Stross on ebooks

Disclaimer: Since 2006 I have been employed by Google, which sells ebooks and related technology, and therefore competes with several of the companies involved in the subject matter. My opinions are my own and not those of my employer.

Charlie Stross has a compelling analysis of the book publishers' position, in light of the recently opened Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple for alleged price fixing. (Incidentally Stross's comments are usually decent and he engages with his readers as well, so they're worth a skim.)

Stross's post reminds me a lot of something I wrote about 2 years ago. Rereading that post today, I find that I have very little to add to it.

There is one additional thing from Stross's post, though, that I find particularly galling:

. . . if your boss is a 70 year old billionaire who also owns a movie studio and listens to the MPAA, you don't get a vote. Speaking out against DRM was, as more than one editor told me over the past decade, potentially a career-limiting move.

Publishing companies like to portray themselves as scrappy underdogs locked in heroic battle on the side of knowledge against the forces of ignorance. In fact, they are merely subordinate tentacles of large, stupid media conglomerates; they aid the forces of knowledge when it is convenient for business, and do whatever they can to muzzle open discourse when that is convenient. (Fortunately their power to silence critics is fairly limited in a free society.) Critics have been repeating for years that ebooks should be convenient and DRM-free. Publishers never listened; instead they threatened the careers of people like Stross's editors for even bringing it up.

Anyway, I can't comment on the substance of the DoJ lawsuit (and anyway, I know nothing about the facts of the case, so my comments would be pointless), but I find it hard to muster much sympathy for these people. The solution to their problems has been staring them in the face for as long as ebooks have existed. Unfortunately, I'm somewhat less sanguine than Stross that publishers are going to learn the lesson. They seem pretty impervious to persuasion.

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p.s. See also Tim O'Reilly's Plus post.

Electronic goods markets: end-to-end wins?

Hypothesis: As industries of cultural production adapt to digital distribution, content publishers in each industry will follow, with minor variations, the four-phase pattern set by the music industry:

1. Denial: Publishers pretend that digital distribution does not exist, attempting to salvage business models based on distribution of physical media. In some cases, publishers use the legal system to try to make this fantasy a reality. Regardless of the legal outcomes, this proves unsustainable in the long run. During this phase, publishers may make halfhearted forays into digital publishing, which invariably fail because they are deeply and deliberately user-hostile.
2. Faustian Bargain: A technology company designs a system which disguises computers' fundamentally general nature with a fig leaf of DRM. The disguise allows this company to strike a deal with major content publishing cartels to distribute content. Because a technology company has taken control of the technology, the system finally works in a way that doesn't make customers want to tear their hair out. The DRM system fails to prevent widespread copyright infringement, but it provides a hook for the technology company to build a vertically integrated stack which is somewhat inconvenient for customers to exit.
3. Clash of the Titans: Publishers realize that they are in a weakening bargaining position with respect to the technology company, which has acquired considerable monopsony power due to its control of the platform. Publishers butt heads with the technology company over prices and other contractual terms. This, too, proves unsustainable.
4. End-to-End Wins: Publishers realize that architectures which embed control in the distribution mechanism put more power in the hands of middlemen than endpoints. Conversely, end-to-end architectures, wherein the endpoints negotiate the transaction and any number of interchangeable mechanisms carry data between them on a best-effort basis, place power in the hands of endpoints rather than middlemen. Publishers furthermore realize that publishers and customers are the endpoints; that in the long run both are best served when the customer can purchase a bundle of data which is not bound (even weakly) to the sales channel, the software stack, or the physical device, all of which are intermediaries between the content and the customer. Publishers finally offer their content in a portable format via multiple sales channels.

This is just a hypothesis. I'm not sure I believe it. However, as evidence that expecting the final stage is not laughably utopian, I offer Sony and Warner's deals with eMusic and the introduction of MP3s on iTunes as evidence that stage 4 is already happening for music.

Detailed application of the above model to current hoopla in the e-book market left as an exercise to the reader. However, I will note that one reason I bought a Kindle is that I thought book publishers were so ornery, retrograde, and technophobic that they'd never progress to stage 4 unless they had an obnoxious would-be monopsonist (viz., Amazon) to frighten them through stage 3.

(A counterpoint to the above argument would be to observe that certain goods, like streaming video and computer games, appear to be evolving in the direction of fairly strong architectures of control. Neither Netflix streaming nor Steam give you much freedom w.r.t. your "purchase". It's unclear whether this means their respective markets haven't progressed far enough yet, or there's something fundamentally different about these media.)

A Proposal: The Peer Review

Briggs Seekins describes the incestuous, careerist nightmare that is the current poetry publishing scene. Now, Seekins sounds like a rather unpleasant individual to be around (how many alcoholic depressives with inferiority complexes aren't?); and as for Dan Schneider (the owner/operator of the site publishing Seekins's essay) --- well, just look at his site's front page. Still, the dysfunction in the literary community seems real.

As an ersatz scientist, I can't help but observe that one of the major problems with the poetry business ("PoBiz") is that there's no effective system to encourage publication based on merit instead of nepotism. Therefore, I propose a new poetry journal: The Peer Review.

Editorial staff: Unlike today's poetry journals, the Peer Review will not have an editorial staff as such. Rather, the Peer Review will be run by two entities: a general chair, who is responsible for administrative matters, and a program committee (or, as we call it, a PC) that is responsible for substantive editorial judgments. The PC shall be led by an individual, called the program chair, who shall be responsible for twisting the arms of PC members to get their reviews done and such (see below). The composition of the general chair and program committee shall rotate from issue to issue; serving on the Peer Review shall be considered a service to the poetry community. PC members may not serve on the committee for two consecutive issues.

Rules for submission: Work by PC members or their current students shall be barred from submission to the issue over which they preside. Works shall be submitted with the author's name attached, but these names shall be concealed from the program committee throughout the review process. Authors must disclose any personal or professional relationships with program committee members.

Review process: All PC members shall be responsible for at least skimming over every submission. Additionally, each submission shall have no fewer than three written reviews by PC members (the PC chair shall distribute the burden of writing reviews equitably among PC members). Each review shall be several paragraphs long, discussing the work's merits and weaknesses, and recommending "accept" or "reject". Once all submissions for an issue have been collected and reviewed, the whole program committee shall arrange to convene in person, over several days, to discuss the relative merits of each poem. The program chair and committee shall cooperate beforehand to discover conflicts of interest between poems and committee members (poems written by former students, etc.), and committee members with a conflict of interest shall be asked to leave the room while the rest of the committee discusses those poems. If a committee member fails to disclose a conflict of interest, and a poem gets in regardless, then that member shall be shunned from the Peer Review forever after and he or she shall be pilloried within the poetry community.

Author notification: Along with notification of the program committee's decision, the written reviews shall be sent back to the poets in full, promptly and predictably after the program committee meeting.

In case it's not obvious: to someone coming from the world of scientific conference publication, all of the above is utterly boring and standard. But someone coming from the world of literary journals, considering the above measures, will probably be caught somewhere between laughter and tears. Anonymized submissions! Rotating editorial staff! Program committee members and their students barred from submitting! Disclosed conflicts of interest, and procedures to eliminate them! Prompt and transparent notification of acceptance or rejection! If only the world could be so fair and bright!

Would the Peer Review work? There are practical concerns: a poetry journal receives an order of magnitude more submissions than a top scientific conference; poets may not be able to afford to fly off to a program committee meeting several times a year; since the poetry world doesn't have a tradition of "professional service", it may be difficult to convince people to serve on program committees. I think these obstacles and others could be overcome by someone with determination. I just doubt that anyone with influence in the poetry world would actually be willing to try it.