I occasionally wander around websites where people self-publish stuff on the internet, and most of it is really, really, really, awful. Not in the sense that I could do better, I probably couldn't (and certainly haven't), but so incompetent that it's not remotely entertaining. I'm really cheap, and I'm always looking for free entertainment, and amateur fiction isn't free entertainment because it's not entertainment of any kinds, at least not for me. If it remains available, I'm always going to be willing to pay extra for stuff that a professional publishing house has (a) identified as of professional quality and (b) edited professionally.
Wrong, LB. There is no purpose or point whatsoever to any distribution or marketing or culture; it is all a scam produced by "artificial" government regulation produced by the iron will of big corporations. If the price of ebooks gets too low, people will keep writing and aggregating good books because they want to from the bottom of their hearts; who doesn't love a good book, and, anyhow, we can already rely on people like obsessed Star Trek fans to create our movies of the future for no money. Information wants to be freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Current e-book prices for books where there is clear demand (popular authors, texts, etc.) are many multiples of $1-3. I would expect their price to stay much higher than $1-3, unless authors are actually able to disintermediate publishers and distributors completely and readers come to view a wide variety of authors as good substitutes for Grisham and the like.
But what's the harm in having free unreadable tripe available, except that the creators of it are getting something out of it?
There's no clearinghouse for blogs. I love blogging. I would never, ever want to be vetted by an editor.
"except" should be not that word.
Two or three layers of editing--serious, professional, educated editing--are required to make anything readable. If the author can pay for that out of his or her pocket, great.
I think you'd still get some professional publishing even with much weaker copyright (to address what's underlying your comment), but I do absolutely agree that publishers are valuable. (I am less sure in the music business, but that's mostly because I'm not very interested in music. But also, I have the vague belief that writers like and feel supported by their publishers, musicians feel exploited by their record labels.)
1 gets it exactly right. The sentiment can be derided as elitist -- who are publishers to say that they are actually better at discerning worthwhile writing from your average dross? -- but let's face it, there is a difference. Not all publishers are awesome at it, and we may take issue with their criteria at times, but pelting the intertubes with any e-content at all does not obviate the need for publishers and editors.
It's perfectly fine to distinguish between two types of 'publishing', if you like.
There are certainly people with high enough tolerance for crap to go for this kind of thing (fanfiction comes to mind). And there are certainly some markets where the editors already aren't doing very much.
7 to 2.
4: No harm in it, but it's no use to me to feed my fiction habit. I need professionals writing me stories, not amateurs. (Obviously, they'd be the same people and could conceivably do the same job if they weren't identified and edited by publishers, but that process of identification and editing is prohibitively difficult -- I'll pay to not have to sift through amateur stuff in order to find something to read.
I have the vague belief that writers like and feel supported by their publishers
Nope, or not in my limited E. It's just a kind of inherently tense relationship. Doesn't mean that (most) authors would be better off without (most) publishers.
Actually, to add more depth to 3...the structure of ebook markdowns is very interesting. For unknown authors with no publishing deals just trying to break in, ebooks are super cheap...price elasticity is presumably extremely high and reader attention is the scarce commodity. (One can imagine prices for this group going to zero pretty easily). For popular but not superpopular authors with conventional publishing deals for bookstore distribution, the markdown is smaller but still significant...ebooks are maybe $10 and about 40-50 percent below paper books. For superpopular authors like Grisham markdowns are in the 15-20 percent range. For textbooks and technical books, markdowns are quite small, in the 5-10 percent range.
Conventional economic theory says a monopolist prices off the demand elasticity, that fits this model.
high enough tolerance for crap
I dunno, LB and I have both repeatedly gone on the record as willing to read the most godawful tripe.
Well, there's different kinds of crap. I can read unutterable tripe on an intellectual/emotional level, but the prose has to be very competent before I'll bother. Most professionally published books are that competent, but if you drop even slightly below my tolerance level, which most, e.g., fan fiction does, I'm right out.
11: What I'm thinking of is something like Making Light -- it's a blog community run by a couple of editors, and quite a few professional writers hang around there. Clearly, they think of themselves as members of the same professional community, and are friendly within it. I don't get the sense that musicians think of themselves as collaborating with record labels the same way. But I really don't know anything about the music industry.
I wonder if there's a market for freelance editors who go over the work of authors aiming for the ebook market. If the authors understand the value of a good editor they ought to be willing to share the profits, and a well edited book is sufficiently superior to an unedited one that there ought to be a premium for it. I couldn't handle the uncertainties associated with trying to make a living that way, but I bet there are people who could.
Presumably the rise of cheap ebooks could be accompanied by the rise of high quality, non-centralized means of evaluating their quality. Publishers play that role now, with mixed results, but its not like there is no other way to do it.
It's probably about the same, in that people are both part of a shared community, marketing and producing a shared product, and fighting over a limited pool of money created by their joint effort. Traditionally, i.e., 40 years ago, the music industry was full of shady, largely Jewish characters and the publishing industry was full of alcoholic WASPs, but my guess is that they try to screw over/support their artists in about equal measure.
there will be less money available to promote such cultural-enhancing wonderworks like LMFAO !
what a loss.
...the structure of ebook markdowns is very interesting.
The structure of regular book markdowns isn't straightforward to me. I buy mostly from the "bargain" pile at the campus bookstore. I wonder what percentage of $25 nonfiction hardcover books really go for $7 to a guy who buys them to read at lunch.
16: The thing is, you can't polish a turd. Editing is important, but if I could find the same writers I read now (and ones of equal quality in the future, so just following the names I know now isn't enough) and read them without editing, it would be less desirable but not awful. Most of the stuff out there doesn't need an editor, it needs a trash can. (Still not claiming I could do better, just that it's not up to the level of what I want to read.)
The function of a professional publishing house I really don't want to give up is filtering the pile of crap. I can imagine a barebones publishing house that just found writers and copyedited them, but I need someone to read the slush pile for me.
Book clubs and record clubs are even a better example of what I was getting at in 21. Except for a very few books that can stay on a backlist, nearly every book gets sold for cheap in some way.
But, LB, if there was a blogger whose opinion on straight-to-reader books you trusted, wouldn't that suffice?
There's no reason to view this as an all-or-nothing proposition, as though we will have no publishing houses at all, or else all books will go through the professional publishing process. There have been small presses for quite a while, for example (though I gather they're increasingly stressed, and I don't know a lot about how they're faring these days).
On the disintermediating front that PGD mentions up in 3, the principal way for that gain any traction, i.e. for self-published authors to gain a wide audience, would be for there to grow up a robust (and discerning!) mechanism for "liking", as it were -- recommending on the internet -- these self-published works. That effectively counts as the kind of promotion that publishing houses currently spend a lot of time on.
Wikipedia still has editors. It's a more democratized version of editing than what we once knew, but there are still editors, who are vetted by the community.
Both our agent and our publisher have been total bitches to Mom and me, which is coloring my opinion at this moment.
There's no reason to view this as an all-or-nothing proposition, as though we will have no publishing houses at all, or else all books will go through the professional publishing process.
This. Some editors could freelance, and you could have every degree in between.
24: Not really. If there's someone who's willing to dive into the giant pile of crap out there to find the few good writers, for free, then I automatically don't trust them because they demonstrably have a massively higher tolerance for crap than I do. (I need some non-scatalogical metaphors for amateur writing, don't I.)
I think I could, given a certain amount of on-the-job training, do a fine job of distinguishing publishable from unpublishable prose. But the capacity to distinguish between the two means that sorting the internet into those two piles would be something you'd have to pay me a professional salary to do. Someone who didn't find it burdensome wouldn't, I think, do a good job.
If there's someone who's willing to dive into the giant pile of crap out there to find the few good writers, for free, then I automatically don't trust them because they demonstrably have a massively higher tolerance for crap than I do.
This seems bizarre. You have trusted bloggers who could recommend a new blog, and you'd trust it. There are as many horrible blogs out there as horrible books. I'm sure there's a network out there. If an editor was blogging on the side, it couldn't be well-plugged in?
Parsimon's probably right in that you will see more segregation in the market (i.e., new forms of publishing for smaller run books, which will basically take over a lot of what small presses used to do) but the most likely result is that a lot of the function of the current mass market publisher (advertising, marketing, positioning of the book) will transfer from the publishing houses to big distributors, particularly Amazon but maybe Google.
But the capacity to distinguish between the two means that sorting the internet into those two piles would be something you'd have to pay me a professional salary to do. Someone who didn't find it burdensome wouldn't, I think, do a good job.
This argument has been shot down a million times over, given how people actually behave on the internet, no? There are tons of people doing brilliant work, and mining other people's work, for free. And some of them are quite credible.
You have trusted bloggers who could recommend a new blog,
I follow a recommendation to a new blog maybe once or twice a year these days.
I assume that's because your hunger for new blogs isn't driving you to seek out more.
There are tons of people doing brilliant work, and mining other people's work, for free.
Seriously? I don't see that happening, and particularly not in any form that resembles fiction-writing.
33: No, it's because people I trust don't recommend new blogs mostly. I found a personal blog off Redfox's site maybe a year or so ago that I love -- I can't think of a new blogger I've found since then.
The fiction infrastructure may not be set up yet online; I have no idea. This has certainly happened in the world of YouTube, in the world of design, in the world of art, in the world of music, and in the world of encyclopedias. It's not a stretch that it could happen in fiction.
But the capacity to distinguish between the two means that sorting the internet into those two piles would be something you'd have to pay me a professional salary to do.
I will say as sort of a sidebar that so many trends these days are toward outsourcing labor from organizations that used to provide the service via a paid staff-member, to the public. Do it yourself so we don't have to. The USPS is doing this. It contributes to the unemployment rate. I contemplate claiming that it contributes to the amateurification of society as well, but I'd have to think about that. (We do seem to think we can send amateurs to Congress and it'll work out okay, which it doesn't.)
