Tag: Amazon

There’s no such thing as used digital media.

It’s science.  Deal with it.

We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on.  But the idea that a digital file of a song, a movie, a book, etc. can ever be called “used” is nothing more than an attempt to transplant a very old model into the soil of a new, technological market.  So, who’s being anachronistic here?

On purely technical grounds, there is literally no such thing as used digital media because “use” does not in anyway degrade a file.  A digital file of a song or a movie plays as pristinely the millionth time it’s played as it does the first time it’s played.  If you worked in video post-production in the days of early digital tape media, you would have seen a new term affixed on the spines of those tapes — clone.  Because that’s what a digital “copy” actually is; it is an exact replica with no generation loss from the original source.

So, if you transfer a file of a song or a movie to someone else, it will not in any sense be “used” simply because you experienced it before someone else did.  The new “owner” of that file will have a brand new experience, the value of which is identical to the original “owner’s” purchase price of the file from the original distributor.  If we’re talking about a movie, for instance, the only thing that differentiates Viewer A from Viewer B is that the former has seen the film and the latter has not.  Yet, the logical argument being made by certain “new model” entrepreneurs is that Viewer B should be entitled to pay less for the identical experience simply because Viewer A has already paid the original price one time.  This is patently absurd. By the same logic, the ticket price for a movie in a theater ought to decrease incrementally after each screening because the film has been “used” by other viewers. (Yeah, somebody in the copyleft crowd just thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea!”)

This notion of “used” digital media is just one way in which technological opportunists can be disingenuous when it comes offering up what sound like market-based theories.  They want the luxury of cherry picking from both the past and the present as suits their purposes.  In reality, though, these ideas don’t come from particularly innovative technologists, but rather from standard-issue middlemen looking to exploit a consumer-serving limitation on copyrights to siphon value from creators and line their own pockets.  In the long run, though, transporting this doctrine into the digital market, which makes no rational sense, would likely drive prices up in what I’ll call first-user experiences in order to offset lost revenue.

Naturally, when a work is distributed on physical media, the notion of “used” remains intact.  First sale doctrine in copyright law says that I can buy a novel and then sell the book as used at my next yard sale, regardless of whether or not I read it to a dogeared pulp or kept it in pristine condition and never cracked it open.  The condition of the book may affect the second-market value in my yard sale, but it has no bearing on my right to sell or otherwise distribute the used copy one time.  Because this transaction involves a physical object, replicating the process even in tens of thousands of yard sales all over the country would never produce a secondary market for novels that clones the primary market and inherently reduces the value of all novels everywhere.

But this is exactly what would happen in an all-digital “used” market in which a middle-man like Amazon, Apple, or Redigi removes a previously purchased file from Consumer A’s computer, sells it to Consumer B for a lower price than the original, and profits from the transaction while kicking a little something back to Consumer A.  Never mind how easy it would be for the selling consumer to cheat that system by storing files any number of ways, the so-called “secondary” market would very rapidly become the primary (i.e. only) market, and therefore just another means by which tech-happy leaches artificially drive the value of creative works below sustainable levels while pocketing millions before the producing entities collapse.  (Anyone who just thought “Good, I can’t wait until the movie studios, record labels, and publishers collapse,” should understand that it will be the independent, small and mid-sized producers who will fail first.)

I find it hard to believe that any legislator or court would be bamboozled by the parlor trick in which a file is moved from one consumer to another through the resale transaction without making a “new copy.” This is an analysis of the state of the technology and its role in the market viewed through a pre-digital lens, semantically bogged down in irrelevant terms like “copy” while ignoring how the technology actually works and what its potential market impact can be for good or bad.  So, if we’re really talking about developing new business models that correspond with new technology, then the language we employ might have to be new as well.  And in the digital world, the word used has outlived its usefulness.

The Amazon Effect

More than a decade ago, a book editor managing her own imprint at one of the big publishing houses gave me some insight into her world that I’ll never forget.  “I have to publish about five diet books,” she told me, “in order to invest in one new novelist.”  It’s important to understand that this is not a comment on the publishing industry but rather a comment on the book-buying market.  Like it or not, the number of people who want to purchase serious literature and non-fiction is considerably smaller than the number of people who want to buy self-help books, diet books, and pulp fiction.  And there’s nothing inherently wrong with suppliers delivering the products people want, but when it comes to products like books (as it is with music and filmed works), the healthiest market overall is one that sustains the greatest diversity of material, which is not necessarily the same thing as the greatest number of works.  This is a distinction I suspect the algorithmically-minded folks at Amazon may not understand, or care to understand; and this leads to the question of what effect the distribution leviathan will continue to have on publishing and literature going forward as well as what the company represents to the overall economy.

