5 ms·

Publishers Lose Their Shit After Authors Push Back on Their Attack on Libraries

91 points by jacooper 4y ago

g42gregory 4y ago
> The Association of American Publishers put out a statement falsely claiming that the letter ... was actually “disinformation in the Internet Archive case.” I think that The Association of American Publishers, together with other players, are in the process of re-defining the meaning of English word "disinformation". These days, the word "disinformation" basically means "something you disagree with" or "something you strongly dislike". I wonder if the online dictionaries would be catching up at some point.
- RichardCNormos 4y ago
  Labeling something as "disinformation" or "misinformation" isn't an attempt to convince people it's not true, rather, it's an attempt to get tech companies to remove it, and to de-platform the people who post it. It's a bit like calling someone a witch in the 1600s. You only do it because you want someone burned at the stake. To me, this is a signal that I should pay closer attention to something. Calling something "misinformation" is expressly saying that you want this information suppressed, which is more interesting than the information itself.
  - bb88 4y ago
    Just only a year ago, many people believed that taking horse paste was more important than taking a vaccine -- which may or may not have had microchips embedded in it which the CIA could control. People would practically inject bleach rather than question their own belief system. Participate in our collective objective reality -- or don't. But don't expect social media to spread your lies about the holocaust so you can preach the gospel of hate.
    - RichardCNormos 4y ago
      This level of hatred and vitriol is curious. Why are you so angry at people you simply don't agree with?
      - LinAGKar 4y ago
      - sacrosancty 4y ago
        Information spread on the news and social media probably made them that way. Ironically.
      - bb88 4y ago
        What makes you want to deny an objective reality?
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        I don't sense any "hatred and vitriol" in that comment. At worst, I sense frustration - and in light of the million or so needless deaths from COVID in my country alone, that seems rather justified.
        bb88 4y ago
        The mechanism is this typically: 1. Deny fact "X" either historical, scientific, or otherwise provable -- meanwhile never disclosing your ulterior motives. 2. Argue from first principles that people who believe "X" should be allowed to say it no matter how repulsive or dangerous it is. 3. Debate endlessly to make it seem that "X" is more controversial in its widespread belief than it is. (Search HN for the Ivermectin). Aso, make sure to engage in whataboutery, false premises, strawman arguments, or demonization of those who support "X". (See Dr. Fauci) 4. Complain when someone (or a group of people or a corporation) decide to not let your arguments against "X" on their network as censorship.
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      Just because you see somebody's behavior as obviously wrong doesn't mean it is. Whenever I see this kind of arrogance I remember a story about westerners discovering some indigenous tribe in the jungle and seeing how they do a magic ritual to tell them the best place to go hunting. The ritual seemed to be just random and pointless but the tribesmen believed it gave them useful knowledge. Turns out, the value of it was exactly in the randomness which helped to prevent prey from learning their routines or over-using some areas. Many other "obviously" pointless beliefs are valuable simply for being beliefs, not for accurately reflecting the real world like some non-human information processing machine. If you believe that bleach injection is really about a practical decision to choose the best medicine and making the wrong choice due to misinformation, then you're lost in your own bigotry.
HillRat 4y ago
Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial, so this was not exactly calculated to smooth over the troubled waters between authors and publishers.
- ilamont 4y ago
  There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold. The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524 https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists. So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
    - HillRat 4y ago
      That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles. In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.
jawns 4y ago
I am an author who supports libraries and Controlled Digital Lending, but I vehemently opposed the Internet Archive's uncontrolled digital lending stunt at the start of the pandemic. The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law. IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that. I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work. So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  Lending out digital copies of your physical books - fine. Working with other libraries to lend out digital copies for ALL their physical books - fine. Crossing the line into supposedly "justifiable piracy because Covid" - not fine. At least that's how I see it.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  It was an unpopular opinion at the time and probably still is, but I couldn't help but feel like IA was trying to push something by placing itself in danger during a crisis. "Now that you need us more than ever, we're going to step in front of a train. Someone better stop it." Something like that. They had to know they were courting trouble, so we have to ask why they did it anyway.
- bawolff 4y ago
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
I am a big fan of the cosmere built by Brandon Sanderson, and his achievement in pulling off the most popular Kickstarter to date, publishing four novels independent of the big publishers, should have them nervous.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  The problem is that the overwhelming majority of books written are complete crap. And that’s true even among the select few books that actually manage to get published. Crowd funded novels would have a terrible return on investment. And unlike the VC model where one unicorn can make up for hundreds of garbage investments the same strategy won’t work when allocating you’re limited lifetime reading hours.
raspyberr 4y ago
Why are we all walking around with clown make up on but pretending to one another like we're not. The cat is out of the bag. All of human literature can be stored on something that fits in a bag I can carry. Why are we so adamant to live 100 years in the past?
- Tao3300 4y ago
  Speak for yourself, my nose looks like this naturally.
- dontsayfree 4y ago
  because of the possibility (a dream for most) that you too will be able to live off the rent genereated by your artistic creations for up to 70 years after you die.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  You can also murder someone with a hammer. Why are we all walking around pretending we can't? Laws exist to serve the interests of people, not to reflect natural laws. Copyright is no different. If you don't like it, make the case for why it doesn't benefit people.
  - pasquinelli 4y ago
    laws exist to serve the intrests of money first, that's why people are expected to act like copyright still makes sense.
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      Then stop voting for those corrupt politicians.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ghusto 4y ago
I see much use of the word "piracy" in the comments as an unquestionably derogatory term. I'd like to question it. In terms of the current capitalist model, we're agreed, piracy is a bad thing: People pirate media, the industry suffers monetary losses, the media producers don't get paid enough to keep producing, and as a result of all this there is less media. I'm with you. What if the entire premise that this was a bad thing was wrong though? The only thing that would go away is _this iteration_ of media creation and distribution. "In the old days", things like music and stories were _meant_ to be copied, shared, and even expanded, by everyone. I'd argue this was a better system because it's literally what "culture" means: "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively" — my Apple dictionary, don't know it's source ;) The standards were high, because the motivation was in great part the art itself, not as much the monetary gains (compared to today). Of course the artist has to earn money to live, but they used to before too! This part is a whole argument in itself, so I won't expand on it here. My point — and believe it or not, I have a point — is that technology seems to be naturally supporting my world view on this, and we're trying to artificially cripple it not to.

