Time for a Google Books Settlement update…

First of all, the Fairness Hearing – the bit where Judge Chin decides whether the Settlement is acceptable to the US court – started on Friday. James Grimmelmann has a transcript here. As you’d imagine there’s a lot of it, but the Maestro has helpfully culled a summary here and here. Even the summaries are not short, but hey: this is rather a significant thing. You can cope.

A few things which have occurred to me of recent days, as a result of the hearing, and of some meetings I’ve been to:

1. Orphan Works

Somewhat startling discussion between Michael Boni for the Author’s Guild and Judge Chin. I’ll reproduce Laboratorium’s account here and then say a couple of things…

Judge Chin: What about those [opted in rightsholders] who don’t come forward?

Boni: They’ll be looked for.

Judge Chin: Aren’t the vast majority out of print?

Boni: So far, some 620,000 out-of-print books have been claimed by 40,000 authors, through the notice program alone. We expect to find a lot of these people. We’ve had an 85% success rate; the UK licensing society has found over 90%.

First up: it’s vital to distinguish here between books which are out of print, which frequently come back into print and (especially if there’s been a film or the author has won an award) sell more copies than they did first time round – and orphan works whose copyright owner is impossible to locate (for a given value of impossible).

Second, Boni seems to be saying here that they expect to find a high percentage of the rightsholders. If that’s the case, I have to ask what we’re all doing here. The whole point, surely, of an opt-out settlement is to bring in those works for whom no negotiation is possible. Otherwise this is just a massive compulsory licensing system for the convenience of a large media company.

Third, the discussion of orphan works has become something of a magic word in copyright reform and Digital Economy chatter in the UK. I’ve been guilt of taking this at face value myself. That figure of five to ten million orphan works is impressive, but it’s a little misleading. Some estimates put it as low as five hundred thousand. If Google expects to find 85% of those rightsholders eventually, then the number of works at risk of loss is… er… well, seventy five thousand at its low end and seven hundred and fifty at the top. Not so impressive as a bargaining chip, is it?

2. The Plan

I think a lot of people are assuming merrily that Google has A Plan. This is very comforting for publishers and agents and writers alike. The digital world is looming and digital piracy (or filesharing or booklending, call it what you like) is already begun. It’s a scary new world, and ho ho! Here’s the most friendly face in it – or one of them – offering to sort it all out. Yay!

Except the thing is Google doesn’t seem to have a plan. Google has a belief in Creative Destruction and a sense that if they put stuff out into the world first and find ways to monetise it later, that will work. It has done before. Never mind that inductive reasoning is not dependable (ask a turkey) or that it may, if it works, work because of Google’s stunningly privileged position as the index of the web rather than because it’s a good way of dealing with stuff. It’s only ‘creative’ if what is produced is better and more powerful and brighter than what was there before, and there’s actually no particular reason to believe that to be the case. This may just be destructive destruction of an industry which is heavily bound up in the culture of our nations and whose existence props up the production of long-form fiction and all sorts of other stuff, in favour of, er, Google and companies like it which are essentially aggregators and searchers rather than content creators.

Google has said repeatedly that they are not entering publishing, and we tend to take that with a pinch of salt. Guess what? I think it’s absolutely true. They’re not. If they end up being in the position where they have to take over some of the roles of publishers, that will be a side effect rather than an ambition, and they may not do it very well. Indeed, they may choose not to do it at all, leaving the broken bits of our industry to fester where they lie.

Or they may become a great publisher. The point is, I don’t think they know.

3. The Plan (2)

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The Settlement cuts off in January last year, and from now on, Google will notionally be focusing on contractual and legislative means of acquiring the right to display books. Unless they can persuade the governments of the world to grant them an compulsory license (unlikely) there will be books whose rights they do not acquire. In fact, there will be many. The publishing industry produces hundreds of thousands of new books every year. A percentage of those will be exclusive to other internet formats. Some of those will be successful. Google will be in the position of watching its library shrink in proportion to new output. So here’s the question I’d really like an answer to:

Are we going to go through this whole process again in ten years time with Son Of GBS?

Because you have to wonder.

Because a day on which I don’t take ten minutes out from actual work to speculate on something no one can actually be sure of is clearly wasted…

It occurred to me just now, reading this, that there are some weird consequences floating around waiting to leap on everyone as a result of the arrival of digital books – always assuming that they have arrived, do arrive, and stay arrived – which are not the ones everyone is expecting.

Basically: it’s not that publishers think pricing ebooks high will lead to more sales (clearly, it won’t), it’s that they are scared that pricing them low will devalue the book per se, with the result that no book will be valued enough by the market to command a price which makes what they do profitable.

They also believe that digital sales will cannibalise paper sales.

You know what? If digital sales are any kind of success, they will. I just do not buy the idea that ebooks will be a driver of paper sales for ever. Either people will shift, or they won’t. In the latter case, ebooks are Minidisc or Betamax and the discussion is over. In the former, they will consume a part of the paper market. They’ve already consumed a part of my paper purchases. Why, why, why would I ever buy books I will almost certainly want to leave in my hotel room and carry them around instead of a Kindle?

