Commerce, Art, and the Anxiety of Donuts

I've been struck by the ferocity of debate over what is on the surface a matter of pure commerce: the pricing of e-books.

As the schoolyard shoving match between Amazon v. Macmillan appears to be winding down, the debate continues to rage.

And by rage, I mean people getting really, really angry and fiercely arguing over issues such as price points and the agency model, two things I had never heard of before this whole thing started.

Authors are both on the defensive and the offensive, trying to deal with readers who somehow blame them for pricing while generally rising to the defense of the publisher against Amazon's bullying tactics. And readers have risen up and called for boycotts, eternal cheapness of e-books, and even for the dissolution of the publishing system.

That's a lot of conflict over a corporate pricing negotiation!


This is obviously about a lot more than prices. For some people, it is about corporate control of art and entertainment. For others, it is about consumer choice. And for a few, it is about their livelihood. This dispute has gotten people to thinking about the future of not just the e-book, but of the business of publishing in the 21st century. Underneath all of this discussion of percentages, corporate rights, and consumer preference is a combination of curiosity, anxiety, and perplexity as people try to understand what's going on while also struggling to figure out where things go from here.

Many people both more savvy about this and more affected by it have written at length about the business end: go read Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Scott Westerfeld, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and (with a very different take) Mike Stackpole about this. Authors generally take the position that Amazon does not have their interests in mind, particularly when they delist a publisher's entire stock from their storefront. They also point out that they have relatively little power in this system, and that the publisher provides them with a range of services and some protections that allow them to continue writing. Authors are primarily interested in continuing to write, and to have some sort of security (although the amount of that varies from author to author) in a system undergoing huge changes.

Readers engaging in this debate sometimes support authors, but more often support cheap, accessible e-books. Many readers on the Kindle forums have stated that they will never buy an e-book that costs more than $9.99 (Amazon's upper-limit, artificially maintained by them). Some have called for a boycott of Macmillan titles. Most distressingly for authors, a significant number of readers have stated that they will just read something else if the price isn't right because, to them, authors are substitutable.

What this means is that books are like donuts. Some readers go to a bookstore to get a new book like a supermarket customer goes to the bakery to get some donuts for breakfast. Some people have one kind they really like, and thus will always buy crullers or chocolate-frosteds. Some people go and buy whatever catches their eye, like a Boston creme or a French twist. Others just grab a variety and bring them home. The buyer doesn't care who the baker was, or if the donut is not perfectly shaped, or if the sprinkles are artfully placed on it. They just want donuts, undifferentiated, easily consumable product.

This is apparently how a distressing number of readers choose their books, and this has authors worried. Within this clash of corporations there has been an awakening for both authors and readers as they articulate their understanding of the significance of the Great E-Book Kerfuffle. Many readers have put forth what are to them utopian visions of the e-book's future, where bookstores disappear and any book can be yours (well, rented at least) with the touch of a button. Others think that the publishing companies should be abandoned entirely and that authors should self-publish their work. Authors have largely rejected these ideas for a number of reasons (Jay Lake has discussed this in a number of his blog entries), including loss of writing time, financial uncertainty, and the need for the professional assistance that a publisher provides.

A few writers disagree, and I think that within that area of disagreement we see something significant emerge. Mike Stackpole, beneath some rather condescending and simplistic discussions, believes that we are arriving at a point where authors can, without endless amounts of effort and money, put forth their own product and circumvent the publishing houses (or have their work put out directly by the e-book provider, with a larger margin of profit for themselves). Self-publishing is not easy to do, and it does require time and effort to be directed away from one's writing to do things that the publishers do for many writers now. While many writers just want to write, and leave the logistics of getting the work out to others, he believes that they are missing a chance to make more money, and also to take more direct responsibility for the business of writing. In essence, he wants writers to acknowledge that they are donut-makers, and to do more of the work of getting their particular donuts to the reader and getting paid for them directly.

Stackpole's ideas highlight the crux of the problem: the e-book market creates opportunities, but they are unstable and contingent, and likely subject to further change as the market grows. What the Great E-Book Kerfuffle has highlighted is that within the next decade or so how people choose and purchase books is going to undergo some major shift that may require authors to do their work differently. This is not a just a shift in the format of books, but a shift in how they are produced, who controls their distribution, and even how people think about what a book is. The anxiety comes from the fact that any new opportunities come with a price, whether that is DRM on your e-book, an explosion of self-publishing, or the collapse of publishing altogether. What will be lost in this evolution? Will books lose their artistry, their individuality, their quality, or will they become too individuated and subsumed into micro-niches? There are too many possibilities, but at the end of the day, people will still want their donuts. The question is, how to get the ones they want to them in a way that benefits everyone.