The sheer size of the slush pile makes a "blogger recommendation" system extremely unlikely, except for very small communities with narrowly defined interests and other ways of assigning reputation and expertise (I've long said that the internet really should kill academic publishing, and with good riddance; there doesn't seem to be any reason whatsoever that the 500 page manuscript on 15th Century Finland, written by a graduate student/professor on a budget paid for by grants or an academic salary, designed for an audience of 40 people, all of whom will be competent to judge its merits, and destined to make no serious money at all no matter what, should be handled by a publishing house.) But for mass market books, something that does the marketing and distribution and advertising of a big publisher will end up eating everyone else's lunch, so that will continue in some form (although, as I say, the Amazons of the world are likely to eat up a lot of the traditional publishers of the world).
This has certainly happened in the world of YouTube, in the world of design, in the world of art, in the world of music, and in the world of encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is kind of a sui generis exception. In every other area you mention, you may think that the source of your information is unmediated by professionals, but you are dead wrong.
YouTube, most of what I use it for is professionally created content someone put up online through some dubiously legal means. I will give you that the genre of amateur instructional videos is new and is an awesome thing -- that for almost any skill, someone's demonstrating it online, that's great.
Fanfiction has been around since Usenet (well, before Usenet there were mimeograph machines, but it's been online since Usenet). And I have occasionally poked around fanfiction sites, because I have no pride, and will read unutterable crap. And they edit each other, and they have 'Best of' sites. And the cream that floats to the top, and gets recommended by the community, is still, mostly, so bad that it's not even a little entertaining. The infrastructure's there, it just doesn't work well.
(And I don't want to be dissing fanfiction and other amateur writing. People who get pleasure out of writing on an amateur basis are doing a good, creative thing; people who enjoy reading it, it's great that the internet allows easy communication and distribution. But it doesn't serve the same purpose professional writing does.)
40: I did read a bunch of "My Beautiful Courtship and Marriage to Clay Aiken"-type stories once. They were priceless.
Somebody linked some fanfiction about Jon Stewart -- a fantasy about being an intern on the show -- that while it wasn't particularly explicit in detail and clearly wasn't meant to be upsetting, would have creeped me the fuck out if I were him.
A forum where authors pay a small price to be read by random amateurs should be a possible solution. Posting on metafilter costs something, lulu.com charges something for self-publishing.
Currently, successful amateurs are usually poached by established publishers rather than continuing to self-publish; hyperboleandahalf has a book contract now, for instance. I think that's a pretty fragile arrangement, that more and more authors with an audience will find a more independent way forward.
There's a format and longevity question also-- Kids set up tumblrs expecting that they'll be forgotten (or more precisely not thinking about the future), morose adults send their essay or poetry collections to lulu hoping that they won't.
I have purchased two books that were written by bloggers whose blogs I read.
Currently, successful amateurs are usually poached by established publishers rather than continuing to self-publish; hyperboleandahalf has a book contract now, for instance.
Yes, this, massively. LB's "it's all total crap" view is completely tainted by this institutional bias--the good stuff tends to get picked up by the standard system, and usually long before you notice it, so that by the time it appears on your radar, it's in the Professional box, and you judge it as such.
My understanding is that many authors, particularly midlist types, participate in mutual-support writing groups and such; this is something that one might think network technology could help democratize, so that one's initial luck w.r.t. knowing the right people mattered less than previously. For example: joining a genre-appreciation community as a reader might lead to more opportunities to share work within that community, gaining both knowledge and reputation.
38: (I've long said that the internet really should kill academic publishing, and with good riddance; there doesn't seem to be any reason whatsoever that the 500 page manuscript on 15th Century Finland, written by a graduate student/professor on a budget paid for by grants or an academic salary, designed for an audience of 40 people, all of whom will be competent to judge its merits, and destined to make no serious money at all no matter what, should be handled by a publishing house.)
Dude. I haven't refreshed the thread since reading this, but who should be handling it?
30: the most likely result is that a lot of the function of the current mass market publisher (advertising, marketing, positioning of the book) will transfer from the publishing houses to big distributors, particularly Amazon but maybe Google.
Okay, I'm getting now, from the mention of mass market publishing in 38 as well, that Halford is mostly interested in mass market products. They will probably manage just fine in one way or another, amirite, and whether Amazon is qualified to judge the actual product is not really relevant, because it's mass market, so who fucking cares. It's about the money.
48 -- academic authors could self-publish and self-promote pretty easily these days, and their paycheck doesn't come from the work anyway (and the work isn't incentivized by a paycheck at all). This is obviously true for academic journals, which could be run from a website; it's not any less obviously true (to me) for academic manuscripts. Presumably the standards of copyediting and proofreading would drop, but who cares for the book that will be read by 45 people max. This is completely different than the mass market, where how much you make is as driven by your marketing, placement, distribution, etc. as it is by what a tiny community of scholars thinks of the work.
There is no purpose or point whatsoever to any distribution or marketing or culture; it is all a scam produced by "artificial" government regulation produced by the iron will of big corporations.
Halford, you are aware that there's a rather robust tradition of leftist critique of marketing and consumerism, and that one needn't at all rely on arguments about the "natural" market versus "artificial" regulations, right? Because sometimes I wonder.
What's particularly curious is that in your other comment, you seem to basically concede that marketing & distribution & advertising are decisive to commercial success, often outweighing, say, innate quality:
But for mass market books, something that does the marketing and distribution and advertising of a big publisher will end up eating everyone else's lunch
Isn't this a rather large concession to make?
49 -- no, I just mean that for the mass market, he who advertises and distributes and promotes best will win, so there are huge built-in advantages that a system of amateur bloggers can't compete with. And those companies will continue to look for the best content. So something that looks a lot like big publishing houses will continue, and will continue to put out content, regardless of whether some of the cash moves from the hands of companies like Bertelsmann to companies like Amazon.
15th Century Finland seems like an interesting place and involves a man (Swedish, but still) named Knut Posse.
This is completely different than the mass market, where how much you make is as driven by your marketing, placement, distribution, etc. as it is by what a tiny community of scholars thinks of the work.
I'm basically repeating myself here, but this seems a surprisingly cynical and concessionary view of the value of mass-market media to be on offer from someone who takes himself to be defending it.
Fanfiction has been around since Usenet (well, before Usenet there were mimeograph machines, but it's been online since Usenet). And I have occasionally poked around fanfiction sites, because I have no pride, and will read unutterable crap. And they edit each other, and they have 'Best of' sites. And the cream that floats to the top, and gets recommended by the community, is still, mostly, so bad that it's not even a little entertaining. The infrastructure's there, it just doesn't work well.
The infrastructure is there for this one genre, "fanfic". I cannot for the life of me drum up any interest in fanfic. Even if publishers dabbled in it, I would never, ever read it.
However, this community functions well for people who like fanfic. Why couldn't a parallel infrastructure exist for other stuff?
academic authors could self-publish and self-promote pretty easily these days, and their paycheck doesn't come from the work anyway
And they do, in math.
50: I can't really tell what your underlying beef is here. What is to you if there are university presses employing staff, and there's peer review of journal articles and academic books? Are you just worrying that labor is going unhelpfully to waste or something? With not enough profit margin? I totally don't get why you're comparing the two markets and deciding that there's something wrong with the academic one.
You're also wrong that academic authors could self-publish and self-promote pretty easily these days: peer review is essential.
But mostly I don't get why you care.
But the capacity to distinguish between the two means that sorting the internet into those two piles would be something you'd have to pay me a professional salary to do.
They don't have to do it for free. There is a business model here.... review a bunch of books, provide affiliate links to purchase said ebooks, get paid when people buy ebooks. The key would be building an audience that trusts you not to recommend crap books as a means of turning a quick buck.
you are aware that there's a rather robust tradition of leftist critique of marketing and consumerism
Sure. As I always say in these conversations, if your argument is "let's take down capitalism" I'm on board. If your argument is "let's abolish copyright and leave the rest of the world to the free market" which is basically the net-Yglesias-cod-libertarian view, then I will get off the train and accuse you of destroying what makes mass culture possible. If you want to organize cultural production in capitalism, you need a way to ensure that the producers of content get money, and in this world that means ability to distribute and market. If you want to replace it with some kind of medieval payment system like the University, or some kind of state socialism, I'm all ears but you'd better be putting the investment bankers out to work on the collective farm, too.
50: The issue that stops self-publishing is the need for peer reviewed articles in order to get jobs, promotions, and in general buy food. You can't just pass out your work to three other people and then make a pdf file.
In the smaller fields, they aren't exactly self-publishing, but it is as close as you can get considering the need for anonymous peer review. The professional organization is publishing the main journal or journals. The model is to keep the journal and the membership in a combined package in order to make sure the journal can be paid for. The other journals play the game of "can we become required for university libraries." I suspect they may be in danger in some fields.
I think that will be a transitional period, and then some alternative method of evaluating books will arise. It sounds like fan fiction already has the kinds of mechanisms that will evolve, but the issue there is that a) fan fiction sucks, and thus the fans of it like stuff that's b) no good. There's no intrinsic reason that this wouldn't work for communities that like and can produce stuff that's good.
The industry that's fucked is movies. The only movies that will be made are ones that are intrinsically events that people will leave the house to see. I suppose we're already most of the way there for that one. I wonder if romantic comedies or movies like The Hangover will still be made in the future.
57 -- I'm mostly just supporting a point you made earlier. There are certain areas where it seems like a big publishing house is performing an essentially useless function, and is thus likely to perish. To my mind, academic publishing is one of those areas, and the persistence of the university press and the expensive academic manuscript is basically a function of the inherent conservatism of academia. There's no reason why the entire peer review/academic validation process couldn't be run entirely separately from publishing houses, in fields like math and physics this already appears to largely be the case.
