"Book Burning"
&rea
This is a question about publishing and changing technology.
In Australia, they're fooling about with a prototype of "burn your
own CD" technology, where a consumer selects the songs s/he wants,
and has that selection of songs burned onto a CD through an extremely
simple process. Any songs (which have been made available to the
process), any order, however many will fit on the CD. Royalties
and all other costs are met on a song-by-song basis. They even
print you up a cover with a song list.
Now, probably most of us are familiar with the impossibility of
obtaining books which are out of print. Usually, this is met in
the form of picking up book three of a trilogy, trying to find the
previous two books and failing utterly. (Or finding book one, but
not book two). In other words, books have their chance, and
because it's not profitable for publishers to keep a huge stock
of old books, after their month in the sun they vanish into
oblivion.
Having books available for purchase on-line would partially alleviate
the problem, but there's not many people who enjoy reading text on
the screen. But what if you could select an out of print book and
"burn" yourself a copy - print it out to order, have it bound,
perhaps even given a spiffy cover, and mailed out to you?
Now, I recall someone telling me that actually printing a book
doesn't take very long at all, presuming the existence a correctly
formatted document to start off with. I very much doubt that it's
currently profitable for a publisher to print a single copy of a
book, but could it be? Is there hope out there for the vanished
back-list, could "out of print" become a thing of the past?
Of course there's a whole bunch of issues here - copyright being the
first to spring to mind, but the idea of being able to go to a website
and order the complete works of Andre Norton, freshly printed out,
really tickles my fancy. So is it possible? Or, more correctly, will
it be possible? Or likely?
A
Dave Howell
&rea wrote:
> Having books available for purchase on-line would partially alleviate
> the problem, but there's not many people who enjoy reading text on
> the screen.
1. Depends on the screen. Think about a laptop in a hammock.
2. You can always print your own.
3. Some upcoming technologies, especially MIT's "Digital Ink,"
will allow "paper" that can change what's written on it. In effect,
one book would be whatever book you wanted it to be.
> But what if you could select an out of print book and
> "burn" yourself a copy - print it out to order, have it bound,
> perhaps even given a spiffy cover, and mailed out to you?
Already happening. I *think* it was Baker&Taylor that's started
doing that; there was a news release in Publisher's Weekly some
months ago. "Renaissance Press" maybe?
> Of course there's a whole bunch of issues here - copyright being the
> first to spring to mind, but the idea of being able to go to a website
> and order the complete works of Andre Norton, freshly printed out,
> really tickles my fancy. So is it possible? Or, more correctly, will
> it be possible? Or likely?
Print-On-Demand books are basically a stop-gap measure on the
way to the technologies listed at the top of this article. Whether
PoD gets cheap enough fast enough to truly blossom before it
gets obsoleted by digital display technologies that rival paper
is anybody's guess.
J Steven York
On Sun, 26 Apr 1998 18:58:59 GMT, rog...@sff.net (Robert Rogoff)
wrote:
>On- demand publishing would render the Thor Power Tool Decision moot
>in terms of books.
Thor Power Tool has been a non-issue in publishing for some time now.
It's turning into the "poodle in the microwave" of writer's
discussions.
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J Steven York
On Mon, 27 Apr 1998 21:11:16 GMT, rog...@sff.net (Robert Rogoff)
wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Apr 1998 08:22:24 GMT, j-stev...@sff.net (J Steven
>York) wrote:
>
>>Thor Power Tool has been a non-issue in publishing for some time now.
>>It's turning into the "poodle in the microwave" of writer's
>>discussions.
>
>Why is it a non- issue? What do you mean by "'poodle in the
>microwave' of writer's discussions?'"
Well, I'm not well versed in the details, but I believe that the
publishers got around it years ago, simply by warehousing books and
covers separately. They're bound in lots as needed.
By "poodle in the microwave," I mean that it now borders on an urban
myth. It surfaces whenever the plight of midlist authors comes up,
and gets repeated so often that most people take it as gospel truth.
As with most urban myths, it does have an element of truth (there is
such a decision, it did once impact the publishing industry, and it
did once hurt the midlist), but the story has outlived its truth.
It can be compared to the infamous "card kid" of usenet and
fax-machine infamy. There once was a kid diagnosed as having terminal
cancer who wanted to get in the Guiness Book of World Records for
receiving the most GREETING cards. This was passed around the world
again and again, first by fax, then by usenet and e-mail. Meanwhile,
the kid got in the book, Guiness retired the category, the kid's
cancer when into remission, he grew up (he's either a teen or a young
adult now). But the messages kept getting passed by well intended
folks, and as it did, it began to mutate. Somehow, "greeting card"
turned into "business card," and the Make A Wish foundation got pulled
into the legend. Now everyone, especially the kid and the Make A Wish
Foundation (which has to spend large amounts of money to deal with the
mail and information requests) wishes it would just go away. But it
doesn't. My wife got another Fax about it at her office last week,
and she probably averages about one or two a year.
Likewise, I suspect writers will still be blaming Thor Power Tool for
their woes about the time we have the technology to beam novels
directly into your memory.
Chuck Rothman
While you are right that publishers have methods of getting around
Thor Power Tools, I think the ruling still strongly influences them.
Before Thor, publishers routinely kept backlist books around longer.
Warehousing costs were considered part of the cost of doing business.
It was felt you had to give a book more time to catch on.
Initially, Thor cause publishers to reduce inventory. They discovered
they could survive without a big backlist. Even after they found ways
to skirt the ruling, it changed their mindset so that they were
pulping books sooner. Few publishers have a backlist these days, even
though the direct financial aspects of Thor have been avoided.
In a way, this is worse, since a simple repeal of Thor is not going to
change back the mindset. A repeal may, however, remove an excuse for
not returning to the older system. It wouldn't hurt publishing,
certainly.
--
Chuck Rothman
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Lawrence Watt-Evans
j-stev...@sff.net (J Steven York) wrote:
>It can be compared to the infamous "card kid" of usenet and
>fax-machine infamy.
His name is Craig Shergold.
--
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J Steven York
On Tue, 28 Apr 1998 12:43:11 GMT, rot...@sff.net (Chuck Rothman)
wrote:
>In a way, this is worse, since a simple repeal of Thor is not going to
>change back the mindset. A repeal may, however, remove an excuse for
>not returning to the older system. It wouldn't hurt publishing,
>certainly.
In any case, Thor itself is no longer the problem, and "fixing" Thor
isn't likely to make any of our lives any better.
Vera Nazarian
I look forward to this technology!
It would be neat not to have to search for series books, but tho have
the whole thing custom-printed for you! ;-)
-- Vera
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