Jim Baen's Universe

Salvos Against Big Brother

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A Matter of Symbiosis

Written by Eric Flint

In my last essay, I examined the question of whether e-books will be replacing paper books any time soon as the dominant format for publishing. The conclusion I came to was that they wouldn’t be—and that’s true even if “soon” is a term measured in decades, not simply years.

But that issue, taken by itself, would ultimately seem to be a side issue. After all, everyone involved in the debates surrounding electronic publishing and the manifold impact that it has on issues concerning copyright agrees that electronic publishing will continue to grow until it becomes the dominant form of publishing.

So what difference does it make, really, how long that takes? Whether it’s five years or fifty years, or even a century, sooner or later we’ll all have to deal with the realities of a market determined by the imperatives of electronic publishing. It would seem sensible, therefore, to put policies in place now that protect authors and publishers from the dangers of electronic copyright infringement—what’s called “online piracy”—whether or not that infringement causes any significant financial damage to authors and publishers today.

There are actually two issues tied up here, which I’ll need to disentangle and deal with separately. The larger issue is whether or not it’s true that, even if we assume a total dominance of the market by electronic publishing, electronic copyright infringement will pose a major threat to the income of authors and publishers.

I’ll deal with that question in the next essay. Before we get there, however, we need to address something else. Namely, is it even true in the first place that, regardless of how long it takes, electronic publishing is “destined” to replace traditional paper publishing?

As I put it in my last essay:

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

a) typewriters and computers—complete substitution;

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

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

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

One of the things that’s happened over the past two decades or so, I think largely as the byproduct of the explosive growth of new electronic technologies, is that many people have developed what amounts to a belief in the quasi-magical powers of new technologies as such. Coupled, in many cases, with what amounts to a belief in the magical nature of the technologies themselves.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Then consider, for a moment, how often you’ve heard people pontificate on the subject of the so-called “post-industrial society.” Consider, for a moment, how many times—how many, many, many times—you’ve heard or read some so-called “pundit” assure his listeners or readers that we now live in an “information age” in which wealth is primarily produced by exchanging information, rather than by the crude, ancient and now-obsolete methods of . . .

Well . . .

You know. Actually making something.

Apparently, everyone will now make a living by swapping information back and forth. Much the way, in the old fable, two men marooned on a desert island survived by trading rocks back and forth—and had become millionaires by the time they were rescued.

The notion of a “post-industrial society” or an “information age” is literally a belief in magic. It is a belief that “high tech” as such possesses latent and mystic powers that are the quantum mechanical equivalent of a sorcerer’s wand, which can conjure up something out of nothing. No longer, it seems, does anyone need to be engaged in the production of food, clothing, shelter, metals—anything material, in fact. No, no. In the “post industrial age,” we will all make a living by exchanging information about things that no one is making any longer.

The reality is quite different. What has actually happened is that the new electronic technologies have intertwined with existing technologies and made them often vastly more efficient. In some cases—but not very many—the old technologies have been rendered completely obsolete and have essentially vanished. But the most common pattern is for the existing technologies to remain in place, albeit much transformed, and for the new technologies to grow up alongside them. To put it another way, the most common pattern whereby a new technology emerges is not as a replacement for a now obsolete technology. No, it usually emerges either as a supplement to or as a partial alternative to an existing technology. The relationship between the new technology and older ones is far more often akin to symbiosis or commensalism than all-out competition.

Consider wood.

As technologies go, wood is about an ancient as it gets. It’s far more ancient than paper, certainly.

Yet . . . wood and wood-based technologies are doing just fine, thank you. An enormous amount of building construction, to this very day—and no one foresees any drastic change in the near future—is done by fastening crude pieces of coarsely sawn wood together using incredibly primitive pieces of simple metal that are called “nails” and “screws.” And these, in turn, are driven into place by equally crude tools which carry names like “hammers” and “screwdrivers.” Some of which tools, like hammers, are just as ancient as the wood they work.

Dammit, what happened to all the high tech? Why are we still using primitive and obsolete wood for building material when—long ago, now!—we developed such newer and obviously superior building materials as metals, plastics, and various other composites?