The difference, of course, is that academics and scientists don't get paid based on sales of their content; they get paid by universities, and are expected to produce work that only a few people will read and/or be able to judge. Very different than the mass market.
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I want to get a second laptop to play around with GNU/Linux and applications that run on the platform.
How careful do I have to be about hardware compatibility these days (my understanding is that the main compatibility issue is making sure there are device drivers for the components)? Also, is that question very distribution dependent?
I live in an area where it's easy to pick up ultra-cheap 2-to-3 year-old Dells, which I assume would not provide any hassles (or, to the extent that they have problems, they are Dell-related problems, rather than Dell-running-Linux-related problems).
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In reality of course academic publishing seems to be a fairly profitable semi-monopoly, so I don't see it falling down quite yet.
It sounds plausible to say that people who are not making money from their books, but just use it as a vehicle to get their ideas to the small audience capable of judging their efforts, but it neglects all the work you as the writer can outsource to the publisher. A good copy editor is word their weight in gold and as proof I offer archives of my blog passim.
Why would any academic writer want to do more work to get their book out of the door when they're already swamped by their proper job?
(To be honest, I would love it very much indeed if academic writers did publish via library.nu and made their work freely available that way, but that would mean a fairly big paradigm shift in how universities, academics and publishers work...)
Academic publishing needs to die because the publishers are exploiting their monopoly hold over the top journals to make a killing by slowly bankrupting libraries. The issue isn't the money that goes to editors, it's the money that goes to CEOs.
What I'm thinking of is something like Making Light -- it's a blog community run by a couple of editors, and quite a few professional writers hang around there. Clearly, they think of themselves as members of the same professional community, and are friendly within it. I don't get the sense that musicians think of themselves as collaborating with record labels the same way.
I really don't know much about the relationship between musicians and their labels, except that it is often tense. However the closest parallel to the writer/editor dynamic would be musician/producer/audio engineer and it's easy for me to imagine musicians and audio engineers interacting online in a collegial fashion.
academic publishing seems to be a fairly profitable semi-monopoly
Oh, I don't doubt it. All parties to the system seem relatively happy, the academics can use their university funds to buy books, the publishers can take over some of the editing and marketing function, and it turns out that since academics don't particularly care about wider distribution of their work as long as they are safe in their sincecures, they don't care much about the current system. I'm just saying that if you are looking at an area in which you could very easily kill off the publisher without doing harm to the underlying product, that's it, so if there started to be a mass movement (e.g., peer review work that now shows up in the American Historical Review went to a peer-reviewed online journal called the "Stanford Historical Review" that was entirely free, or a similar website for free peer-reviewed manuscripts became popular) there would be little reason for the academic presses, in a way that's not true for the mass market press.
The enthusiasm for the new technological paradigm of publishing reminds me the '90s-era fancy in government and client academic administrations for "distance learning." And, separately, of all the op-eds and campaign speeches that one has suffered through about how American "doesn't make anything anymore" but can recover the Vorpal Blade of Baby Boomers' Childhood Expectations Manufacturing by increasing taxes on somebody.
The government now requires, at least in medicine, that the articles from data obtained by their grants (which is to say nearly all of it) are published online and for free.
63: There are certain areas where it seems like a big publishing house is performing an essentially useless function, and is thus likely to perish. To my mind, academic publishing is one of those areas
We aren't speaking on the same terms, then. I don't think of university presses as big publishing houses. I don't think of them as performing useless functions at all. That doesn't mean I think they're always and necessarily right in their judgments, but I guess I'd venture that they're right more often than they're wrong.
There's no reason why the entire peer review/academic validation process couldn't be run entirely separately from publishing houses
I suppose so. Why is separating the functions important, though? What's so dastardly about academic publishers that we should cleave off the peer review process and build a new one?
What I'm thinking of is something like Making Light... Clearly, they think of themselves as members of the same professional community....
Not to be too dickish but cough RaceFail cough.
What's so dastardly about academic publishers that we should cleave off the peer review process and build a new one
Their books are very expensive and have limited distribution. If you're not concerned about that, no problem.
71 without having seen 66 and following.
73: In most cases, the books are expensive because the fixed costs of production must be paid for in a very small production run. The cost is the editor, not the printing.
The problems in academic publishing is that the publishers own some really important things: the names of the journals and the back issues of the journals. The latter is a problem because copyright lasts forever and because you can only license --not purchase-- electronic versions of the books. The former is a problem because deans need quick and stupid rubrics when making decisions.
I just mean that for the mass market, he who advertises and distributes and promotes best will win, so there are huge built-in advantages that a system of amateur bloggers can't compete with.
Note that the abolition of copyright, or at least complete decriminalization of infringement, would push against this somewhat.
First, Halford is right to point to the importance of advertising and so forth for the mass-marketing; my understanding is that much of the content industry has become even more dependent on big hits than ever. This makes sense--however you want to interpret it, whether as mindless conformism or (my view) an aspect of human sociability, we don't process media as isolated individuals. By and large, we want to watch/listen to/read along with our friends, even aside from the purely informational/advice value of trusting recommendations. Commonly experienced books/music/movies form a huge part of what we talk about, how we see each other as people with something in common, etc. But as social networks become more transparent, cheaper to explicitly leverage into other endeavors, and (perhaps and controversially) lose some of their contextual specificity, it becomes easier for popularity cascades, for things to "go viral," and given limited attention, profit-maximizing enterprises will direct more attention to trying to increase the likelihood of such big hits through manipulating how the payload is injected, so to speak, rather than the content. Partly because it's easier to try to analyze and measure the effects of marketing and campaigns and whatnot, as opposed to the content, on popular uptake. It's a lot easier to [tell ourselves we] know how marketing campaigns mattered when they roll out in different markets at different times than to test how Blade Runner would have done if Deckard were unambiguously identified as a replicant. We look for the dropped keys where the light is. (Of course, one of the ways that content does play into things is via the choice to re-use a preexisting thing, whether through sequels or spinoffs or adaptations, in the hopes of having a larger injection base for your viral payload--and we see more of these, I believe.)
Anyway. As Halford knows well, the biggest hits are also the ones that get the most unlicensed downloads. At an absolute level, this is obvious and trivial, but my impression is that this is (as a generalization) true in a relative sense. The fans who care most will want to invest in a sense of identification with the artist, and hence pay; the marginal fans, not so much; what makes (most) big hits big isn't so much the dedication of the core fanbase but the size of the "yeah, why don't we watch this one" tag-alongs. A world completely without copyright would affect the behavior of the hardcore fans--for whom purchasing decisions are about identity more than they are about accessing the work in question--much less than it would these marginal ones.
Also in math/physics/CS they typesetting is typically done by the author, not the journal. Recently the publishers have come up with the clever idea to offer good copy-editing for a fee rather than for free.
"The enthusiasm for the new technological paradigm of publishing reminds me the '90s-era fancy in government and client academic administrations for "distance learning." And, separately, of all the op-eds and campaign speeches that one has suffered through about how American "doesn't make anything anymore" but can recover the Vorpal Blade of Baby Boomers' Childhood Expectations Manufacturing by increasing taxes on somebody."
I actually think it is bad that the US doesn't have as many middle class manufacturing jobs as it used to. It has led to a decline in unions and an increase in inequality in the US. The US used to leverage its technological savvy into good jobs for the middle class. These jobs have been increasingly shipped to china.
75 is totally right, but that's what would go under a different system. You'd lose the copy editor (or, more precisely, a copy editor paid for by a publisher, as opposed to, say, by a nonprofit university) but gain the right to distribute more broadly and for less money. As I say, if you're looking for an area in which something like the Heebie/Shearer world really could take off, it's in something like academic publishing, because the for-profit aspect of it isn't inherent at all to the business model.
80: No. You'd just lose the copy editor. I'm thinking that maybe the inherent conservative of academic publishing isn't simply the knowledge that any change is likely to be for the worst.
If we didn't have stupidly long copyright protection, or copyright law that treats electronic copies stupidly, we could break the academic publishers. However, stupid copyright law is going to make it very very hard.
I'm not sure why you couldn't pay for copy editors from university budgets, as opposed to from the profits of distributed academic books. But if the expensive production/expensive product/limited distribution model is working even in academia, there's even less reason to think that a world of self-published ebooks could work in other areas; I was trying to think of a zone in which something like the end of the publisher could actually work and be a realistic possibility.
83 -- as we've discussed previously, there is nothing in current US copyright law that would prevent universities from "breaking" the academic publishers for publishing academic work on a going-forward basis, if the universities or the professoriat seriously wanted to do so. (Whether they'd want to do so is another question). The access to archival material is another, different question (although note that if there was a credible threat of abolishing academic publishing on a going-forward basis, access to past works might get a lot cheaper for academic institutions).
84: The publishers of academic books are mostly university presses anyway. You're talking about shifting these people away from stable jobs with institutional support into the ether.
on a going-forward basis
I hope you smack yourself every time you use business lingo like that.
The industry that's fucked is movies. The only movies that will be made are ones that are intrinsically events that people will leave the house to see. I suppose we're already most of the way there for that one. I wonder if romantic comedies or movies like The Hangover will still be made in the future.
This has been a "problem" for the industry since the fifties, when the number of theater seats started declining. Quotes, because some companies (Warner tv westerns) realized that although people weren't leaving their houses, they were still watching video content in actually increasing amounts. The problem 1955-65 was not a copyright problem, but a competition problem. And remains so.
I no more worry about a dearth of video content than I worry about about a lack of music or texts. Artists will make art, academics will write. Breathless and 400 Blows didn't need the GDP or a small nation to get produced. There was terrific tv made in the 70s, there is terrific tv made now. Most of the recent art movies I watch never got wide distribution and were financed by television consortiums.