91 points by jacooper 4y ago

> The Association of American Publishers put out a statement falsely claiming that the letter ... was actually “disinformation in the Internet Archive case.” I think that The Association of American Publishers, together with other players, are in the process of re-defining the meaning of English word "disinformation". These days, the word "disinformation" basically means "something you disagree with" or "something you strongly dislike". I wonder if the online dictionaries would be catching up at some point.

RichardCNormos 4y ago
Labeling something as "disinformation" or "misinformation" isn't an attempt to convince people it's not true, rather, it's an attempt to get tech companies to remove it, and to de-platform the people who post it. It's a bit like calling someone a witch in the 1600s. You only do it because you want someone burned at the stake. To me, this is a signal that I should pay closer attention to something. Calling something "misinformation" is expressly saying that you want this information suppressed, which is more interesting than the information itself.
- bb88 4y ago
  Just only a year ago, many people believed that taking horse paste was more important than taking a vaccine -- which may or may not have had microchips embedded in it which the CIA could control. People would practically inject bleach rather than question their own belief system. Participate in our collective objective reality -- or don't. But don't expect social media to spread your lies about the holocaust so you can preach the gospel of hate.
  - RichardCNormos 4y ago
    This level of hatred and vitriol is curious. Why are you so angry at people you simply don't agree with?
    - LinAGKar 4y ago
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      Information spread on the news and social media probably made them that way. Ironically.
    - bb88 4y ago
      What makes you want to deny an objective reality?
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      I don't sense any "hatred and vitriol" in that comment. At worst, I sense frustration - and in light of the million or so needless deaths from COVID in my country alone, that seems rather justified.
      - bb88 4y ago
        The mechanism is this typically: 1. Deny fact "X" either historical, scientific, or otherwise provable -- meanwhile never disclosing your ulterior motives. 2. Argue from first principles that people who believe "X" should be allowed to say it no matter how repulsive or dangerous it is. 3. Debate endlessly to make it seem that "X" is more controversial in its widespread belief than it is. (Search HN for the Ivermectin). Aso, make sure to engage in whataboutery, false premises, strawman arguments, or demonization of those who support "X". (See Dr. Fauci) 4. Complain when someone (or a group of people or a corporation) decide to not let your arguments against "X" on their network as censorship.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    Just because you see somebody's behavior as obviously wrong doesn't mean it is. Whenever I see this kind of arrogance I remember a story about westerners discovering some indigenous tribe in the jungle and seeing how they do a magic ritual to tell them the best place to go hunting. The ritual seemed to be just random and pointless but the tribesmen believed it gave them useful knowledge. Turns out, the value of it was exactly in the randomness which helped to prevent prey from learning their routines or over-using some areas. Many other "obviously" pointless beliefs are valuable simply for being beliefs, not for accurately reflecting the real world like some non-human information processing machine. If you believe that bleach injection is really about a practical decision to choose the best medicine and making the wrong choice due to misinformation, then you're lost in your own bigotry.

