Jim Baens Universe-Vol 2 Num 5

by Eric Flint

  During the same time period that Asimov developed his laws, Robert A. Heinlein created the ultimate time paradox tale in his classic novella, "By His Bootstraps." No need for anyone to ever write another.

  But Heinlein himself topped it with "All You Zombies." So did David Gerrold with The Man Who Folded Himself. So did William Tenn with "Me, Myself and I." And none of them had anything in common with "By His Bootstraps" except that they concerned time paradoxes.

  Phillip Wylie actually created the first superman in his novel, Gladiator. Then came Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, a mental rather than a physical superman. Then came a whole series of supermen created by A. E. van Vogt. And of course there was Asimov's Mule, and Henry Kuttner's Baldies, and James H. Schmitz's delightful Witches of Karres . . . and need I go on? The only ones who bore more than a passing resemblance to Wylie's original were the continuing pulp character Doc Savage, and the continuing comic book character Superman.

  Olaf Stapledon gave us a thinking dog in Sirius. Which was nothing like the thinking dogs Clifford D. Simak gave us a decade later in City, or Fredric Brown's thinking dog, or Brown's thinking mouse, or any number of thinking cats, horses, dragons, you name it. None of which had anything in common with Sirius, except that they were animals and sentient.

  Okay, move the clock ahead to the 1990s and 2000s. I can't tell you how many young people I've spoken to at lectures, workshops, and online who only want to write Star Trek books or Star Wars books (and in the 1990s you could add Beauty and the Beast books). The CompuServe network, back in the 1990s, had about 300 embryonic writers who only wanted to write Pern stories, even though the laws of copyright were explained to them and Anne McCaffrey had to land on a couple who ignored those laws.

  For the longest time I didn't understand it. These aren't detective or Western stories, where you create a Sherlock Holmes or Hopalong Cassidy and tell his adventures for the rest of your career—and even in mysteries or Westerns, you created your own detective or cowboy, you didn't swipe someone else's.

  We're not mysteries or Westerns. We're science fiction, which gives its writers all time and space to play with. Our galaxy has about one hundred billion stars. We've got at least a couple of billion Class G stars, just like our sun, and we're starting to find out that damned near every star we examine has planets. The possibilities, scientific and fictional, are endless. So why do so many people want only to tell second-hand stories about Kirk and Spock and Picard and Skywalker in a handful of third-hand, shopworn, thoroughly-explored and not-very-logical universes?

  When they see something that interests them or impresses them, why don't they do what Simak did when he read about Asimov's robots, what van Vogt did when he read about Wylie's and Stapledon's supermen, what Gerrold did when he encountered Heinlein's time paradoxes? Why are the book and magazine slushpiles filled almost to overflowing with thinly-disguised Enterprises and Darth Vaders and the like?

  And then it occurred to me. There is one major difference between most of the writers I named, and all of the hopeful ones I've been encountering for the past decade or so . . . and that is that most of the writers I named did not grow up watching television. Television didn't exist during their formative years, so they grew up reading. They did not watch the same unchanging characters in the same trite, interchangeable plots week in and week out. They did not spend hours every night exposed to uncreative, unthreatening mental pablum that convinces each new generation of couch potato that it is Art. And, uninfluenced by the tube, they kept science fiction lively, creative and innovative.

  Conclusion: even out here in the boonies where written science fiction lives, television has a lot to answer for.

  Paper books are not going to be joining the dodo any time soon.

  If ever.

  Written by Eric Flint

  Beginning with this essay, I'm going to devote several essays in this column to analyzing the impact on publishing as electronic reading continues to expand. So far, for the most part, I've concentrated on demonstrating the fallacy of the various arguments in favor of DRM that focus on the impact of electronic so-called piracy on the sales of paper books.

  If we plant our feet on the real world, that was quite reasonable. Outside of some specialty areas like encyclopedia publishing, the overwhelming bulk of publishing—whether you measure that in terms of income generated, number of titles produced, or number of readers—has remained traditional paper publishing. Except for those specialty areas, electronic publishing is still a tiny sliver of the market.

  But what if—or when—that changes? What if—or when—electronic publishing becomes the dominant form of publishing? Perhaps even the exclusive form of publishing?

  It would seem self-evident, the argument goes, that at that point the problem of electronic piracy would become paramount. Whatever income the expanded sales of paper editions might get from free electronic copies would obviously no longer offset the losses. It would vanish altogether—or, at the very least, become picayune.

  From that time on, so the argument goes, doom is upon us. The moment pirate editions of electronic books—and there are no other kind of books, any longer—start reaching the top of the list in search engines, authors will starve to death and publishers will go bankrupt.

  Everything about this argument is wrong, from the letter A to the letter Z. And it's wrong on all levels. It will take me several essays to dismantle the argument, because it's based on a pile of errors, each of which lays the premise for the next.