This past February, George Packer published a detailed examination of Amazon in The New Yorker under the subtitle Amazon is good for customers.  But is it good for books?  Packer covers so much ground, some of it rather startling, that the article is hard to summarize, and I strongly suggest reading it if you haven’t.  Probably the most striking revelation in the piece is the manner in which Amazon pushed the concept of “co-op marketing” fees, money a publisher would spend at a brick an mortar store like Barnes & Noble for a prominent display of a new book, to something reminiscent of an old-fashioned shakedown with a digital spin.  According to accounts cited in Packer’s article, it was pay the fees to Amazon or watch the “Buy” buttons disappear from your products, meaning browsers literally could not purchase the books on the site.  You can almost imagine the heavy saying something like,  “Youze got a nice collection of novels here. I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to ‘em.”

To my mind, the techo-utopianism exemplified by Amazon — and uniquely by Amazon because of the way the business is both web-based and operates in physical space — is based on two illusions, one that is probably hazardous economically, and another that is probably hazardous culturally.  The economic implications are relatively easy to recognize in that we’re seeing the Wal-Martization of every line of business represented by the things Amazon delivers — and Amazon delivers everything.  The illusion for the consumer is that we get low prices and convenience; but the hidden, long-term cost may well be the jobs that enable us to buy stuff in the first place.  This vicious, downward cycle is very neatly summed up in this 2005 JibJab spoof. It depicts a man enjoying low prices at “BigBox Mart,” losing his job at a supplier due to pricing pressures by “BigBox Mart,” then having no recourse other than to work for “BigBox Mart” well below his qualifications and at some fraction of his previous earnings.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

An economy is an ecosystem, and just as the principle of biodiversity teaches us that a whole species cannot be eradicated without threatening other species, I suspect the same can be said for certain organisms within a free-market economy.  Sure, those who stand to gain will talk about creative destruction and technological progress, but when the products or labors being artificially devalued still have real value (i.e. market demand), that’s not creative destruction; it’s just destruction without creating anything new to replace what’s been lost. Like Wal-Mart, the Amazon model doesn’t create anything; it is merely a distribution system, a contemporary railroad that can dictate the prices charged in every diner along its route.  Except this railroad has thousands of lines spanning in all directions, doling out cheap candy to the passengers and simultaneously reducing the value of labor in so many little towns along the way until eventually nobody can ride the train.  From the Packer article:

According to a recent study of U.S. Census data by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in Washington, brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.

Like his Silicon Valley brethren, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks with the confidence and arrogance of determinism, as though these dominant, even monopolistic, technology companies are manifestations of the only history that could have unfolded in the digital age.  “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling,” Bezos is quoted as saying in the Packer article.  And while it may be true that the publishing industry does cling to some antiquated practices, it’s a subtle but important sleight of semantics happening there when a wealthy corporation owner tells us that the manner in which his business operates was inevitable, ordained as it were by the natural order of our times.  Does this apply to the entire enterprise?  Are the transitory, non-union “pickers” hired to work in Amazon fulfillment centers in questionable conditions and for low wages an inevitability in this “future?” Because on the subject of antiquated practices, the notion that warehouse workers have to be treated like machines so that I can get a dollar off a luxury item like a book or a CD takes us back at least a century.  Does the future belong to people who make conscious choices, or is it already encoded by seven wizards who dwell in the sacred valley?

While the consumer is distracted by cheap commerce, the producers (authors) gaze at a different illusion — one that preaches self-reliance, a chance to connect directly with customers, and bypass the traditional, elitist “gatekeepers.”  This is music to the aspiring writer’s ears, particularly if he’s been turned down for publication by one of those gatekeepers in the publishing world; but more total manuscripts uploaded by more writers does not mean that more great works must inevitably be discovered or that more writers will make a living through digital sales.  “The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich,” writes Packer.

There’s a reason my editor friend referred to “investing” in an author, and it’s because the best stuff almost always comes from the healthy center of an industry, where experienced professionals have the resources to cultivate something the market doesn’t know it wants yet. The best stuff comes from high-risk bets.  It’s not too hard to sell a slightly scandalous S&M trilogy or mass-market paperbacks or diet books. But stewardship of the next Toni Morrison is hard and takes experience and real risk because that kind of literature just isn’t going to be as popular as 50 Shades of Grey.  And unfortunately, what is threatened by the devaluation of all works by a model like Amazon are the resources available to make those riskier investments.  Some people may call the curators of those bets elitist, but which is the preferable tastemaker — the agent or editor steeped in literature his whole life, or Amazon’s pay-to-play model for promoting a book?  Or worse, how about a bot swarm telling us how great or awful some new ebook is?  I say, bring on the elitists.

The promise says “your work will retail for less, but you have the potential to sell more and pocket a larger percentage of the sales than you would with a traditional publisher.”  This illusion is how the internet industry convinces people that these models are examples of creative destruction — that these new opportunities for authors are what’s being created to replace those jobs in publishing and book retail that are being wiped out. Interestingly enough, though, Packer’s article mentions that even Bezos’s own wife, an author, published her last novel with Knopf and not through Amazon Publishing.  Since it’s a safe bet MacKenzie Bezos knows where her next meal is coming from, why not give Amazon Publishing or even direct sales on its platform a go?  Maybe because book publishing is more complicated than the Amazon model says it is.  From the Packer article:

“Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

It was inevitable that these companies, once they controlled the lines of distribution, would get into the business of production; and while it’s reasonable to expect that Amazon as publisher might partner with some great authors and strike good deals with them, what would Amazon be at that point other than another so-called gatekeeper?  More importantly, everything about the company’s business practices suggests they expect to be the only gatekeeper, which is why all this democratization talk is bullshit; it’s a hypnotic used to blind people to the fact that these companies are designed to devour whole industries and emerge as the only game in town.  That doesn’t sound like the promise of the information age to me.