It seems to me what is going on is nothing more than nostalgia for the distribution system, rather than a fear for the art.
85: Breaking the publishers on a going-forward basis is useless: they would still be able to charge exactly the same thing they charge now because of their copyright granted monopoly on back issues. The net affect on libraries would be an increase in cost: small costs for the new journals plus large costs for the old journals.
If you want to replace it with some kind of medieval payment system like the University, or some kind of state socialism, I'm all ears but you'd better be putting the investment bankers out to work on the collective farm, too.
Don't worry, when the Revolution comes, all you motherfuckers are up against the wall, not just the JDs and MBAs.
But seriously--academic publishing is a big industry: "Worldwide, the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) segment of the academic journal publishing industry generates [in 2008] a little more than $19 billion in revenue," about 60% in North America, as compared to apparently $9.85 billion in US movie ticket sales. You (rightly!) see no problem with fundamentally destroying academic publishing as a profit-centered enterprise, because you see that the system's essential inputs can be, and already often are, provided through incentive mechanisms delinked from profit-maximization, and you're aware of the huge waste and redistribution-to-the-top that the current system generates. And yet you're horrified by similar arguments when applied to books or music or fine arts or films, despite the fact that the production of culture is far more of a human universal than is the production of organized scientific knowledge.
I do agree that we don't want a world of neofeudal ibankers ruling over pixel-stained technopeasants putting in 12-hour days at unpaid internships in the hopes of being the winner of the paid-job tournament. But I think you're ignoring the extent to which the current system of legal entitlement helps prevent new models from coming into existence, both by diminishing the incentive to discover them, and by providing incumbents with legal weapons to blast many of them out of existence.
And now it's time for me to do some tutoring. Perhaps my foodstamps PIN has arrived in the mail today!
80: it's in something like academic publishing, because the for-profit aspect of it isn't inherent at all to the business model.
Wait, so which is it? The academic publishing world has a lucrative monopolistic stranglehold on the relevant market, or it's not a profit-making thing?
I'm off now.
I mean, think about it for a moment. Even in a field like academia, what do you think is more valuable: new content or old content? What do you think happens when the old content starts to go out of copyright? What happens to the content that you've already sold?
I actually think it is bad that the US doesn't have as many middle class manufacturing jobs as it used to.
I don't want to start a fight, but I think that this sort of yearning for the brief and long-past era of GM funding the orthodonture and vacation houses of the Workers constitutes an unhealthy, if not dangerous, nostalgia. It reminds me of nothing so much as Republican pipe dreams about never-locked front doors, neighborhood schools cough before busing cough and respectful, forelock-tugging paperboys.
64: I don't know about laptop hardware, but if I want to screw around with Linux, I generally prefer to just fire up an instance of VirtualBox and run a virtual linux machine on top of my existing Windows desktop. I find that far less frustrating than the endless screwing around with uncooperative hardware that accompanies the dedicated-linux-box-experience.
If you are dead set on a laptop, I think this has been the go-to resource on what works and what doesn't, for the past decade or so.
92 -- academic publishing is a for-profit business. Academia is a non-profit business, and the incentive for academics to produce works comes from university funding. The question is whether or not you could have university professors continue to produce, and effectively distribute, quality academic work without the mediation of a publisher. If it doesn't work in academia, it ain't gonna work anywhere.
93 -- the university is a nonprofit business model that's existed since at least 1200. The rest of the culture industry is a business and didn't exist before capitalism. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the idea that you can leave the rest of the world the same but deny artists a way to make and mass market their work and expect to have anything like the current level of cultural production we have today.
85: The problem is that the journal brand names are themselves intrinsically valuable as brands. New journals could build up those brands, but it will take time.
What do you think happens when the old content starts to go out of copyright?
Beats me. Whens the last time anything ever went out of copyright?
99: Books of note slip out from under copyright from time to time.
Even in a field like academia, what do you think is more valuable: new content or old content?
Good question. Answer please?
Definitely say Rawls ToJ has sold well for umpteen years, but I presume those academics in the field who bought ToJ in 1980 also have to buy or read every fucking credentialed book about ToJ written in the last thirty years.
I also presume ToJ, especially considering the used market, sells for considerably less than ToJ and Anti-Colonialism:A New Perspective
Third:If ToJ is still a profit center, then it is specifically and only because academics are still teaching it and writing about it.
96: We're not going to have the same level of cultural production in the future. The preeminence of cultural production will be something historically bound to the twentieth century.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's all bad. The obsession with being a "star" has distorted American culture for long enough. We've spent an inordinate amount of time over the last century making songs, and books, and movies, until now we have a vast pile, more than any one person could experience in a lifetime. It's time for us to do something else.
102 might be right, and at least sets out what the terms of the debate actually should be.
@93Even in a field like academia, what do you think is more valuable: new content or old content?
Research, even in the sciences, involves an awful lot of consulting the details of older work. It would be a serious problem if this were unavailable or available only at an exorbitant cost.
@97
I agree. However, the PLOS journals are a hopeful example. Several of them have risen to near the top of their respective fields' prestige hierarchies in a remarkably short time.
Research, even in the sciences, involves an awful lot of consulting the details of older work. It would be a serious problem if this were unavailable or available only at an exorbitant cost.
I'm sure that's right. It still doesn't mean that if universities really wanted to (i.e., by collectively deciding to move away from the current well-known journals that have publishers) they couldn't break the current system going forward, or that this wouldn't be a very very big deal for publishers. Obviously, the universities don't want to do that, because they don't view the current system as that big of a problem.
It's already true that theoretical physics has essentially done away with publishers. All the work is on the arXiv, and journals sole use is credentialing. Math is getting there, probably about half of articles are on the arXiv and the other half are not. The point of journals is not distributing. Their point is credentialing (and possibly archiving). And there the main problem is that they own the journal names.
There is zero problem with distributing and evaluating math without publishers, the only problem is giving ratings that deans understand.
Would it even be legal for all universities to collude and decide that none of them will pay for journals that are published by non-university presses? That sure sounds like something that would be illegal.
For clarification, PLOS = Public Library of Science, whose content is available free of charge.
...but deny artists a way to make and mass market their work and expect to have anything like the current level of cultural production we have today.
Artists have a way to make and mass market their books. It is called the Internet. There is absolutely no shortage of people reading texts. God help us.
The question is whether the distribution of big publishing is necessary in order to create a continued high-quality of literary work. That is a very fucking difficult argument to make, taking literary history into account.
And if the argument that the bestseller system needs to be preserved, because bestsellers by their sales numbers in themselves denote some kind of protectable quality, well, another difficult argument.
We don't need Sitter and Breaking Dawn. People might stay at home and read Alcott and Austen. A tragedy.
107 -- sure. You likely couldn't have a mass meeting in which every American university signed a written agreement to never ever sell anything to Reed Elseiver, although even there I'm not totally sure as complicated antitrust exemptions applicable to universities might apply. But there would be no problem with replacing the most prestigious current academic journals with new online ones with free distribution, moving the peer review over there, and simply abandoning the for-profit journals to their fate. If a field really wanted to do that, and simply decide that the new journals were more prestigious and the appropriate place for publication, it could do so pretty easily, although it takes a fair amount of organization and shift away from established brands.
110: But "the field" is not an actual actor. The difficulty of coordination can't be hand-waved away.
We're not going to have the same level of cultural production in the future
Ridiculous. Population and education will increase, and we will more new cultural production than we be able to even imagine. We are already way past that breaking point.
What we won't have is whatever highly-capitalized very expensive mass market cultural production provides us.
Perhaps we need to think about what that is.
Maybe "culture" Good riddance.
111 -- I agree. It wouldn't be easy. But there's no legal reason preventing academics from doing that, if they wanted to. It sounds like in theoretical physics they've already done so.
The problem is that on the margin this does very little. For example, there's a subfield of math where this has happened. (First a new journal in the field was started, and eventually the Elsevier editors left and started their own journal. So now there's no Elsevier journal in the subfield and instead a university press one, and a mathematician-owned one.) But that doesn't change the library costs at all because they still have to buy the Elsevier bundle. In fact, it's arguably made things worse on the margin as there's now a new cheap journal that the libraries have to pay for.
In the current setup you really need massive collusion. The most likely scenario is that as the University of California becomes more and more broke, at some point they'll cancel their Elsevier and Nature publishing subscriptions and the faculty of UC schools will stop publishing in those venues. But the University of California is a weird case because it's so massive and so broke.
Part of WS and Halford are really saying here is that Capital proces Art, Capital produces Science, Capital produces Knowledge
Labour produces these things, and people love to produce. It is only Capital that makes something entirely natural into drudgery and stress.
112: I think of a phrase like "cultural production" as implying "highly-capitalized very expensive mass market". People will still make songs, books, videos, but there won't be "production".
Capital produces those things because it's capital that turns those natural organic activities into "production".
It seems to me what is going on is nothing more than nostalgia for the distribution system, rather than a fear for the art.
Given the ever-increasing number of Assistant Executive Associated Consulting Producers needed to put on a half-hour reality show about cesspool cleaning, I think you've nailed it. I see lots of Porsches & Bentleys in and around Burbank.
@105
I agree, going forward there's nothing but inertia and tradition preventing academia from dumping the for-profit journal model. The arxiv (theoretical physics) and PLOS (mostly biomedical stuff) are 2 successful examples.
But the problem of someone like Elsevier owning huge swaths of older content is a serious one that can't be dismissed.
So we'll have shittier poorly distributed versions of new stuff and access to a past set of glorious cultural production that's not going forward in the future, all while working our wage slave jobs. Say hello to dancing kittens and Star Trek fan videos and retromania all while working 14 hours for little pay in tech support. Count me out.
