a decent screen? You bet.

What about the infa­mous Google Book Agree­ment? Well, that’s a giant cor­po­ra­tion and imme­di­ately peo­ple think of cul­tural coloni­sa­tion, with good rea­son. As for its ben­e­fits and draw­backs and whether it’s pirat­i­cal, it’s far too com­plex for mere mor­tals like most authors to fig­ure out. Agents and pub­lish­ers hope­fully under­stand it bet­ter. For my part, I opted out.

I will say this, though. I’m doing a lot of research at the moment, and the lim­ited pre­view fea­ture on Google Books has been a god­send. Why? Because I can find out whether an expen­sive book has the infor­ma­tion I need. Not only do I buy the book if it has that infor­ma­tion (my poor post­man is now aware of mus­cles he never knew he had) but I often use the lim­ited pre­view to look up a ref­er­ence in the hard copy on my desk. It’s quicker than trawl­ing through an index, believe it or not.

Mean­while, you could do worse than browse Philip Davison’s first novel, The Book Thief’s Heart­beat, 1981, which he has made avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons licence.

Pre-eminently human… funny in the way that The Catcher in the Rye was funny. BOOKS IRELAND

Mr Davi­son has a gen­tle touch with words that allow them to fil­ter through the mind, leav­ing a residue of warmth and famil­iar recog­ni­tion behind. SUNDAY PRESS

It has a hero who smacks of early Beck­ett EVENING HERALD

It is obvi­ous that Philip Davi­son could make any place or cir­cum­stance or char­ac­ter that took his fancy equally com­pelling. He has a sparse and strangely matter-of-fact style of writ­ing that gives full value to every word and act. THE IRISH TIMES

It’s now out of print, but if you’re a book col­lec­tor, you can buy The Book-Thief’s Heart­beat from Kenny’s for £86.40, which is about €97.50.

So it’s a com­plex sub­ject in an ever-more com­plex world. If I have any strong opin­ion on it it is that Cory Doc­torow has the right idea — pub­lish in hard­copy but also encour­age dig­i­tal re-use and shar­ing in order to pro­mote the book. In other words pos­i­tively and actively make a virtue out of an inevitabil­ity. All the DRM stuff is a pain in the neck for every­one concerned.