A Response to Dallas
Nick Inman
Nick Inman reacts to Gregor Dallas’s ‘More on This Electronics Business’ (26 March 2009). He argues that the cause of success or failures of given technologies is often trivial and relies, to a large extent, on immediate profitability. He fears that the book could simply, one day, disappear because of this. He outlines some of the positive features of online technology, worries about the poor quality of research and writing that is appearing on the net. And he believes that the essence of high quality writing is in ‘discernment’. So we come back to the critical role of ‘meticulous, even pedantic editors’ in the publishing process — something that is quite obviously lacking in publishing today. He points out some of the areas of publishing not discussed by Dallas, he thinks we can be more positive about the future of Self-Publishing, and he does not accept Dallas’s proposals regarding legislation. Inman concludes that we ‘need to help each other in promotion and finding new markets,’ and we have to develop a ‘bouquet’ of earnings.
I once wrote an article called ‘Whatever Happened to the Future’, which was similar to Gregor Dallas’s recent ‘More on This Electronics Business’ (SOAF Blog, 26 March 2009). In it, I argued like you that nothing has fundamentally changed since the vision we were sold by Dan Dare, Look & Learn, etc. I further argued that things in some ways have actually deteriorated rather than improved, but that unhappily no one wants to see this (witness automatic telephone-answering). It seems we have concentrated all our resources on trivial amusement – that's what 95% of the internet amounts to. On a more serious side, some good technologies and ideas have become obsolete for the shoddy reason that they are not profitable for large corporations/monopolies to bother with. An example is the BT phonecard: cheaper and easier than a mobile and it works in places not covered by the mobile network.
With technology, the key is knowing how and when to use the tools available. You can, for example, choose to write an old-fashioned letter instead of sending an email. I do both. Anything absolutely essential goes in a letter with a stamp on it and a tracking number. But few people are interested in the idea that simple is sometimes best. Most people would argue that if we can digitalize texts and download them on to a book-like machine it will somehow be better than printing an old fashioned book.
This makes me worry that the book might one day soon have had its day not because there is anything wrong with it but because the world is obsessed with novelty.
So, I’m not sure the book has any right to exist per se; it could just disappear if companies thought the cost/profit ratio no longer worth bothering with. I hope the book will be treasured by the next generation (people who are ‘digitally resident’ resident rather than ‘digitally immigrant’ like you and me). Maybe one day soon no one will want words that they have to pay for in any form.
I'd slightly disagree with you on the use of Google for research (to which I would add Amazon and the anger-rousing Wikipedia). But the essence of what your say is true: it's knowing how to find the particular information you want that counts – how to form the question and how to separate truth from error. You can find very good things online, but you do need to know how to verify their accuracy. In my work with travel guides, for example, I refer to maps all the time but they must be 100% reliable. I am continually buying maps and I always hope to find good, free on-line maps to save me the expense. Most internet maps are rubbish but a few (particularly official municipal street plans) are better than any map you can buy. So there are a few contra-flow cases where the internet scores over paper. But you have to know your stuff to differentiate between good and bad information.
To your thesis of poor research, I would add that there is a worrying tendency by some authors to regard the existence of ‘hard evidence’ in itself as debatable; as if the validity of evidence can vary according to personal taste and prejudice making it not worth the effort of going in search of verifiable facts.
I think the issue boils down to discernment. That is what is lacking these days. When everything is equal – every comment, every word on the web considered of equal weight – we lose our bearings and we dare not judge or promote one thing over another.
It’s especially difficult in the present climate to make the case that something (e.g. the book) is culturally desirable to retain even it if doesn’t turn a profit.
Wearing my heretic's cap, dare I say that there is a hint of a golden age in your article? I wholly agree with you that we need meticulous, even pedantic, editors and that the world doesn’t need literary agents to judge what is good and bad; but I think we need to be wary of the inference that pre-1980s publishing was intrinsically ‘better’. Maybe it was in some ways but we have to start from where we are.
Aren’t we faced with a perennial problem but in a different form: the conflict between creativity (intellectual/artistic worthiness) and market recognition (creativity translated into sales)? Between the publisher's need to make a living and the poet's desire not to languish ignored in a garret? This throws up questions which there are no simple answers. Does society owe anyone and everyone who calls himself a writer a living? Do publishers somehow have a duty to serve society as well as to line their pockets? Do they have to treat authors decently, for the good of the psychic health of humanity? I don’t know that we can ask that of them. And I am not sure that state subsidies for the arts produce good results.
I'm worried about your call for the law to solve the problem; using legislation to bolt the stable door. The campaign to safeguard copyright is a case in point. I’d like to keep control of everything I create and get paid for it while I sleep but in a world of instant global communication, is it really feasible? I suspect we need a new, more sophisticated, less legislative approach to copyright which begins with the recognition that bytes are infinitely copiable and very hard to keep in one place.