I could go on and on. Why are we still relying almost entirely on people to guide the transport of goods? There are over a million truck drivers in the United States, each and every one of whom is a crude, primitive, ancient and damn-well-oughta-be obsolete piece of software to be guiding immense objects weighing up to forty tons (or more, if the unreliable pieces of software are breaking weight limit regulations) as they hurtle down the highways of the nation at speeds anywhere up to seventy miles an hour. (Or more, if the unreliable pieces of software are breaking speed regulations also—which they are notoriously prone to do.)

As I said, I could go on and on—but I’d soon be flogging a dead horse. Everybody with half a brain knows the answer to these questions.

Wood is not obsolete. Ancient, yes; obsolete, no. In many ways, in fact, it remains a superior building material to any of the more recently developed alternatives. And even when it isn’t, the simple fact that it is often much cheaper to produce and work with more than makes up the difference.

Truck drivers are not obsolete either. Neither are train engineers or airline pilots—or janitors and short-order cooks, for that matter. The simple fact is that, far more often than not, crude and ancient and primitive and unreliable and erratic as they may be, human beings make far better—and certainly cheaper—pieces of management software to guide and handle a task than any computer program yet developed.

There’s a basic principle underlying all this, which is simply a variant of the famous old saw: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

We’ve all heard the saw, and everyone I know not only thinks it’s funny but also subscribes to it. (At least in theory.) But I wonder how many people have ever taken the time to consider why the old saw is actually true to begin with.

I mean . . . Really. Think about it.

Fine. Gadget A or Technique B or Device C ain’t broke. But that still doesn’t mean—usually doesn’t; in fact, almost never does—that they work all that well in the first place. And it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t figure out a better way to accomplish the same purpose.

So why not “fix it”?

And the answer is . . .

Because there’s an enormous economic inertia involved. First, it’s going to cost a lot to develop an alternate way of doing something. Secondly—this is the usual rule of thumb, anyway—you can figure it’s going to cost at least as much to get the bugs worked out of the new technology once it’s in place. Thirdly, you’re going to lose the value of the existing technology, which often represents an enormous investment in capital and human skills. And finally . . . for all you know, the new technology may turn out to be obsolete itself within a short time, replaced by yet another technology—and so now you’ve subjected yourself to all the above costs twice over.

What results are certain basic patterns that you can see, over and over again throughout history, whenever a new technology emerges. “Rules,” if you will.

Rule 1. A new technology will not become important in the first place unless it does something that existing technologies can’t do at all or does them drastically better.

Rule 2. Even assuming those conditions are met, the new technology still won’t become important unless it is perceived as satisfying an important need. Or desire, at least.

Rule 3. Even then, you can pretty much count on most people doing whatever they can to make the new technology fit alongside technologies they’ve already invested money and skills into and are already comfortable with, rather than junking the old technologies altogether.

You can see these rules at work, literally everywhere you go and everywhere you look.

Start with the clothes you’re wearing. They will almost invariably be a mix of materials ranging from ancient to very modern, produced by technologies which are an overlay of many generations of technologies far more than a replacement of one by another by another by another.

Walk outside your home and contemplate the surfaces you’re walking on with feet usually clad in leather—a very old technology, albeit much reinforced by more modern techniques. Most of the surfaces you will walk on—or ride on, when you get into a car—are just about as ancient as much of the material you’re wearing on your body. Far more ancient, in the case of grass—except the grasses you walk on are usually domesticated varieties.

Again, I could go on and on, but I’d soon bore you. Still, it’s an interesting mental exercise which you can do for yourself. Consider, no matter where you go or what you do, how rarely—how incredibly rarely—you will ever find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded only by new technologies.

Never, in fact—unless you do one of three things.

First, go to enormous trouble and expense to eliminate all old and even ancient technologies from your presence and insist on surrounding yourself only with things that are new and high tech and “superior.”

Warning! Do not try this stunt unless you are very wealthy—and even then, be prepared for a long and frustrating struggle before you reach your goal.