  I will take up the following issues:

  1) Is it true, to begin with, that electronic publishing is on the verge—or even within a decade or two—of replacing paper publishing as the dominant form of publishing?

  2) Will the relationship between traditional paper publishing and electronic publishing be one of replacement? Or will it, instead, be a supplemental one? And, within that range, what are the most likely outcomes? Should we use as a past historical model the relationship between:

  a) typewriters and computers—complete substitution;

  b) manual transmissions and automatic transmissions—a division of the market;

  c) ground personal transport and air personal transport—supplemental, with both old and new technologies used by almost everyone;

  d) kitchen knives and home food processors—the old technology remains dominant, with the new one purely supplemental and used by relatively few people.

  3) Assuming the most likely variant—which is somewhere between "b" and "c," to prefigure my analysis—how significant will be the impact of electronic copyright infringement? To put it another way, what policies would be best to follow concerning DRM and fair use?

  4) Assuming the "worst" possible variant—the complete substitution of paper publishing by electronic publication, and the relegation of paper books to historical curiosities—would those policies need to be drastically changed or modified?

  In this essay, I'm going to concentrate on the first issue: How close are we to seeing the advent of the "electronic age" in reading books? And how rapidly is the change going to take place?

  I'll start with the simple version of the answer. We are not even close to the point where, outside of some specialty areas, we will be seeing electronic publishing become the dominant form of publishing. In fact, in those areas of publishing which are and always have been the mainstay of book publishing—fiction of all sorts, and popular non-fiction titles—electronic publishing will remain a sideline for many years to come.

  Why? For the good and simple reason that while electronic publishing presents some advantages for publishers and readers (and authors, for that matter), compared to traditional publishing, the advantages simply aren't great enough for most people to offset either the disadvantages or the sheer cultural inertia of paper books. Analogies between electronic publishing and other technologies which have seen a rapid and explosive growth collapse at the very beginning—because the analogy itself is fallacious.

  Whene
ver you see or hear someone arguing that electronic publishing is about to undergo an explosive development, I urge you to look closely at the structure of the argument. What you will discover—each and every time, with no exceptions—is that the argument is based purely on reasoning by analogy. It is never based on any facts deriving from the actual industry under question, which is the book publishing industry.

  That's because all the facts point in the opposite direction. The facts—which are now based on at least fifteen years of experience—indicate that electronic publishing and reading grow quite slowly, outside of some specialty areas.

  Argument by analogy is always suspect. Pointing to the explosive growth of computers, or cell phones, or various forms of electronic copying devices for music and video (VHS, DvDs, etc) as if those phenomena provide any sort of predictive powers for the growth of electronic reading simply begs the question. So do learned arguments about so-called "S-curves" in the development and expansion of technological innovations.

  The reason it begs the question is that the argument pre-supposes that simply because something is a technological innovation it is predestined to develop a large market.

  But that's silly. Technological innovations come in a vast range. Some are so much better that they rapidly and completely replace the pre-existing technology. To use my range of examples above, a computer word processing program is so superior to a typewriter for any purpose that within a very short time, typewriters became purely historical objects.

  But, moving down my list, consider what happened with automatic transmissions. They were first introduced into the commercial market by Oldsmobile in 1940—over two-thirds of a century ago. But, on a global scale, they've only just begun to finally supplant manual transmissions as the predominant form of automobile transmissions, although they did so in North America several decades ago. Still, even in North America, about seventeen percent of all cars purchased use a manual transmission. And that doesn't include the use of manual transmissions in commercial-size trucks.

  Moving still further down my list, air personal transport—once widely predicted in science fiction to be on the verge of replacing ground personal transport—did indeed enjoy explosive growth since the first airplane specifically designed for passenger flight was introduced by Boeing in 1929. But the growth came entirely as a supplement to ground transport, not a substitute. In the United States, air travel has by now largely supplanted rail travel for the passenger market—but it hasn't made a dent in automobile travel. And, in most of the world outside of the U.S., rail travel is continuing to do quite well.

  Finally, there's the home food processor. First introduced into the market in France in the late 60s, it spread to the United States in the early 70s. To put it another way, the new technology has had four decades to supplant kitchen knives. And . . .

  Kitchen knives are doing just fine, thank you. Even those people—a small share of the potential market—who do buy home food processors, never get rid of their kitchen knives. Food processors have simply become a minor supplement to the traditional technology, and have not replaced that "obsolete" technology at all.

  Why? Because while food processors have some advantages over kitchen knives for some purposes on some occasions, they simply don't provide enough advantages—and have some drawbacks of their own—to replace kitchen knives. Even for people who buy and use home food processors, kitchen knives are still the "default tool" used for most purposes.

  To be sarcastic about this, the next time someone lectures you on the S-curve and what it "inevitably" implies for electronic publishing, ask them what the S-curve was for the autogyro.