Much of what you say has to do with the failings of conglomerate publishers and indeed these are the people who have the money to pay authors a living wage. But there are other kinds of publishers and I don’t think you give enough consideration to them:
1) You dismiss self-publishing too readily as if it were a dead end or mark of failure. I prefer to see it as an option which works very well for a particular kind of book, as long as you go into it with your eyes open. I’ve lots to say on this subject but it’s really a separate issue.
2) You don’t mention small publishers. There are small dynamic, bubbling under, up and coming firms. A publisher friend of mine would argue that this is what capitalism does best: that the company with imagination and little capital will eliminate the slothful unimaginative corporate monster. I don’t say I agree with him but there may be some truth in it and maybe we should all be paying more attention to the emerging players in the market rather than to the dinosaurs.
And (3) you don’t mention bookshops and the effect of supply and demand. It’s easy to write off retail bookselling in an age in which Amazon has demonstrated a new model but this doesn’t mean there is still not a local, consumer power to harnass. All authors should, for instance, be campaigning for competitive bookselling to be reintroduced to Stansted airport where WH Smith has taken over all bookselling outlets and hence reduced the choice of titles on offer. How can we know which books there is demand for if they are not available?
And by the way, I’d differentiate between different kinds of cheap books. I wouldn’t want my books remaindered too quickly but is there anything wrong in people selling secondhand copies? I buy a lot of books secondhand either because the book is out of print or because a new copy is significantly more expensive.
Where does all this leave us?
As authors, we need to be fully informed and to share information between us. Dispersal is the vice of the contemporary age: all the information is available but scattered every which way and we’re all constantly distracted. We need to concentrate our forces and rediscover solidarity and co-operation (which, by definition, authors are usually hopeless at). Mostly we feel separated, isolated, on our own.
We need to help each other to feel confident to challenge and reword each ‘standard contract’; to negotiate each advance upwards; to insist on our rights. We need to drive hard bargains for the good of all. And we need to help each other with promotion and finding new markets etc., to realize the advantages there can be in self-publishing and POD.
In short, we have to brace ourselves for a world which doesn’t look exactly like the old. Authors need to be omnivorous; in the French phrase, we each need to have a ‘bouquet’ of earning opportunities.
Nick Inman reacts to Gregor Dallas’s ‘More on This Electronics Business’ (26 March 2009). He argues that the cause of success or failures of given technologies is often trivial and relies, to a large extent, on immediate profitability. He fears that the book could simply, one day, disappear because of this. He outlines some of the positive features of online technology, worries about the poor quality of research and writing that is appearing on the net. And he believes that the essence of high quality writing is in ‘discernment’. So we come back to the critical role of ‘meticulous, even pedantic editors’ in the publishing process — something that is quite obviously lacking in publishing today. He points out some of the areas of publishing not discussed by Dallas, he thinks we can be more positive about the future of Self-Publishing, and he does not accept Dallas’s proposals regarding legislation. Inman concludes that we ‘need to help each other in promotion and finding new markets,’ and we have to develop a ‘bouquet’ of earnings.
I once wrote an article called ‘Whatever Happened to the Future’, which was similar to Gregor Dallas’s recent ‘More on This Electronics Business’ (SOAF Blog, 26 March 2009). In it, I argued like you that nothing has fundamentally changed since the vision we were sold by Dan Dare, Look & Learn, etc. I further argued that things in some ways have actually deteriorated rather than improved, but that unhappily no one wants to see this (witness automatic telephone-answering). It seems we have concentrated all our resources on trivial amusement – that's what 95% of the internet amounts to. On a more serious side, some good technologies and ideas have become obsolete for the shoddy reason that they are not profitable for large corporations/monopolies to bother with. An example is the BT phonecard: cheaper and easier than a mobile and it works in places not covered by the mobile network.
With technology, the key is knowing how and when to use the tools available. You can, for example, choose to write an old-fashioned letter instead of sending an email. I do both. Anything absolutely essential goes in a letter with a stamp on it and a tracking number. But few people are interested in the idea that simple is sometimes best. Most people would argue that if we can digitalize texts and download them on to a book-like machine it will somehow be better than printing an old fashioned book.
This makes me worry that the book might one day soon have had its day not because there is anything wrong with it but because the world is obsessed with novelty.
So, I’m not sure the book has any right to exist per se; it could just disappear if companies thought the cost/profit ratio no longer worth bothering with. I hope the book will be treasured by the next generation (people who are ‘digitally resident’ resident rather than ‘digitally immigrant’ like you and me). Maybe one day soon no one will want words that they have to pay for in any form.