What does sound like the promise of the information age to me is something akin to my long-time friend and colleague’s venture Bittersweet Editions. Marco North spent over two years developing an artist-centric, all-digital publishing entity. Modeled after a classic small press, Bittersweet and ventures like it are seeking a balance, looking to provide authors a choice between big, corporate publishing and getting lost in a sea of “content” on the Web.  The roles of editing, marketing, and connecting with the right audience are still relevant, still take labor and expertise, and still have value.  Just like any editor/publisher, the small press or small label or small film distributor makes an investment in works and cannot help but impose his own tastes in making selections.  Call this “gatekeeping” if you will, but it seems to me that the better vision for the future is one that fosters more independent gatekeepers rather than one big company with a master key.

Anne Rice signs petition against attack reviews on Amazon

When it comes to free expression, the rule of thumb I assume most of us apply is “the more the merrier,”  and this is certainly my own default position.  But there’s no question that there is a prickly side to this principle that goes beyond mere aesthetics.  After all, this principle was the central argument made by Justice Scalia in writing his opinion as part of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC.  And in the age of social media, of course, one of the downsides of abundant free expression, especially when combined with anonymity, is the spawning of several species of trolls.  When trolls go beyond the bounds of mere buffoonery and actually coordinate attacks on named individuals, expressing desires to see said individuals killed, commit suicide, raped, maimed, you name it, the victims of these virtual attacks have reason to be concerned in the real world. We’ve seen too many cases in which these infantile wishes have, in one way or another, been tragically granted.  As such, the cyber utopians who defend systems that allow anonymity and do not moderate this kind of behavior on their sites should not be allowed to hide behind the First Amendment as justification.  To do so is to be blind to the fact that even in virtual space, bullies can have a more profound chilling effect on free expression than any form of regulation.

And that brings me to this story from The Guardian reporting that famed novelist Anne Rice has just added her name to a petition containing the signatures of over 1,000 demanding that Amazon change, or in some cases merely enforce, its policies with regard to personal attacks on authors in the “reviews” sections on the site.  The petition was started by freelance editor, Todd Barselow, who says he’ll submit the document to Amazon as soon as he gathers a few thousand signatures; and other authors are speaking up about the tangible effects this particular brand of trolling can have on the writers and even on the communities where they connect with fans online. Rice herself identifies these trolls as a small minority, but a little harassment can go a long way for any individual, and I’m hard-pressed to see where society is served when I read this quote from the article:  “True Blood author Charlaine Harris was in a similar situation last May, when she received death threats for ending her series in a manner unpalatable to her fans.”  Ah, the new, broader definition of fan in our times — someone who may or may not pay to view, read, listen to your work and then might threaten your life if he doesn’t like it.

At best, even the world of professional criticism is comprised of a great number of hacks and a small handful of reviewers who do their jobs exceptionally well. Those who write criticism best always add something to the experience that is generally positive, even while writing negatively about a particular work. As the saying goes, “anyone can write a bad review,” and crowd-sourced reviews certainly proves this in spades, if we very broadly define the word write.  But the purpose of review isn’t like Consumer Reports, meant to warn against the reading of a certain book or seeing a certain movie.  Good criticism complements the larger experience of all media and, I believe, comes from a place that understands somewhat humbly that the crafts themselves are mastered with great difficulty.  At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, therefore, I find it hard to understand Amazon’s tolerance for such cultural insights as, “I hated your book. If I see you in the street, I’m going to punch you in the face, Bitch!”  This adds nothing the world needs, and Amazon’s failure to mitigate this kind of lashing out actually supports a chilling effect on the author’s speech, giving her legitimate grounds to be concerned for her safety.  Or, if not safety, even Anne Rice’s example of leaving a meaningful dialogue with her readers after the trolls arrived like locusts to consume the thread constitutes a chilling effect on speech.

Those who extoll the virtues of artists connecting with fans online and the preservation of meaningful free expression should be among the more vocal to support this kind of petition; but they are consistently silent on such matters in favor of defending the world against theoretical threats to free speech — like enacting or enforcing rules for behavior on certain sites.  The truth is voices of free expression are often silenced by ham-fisted thugs.  The problem here lies in putting too much stock in systems that can’t tell the difference.

ADDENDUM:  Well, thanks to some readers here and at least one friend in the publishing industry, it appears that this matter deserves further investigation.  While the subject of trolling by review is one that deserves attention, it’s possible that Ms. Rice makes an imperfect poster child inasmuch as she may well be dishing out as good as she gets.  More anon.