The second, considerably cheaper and easier method, is to found in your residential area a new local chapter of the Whig Technology Society. The Whits, as they are known, as those people who subscribe to the Whig interpretation of history as applied to technological change. All new technologies are progressive by definition and are therefore destined to replace all older technologies lock, stock and barrel.

Warning! This is harder than it looks. That’s because while Whits are a plentiful breed, they are hard to coax out of their natural habitat long enough to form a stable local society with a regular meeting place and location.

The natural habitat of the Whit, of course, is the internet—and that leads to the third and by far the easiest method to surround yourself with nothing but new technologies.

Simply go on online and post or blog or otherwise dispense some piece of nonsensical blather predicting the imminent demise of the ancient and obsolete paper book and its replacement by e-books. You will, sure enough, be in a purely high tech environment—nothing but electrons, anywhere you look—and will be joined by many co-thinkers.

True, it will be a fantasy world. But why not? We live in the post-industrial information age society where apparently all everyone has to do is exchange information—yap at each other, basically—and we’ll all get rich.

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Okay, fine, I’m laying on the sarcasm pretty heavily. But it’s honestly hard not to do so.

Why in the world would anyone in their right mind think that the basic patterns of technological change that I laid out above would not apply to electronic reading?

Consider what is being predicted. Here is what is apparently supposed to happen, in a fairly short time frame:

First, an enormous existing infrastructure is going to be scrapped. Thousands of existing bookstores, warehouses, you name it—not to mention the people working in them—are going to be consigned to historical oblivion.

That initial surgical strike having taken place, the campaign now becomes one of systematic literary attrition leveled against an entire society. In every home in the land where literacy holds any sway, untold millions of bookcases are going to be either stripped out or used for new purposes. (What new purposes? I have no idea. Perhaps some people will use all that now-empty shelf space to display their bunny rabbit collections, heretofore consigned to the attic.)

Untold billions of books will be dumped—most of them in landfills, since obviously the existing used book industry can’t possibly absorb such a sudden influx of product. And, besides, the used book industry is now teetering on the edge of extinction itself anyway.

All across the land, public libraries—awash in the wealth that municipalities will eagerly bestow on them for the purpose, after the taxpayers cheerfully agree to raise their taxes to cover the expense—will spend hundreds of billions of dollars getting rid of their paper books in order to become purely electronic outlets.

And don’t let anyone try to tell you that there’s no need to get rid of all these paper books. Of course there is—if you really expect or want an Electronic Only Reading Age to emerge. If you leave paper books lying around all over the place where anyone can get their hands on them—including innocent and impressionable little children!—you will inevitably maintain the existing social, cultural and economic inertia that makes it so hard to get rid of the musty and ancient things in the first place.

My wisecrack about children, by the way, isn’t actually a wisecrack at all. It’s the plain and simple truth. Even in today’s “computer age,” almost all children are first introduced to reading with paper books—and there is not a shred of evidence that that custom is changing. The number of children just learning to read who are being provided with electronic reading devices and e-books instead of “obsolete” and old-fashioned children’s paper books can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Why in the world would that change? Why would any parent with the intelligence of a carrot saddle their small child with two tasks to learn simultaneously? The ease of handling traditional paper technology is so great that any small child can master the art of handling a paper book in minutes—which allows them to move on almost at once to the critical task, which is learning how to read. Why would any intelligent parent place an obstacle in the way by insisting their child had to also learn how to handle an electronic reading device before they could start reading?

And don’t let anybody tell you that an e-book reader will ever be as simple to use as a paper book. If for no other reason, paper books don’t need batteries so they don’t need to be turned on and off. But what’s far more important is that the very fact that electronic reading only provides marginal advantages to paper reading means that e-book readers will never be simple. Making them simple would eliminate all of the bells and whistles that are the main drawing card for e-book readers in the first place.

In short, trying to use e-books to teach a toddler how to read makes as much sense as teaching them how to ride a bicycle by putting them in a simulator.

Can it be done?

Theoretically, sure. But why bother—when it’s so much simpler and easier to just use the existing technologies and methods?

Remember that, the next time someone wisely informs you that “today’s youngsters” are “accustomed to electronic reading.” Unlike us old farts.