I'd slightly disagree with you on the use of Google for research (to which I would add Amazon and the anger-rousing Wikipedia). But the essence of what your say is true: it's knowing how to find the particular information you want that counts – how to form the question and how to separate truth from error. You can find very good things online, but you do need to know how to verify their accuracy. In my work with travel guides, for example, I refer to maps all the time but they must be 100% reliable. I am continually buying maps and I always hope to find good, free on-line maps to save me the expense. Most internet maps are rubbish but a few (particularly official municipal street plans) are better than any map you can buy. So there are a few contra-flow cases where the internet scores over paper. But you have to know your stuff to differentiate between good and bad information.
To your thesis of poor research, I would add that there is a worrying tendency by some authors to regard the existence of ‘hard evidence’ in itself as debatable; as if the validity of evidence can vary according to personal taste and prejudice making it not worth the effort of going in search of verifiable facts.
I think the issue boils down to discernment. That is what is lacking these days. When everything is equal – every comment, every word on the web considered of equal weight – we lose our bearings and we dare not judge or promote one thing over another.
It’s especially difficult in the present climate to make the case that something (e.g. the book) is culturally desirable to retain even it if doesn’t turn a profit.
Wearing my heretic's cap, dare I say that there is a hint of a golden age in your article? I wholly agree with you that we need meticulous, even pedantic, editors and that the world doesn’t need literary agents to judge what is good and bad; but I think we need to be wary of the inference that pre-1980s publishing was intrinsically ‘better’. Maybe it was in some ways but we have to start from where we are.
Aren’t we faced with a perennial problem but in a different form: the conflict between creativity (intellectual/artistic worthiness) and market recognition (creativity translated into sales)? Between the publisher's need to make a living and the poet's desire not to languish ignored in a garret? This throws up questions which there are no simple answers. Does society owe anyone and everyone who calls himself a writer a living? Do publishers somehow have a duty to serve society as well as to line their pockets? Do they have to treat authors decently, for the good of the psychic health of humanity? I don’t know that we can ask that of them. And I am not sure that state subsidies for the arts produce good results.
I'm worried about your call for the law to solve the problem; using legislation to bolt the stable door. The campaign to safeguard copyright is a case in point. I’d like to keep control of everything I create and get paid for it while I sleep but in a world of instant global communication, is it really feasible? I suspect we need a new, more sophisticated, less legislative approach to copyright which begins with the recognition that bytes are infinitely copiable and very hard to keep in one place.
Much of what you say has to do with the failings of conglomerate publishers and indeed these are the people who have the money to pay authors a living wage. But there are other kinds of publishers and I don’t think you give enough consideration to them:
1) You dismiss self-publishing too readily as if it were a dead end or mark of failure. I prefer to see it as an option which works very well for a particular kind of book, as long as you go into it with your eyes open. I’ve lots to say on this subject but it’s really a separate issue.
2) You don’t mention small publishers. There are small dynamic, bubbling under, up and coming firms. A publisher friend of mine would argue that this is what capitalism does best: that the company with imagination and little capital will eliminate the slothful unimaginative corporate monster. I don’t say I agree with him but there may be some truth in it and maybe we should all be paying more attention to the emerging players in the market rather than to the dinosaurs.
And (3) you don’t mention bookshops and the effect of supply and demand. It’s easy to write off retail bookselling in an age in which Amazon has demonstrated a new model but this doesn’t mean there is still not a local, consumer power to harnass. All authors should, for instance, be campaigning for competitive bookselling to be reintroduced to Stansted airport where WH Smith has taken over all bookselling outlets and hence reduced the choice of titles on offer. How can we know which books there is demand for if they are not available?
And by the way, I’d differentiate between different kinds of cheap books. I wouldn’t want my books remaindered too quickly but is there anything wrong in people selling secondhand copies? I buy a lot of books secondhand either because the book is out of print or because a new copy is significantly more expensive.
Where does all this leave us?
As authors, we need to be fully informed and to share information between us. Dispersal is the vice of the contemporary age: all the information is available but scattered every which way and we’re all constantly distracted. We need to concentrate our forces and rediscover solidarity and co-operation (which, by definition, authors are usually hopeless at). Mostly we feel separated, isolated, on our own.
We need to help each other to feel confident to challenge and reword each ‘standard contract’; to negotiate each advance upwards; to insist on our rights. We need to drive hard bargains for the good of all. And we need to help each other with promotion and finding new markets etc., to realize the advantages there can be in self-publishing and POD.
In short, we have to brace ourselves for a world which doesn’t look exactly like the old. Authors need to be omnivorous; in the French phrase, we each need to have a ‘bouquet’ of earning opportunities.
posted by SOAF Chairman at 2:20 AM
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