  There's an old maxim: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

  And the fact is, the traditional "obsolete and old-fashioned" paper book ain't broke. Not for most readers, most of the time, for most purposes. And, whatever its limitations, it possesses some enormous advantages over electronic books.

  To begin with, like kitchen knives, paper publishing is a technology that has been tested over centuries and has proven itself to be extremely durable and reliable. In contrast, NO software yet developed has demonstrated that it can even last a decade before it gets replaced by something else.

  You can buy a paper book and know, for a certainty, that barring a flood or a fire or a bombing raid or an asteroid strike or real carelessness on your part, you will still be able to read the same book half a century from now. If it's a hardcover, longer than that.

  Can anyone say the same about any electronic reading device on the market today—or predicted to be on the market in the foreseeable future?

  No. In fact, everyone has dark memories about "inevitable" technologies that bit them on the ass. Can we say . . . eight-track tapes . . . Betamax . . . software programs too numerous to count which became obsolete . . .

  There are some absolutely enormous advantages to paper books. The biggest and simplest stem from the very simplicity of the technology.

  Here's what you need to obtain and use a paper book:

  Literacy in one or another language. That is the only software required.

  A relatively small amount of money. That is the only financial limitation—and you can get around that one easily, by borrowing a book or using a library.

  If you can read and have some money, you can own and use a paper book. That book does not require you to agree to an end-user license. That book does not carry any risk of becoming obsolete so long as the paper, ink and binding holds up—and they'll hold up for decades, even with a cheap paperback.

  There is no restriction as to which publisher you buy from. You can buy from any of them—because they all use exactly the same software. The English language. (Or whichever other language you're reading.) There are no security codes you need to obtain, learn, memorize. No username, no password.

  And . . . once you buy that book, you OWN it. No ifs, ands or buts. You can do anything you want with it. Keep it, sell it, lend it to a friend, throw it at the neighbor's yowling cat or use it for a doorstop. There is no chance at all that you will be subjected to a lawsuit because you violated this or that or the other provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or fell foul of the RIIA.

  One universal and standard software. One universal and standard purchasing mechanism. Complete and total ownership.

  Those factors alone make the potential market for e-books extremely resistant. All the more so because the only major advantage of electronic text for most readers is simply storage. The one respect in which electronic books and e-book readers are clearly, unequivocally and absolutely superior to paper books is that they don't take up much space. You can fit an entire bookshelf into one e-book reader. (At least, with certain models.)

  The problem, however, is that the same clear advantage is also a major disadvantage. The fact is that the great majority of book purchases are done by a small minority of readers. That's true in every literate country in the world, although the percentages vary from nation to nation. Russians, for instance, have a traditionally book-oriented culture whose adults read a lot of books, whereas Americans do not. Throughout American history—this is not a recent development "caused" by the digital era; it goes back at least three centuries—most adult Americans read few books, and when they do the books will usually be either religious in nature and/or be practical manuals or self-help books of one sort or another.

  What that means is that publishers, author and editors have always relied on a relatively small percentage of the population for their income and livelihoods. In the United States, the figure is not more than fifteen percent of the adult population.

  The reason this is possible, however, is because—as a rule; there are always exceptions—those people who do read books typically read a lot of them. Go into any household in the Unites States, and with a few exceptions you will always discover the same thing:

  There are either no books visible, beyond perhaps the Bible and one or two self-help books (diet books; "How to Get
Rich in Ten Easy Steps;" etc, etc) or there is at least one full bookcase.

  Those people who assume that the storage advantage of e-books will be enough in itself to cause that technology to soon dominate the market, should really ponder the implications. Because the reality is that paper books are not and never have been simply a tool to read text. A paper book is a cultural artifact whose intellectual, emotional, social—even symbolic—important is deeply rooted in every literate culture in the world.

  There's a reason, y'know, it's called the Holy Book.

  Try to imagine a world whose regular readers will cheerfully give up bookcases full of books.

  Go ahead. Try.

  Not so easy, is it?

  And for what? Ease of storage?

  Oh, what a laugh. I do not know one single person who reads regularly who has not, at least once in their lives, gone to well-nigh incredible lengths to figure out a way to store their books. Be it ingenious locations for bookshelves, stashing them in the basement or attic or garage, whatever. With a few exceptions, it's only with great reluctance that such people finally decide to give away or sell some of their books. (Except the ones they don't like, of course. But not even the most rabid enthusiast for e-book readers thinks people will buy the gadgets to store books they don't want to begin with.)

  What other real advantages do e-books have over paper books?

  For most people . . . none worth talking about.

  I stress "for most people," because there are obviously exceptions—and a fair number of them. The single most important group, for whom electronic reading is definitely superior to paper reading, are those people who suffer one or another physical handicap that makes reading paper books difficult. The most common example are people who are blind or have a severe visual impairment. For them, the advent of electronic reading has been a genuine blessing.