by John Brooks
It has been suggested that the 914 is the most successful commercial product in history, but the statement cannot be authoritatively confirmed or denied, if only because Xerox does not publish precise revenue figures on its individual products; the company does say, though, that in 1965 the 914 accounted for about sixty-two per cent of its total operating revenues, which works out to something over $243,000,000. In 1966 it could be bought for $27,500, or it could be rented for twenty-five dollars monthly, plus at least forty-nine dollars’ worth of copies at four cents each. These charges were deliberately set up to make renting more attractive than buying, because Xerox ultimately makes more money that way. The 914, which is painted beige and weighs six hundred and fifty pounds, looks a good deal like a modern L-shaped metal desk; the thing to be copied—a flat page, two pages of an open book, or even a small three-dimensional object like a watch or a medal—is placed face down on a glass window in the flat top surface, a button is pushed, and nine seconds later the copy pops into a tray where an “out” basket might be if the 914 actually were a desk. Technologically, the 914 is so complex (more complex, some Xerox salesmen insist, than an automobile) that it has an annoying tendency to go wrong, and consequently Xerox maintains a field staff of thousands of repairmen who are presumably ready to answer a call on short notice. The most common malfunction is a jamming of the supply of copy paper, which is rather picturesquely called a “mispuff,” because each sheet of paper is raised into position to be inscribed by an interior puff of air, and the malfunction occurs when the puff goes wrong. A bad mispuff can occasionally put a piece of the paper in contact with hot parts, igniting it and causing an alarming cloud of white smoke to issue from the machine; in such a case the operator is urged to do nothing, or, at most, to use a small fire extinguisher that is attached to it, since the fire burns itself out comparatively harmlessly if left alone, whereas a bucket of water thrown over a 914 may convey potentially lethal voltages to its metal surface. Apart from malfunctions, the machine requires a good deal of regular attention from its operator, who is almost invariably a woman. (The girls who operated the earliest typewriters were themselves called “typewriters,” but fortunately nobody calls Xerox operators “xeroxes.”) Its supply of copying paper and black electrostatic powder, called “toner,” must be replenished regularly, while its most crucial part, the selenium drum, must be cleaned regularly with a special non-scratchy cotton, and waxed every so often. I spent a couple of afternoons with one 914 and its operator, and observed what seemed to be the closest relationship between a woman and a piece of office equipment that I had ever seen. A girl who uses a typewriter or switchboard has no interest in the equipment, because it holds no mystery, while one who operates a computer is bored with it, because it is utterly incomprehensible. But a 914 has distinct animal traits: it has to be fed and curried; it is intimidating but can be tamed; it is subject to unpredictable bursts of misbehavior; and, generally speaking, it responds in kind to its treatment. “I was frightened of it at first,” the operator I watched told me. “The Xerox men say, ‘If you’re frightened of it, it won’t work,’ and that’s pretty much right. It’s a good scout; I’m fond of it now.”
Xerox salesmen, I learned from talks with some of them, are forever trying to think of new uses for the company’s copiers, but they have found again and again that the public is well ahead of them. One rather odd use of xerography insures that brides get the wedding presents they want. The prospective bride submits her list of preferred presents to a department store; the store sends the list to its bridal-registry counter, which is equipped with a Xerox copier; each friend of the bride, having been tactfully briefed in advance, comes to this counter and is issued a copy of the list, whereupon he does his shopping and then returns the copy with the purchased items checked off, so that the master list may be revised and thus ready for the next donor. (“Hymen, iö Hymen, Hymen!”) Again, police departments in New Orleans and various other places, instead of laboriously typing up a receipt for the property removed from people who spend the night in the lockup, now place the property itself—wallet, watch, keys, and such—on the scanning glass of a 914, and in a few seconds have a sort of pictographic receipt. Hospitals use xerography to copy electrocardiograms and laboratory reports, and brokerage firms to get hot tips to customers more quickly. In fact, anybody with any sort of idea that might be advanced by copying can go to one of the many cigar or stationery stores that have a coin-operated copier and indulge himself. (It is interesting to note that Xerox took to producing coin-operated 914s in two configurations—one that works for a dime and one that works for a quarter; the buyer or leaser of the machine could decide which he wanted to charge.)
Copying has its abuses, too, and they are clearly serious. The most obvious one is overcopying. A tendency formerly identified with bureaucrats has been spreading—the urge to make two or more copies when one would do, and to make one when none would do; the phrase “in triplicate,” once used to denote bureaucratic waste, has become a gross understatement. The button waiting to be pushed, the whir of action, the neat reproduction dropping into the tray—all this adds up to a heady experience, and the neophyte operator of a copier feels an impulse to copy all the papers in his pockets. And once one has used a copier, one tends to be hooked. Perhaps the chief danger of this addiction is not so much the cluttering up of files and loss of important material through submersion as it is the insidious growth of a negative attitude toward originals—a feeling that nothing can be of importance unless it is copied, or is a copy itself.