HillRat 4y ago

Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial, so this was not exactly calculated to smooth over the troubled waters between authors and publishers.

ilamont 4y ago
There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold. The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524 https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists. So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
  - HillRat 4y ago
    That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles. In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.

jawns 4y ago

I am an author who supports libraries and Controlled Digital Lending, but I vehemently opposed the Internet Archive's uncontrolled digital lending stunt at the start of the pandemic. The principle is simple. If the IA or any online library owns a physical copy of a book, then CDL says it can be lent out either physically or digitally, but only as much at a time as there are physical copies owned. You basically treat digital copies as if they are physical copies, which can't be lent to more than one person simultaneously. Publishers don't like CDL, preferring more lucrative ebook licensing, but it's an intuitive application of the spirit of copyright law. IA decided to abandon CDL and loan out many more copies of books than it owned. In other words, they blatantly ignored copyright, in both the letter and spirit of the law, and effectively pirated the material. And I think the publishers were very much in the right to pursue litigation about that. I hear defenders of this stunt say that IA does so much important work, and that litigation threatens the good work, so they conclude the litigation is the problem. But if IA really does such important work, and the stunt jeopardized that work, then the fault lies with those at IA who were willing to imperil that work. So yes, as an author I support libraries. Unless the libraries start acting like pirates.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
Lending out digital copies of your physical books - fine. Working with other libraries to lend out digital copies for ALL their physical books - fine. Crossing the line into supposedly "justifiable piracy because Covid" - not fine. At least that's how I see it.
Tao3300 4y ago
It was an unpopular opinion at the time and probably still is, but I couldn't help but feel like IA was trying to push something by placing itself in danger during a crisis. "Now that you need us more than ever, we're going to step in front of a train. Someone better stop it." Something like that. They had to know they were courting trouble, so we have to ask why they did it anyway.
bawolff 4y ago

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

I am a big fan of the cosmere built by Brandon Sanderson, and his achievement in pulling off the most popular Kickstarter to date, publishing four novels independent of the big publishers, should have them nervous.

elliekelly 4y ago
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of books written are complete crap. And that’s true even among the select few books that actually manage to get published. Crowd funded novels would have a terrible return on investment. And unlike the VC model where one unicorn can make up for hundreds of garbage investments the same strategy won’t work when allocating you’re limited lifetime reading hours.

raspyberr 4y ago

Why are we all walking around with clown make up on but pretending to one another like we're not. The cat is out of the bag. All of human literature can be stored on something that fits in a bag I can carry. Why are we so adamant to live 100 years in the past?

Tao3300 4y ago
Speak for yourself, my nose looks like this naturally.
dontsayfree 4y ago
because of the possibility (a dream for most) that you too will be able to live off the rent genereated by your artistic creations for up to 70 years after you die.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
sacrosancty 4y ago
You can also murder someone with a hammer. Why are we all walking around pretending we can't? Laws exist to serve the interests of people, not to reflect natural laws. Copyright is no different. If you don't like it, make the case for why it doesn't benefit people.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  laws exist to serve the intrests of money first, that's why people are expected to act like copyright still makes sense.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    Then stop voting for those corrupt politicians.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ghusto 4y ago

I see much use of the word "piracy" in the comments as an unquestionably derogatory term. I'd like to question it. In terms of the current capitalist model, we're agreed, piracy is a bad thing: People pirate media, the industry suffers monetary losses, the media producers don't get paid enough to keep producing, and as a result of all this there is less media. I'm with you. What if the entire premise that this was a bad thing was wrong though? The only thing that would go away is _this iteration_ of media creation and distribution. "In the old days", things like music and stories were _meant_ to be copied, shared, and even expanded, by everyone. I'd argue this was a better system because it's literally what "culture" means: "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively" — my Apple dictionary, don't know it's source ;) The standards were high, because the motivation was in great part the art itself, not as much the monetary gains (compared to today). Of course the artist has to earn money to live, but they used to before too! This part is a whole argument in itself, so I won't expand on it here. My point — and believe it or not, I have a point — is that technology seems to be naturally supporting my world view on this, and we're trying to artificially cripple it not to.