There is a lot of moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth in the book business these days. For instance, this NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28streitfeld.html?_r=2&emc=eta1
There are many reasons why publishers and bookstores (both chains and independents) are shrinking or disappearing altogether. Part of it is just a head-in-the-sand approach to new technology. But a very big part of it is the problem of the reselling of used books on the Internet.
Now, full disclosure here, as an author/publisher, at the moment I take a pretty dim view of people reselling my book. I see it as truly unfair use (piracy even) of my intellectual property.
Of course, this is an extremely foggy legal situation. Most people understand that installing software on your computer and then reselling the manufacturer’s disk to someone else is a form of piracy and/or copyright infringement. But, once you have "installed" the information from a book in your head, are you then free to resell that piece of intellectual property to someone else, just because you own the media that contains and conveys it?
At the moment, for books anyway, the answer is yes. Reselling used books has been a tradition for centuries, but now, with the Internet replacing the garage sale and making it very easy to re-sell used books, this is a whole ’nother ball game.
The new technology now forces us to ask the question: is this wise? If, once a book is written, the physical manifestation of this intellectual property essentially becomes public domain (by being sold for 99 cents on Amazon or Half.com), this potentially puts a severe economic drag on the creation of new books.
Now this does not necessarily mean books will disappear. Far from it. For the foreseeable future, there will always be books, just as there will also always be free television (i.e. infomercials). But if certain authors cannot recoup the time and effort it takes to write and publish a book, after a while, certain kinds of book products will simply disappear– like mine. And this is a threat, not just to authors, but to the open exchange of ideas. If certain kinds of informational books become unprofitable, there will be fewer of them. Sure, promotional and propaganda books will always be around, but that is a different animal in the market.
Anyway, those dire predictions aside, I hope it is self evident that reselling a book and depriving the author of that book of some form of emolument is, ipso facto, wrong. Just as DVDs of movies are not supposed to be shown in large public settings, it’s important to have some kind of system in place that allows authors to be paid for their time and effort. But right now, other than buying it new, there is no way for book buyers and readers to do the right thing, even if they want to.
So, rather than simply sitting here and complaining about it, I have a solution to propose. It requires a group effort.
To illustrate, imagine yourself going out to eat in a restaurant. You are not "required" to leave a tip, but it is more or less assumed by everyone (at least here in the USA) that you will do so. It is understood that this is the only way your waitperson will make a decent amount of money. So if you take a book that is under copyright out of a library (or buy it cheap used) and the author is still alive, why not make it "assumed" that, if you enjoy the book, you will leave the author a tip as well? Like 10-15% of the cover price? (Which, incidentally is exactly how much most authors make off of House-published books anyway).
Just as the Internet opened the door to massive reselling of used books and caused this problem in the first place, that same Internet also offers the solution.
I have created a contribution page on my web site that allows people to send me just such a payment via paypal. Real Men Don’t Rehearse costs $15 new. I figure most books get read by approximately two to five people, and I think the 15 bucks covers that use, good enough. But, if you have a situation similar to this, (and this is happened to me twice in the last month), where people come up to me and say, "Justin, I loved your book so much, I loaned it to 50 of my best friends in the local civic orchestra, and they all just loved it too" … Well wouldn’t it be great if all those 50 people went to my paypal site and compensated me for my time and effort? I would be happy if they all gave me something like 3 or 5 dollars. Instead of fuming about the theft of my intellectual property, why not give them an alternative method of paying for the service/ value I gave them?
This plan has numerous advantages: 1) no one had to take a risk on the book, as they got to read it "on spec" for free; 2) it is a more "green" approach, as one physical copy of the book gets recycled, 3) I don’t have to pack up the book and drive to the post office, and 4) I still make about the same money "per reading" that I would have made from selling a physical copy of the book.
In other words, everybody wins.
So anyway, the graphic at left will link you to this new page. I am hoping that other authors and publishers will get on this bandwagon. Printers may not be excited about it at first, but remember, when television and VCR’s came out, the movie industry thought this was all a terrible incursion on their territory, but now the existence of home theater doubles and triples the income on most Hollywood movies.
Note, another possible fix to this is for literary intellectual property owners to get together and require Internet book resellers to add 15% to every used book sale and give that to the book’s copyright owner. The music industry has something very similar to this, it’s called ASCAP payments. Every orchestra and radio station keeps track of what songs it plays, pays a fee for them all, and a parent organization in New York distributes all those payments to the copyright owners. There’s no reason why people in the book business couldn’t do the exact same thing, and make a ton of dough.
Instead of bemoaning our fate, let’s have a little bit of faith in our customers and their desire to do the right thing if we just provide a little bit of leadership.
© Justin Locke