A more immediate problem of xerography is the overwhelming temptation it offers to violate the copyright laws. Almost all large public and college libraries—and many high-school libraries as well—are now equipped with copying machines, and teachers and students in need of a few copies of a group of poems from a published book, a certain short story from an anthology, or a certain article from a scholarly journal have developed the habit of simply plucking it from the library’s shelves, taking it to the library’s reproduction department, and having the required number of Xerox copies made. The effect, of course, is to deprive the author and the publisher of income. There are no legal records of such infringements of copyright, since publishers and authors almost never sue educators, if only because they don’t know that the infringements have occurred; furthermore, the educators themselves often have no idea that they have done anything illegal. The likelihood that many copyrights have already been infringed unknowingly through xerography became indirectly apparent a few years ago when a committee of educators sent a circular to teachers from coast to coast informing them explicitly what rights to reproduce copyrighted material they did and did not have, and the almost instant sequel was a marked rise in the number of requests from educators to publishers for permissions. And there was more concrete evidence of the way things were going; for example, in 1965 a staff member of the library school of the University of New Mexico publicly advocated that libraries spend ninety per cent of their budgets on staff, telephones, copying, telefacsimiles, and the like, and only ten per cent—a sort of tithe—on books and journals.
To a certain extent, libraries attempt to police copying on their own. The photographic service of the New York Public Library’s main branch, which fills some fifteen hundred requests a week for copies of library matter, informs patrons that “copyrighted material will not be reproduced beyond ‘fair use’”—that is, the amount and kind of reproduction, generally confined to brief excerpts, that have been established by legal precedent as not constituting infringement. The library goes on, “The applicant assumes all responsibility for any question that may arise in the making of the copy and in the use made thereof.” In the first part of its statement the library seems to assume the responsibility and in the second part to renounce it, and this ambivalence may reflect an uneasiness widely felt among users of library copiers. Outside library walls, there often does not seem to be even this degree of scruple. Business people who a
re otherwise meticulous in their observance of the law seem to regard copyright infringement about as seriously as they regard jaywalking. A writer I’ve heard about was invited to a seminar of high-level and high-minded industrial leaders and was startled to find that a chapter from his most recent book had been copied and distributed to the participants, to serve as a basis for discussion. When the writer protested, the businessmen were taken aback, and even injured; they had thought the writer would be pleased by their attention to his work, but the flattery, after all, was of the sort shown by a thief who commends a lady’s jewelry by making off with it.
In the opinion of some commentators, what has happened so far is only the first phase of a kind of revolution in graphics. “Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,” the Canadian sage Marshall McLuhan wrote in the spring, 1966, issue of the American Scholar. “Authorship and readership alike can become production-oriented under xerography.… Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere.” Even allowing for McLuhan’s erratic ebullience (“I change my opinions daily,” he once confessed), he seems to have got his teeth into something here. Various magazine articles have predicted nothing less than the disappearance of the book as it now exists, and pictured the library of the future as a sort of monster computer capable of storing and retrieving the contents of books electronically and xerographically. The “books” in such a library would be tiny chips of computer film—“editions of one.” Everyone agrees that such a library is still some time away. (But not so far away as to preclude a wary reaction from forehanded publishers. Beginning late in 1966, the long-familiar “all rights reserved” rigmarole on the copyright page of all books published by Harcourt, Brace & World was altered to read, a bit spookily, “All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system …” Other publishers quickly followed the example.) One of the nearest approaches to it in the late sixties was the Xerox subsidiary University Microfilms, which could, and did, enlarge its microfilms of out-of-print books and print them as attractive and highly legible paperback volumes, at a cost to the customer of four cents a page; in cases where the book was covered by copyright, the firm paid a royalty to the author on each copy produced. But the time when almost anyone can make his own copy of a published book at lower than the market price is not some years away; it is now. All that the amateur publisher needs is access to a Xerox machine and a small offset printing press. One of the lesser but still important attributes of xerography is its ability to make master copies for use on offset presses, and make them much more cheaply and quickly than was previously possible. According to Irwin Karp, counsel to the Authors League of America, an edition of fifty copies of any printed book could in 1967 be handsomely “published” (minus the binding) by this combination of technologies in a matter of minutes at a cost of about eight-tenths of a cent per page, and less than that if the edition was larger. A teacher wishing to distribute to a class of fifty students the contents of a sixty-four-page book of poetry selling for three dollars and seventy-five cents could do so, if he were disposed to ignore the copyright laws, at a cost of slightly over fifty cents per copy.