And there's not really many people well-positioned to spearhead the collusion. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, but there's no way the lobbyists would allow that. Provost of the University of California maybe? President of the AMA maybe? President of the NAS maybe?
120: What do you think most of us do now? All copyright will give us in the future is employment for the men with guns.
120: a lot of people would say we mostly have that already Halford. Christ aren't we privileged here?
Let's try, in the holiday spirit, not to lapse into a privilege fight. We're not animals Jezebel commenters.
You've wallowed in the privilege of not being a Jezebel commenter for far too long, Flippanter.
God damn it. Here we go.
It's the privilege embedded in your male-identified patriarchal pseud that enables your oppressive denial of my premises, Walt. Hate crime!
I do hate crime. Good point. Why, do you like crime?
I like ... how do you say? ah, yes ... le crime passionel.
If it's crime by the powerless against the powerful, it's not really crime, so we can like it. Otherwise, not so much. Unless it's against me, in which case we hate it despite liking it. Is clear, or does it need some explanatory FlipMumbles sprinkled in?
the university is a nonprofit business model that's existed since at least 1200. The rest of the culture industry is a business and didn't exist before capitalism.
The university as we know it is very different from U Bologna circa 1088; my general impression is that we're really talking about the spread of the "Humboldt model" from the early 19th century onwards, which then mutated again quite a bit with the arrival of "big science" and the growing importance of capital-intensive laboratories, on the one hand, and mass enrollment on the other. In any case, we're talking about the enlightenment and capitalism, just as with "the rest of the culture industry."
But on this, I'm totally on Halford's side: for-profit academic publishing is a racket and ought not to exist. However, it's a very profitable racket, and a very concentrated one, so you have all the usual concentrated costs vs. diffuse benefits collective-action issues, combined with some idiosyncratic roadblocks in the way of change. In particular, because what the publishers have a lock on right now is prestigious titles, what's needed is for collective action on the part of high status professors, but being high-status means you don't need to give a fuck about the cost of journals or whether grad students in Liberia can access your latest article. Institutional-level change is a more promising avenue, and some places have, especially recently, gotten good about trying to institutionalize open-access policies, but again, there's a mismatch of influence versus need: Harvard ultimately can buy whatever they want. Anyway, change is coming, but it's a lot of work (that people generally aren't getting paid for!).
OT: The Ex's mother sent one brownies for one's mumblemumble.
The rest of the culture industry is a business and didn't exist before capitalism.
Huh?
I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the idea that you can leave the rest of the world the same but deny artists a way to make and mass market their work and expect to have anything like the current level of cultural production we have today.
As Bob points out, technology has now solved the "way to make and mass market their work" problem. The issues faced by the culture industry are as much about constraining the potential of this new technology as anything else.
BTW, the issue is not whether artists should get compensated for their work. As I said in another thread, I favor some kind of subscription-based government infrastructure to guarantee that. The issue is whether we have the right balance between money into the system and production, quality, and ease of use / low transaction costs coming back out.
134.1 -- culture as something paid for by sale of a work is essentially synchronous with the rise of capitalism. (First, through a monopoly given to printers; then, after the Statute of Anne, increasingly to a copyright given to authors but assignable). Before that you had pure patronage systems or things like the University to manage the financing of cultural production. It's just a totally different model of production; we should be clear that what universities do is fundamentally different than the kind of culture encouraged by the "culture industry."
technology has now solved the "way to make and mass market their work" problem.
That's just not true. At all. "Mass marketing" a work doesn't mean setting up a website and publishing it for free. It has made the costs of copying substantially cheaper.
The issues faced by the culture industry are as much about constraining the potential of this new technology as anything else.
It's tendentious to say it's "constraining the potential." There's a real problem: It's easy and cheap to copy things, which makes it hard to pay people for their work. How do you solve that problem without killing off either technology or the culture business? That's a real question and a hard one, but it's not one that you can just ignore.
I favor some kind of subscription-based government infrastructure to guarantee that.
For reasons we discussed before, that doesn't solve any of the (a) easy copying or (b) marketing and distribution problems. It wouldn't even be necessarily cheaper. A centralized distribution system with set royalties doesn't really solve any of the things that you think are problems. If you're looking for a socialized system, you'd be better off with direct government funding of artists in exchange for a renunciation of some forms of copyright. But that's a pretty aggressive variant of socialism, has real first amendment and government-control-of-the-arts problems, and is not one that's particularly appealing to most of the anti-IP forces.
This conversation is a bit hard to follow for being very under specified. You've got sciences, medicine, social sciences, humanities and probably some other stuff that I have not heard of (Journal of Hotel Management?). In each, you have journals and books and variation within each of these. So, we've got somebody talking about the University of Bologna and somebody else talking about reforms that need to happen but have already happened in other fields. And, despite various worries about raising the cost of books, nobody has mentioned textbooks since 12. I'm saying this is a difficult discussion to have.
That said, 110 is the kind of stupid hand-waving "your job must be so simple" bullshit that makes me want to crack skulls using a copy a The Logic of Collective Action filled with lead shot. Not only does it ignore the difficulties of coordination across fields, it completely ignores the work that would be required to coordinate peer review for hundreds of thousands of articles winnowed from a pool of how many subscriptions. 132 makes that same mistake, but in a less annoying way.
132: change is coming, but it's a lot of work (that people generally aren't getting paid for!).
That people generally aren't getting paid for. I'm not in the mood to fight terribly much about all this, but I haven't been clear how the actual work done by academic publishers is to be provided by a non-publisher network in which peer review (say) is still accomplished, and distribution done. I gather the idea is that academic publishers don't actually do any work in this regard, or else pay staff for it when they shouldn't. Or something; I'm not sure.
How do arXiv and PLOS handle this? Does anybody actually get paid for seeking out appropriate peer reviewers and then sharing the results of their reviews, then, what, approving the merited articles for publication? Is there a staff and infrastructure of some kind? Sorry to be dense, but how does it work?
136 -- my only point is that if you can't figure out how to get rid of publishers in academia, you're not going to do it anywhere else. And that academics should blame themselves for whatever ongoing problems they have with publishers, not the law. If it's too hard to coordinate, it can't be that big of a problem for them and the publishers are providing a useful service. So either change or stop whining.
Moby, I doff my hat to 136.2, for you have pwned me.
137.2: There is a huge infrastructure with editorial staff, clerical staff, technical staff, and whatnot. Everything we do is now electronic, but I don't know if that is true for everybody in smaller fields.
For journals (books are a bit different) editors aren't paid (with the possible exception of the managing editor). Certainly referees aren't paid. People do it because it's a part of being in the profession.
140 and 141 seem in slight contradiction. Are the clerical and technical staff working as volunteers?
It is true that journals have paid staff, but those are not the people finding the referees, or providing the substantive editing. There are paid employees doing some typesetting (though the bulk of typesetting is done by authors), dealing with many logistical aspects, etc.
The arXiv's budget is public: http://arxiv.org/help/support/2011_budget
@137
At least in the physical/biological sciences, peer reviewers have never been paid. In addition to frequently reviewing papers sent to me by journals, I'm a managing editor for one journal meaning that I select the peer reviewers for the manuscript, go down the list inviting them to do the review, prod them to give their decision already because they're a week overdue & etc.
I'm not paid anything for this, but it looks good on the "evidence of service in one's field on the national/international level" part of my tenure & promotion package.
135: I think I see your points but only half-agree with them.
culture as something paid for by sale of a work is essentially synchronous with the rise of capitalism. (First, through a monopoly given to printers; then, after the Statute of Anne, increasingly to a copyright given to authors but assignable).
I don't know enough history here to really take this claim on, but I have a feeling you're oversimplifying here in ways that matter. I have a sense that in the 18th and well into the 19th century many lasting cultural products were created by self-funded amateurs and many copies were unauthorized. As I said I'm hardly an expert on this though. Would be interested in AWBs or another experts views.
That's just not true. At all. "Mass marketing" a work doesn't mean setting up a website and publishing it for free. It has made the costs of copying substantially cheaper.
Disagree most with this. The internet is way more than cheap copying. The combination of google-searchable sites and cheap email puts genuine mass distribution and at least small-scale marketing within the reach of everyone willing to invest a couple of hours. Granted, it's not full on modern shove-it-in-your-face market-test and advertise mass marketing, but one point you persistently seem to pass over is that people are not all that fond of that part of the "culture industry" and there is a general feeling that it does not improve quality that much. (Although granted it probably does improve quality in ways we don't appreciate, as it creates an economic incentive to screen out the very worst stuff).
For reasons we discussed before, that doesn't solve any of the (a) easy copying or (b) marketing and distribution problems. It wouldn't even be necessarily cheaper. A centralized distribution system with set royalties doesn't really solve any of the things that you think are problems.
OK, it's an admittedly somewhat half baked idea. As I think about it, the freedom of at least the producer to set their price is probably an important one, and once you don't have set royalties you start reproducing some of the issues in the current setup. (Although you could go half and half and give people hte ability to diverge from a set royalty). However, I do think a centralized distribution system would make marketing and distribution easier, through search functions, forums, sort of a common 'public square' for IP.
138: The publishers do provide a service. The issue is that the individual academic has very little bargaining power. In economics, this type of situation is known as a oligopsony. This could be perfectly reasonable if the taxpayers weren't actually paying for most of the product and if the academic market weren't so stratified that much of it is actually monopsony.
It takes government action. This problem has been tackled in my field, mostly fairly it seems to me, by the mandate for PubMedCentral publication. It was solved the way these kind of price discrimination things usually work. Paying customers get it first and get a slightly better product (formatting-wise).
Alright, so the idea is that the work academic publishers do can be offloaded -- outsourced -- to the academics themselves for the most part, and that shift is incentivized, as they say, by making it part of the credentialing process. Are we sure this is an improvement?