Uh, no. What today’s children are actually accustomed to is not really any different from what we old farts are accustomed to. They view paper books as the standard, so to speak—what you might call the “default mode” of reading. They first learn to read using paper books, just like the generations before them, and they continue to look on electronic reading primarily as a supplement to paper reading rather than an outright substitution.

That’s just one illustration of how deeply rooted the old paper publishing technology remains in our society. Replacing that format of publishing across the board by electronic publishing would be a truly massive cultural change, at an enormous economic cost.

Massive cultural changes have happened before, of course, and they usually do entail enormous economic costs. But such changes are normally driven by powerful imperatives. Whereas this one is going to happen essentially due to whim and a supposedly deeply-rooted human attachment to new gadgets for their own sake. It’s supposedly going to happen simply because the new electronic reading technology provides everyone with . . .

Well. Let’s see. Lots better storage capacity, the ability to read a book in the dark, some secondary bells and whistles that most readers don’t need and don’t want for most reading purposes—and, without question, a tremendously improved reading capability for people with sight problems or other severe handicaps. All of whom put together, however, have never been a major sector of the book market.

If you believe in the above, you believe in magic. Quite literally. You believe that a new technology, electronic publishing, simply because it’s a new technology, will defy all existing and long-established principles of historical change when it comes to new technology. It will, for reasons which are mystical since they obviously can’t be quantified without making them seem derisively silly, do what no other new technology in the history of the world has ever been able to do. In a nutshell:

Replace, at enormous cost whether that’s measured in money, labor or social disruption, an existing and long-established and very reliable sector of the economy with a new technology that offers only marginal improvements over what already exists.

Okay. Here’s what is actually going to happen. More precisely, here is what has been happening for a number of years now:

Electronic publishing is in fact growing. To this day, overall, the growth has been modest, and there is no sign at all that this is changing soon. But, in some areas of publishing, the growth has been rapid. Sometimes, extremely rapid—and, sometimes, so extensively that it has largely replaced paper publishing.

When we look at these areas of specialty publishing, however, what we discover—which should come as no surprise at all—is that in these areas the basic principles I laid out above do apply.

The most obvious example is encyclopedia publishing.

You can still, today, buy a paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It will cost you about $1,400.

Or, you can buy the electronic edition of the same encyclopedia for $39. And get regular updates very cheaply, where there is no practical way to update a paper encyclopedia without buying an entirely new edition at the same cost.

In such specialty areas of publishing, the new technology does satisfy my Rule Number One of technological change: A new technology will not become important in the first place unless it does something that existing technologies can’t do at all or does them drastically better.

In this instance, “drastically better” means the ability to produce an electronic encyclopedia for a tiny fraction of the cost of a traditional paper encyclopedia. You can buy an electronic edition of an encyclopedia for less than three percent of the cost of a paper one.

But there is no such drastic cost advantage in most areas of publishing—and very little at all in those branches which dominate the industry. (To remind you, those are popular non-fiction and fiction.) Yes, there’s a difference between $4 and $8, or $6 and $16, but it’s not the same sort of difference and doesn’t produce the same sort of rapid and overwhelming change. It probably would, of course—if people bought a lot of books every week. But they don’t, as a rule. Even people who read a lot don’t usually buy more than one book a week, on average. And most readers buy fewer than that.

Encyclopedias are not the only example, of course. There are any number of others. Almost any type of publishing which mostly involves making lots of data available that most people will only use small portions of at any given time—reference books and materials of all kinds, essentially—will become primarily electronic branches of publishing very quickly. In some cases, it’s already happened. That’s because the cost differential is usually very large, and the discomfort of use very small. Most people don’t particularly enjoy reading an entire novel on an electronic device. But almost everyone accustomed to computers is already perfectly comfortable extracting some information from a screen.

There are some other examples. As the existence of this magazine itself indicates, electronic publishing provides some major advantages for periodical publishing. It’s almost impossible today, given the cost and limitations of the modern magazine distribution system, to produce a paper magazine at a profit—or even at break-even cost—without depending primarily on advertising revenue. For many periodicals, that’s feasible. But for many others, it’s not—and electronic publishing often provides a way to circumvent the problems, at least to a degree.

