Oxford again

[dreamtouch]

Yesterday I went back to Oxford. I love going somewhere for the second time. I have a general sense of things. My feet know how to get around without my having to consult a map. I retrieved my favorite jacket from the restaurant where I left it last Saturday. I joined a two hour walking tour which included part of the Bodleian Library.

I was very moved by the story of the original collection being burnt during the Reformation. Burning books is as horrible to me as burning people, and they did that, too. Still, few if any works were truly lost, and what a wonderful place it became afterwords. We are almost at the end of a great era: The great classical libraries are now engaged in digitizing their collections and making them universally available. In the early days there was nothing like copyright: if you could afford to copy a book, you didn't need to ask anyone's permission. Now, the only thing which keeps us from making all recorded human expression universally available is coming up with an acceptable alternative to copyright.

I finished my Oxford pilgrimage with afternoon tea at the Grand Cafe, the first coffeehouse in Britain. Coffee came there before tea, so I should have had coffee, but I'm not passing up any opportunities to clot my arteries with clotted cream while I'm here. Finally I went to Blackwell's, the oldest, biggest and best bookshop in Oxford. Another institution I love, and another institution which will hopefully soon pass.

_Greg

Comments

Starving artists?

[al-qhadhulu.livejournal.com]

Another institution I love, and another institution which will hopefully soon pass.

I can understand this statement regarding authors long dead as long as their heirs haven't spent grand sums of money to keep their works in publication. But, how will living authors make money from their craft if all books are available for free?

Re: Starving artists?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_greg/]

A very good question. Let's deconstruct it a bit first. First, few authors currently make a living from their writing. What most writers get when a book is published, when divided by the number of hours spent writing it, is absurdly small. On the other hand, publishers, distributors and bookshops make significant money. It's a similar situation to the music industry, albeit with more diversity still surviving.

Nothing I said about bookshops and libraries fading necessarily implies that "all books are available for free". Consider various subscription models. Expensive pay-per-view schemes would be vulnerable to cheating (digital information is so easy to share), but I can think of several systems which would compensate authors more than the current system.

Should my monthly subscription fee be divvied out according to how much time I spend with each work? Could authors legitimately place some multiplier on works that were particularly hard to write (currently, the hardest books to write generally get the worst compensation)? How about co-authorship? Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypermedia, created his Xanadu system to apportion payment to works which were largely constructed from existing works, which were largely, ..., you get the idea.

I think that this discussion is going on around the world. So far most attempts to set up a restrictive system do not look sustainable. New models (new to society, not to geeks who've been studying this for awhile) will be adopted. Society may make some poor choices. The history of copyright is a history of change. Remember that for thousands of years, there was no copyright, yet people wrote books. I've actually been very lucky, as half of my income for several years was royalties. Yet when my books were remaindered, it went to zero very fast, and I have no right to put out a new edition since I had to give up my ownership in order to get published. I don't own my own work and neither do most writers and artists!!! [This really burns me, that ownership doesn't revert back when the publisher is no longer marketing the work.]

I imagine you can now think of some alternatives I haven't mentioned, and maybe haven't even thought of.

Re: Starving artists?

[al-qhadhulu.livejournal.com]

The history of copyright is a history of change. Remember that for thousands of years, there was no copyright, yet people wrote books.

There's actually one quite ancient case of adjudication on the matter.. I'll have to look it up to get you the exact data... in which one monastic order loaned a manuscript to another monastic order. The second order copied it all, without permission, before returning the manuscript. So, the lending order complained to the monarch of the land who forced the offenders to pony up the manuscript copy.

I've actually been very lucky, as half of my income for several years was royalties. Yet when my books were remaindered, it went to zero very fast, and I have no right to put out a new edition since I had to give up my ownership in order to get published. I don't own my own work and neither do most writers and artists!!! [This really burns me, that ownership doesn't revert back when the publisher is no longer marketing the work.]

Erk! I've known a number of writers who suffered this indignity. Their answer was to write a new book on the subject with a whole new title and lots of new material without any reference whatever to the old book and take it to a different publisher. That always works. Worse, in some cases, is when a publisher hires editors right out of college who have no knowledge of the subject matter but who insist on editing it to the point of meaningless gibberish.

Some authors of my acquaintance are looking seriously at on-demand publishing. The trouble they all have with that is how to market, effectively.

I, myself, really appreciate the Gutenberg Project. I like having access to searchable text of the classics via my laptop. That said, being the study in contradictions that I am, I must also say I am a die-hard. I will *never* give up cloth bound books. I just love the feel of curling up with a good, solid book, my book light, and a cup of good tea.