Most of the "work academic publishers do" for journals *is already done by academics themselves and has always been done by academics*. What happened is that publishers used to do a service, namely publishing and distributing the work. This service is no longer very valuable, but they continue to survive because they leveraged their ability to publish into owning valuable "IP" (namely the journal names and the back issues). Furthermore these rights are wildly more valuable now than they were when the authors signed them away (when the internet didn't exist and so "copying" was something expensive).
143: Wikipedia says arXiv isn't peer reviewed. And yes, I do enjoy the irony of my first sentence.
148 was chiefly to 144. Sorry for the delay in noting that. Intervening comments distracted.
The arXiv itself is not peer reviewed, but most papers on it are peer reviewed (for free!) when the articles are submitted to journals.
Academic journals are a very lucrative business because they don't pay the authors, they don't pay the referees, they don't pay the editors, and yet since they own a monopoly right over works which are very hard to substitute they can charge upwards of a dollar a page.
I have a sense that in the 18th and well into the 19th century many lasting cultural products were created by self-funded amateurs and many copies were unauthorized.
You're right about the first, and right about the second as well although geography matters a lot (the USA was basically an IP importer and pirate state like China is now through much of the 19th Century, Britain not so much at all). I think you're missing my point here, though. There are basically two ways you can fund yourself as an artist or a writer. You can sell your work, or someone can fund you as your patron (it could be your parents, if you're rich, a university, or maybe even the government). Lots of artistic work, some of it very good, was and is today created by patronage -- much of the fine arts, poetry and even literature; I don't think, e.g., John Ashberry lives primarily off of royalties from the sale of his work. But the culture industry - that is, the sale of work to a mass audience for profit -- is a product of capitalism.
149: I actually wasn't talking specifically about journals. We should probably distinguish between journals and books in this discussion, to be honest. I'm not even sure how much overlap there is between university presses that publish books, and the academic publishers (like Elsevier) who control a lot of the journal market.
Indeed books are quite different. I know less about the book situation. For books they tend to pay the people doing the work (both the authors and the editors) and the profits seem to be a lot lower.
The combination of google-searchable sites and cheap email puts genuine mass distribution and at least small-scale marketing within the reach of everyone willing to invest a couple of hours.
"Genuine mass distribution" and "small scale marketing" are not the same thing at all. The question is: how do you distribute something to millions of people -- that is, let them know what it is, why they might want to see it, why they should spend money on it? That's just not something that
an individual can handle. As long as there is any money to be made from culture, organizations with the resources to do genuine mass distribution will trump individual artists putting things up on the internet every time, at least in the mass market (there are some exceptions, like academia or niche genres, that are important and are worth talking about).
A few years ago I produced a book for an academic publisher. Not as author, but as copy-editor (and produced of the final typeset camera-ready copy). The budget was fucking laughable, in a 'profiteering Dutch arseholes' sense, rather than a 'struggling to get by so we tragically can't pay properly' sense. So while someone may have been getting paid, it wasn't the author, editor, copy-editor, or person doing the typesetting.
The reference in PubMed in 147 is interesting. Obviously having a centralized funding source in the NIH for PubMed is interesting, but it's not at all clear that you couldn't do something similar by intra-University agreement. Presumably if the top 20 math departments (or whatever) got together and signed an agreement saying that they were going to put up everything onto a math version of PubMed, and that it would be hosted at one university with cost sharing from others (this is what ArXiv appears to be doing) you could probably get most of the way there. I'm not handwaving away the collective action problems but if publishers' control over journals was thought of a significant problem by elite academics nothing in the law is stopping them from getting around it. And I don't see why the same analysis wouldn't apply for books or textbooks.
152: Republishing previously peer reviewed papers doesn't do anything to solve the solution for how to run peer review. I know you seem to think that it is nearly free, but even ArXiv needs $400,000 for staff. I suspect that the profits journal publishers (and 'profiteering Dutch arseholes' as ttaM put it is apt) make are often coming from the medical journals where there are paid staff (still nothing for the reviewers) as well as ads, publication fees, people reading the articles on sailboats, filthy pharma dollars, and professional organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
I don't know the economics of the smaller journals, so I'm open to evidence on this. But I would need to be convinced that, outside of economies of scale, Elsevier or whoever is making money. That is, if you can't centralize production or bundle the product in order to force libraries to buy it, can you afford to put out the journal even with internet only delivery? More importantly, can you afford it if the journal gets important enough to attract 50 submissions for every space in the issue. (I know there are no limits on how many articles you can fit on an internet, but you need to set a high standard if your journal is going to replace existing ones.)
That's essentially what the arXiv is. After Los Alamos and then Cornell decided they couldn't pay the full price, it's now funded by universities. See: http://arxiv.org/help/support/2011_supporters
158: It's completely clear they couldn't do it by intra-University agreement. The math departments could do this, but they would just get an extra journal for the library to buy. The other journals are bundled. You'd need to get multiple departments at hundreds of universities around the world.
157: What conclusion should we draw, ttaM? I don't know what a 'profiteering Dutch arseholes' sense is, actually: was the academic publisher providing nothing of value to the enterprise? I don't know. Can/should we try to toss them overboard and do it ourselves (without duplicating the same kind of structure they already have, that is)?
I spent a while trying to find some idea of production costs.
Halford and I see show biz differently. There is product seeking 100 million customers in a short period, 10 million, 1 million, 100,000. and I rarely think the top level is worthwhile. I just don't care about it at all.
See, I just don't understand what "mass market" means anymore. I apparently put it at a much lower number than Halford.
What does a network series cost? Is $100 million for 22 episodes out of line? We make dozens of these every year. Something like "Supernatural" or "Homeland" gets produced, in like droves, finds its audience, makes money either initially or in the long term (DVD's, syndication, etc)
What I do see, have seen over the last twenty years, is national cinemas getting wrecked by flash big money American garbage. Hong Kong dealt with piracy we can't even imagine and thrived during the 80s, but died when 8 of ten screens were showing US blockbusters.
Halford is protecting what I would like to see die. We need no more Mission fucking Impossibles. We need them to die.
The most prestigious journal in math is published by Princeton and they charge 13 cents per page. The third most prestigious journal is published by a giant German publishing house and charges $1.21 per page.
164: I understand, but $1.21 times what?
Seriously. I cant' find any actual numbers on this stuff.
It's completely clear they couldn't do it by intra-University agreement.
To solve the entire problem, most likely. I don't see why it would be so insoluble on a departmental level; with enough of those, all of a sudden you take a real bite out of the publishers.
I would need to be convinced that, outside of economies of scale, Elsevier or whoever is making money. That is, if you can't centralize production or bundle the product in order to force libraries to buy it, can you afford to put out the journal even with internet only delivery?
My guess would be that you're right that RE needs to bundle to make a profit. But the whole point is that Universities are nonprofits. It seems likely to me that the net benefit to Cornell and the other partner universities of funding the $450,000 for ArXiv exceed the costs, and those kinds of benefits will increase the more pressure you put on the journals. Or maybe not. But if this problem is insoluble, the issue isn't copyright; it's that you haven't come up with a good model for funding academic publishing without bundling the publication rights, so that's another reason to stop whining.
The former journal publishes around 4,000 pages a year, and the latter publishes around 10,000 pages a year. Tons of info available here: http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/BIB/AMS/Publisher.html
167.1: I'm sure after forty years, you might start to have an impact.
167.2: I wasn't trying to come-up with a way to publish academic publishing without bundling. I like the PubMed model.
Like most things it's a hard collective action problem, and the collective action problem is made much harder by copyright and trademark law.
I spent a while trying to find some idea of production costs.
I can give you some idea if you have a specific question. For most of the movies you like, the distribution costs are at least 2-3x the production costs; a $10 million movie will cost around $30 million to distribute. Generally you see the first number as the "x movie cost this much to make" number in public reports.
Most of those "distribution" costs are advertising though, right?
169 -- OK then, you're on team "stop whining." It still looks to me like this is a reasonably easily solvable problem with sufficient will, and there's not sufficient will or reason to change. Oh well, academics.
What is with the repeated exhortations to stop whining, Halford? It is unseemly. You're the one who introduced copyright in the first place. Nobody said it was particularly about that initially. You work to support reality tv, from what I understand; that academic publishers are in your crosshairs is bizarre and somewhat laughable. There are indeed problems with the hold journal publishers have over their markets, but honestly, keep the high-handedness in check, if you could.
I'll stop being irritable now.
1
I occasionally wander around websites where people self-publish stuff on the internet, and most of it is really, really, really, awful. Not in the sense that I could do better, I probably couldn't (and certainly haven't), but so incompetent that it's not remotely entertaining. I'm really cheap, and I'm always looking for free entertainment, and amateur fiction isn't free entertainment because it's not entertainment of any kinds, at least not for me. If it remains available, I'm always going to be willing to pay extra for stuff that a professional publishing house has (a) identified as of professional quality and (b) edited professionally.
One source of material which will put downward pressure on ebook pricing is books which are currently out of print. There are lots of books which are just as good or better than the Jack Reacher series (at least in my opinion) which are currently out of print and earning nothing which could be bringing in money as $1-$3 ebooks.
168: I don't see what price/page tells you without knowing something about distribution. The fixed costs have to be spread over fewer pages. It is interesting so far as the increasing costs portion of the table if the prices reflect what people actually pay. That is, after bundling for libraries and other things.
173: I'm on team, "I quit whining because the government came close enough to solving my problem that I don't worry so much any more but I know it is different in other fields." We have giant t-shirts.
57
peer review is essential
I think it is questionable whether peer review is even a net benefit.
There are lots of books which are just as good or better than the Jack Reacher series
Those do indeed suck.
Has PubMedCentral decreased library costs yet?
180: I don't know, but I doubt it has helped in the R1s. They can't really tell a faculty member that the article will be available in 12 months. Mostly it helps people without academic affiliation or who aren't at research institutions.