The danger in the new technology, authors and publishers have contended, is that in doing away with the book it may do away with them, and thus with writing itself. Herbert S. Bailey, Jr., director of Princeton University Press, wrote in the Saturday Review of a scholar friend of his who has cancelled all his subscriptions to scholarly journals; instead, he now scans their tables of contents at his public library and makes copies of the articles that interest him. Bailey commented, “If all scholars followed [this] practice, there would be no scholarly journals.” Beginning in the middle sixties, Congress has been considering a revision of the copyright laws—the first since 1909. At the hearings, a committee representing the National Education Association and a clutch of other education groups argued firmly and persuasively that if education is to keep up with our national growth, the present copyright law and the fair-use doctrine should be liberalized for scholastic purposes. The authors and publishers, not surprisingly, opposed such liberalization, insisting that any extension of existing rights would tend to deprive them of their livelihoods to some degree now, and to a far greater degree in the uncharted xerographic future. A bill that was approved in 1967 by the House Judiciary Committee seemed to represent a victory for them, since it explicitly set forth the fair-use doctrine and contained no educational-copying exemption. But the final outcome of the struggle was still uncertain late in 1968. McLuhan, for one, was convinced that all efforts to preserve the old forms of author protection represent backward thinking and are doomed to failure (or, anyway, he was convinced the day he wrote his American Scholar article). “There is no possible protection from technology except by technology,” he wrote. “When you create a new environment with one phase of technology, you have to create an anti-environment with the next.” But authors are seldom good at technology, and probably do not flourish in anti-environments.
In dealing with this Pandora’s box that Xerox products have opened, the company seems to have measured up tolerably well to its lofty ideals as set forth by Wilson. Although it has a commercial interest in encouraging—or, at least, not discouraging—more and more copying of just about anything that can be read, it makes more than a token effort to inform the users of its machines of their legal responsibilities; for example, each new machine that is shipped out is accompanied by a cardboard poster giving a long list of things that may not be copied, among them paper money, government bonds, postage stamps, passports, and “copyrighted material of any manner or kind without permission of the copyright owner.” (How many of these posters end up in wastebaskets is another matter.) Moreover, caught in the middle between the contending factions in the fight over revision of copyright law, it resisted the temptation to stand piously aside while raking in the profits, and showed an exemplary sense of social responsibility—at least from the point of view of the authors and publishers. The copying industry in general, by contrast, tended either to remain neutral or to lean to the educators’ side. At a 1963 symposium on copyright revision, an industry spokesman went as far as to argue that machine copying by a scholar is merely a convenient extension of hand copying, which has traditionally been accepted as legitimate. But not Xerox. Instead, in September, 1965, Wilson wrote to the House Judiciary Committee flatly opposing any kind of special copying exemption in any new law. Of course, in evaluating this seemingly quixotic stand one ought to remember that Xerox is a publishing firm as well as a copying-machine firm; indeed, what with American Education Publications and University Microfilms, it is one of the largest publishing firms in the country. Conventional publishers, I gathered from my researches, sometimes find it a bit bewildering to be confronted by this futuristic giant not merely as an alien threat to their familiar world but as an energetic colleague and competitor within it.
HAVING had a look at some Xerox products and devoted some thought to the social implications of their use, I went to Rochester to scrape up a first-hand acquaintance with the company and to get an idea how its people were reacting to their problems, material and moral. At the time I went, the material problems certainly seemed to be to the fore, since the week of the forty-two-and-a-half-point stock drop was not long past. On the plane en route, I had before me a copy of Xerox’s most recent proxy statement, which listed the number of Xerox shares held by each director as of February, 1966, and I amused myself by calculating some of the directors’ paper losses in that one bad October week, assuming that they had held on to their stock. Chairman Wilson, for example, had held 154,026 common shares in February, so his loss would have been $6,546,105. Linowitz’s holding was 35,166 shares, for a loss of $1,494,555.
Dr. John H. Dessauer, executive vice-president in charge of research, had held 73,845 shares and was therefore presumably out $3,138,412.50. Such sums could hardly be considered trivial even by Xerox executives. Would I, then, find their premises pervaded by gloom, or at least by signs of shock?
The Xerox executive offices were on the upper floors of Rochester’s Midtown Tower, the ground level of which is occupied by Midtown Plaza, an indoor shopping mall. (Later that year, the company moved its headquarters across the street to Xerox Square, a complex that includes a thirty-story office building, an auditorium for civic as well as company use, and a sunken ice rink.) Before going up to the Xerox offices, I took a turn or two around the mall, and found it to be equipped with all kinds of shops, a café, kiosks, pools, trees, and benches that—in spite of an oppressively bland and affluent atmosphere, created mainly, I suspect, by bland piped-in music—were occupied in part by bums, just like the benches in outdoor malls. The trees had a tendency to languish for lack of light and air, but the bums looked O.K. Having ascended by elevator, I met a Xerox public-relations man with whom I had an appointment, and immediately asked him how the company had reacted to the stock drop. “Oh, nobody takes it too seriously,” he replied. “You hear a lot of lighthearted talk about it at the golf clubs. One fellow will say to another, ‘You buy the drinks—I dropped another eighty thousand dollars on Xerox yesterday.’ Joe Wilson did find it a bit traumatic that day they had to suspend trading on the Stock Exchange, but otherwise he took it in stride. In fact, at a party the other day when the stock was way down and a lot of people were clustering around him asking him what it all meant, I heard him say, ‘Well, you know, it’s very rarely that opportunity knocks twice.’ As for the office, you scarcely hear the subject mentioned at all.” As a matter of fact, I scarcely did hear it mentioned again while I was at Xerox, and this sang-froid turned out to be justified, because within a little more than a month the stock had made up its entire loss, and within a few more months it had moved up to an all-time high.