But here’s the interesting thing: I think people do crave authenticity. I think they do enjoy the physical connection with a book, with the process of manufacture, and I think we underestimate the tactile connection with paper and so on at our peril. Otherwise, why would anyone wear a clockwork watch? But people do. Why would anyone go to the theatre? Blah blah.

So the upshot of all this may not be the death of the hardback – which seems to be the particular hate object of many ebook enthusiasts – but of the paperback. If you want to object, you want a proper, solid, long-lasting, attractive object. A boutique object. Otherwise you get the ebook. And if you buy the hardback, of course, you get the ebook and all the singing dancing multimedia thingies thrown in. For which privilege, you pay.

Maybe.

Quick round-up:

The list of opters-out to the Google Books Settlement is up here. It’s a long image-scan .pdf in which all the responders are filed by first name, under their real rather than professional name. I understand there may also be issues with married and unmarried names. Annoying, but still a fascinating document, and it includes more than a few notables: Thomas Pynchon is there, so is Louis de Bernières – and so is one John Prescott, who appears at first glance to be the John Prescott, former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Perhaps I should write to him and ask – if it is he, then he’d be an interesting ally in nudging the government to get off its regal backside and do something useful.

On that note, I’ve been thinking about the government’s attitude and come to the conclusion that it’s relatively simple: it’s convenient to use the smaller players in the media as a whipping horse from time to time. The government loves to be friends with News International and Lord Mandelson gets on frightfully well with David Geffen, but it’s very happy to kick the British Film industry or let writers swing in order to be in tight with Google: trashing creatives in flowery shirts is painless and gives a sense of playing hardball with “the wealthy” – because all creatives are parasitic fops, don’t you know? And some of them, of course, go the other way like that Oscar Wilde bloke, and some take drugs, they’re a bad lot with too much time on their hands, never mind that they’re the engine of a decent slice of the ‘proper’ economy – without actually angering any powerful financial/media groups or making bankers unhappy.

Labour’s obsession with being a friend to industry and finance – a vital component of its election strategy when Tony Blair was reshaping an unelectable party – means that they can’t really be tough with city firms and so on except in crisis, and even then, as we know, it doesn’t stick. They like high-profile initiatives which mean little. Real banking regulation is hard. It’s so much simpler to trumpet the demise of naughty tax equity funding, for example, even if there wasn’t really all that much abuse of the system and it means the demise of £200m of filmmaking over night… (Sorry, that’s a ghost of 2004 I’ve been carrying around for a while – it made my life really difficult for a couple of years, and eventually resulted in me writing The Gone-Away World, so I shouldn’t really complain.)

Aaaaaanyway… rant over. Go check out the Google list. Moving on…

Regarding Oxfam…

I’m going to be talking to some folks from Oxfam this month and getting their point of view. If you have questions you’d like me to ask or wise thoughts you want to share, that’s what the comment thread here is for.

And stuff…

Appearances:

I’m at P-Con at the beginning of March, and then at the Oxford Literary Festival (event 564) at the end of March. Come along and laugh at me as I try to figure out what to say which won’t make me sound like a twerp. I will also be at the 140conf meetup this week.

Facebook:

Someone has created a Gonzo Lubitsch Facebook account. It isn’t me, but it is quite funny.

Someone else has created a Ronnie Cheung page.

UK News:

The Liberal Democrats have surprised me by announcing that they will not form part of a coalition government in the event (increasingly likely) of a hung parliament. They will instead demand four policy initiatives. I understand the logic, but I think it’s a mistake, and I suspect the effects of raising Capital Gains Tax to the same levels as Income Tax may be rather more far-reaching than they imagine. Not to mention that a Conservative government almost certainly wouldn’t go for that without weakening it to the point where it makes no odds.

Elsewhere, the shouting match over Binyam Mohamed continues. Alan Johnson’s bluster and Kim Howells’ inexplicable decision to be (as it appeared to several people I’ve spoken to) rather rude to my wife on Feb 12th have availed them nought. It seems the ISC was misled, and David Davis has said it’s toothless and unable to supervise MI5.

WoW:

By way of an experiment, I have created a World Of Warcraft guild – The Knitting Circle – on the European Scarshield Legion RPPvP server. (Yes, you heard me. RPPvP. I have no idea why, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) We’re an Alliance guild, and my character is a gnome called Weatherby. I wanted to call the guild Lady Weatherby’s Knitting Circle and serve tea in Warsong Gulch, but the name wouldn’t fit on the guild register.

Darn.

Anyway, the idea is that anyone who wants can sign up and we’ll all go trash monsters together and I will call that ‘work’. It is not what you would call a professional guild, and no one is to be mean to anyone. Except the enemy, of course. Actually, if there are any WoW-playing authors out there who want to throw down and make a Horde guild, that would be hilarious.

The New Book:

… is great (even if I do say so myself), bastard hard to finish properly, going well, and will be done when it’s done. At the moment I can barely see the damn screen because my nose is running so hard and my eyes are sore, so in about ten seconds I’m going to have a shower and go get a bacon sandwich, fill my body with over-the-counter medication (but not paracetamol which initiates a chain reaction of badness culminating in the blood vessels around my eyes breaking) and see what happens. If there is a passage in the middle of the book with unicorns and flowers we may assume I wrote it today.