Update to 179: I'm waiting for Jack Reacher, the Undercover Transit Cop, and the One Phone Call.
I sort of agree with Shearer that peer review is a benefit. It's useful for pecking order, hiring, and promotion, but it would seem that informal networks might do the job in terms of selectivity. EG if everyone published their own stuff, and if everyone had networks of people they read and were read by. And already bibliographies and citations serve much of this function.
Authors who bibiograph everything they've ever read, to show that they've done their homework, might be encouraged to only bibliograph the things they learned something from. But actually, people who bibliograph defensively probably aren't opinion leaders anyway.
183: Peer review is usually anonymous. Informal networks might not work so well at rejecting bad work from big names and accepting good work from unknown researchers. Not that peer review doesn't have weaknesses.
Sorry for my outburst in 174. The thread is fine except for the "stop whining" part, is all. Carry on.
that academic publishers are in your crosshairs is bizarre and somewhat laughable.
Oh, the poor little academic publishers and academics. How unseemly of me.
Most of those "distribution" costs are advertising though, right?
Actually, the physical cost of making the prints are often the single biggest item counted as a distribution cost for a film. "Advertising" is a very significant part of that total, almost always the first or second biggest, but not usually "most" of those costs; what you might call "marketing" (foreign rights deals, placements), "checking" (i.e., verifying receipts), foreign taxes, various guild-required payments, so-called "collection costs" (often, paying a lawyer to go after unpaid monies), shipping the prints and items.
For an indie picture, as I say, these distribution costs will add up to 2-3x the amount of production cost for a film.
Speaking of, I should probably volunteer to be a peer reviewer again. I switched fields and dropped the old journals. The new ones have not found me.
186.1: You know, you really do need to drop that rhetorical style. I'm out.
I didn't attack you, Parsi, so please go fuck yourself.
184: If you don't like a major guy's work, you don't reference it. If you like an unknown guy's work, you push it. Unknown guys would have to build up networks of readers, but they already have to. Some people like to read new stuff, and people would send stuff to them AND check in with them for new stuff.. Brad DeLong already works this way, though he's pretty mixed. Another guy could specialize strictly on technical papers in his area of interest.
With this system, mediocre resume-padding papers wouldn't go anywhere. A plus.
It's not resume-padding. It's documenting science for all to read.
No, there's resume-padding. If no one reads something, it's nothing. It would still be out there for all to read, but no one's attention would be called to it because no one cared. If a few people liked it, people who respected those few people would read it. If these people liked it in turn, they would recommend it and their audience might read it.
Granted that everyone's stuff can now all be instantly available on the internet, all the journals do is select from that wealth. But that can be done otherwise.
To the extent that editors now force authors to make substantial improvements, that function would be lost. But I suspect that that function is done more by colleagues and conferences than by editors.
192.1: As long as nobody is pointing fingers around here, sure.
I'm late, but I'm also procrastinating, so I'll chime in with reinforcement for some points made above.
1. Academic journals, at least in the sciences I know (math/statistics/computer science/physics), used to provide the services of typesetting and physical distribution. Editing and peer review were always, as far as I know, done on a purely volunteer basis by other academics. (I'd say that no one ever gets anything for refereeing, but a journal I've been reviewing for for a dozen years recently sent me a lapel pin, which was nice of them.)
Typesetting is now done by authors, and distribution is obviously very cheap. (Arxiv.org handles a huge part of the actual distribution for major branches of the sciences, could expand to handle much more, and costs less than the rounding error in Reed Elsevier's budgets.) There is no difference, in these regards, between for-profit and not-for-profit journal publishers. I'm an associate editor at a society-published journal, and the society does have some paid staff for the journal --- to help with running the website, and occasionally with LaTeX issues for accepted papers. I believe the staff are shared across all four of the society's journals, but I might be mistaken about that. At least as of a few years ago, commercial publishers were far less cost-effective, by any sane metric, than non-commercial academic publishers. I really do not see any useful purpose which for-profit journal publishing still serves.
2. Academic book publishers do pay their peer reviewers, typically in my experience in books. (I expect to get about $150 in list-price books per manuscript.) None of my friends and acquaintances who have published scientific books in the last decade received any "developmental" editing, and all were in charge of their own typesetting. I have a book contract with a university press, which promises some unspecified amount of proof-reading after I deliver a PDF+LaTeX manuscript. I also have the option to let them hire an indexer, to be charged against my royalties, or I could supply my own index. I suspect things are different for introductory textbooks with big markets.
3. Academic publishing is weird, because the people writing the works have day-jobs which pay them to do it. (If you include the cost of doing the experiments and running a lab as costs of production for an empirical paper, they're pretty expensive.) Maybe more important, the primary readers are fellow experts, who have a lot of ability, and time, to pick out what would be good for them to read. We also sign-post it in things like the abstract, which is our equivalent of fan-fiction's elaborate tagging system. (I will not judge whether wanting stories about Roy Orbison being covered in cling-wrap in Vienna is really a more specialized taste than wanting studies of the role of sumoylation in the formation of dendritic claws.) We're probably the literary community which could cope best with the complete disappearance of formal gate-keepers, though I do not think we should get rid of peer review. (I am fond of Paul "arxiv" Ginsparg's ideas about how to do it better.) I would be surprised if much of what works for us could really be exported to, say, popular fiction.
I expect to get about $150 in list-price books per manuscript.
IE, half a book, the way things are going.
196: Why would anyone want to rip off a book by CT swine, Pauly? What you were supposed to say is that their books are worthless for any human purpose.
Analysis of expected value of simulated coitus among characteristic members of the starship crew class
Abstract: The analysis of the value functions derived from hypothetical pairings of individuals characterized broadly as 'starship crew' has been a topic of great scholarly interest. Using the modeling techniques originally developed by LiveJournal et al, we create a simulation space that allows robust permutation of the starship crewmember pairing matrix. By means of convex optimization techniques we are able to find a number of novel local maximums with estimated coital value functions which meet or exceed the value seen in the starship crewmember coital pairings seen most commonly in the literature. We propose several of these pairings as fruitful topics for ongoing study.
(If you include the cost of doing the experiments and running a lab as costs of production for an empirical paper, they're pretty expensive.)
Participants want you to pay their parking.
193: Was I in violation of Standpipe B? Sorry.
Sometimes you have to decide how many articles you need and then spread the content out to fit.
Not that I'm the one who gets to make those calls.
I think I must have heard of this here, but a quick google did not find it. In any event, the publication model of the future.
(Skipping through, sorry if I'm duplicating)
The for-profit journals are doubly ensconced, because the high impact
factor of some of the older journals makes them incredibly valuable to
people's tenure packages. There are more than a few tenured profs
arguing that no-one with tenure should publish in a closed journal,
which would be an interesting tilt of the field. (This seems to me to
be a case of the tenure committees having accidentally deskilled
themselves in the interests of objectivity.)
AGU Nonlinear said that EGU Nonlinear has a discussion journal, which
they considerably prefer: a depository like arXiv, with moderated
comment sections, and then a consider/peer review/publish layer in the
traditional journal fashion. They said almost everyone preferred it,
but it cost twice as much to run.
55: I cannot for the life of me drum up any interest in fanfic. Even if publishers dabbled in it, I would never, ever read it.
So as far as Western Literature goes, it's just Homer, the Bible, and non-Fiction for you, huh?
Other little thing that bugged me: Making Light is maybe not a coherent writers-and-publishers community; it is a coherent fan community, which usually includes writers and publishers but has other important roles.
198: Startlingly similar to some of the papers I'm supposed to be refereeing right now for WWW.
You know, you really do need to drop that rhetorical style.
Pot, kettle.
One interesting development relevant to this thread is JSTOR's recent decision to make their early (i.e., out of copyright) material available to everyone for free. We talked about this issue a while ago.
re: 162
Well, the academic publisher was providing something. Marketing, production and distribution of the physical volume, and a certain amount of prestige: the volume was in a well-known series in philosophy which would be carried by many/most major academic libraries. But they certainly weren't paying anything like a reasonable rate for the work they weren't doing in-house, and this wasn't because they couldn't afford to. The volume sold for $200 a pop, and, because it was in a well-known series, had a guaranteed minimum sale that would be larger than for, say, a monograph by some unknown tenure-track person at Obscure U. The publisher certainly wasn't behaving in a way that'd I'd consider fair, and were able to exploit the fact that this was an academic volume to underpay (or not pay at all) everyone involved. You sure as shit couldn't have had a book copy-edited and typeset in a non-academic environment for the price they paid, and I expect they profited quite nicely out of the situation.
The Dutch bastard thing was a hint as to the identity of the publisher concerned.
210 not an argument against having no academic publishers. Just another piece of anecdotal evidence for 'academic publishers can be dicks, and it's not surprising people are disgruntled with them'.
Lots of artistic work, some of it very good, was and is today created by patronage -- much of the fine arts, poetry and even literature; I don't think, e.g., John Ashberry lives primarily off of royalties from the sale of his work. But the culture industry - that is, the sale of work to a mass audience for profit -- is a product of capitalism.
A surprisingly large amount of the culture industry isn't actually about selling work to a mass audience for profit. Television and radio programmes are much more like a patronage model; either the BBC commissions them, or a commercial broadcaster makes them and then broadcasts them for free. What's being sold is the promise that lots of people will watch or hear your advert in the breaks in the programme.
Newspaper and magazine publishing likewise. The Guardian distributes all its content for free.
Books and films, yes, fair enough.
Dean Baker is frequently right. (If you google for that, you get a bonus bat-shit insane libertarian into the bargain!)