Still, when all is said and done, most publishing isn’t very affected by the advantages of electronic publishing. There are some advantages, certainly—which is the reason electronic publishing grows at all. But the advantages simply aren’t great enough to produce the sort of overwhelming technical transformation of an entire industry which is a rare event historically in any case.

So, not surprisingly, what we’re seeing is the most common pattern by which a new technology emerges: Not by sweeping and complete replacement of what exists, but by growing up alongside the older technologies over time. And doing so as the result of literally billions of trial-and-error tests by millions of human beings experimenting with the new technology.

A clear pattern is already shaking itself out. For most reading purposes, most of the time, most people prefer paper format publishing. That remains and seems likely to remain for a long time what I called above the “default mode” of publishing.

There is no reason to expect this to change except at a pace that can be described as almost glacial.

Why should it? There is no shortage or paper and ink or the raw materials from which they are made, and while the production of paper does place a definite stress on the environment, it’s simply not great enough compared to many others to require drastic action to suppress it as much as possible.

On the flip side, the advantages of paper publishing are genuinely immense. This is one of the most reliable and well-tested technologies the human race possesses. It is incredibly durable. It is incredibly easy to use. It is incredibly difficult to suppress. It is incredibly well-rooted in every literate culture in the world.

At the same time, because there are undoubtedly some advantages to electronic publishing in all branches of publishing and major advantages in some branches, electronic publishing is growing and spreading out. But, as a rule, it does so as a supplement to paper books rather than a replacement for them.

Here is, by far, the most common pattern we’re seeing emerge:

What most people want, most of the time, is both formats of the same book. They want an electronic edition of a given title alongside the paper edition, not instead of it. Not one or the other, but both.

That’s because they use them for different purposes. For most people, most of the time, reading on paper remains the preferred “default mode.” But, for many people, they also find it handy some of the time to be able to read the same text electronically.

Here is one very common pattern, reported to me by any number of people:

They begin a novel at home, reading it in a paper edition. Then, bring an electronic edition with them when they travel—even if that travel is simply a short commute to work on a train or subway or bus. For traveling purposes, the storage advantages of electronic publishing become far more important than they do while reading at home. And there’s the added advantage, reported to me by one person, that she can read a novel on a PDA in a boring staff meeting at work because her boss thinks she’s taking notes. You can’t do that with a paperback, especially one with a lurid cover.

It was this pattern that Jim Baen detected very early in the development of electronic publishing. And it was this pattern, along with his expectation that it would continue indefinitely, that guided him in determining his policies as a publisher. He was right ten years ago, when he decided to launch a major electronic publishing effort on the part of his publishing house—and he’s still right today, two years after his death.

But I’ll get into that subject in later essays, when I move on to examine the kind of policies publishers and authors should be adopting in this day and age. For the moment, I need to keep concentrating on the demolition work, so to speak.

So let’s recapitulate. So far, in the last two essays in this column, I’ve demonstrated the following:

1. Electronic publishing is expanding, but outside of a few specialized areas like encyclopedia publishing, the expansion is rather slow. There is no reason to expect that to change in the future. To put it another way, there will be no “magic moment” when the introduction of The Finally Perfect E-Reader X, Y or Z will suddenly produce a drastic change in the situation. Paper publishing will remain the dominant format in the industry for decades to come.

2. As electronic publishing does grow, it usually grows alongside of or as a supplement to paper publishing, not in place of it. The relationship between the two publishing formats is primarily one of symbiosis or commensalism, not antagonism or competition.

That leaves one question still to be addressed:

Even if it’s only a mental experiment at the moment, what would happen if electronic publishing did become the dominant form of publication—or even the almost exclusive form? What if any changes would be needed in the various policies that I’ve advocated so far?

This question will take me at least one essay to answer. But the gist of the answer is this:

No changes of any kind are needed—for the good and simple reason that electronic publishing never posed any problems for a sound understanding of copyright in the first place. The sky is not falling, it was never falling—and it’s not going to, either.

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