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June 5, 2006
By MOTOKO RICH
Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of
Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University
Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from
his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically,
with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.
Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how books might be in the
future." That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers,
editors and writers grapple with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more
quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically
and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for
music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.
Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and
dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at
BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike
forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and
matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a "grisly scenario."
Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing
industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where
digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the
record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales
are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same
period, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped
more than 1,700 percent in just two years.
What writers think about technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do
with where they are sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar, Anne Fadiman,
author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a
Common Reader," thinks a digital library of all books would be a "godsend" during
research, allowing her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she said:
"That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in its entirety and I think there's
no substitute for the look and feel and smell of a real book — the magic of the paper and
thread and glue."
Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the author of 13 thrillers,
the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde," spent four weeks on the New York Times
hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each
book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out "samplers" of a few
chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of these formats are fine with her, she says.
Whether its "paper, pulp, gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the
best stories," she said.
Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into
one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times
Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave
themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his
BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't
see in a single, isolated book."
"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las
Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel,
"When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated
works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather,
I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up
with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."
For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy readers, however, the Web
offers an unprecedented way to catapult out of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who
started a political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a
foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and telecommunications
company, to write a book this spring. Mr. Greenwald promoted the result, called "How
Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own
blog and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential bloggers, who
helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com before it was even published. This
Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think
people who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices entering will be a
lot more excited about this technology," Mr. Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that
technology always has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new
authors."
For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book publishing inevitably
leads to the question of how writers will be paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an
advance against royalties, which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the
cover price of each copy sold.
But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had pieces put up on Web
sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of thousands of hits, and believe me I sit
around thinking 'Boy, if I got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I
wrote, I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the forthcoming book
"The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a memoir about his hunt to discover what
happened to relatives who were killed in the Holocaust.
Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take time to play out, and
that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as an author who creates texts that people
consume, I want my authorship to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.
Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will continue to pay for
books if the price is low enough. "Even in music, price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler
said. "The service has to be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one
where, as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not clear to me why,
if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."
He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book production, publishers could
afford to give authors a higher cut of the sale price as royalties.
In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will impose on literary society
may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a
relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-
produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing
press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.
That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra, whose 1,000-page novel,
"Sacred Games," will be published in January. Mr. Chandra, a former computer
programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said
he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the
fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually
willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the
only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the
barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a
parking lot over your sacred grounds.
"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."
Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out
ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the
experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the
book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories.
"As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he
said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close
between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could
experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further
emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."