I don't know what a 'profiteering Dutch arseholes' sense is
The publisher in question has been notorious for 250 years. I can give you cites from Voltaire and Lord Chesterfield. Surprised you weren't aware of their reputation. In fact it strikes me that all academic publications are overpriced these days, given technological change etc. - books as much as journals, but I can remember complaints back in the 1970s, when I was working in the trade, so it's not new. I get the impression that university libraries simply don't care (nobody else buys the most expensive stuff).
re: 214
Yeah, I knew their reputation. I did the work as a favour, really. The editor of the volume was a former supervisor of mine, and the philosopher whose collected papers it was was a very old man, suffering from the early stages of dementia at the time, so neither he nor the editor were in any position to do the work themselves. Both now sadly dead. Still, the gulf between the payment they were prepared to make and the profit recouped was pretty gobsmacking.
Of course it's people doing such favours that enables their profiteering bastardry.
The wikipedia page on the profiteering Dutch asshole publisher outlines some pretty serious assholery. On the other hand it says there is no connection between the current company, founded in 1880 and the family that would have ripped off Voltaire, which stopped publishing in 1712.
This was in fact a different bunch of Dutch bastards. I forgot in fact that the one beginning with E was Dutch. I meant the one beginning with K (who are now merged with the German one beginning with S).
I think the point is not that there's something in Dutch water that turns academic publishers into bastards, but that the whole business model has been one that makes it easy for bastards to prosper. I'm not sure what can be done about this except for academics and libraries simply to walk away from it and establish their own communications channels. PLOS looks like a step forward, but I don't know of any comparable initiative in the humanities.
||
I have discovered that I'm definitely too old to pull all-nighters now, even if the deadline is more pressing than ones I had in college.
|>
220: Yeah, I was never any good at it to begin with. Now it's just sad.
When you said Dutch assholes, I thought "oh yes, he means that European academic publisher whose books are ugly and cost way too much." I quickly realized, though, that "European academic publisher whose books are ugly and cost way too much" is not a definite description.
213:Yeah, Baker is usually right, and a good guy, but I have never gotten very far into his work, or cared about reading his posts.
My guess is that his style is relentlessly middle-brow, and he would need to add a hundred dollar word or some jargon to keep me interested.
The K assholes used to charge astounding prices for math books (I don't know if they still do) -- $300 is not unusual. Their business model was clearly "sell to gullible libraries". S was much more reasonable, which is why you'll see so many of their books on the bookshelves of mathematicians.
Baker has no entertainment value. He just persistently and straightforwardly explains the same basic thing over an over again, things that all of the major media and almost all of the politicians get deliberately wrong. Every time someone misrepresents the deficit situation, the European financial crisis, the US financial crisis, or anything else he corrects them. The same misrepresentations are made over and over again, and he writes the same response over and over again, so he's boring and no one reads him. Oddly enough, though, they still read the original lie every time it's repeated.
More than one. Klu/wer. B/rill. etc. (Are we afraid of lawsuits around here?) For one of my reading projects (Khazars) the 5 key books averaged $200 apiece.
More about academic journal pricing with a link to an account of the notorious Barschall litigation .
In 1988, Heinz Barschall, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin, published articles in which he compared the price per page and cost per unit of impact factor for the leading physics journals of the time. He found drastic differences between the prices charged per page by commercial and non-profit publishers. The worst offender was a publisher called Gordon & Breach. Gordon & Breach responded by suing Barschall and his publisher, the American Institute of Physics, in the courts of four countries.
Oh, Else/vier. Kluw/er is part of Spring/er, which is German.
224: Assholishness is still part of the K. business model. Example: this book I'd like to read, which lists for $259. By comparison, paying merely $92 for something the authors obviously produced themselves in LaTeX seems a bargain; perhaps this is why S. acquired K.?
Maybe they're just trying to make this book seem impossibly cheap, so I continue to feel bad for not wanting to spend that much on it.
Someone should look ate the contracts whereby Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, and the others get journal publication monopolies. What I imagine is the executive secretary (full time job, not a scholar) of the "Khazar Review" (not a real name) getting an offer for a long-term contract and forwarding it to the transient unpaid part-time board of directors of the journal (all non-businessmen) with a recommendation. Conceivably the board might ask the membership, and proceed if there are no objections, or they might just make an executive decision.
One would suspect that the various publisher reps would be really good at schmoozing up executive secretaries and boards of directors. I don't see how you could rule out bribery.
And once the signature(s) is (are) on paper, the game is over.
I checked, and you can be totally on top of the present state of knowledge about the Khazars by reading 12 books costing $1391.95 in all -- plus one book unavailable at any price. The 7 expensive ones range from $125 to $395.
The Baker piece is deeply misguided, and be apparently knows nothing about the culture business. I don't really have time to explain why, but if you think that most artists who sell would be scrambling to receive gifts from a $100 tax credit provided by the government instead of putting their work in copyright and selling it, your model has lost touch with reality. There's really no alternative: socialize the arts or have a culture industry with something like copyright protection. But people keep looking for some magical third way.
212: the TV business works by selling shows, for a profit, to broadcasters. The BBC before 1985 or so was indeed a kind of patronage system; I don't know their internal finances now, but they certainly make a lot of money internationally trafficking in sale of rights these days.
During the 19th C. there was effectively no copyright protection in France, and French culture did fine. Everything was pirated in Belgium. Writers lived off serial royalties and first-publication book royalties. Balzac and Dumas made a good living by cranking out several books a year, Flaubert was independently wealthy and lost money on his writing, and Nerval lived off his friends until he didn't. A lot of famous writers (Gautier) made small livings by reviewing plays and operas by people who are now entirely forgotten (e.g. Scribe and Feydeau), or by writing cheesy travel books.
Drama and opera were not mostly about art. They were an alternate sexual world parallel to the marital world and overlapping with prostitution. You went to the plays to ogle the actresses and pick up women from the audience. One impresario said that he assumed that all of his actresses were courtesans, because he didn't pay them enough to live on.
No, I don't know what women thought about all this.
Baker is mostly concerned with drug patents, which have a terrible effect on American medicine and the fiscal soundness of medicare. What he says about culture is peripheral. Be it noted that when copyright was about musicians and writers it was no big deal, but when film, the music biz, Bill Gates, and big pharma took over we got a nightmare. (Disney and NS both trample on others' IP rights while fiercely enforcing their own).
Except for the most famous, authors make very little money from book publication. Most publishers are blockbuster oriented and few books have blockbuster potential. Without copyright authors would get first-publication royalties by contract, as in France in the 19th c.. If they were popular enough to pirate that would be both their good luck and their bad luck, but mostly good. They'd really lose only if a book was pirated immediately by a sharp pirate who outpromoted and undersold the original publisher.
Same for working musical groups. The big losers on file sharing are the blockbuster groups and studio musicians. It does make it hard for an emerging group to capitalize by selling CDs, but that's already always hard.
A lot of the culture that wouldn't be produced under a different copyright regime, or none, is crap. Here's the Amazon best sellers: http://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-books-Amazon/zgbs/books#2
Mostly crap. No need to worry about the consequences for American culture if Bill O'Reilly quits writing books.
A friend of a friend worked 1+ years full time on a biography, with the necessary travel, etc. Her book was on the Pulitzer non-fiction list. She made so little money that she swore never to write another book.
Glenn Beck can't even himself off the cover of a book ostensibly about George Washington!
One impresario said that he assumed that all of his actresses were courtesans, because he didn't pay them enough to live on.
You are, like, in love with this fact, John. I believe you have brought it up in every conceivable context, including discussions of the federal reserve.
I have hundreds of related facts, but that's the best one. 19th c. France was insane. It's also interesting that the whole country, including the great writers, spent all their time going to plays that no one in the world would ever want to see.
Plus ca change plus la meme chose. You may as well be describing this place, obviously.
Are there interesting biographies or cultural histories you could suggest? Are you sure that you haven't been reading the equivalent of Hollywood Babylon or Suetonius?
It's also interesting that the whole country, including the great writers, spent all their time going to plays that no one in the world would ever want to see.
Probably the equivalent of much of the UK & Ireland watching X-factor, plus the equivalent of celebrity gossip magazines/websites.
Regarding Dean Baker being right, here's my favorite example. He called the housing bubble in 2002.
And he didn't just call the bubble, he foreshadowed the results of the bubble's collapse:
It will also lead to a surge in mortgage default rates, as many homeowners opt not to keep paying a mortgage that exceeds the value of their home. This could place serious stress on the financial system. In the late eighties Japan experienced a simultaneous bubble in its stock market and its real estate market. The collapse of these bubbles has derailed its economy for more than a decade. A similar collapse in the United States, coupled with a poor policy response, could have similar consequences here.
Rounding's Grands Horizontales.
The Goncourt Diaries (NYRB edition is what I have).
Arsene Houssaye, Man About Paris.
Baldick, The First Bohemian.
Brombert, Portraits of a Princess
Seigel, Bohemian Paris
Biographies of Flaubert, Gautier, Henry Murgerand Balzac; biographies of Dumas, Hugo, Zola, and Daudet would bring more. Baudelaire's taste for the macabre and loathsome was strange, but he was relatively chaste in actual behavior.
Dean Baker has been like a Jeremiah or a Cassandra preaching warnings for almost 10 years now. He stuck his neck out and he was right. AFAIK the economics profession has given him no credit; he's still low-ranking because of his original credentials, his publication record, and his job history.
AFAIK he was right because he didn't get distracted by various sorts of over-optimistic propaganda, not because of any theoretical superiority. He just drew the normal conclusions while everyone else was dreaming of unicorns and ponies.
214: The publisher in question has been notorious for 250 years. I can give you cites from Voltaire and Lord Chesterfield. Surprised you weren't aware of their reputation.
I wasn't, not of them in particular. I will say we sell second-hand copies of their publications for a not-disgustingly-low price; the second-hand trade is less aware of particulars than the new book trade, I guess.
214 and following are enlightening, thanks.