Beginning with the advent of written language between seven and eight millennia ago, each technological advance has changed the way societies interact with information.
- Caves and stone walls enabled writing to be preserved indefinitely.
- Papyrus allowed ancient scribes to put their writings on a portable medium that traveled to readers, rather than requiring readers to travel to it.
- Johan Gutenberg's printing press revolutionized the spread of knowledge through Europe and brought Western culture out of the Middle Ages.
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing another transformation in the way people gain access to information: the Internet.
Until now, the ability to distribute written information depended on the dispersion of the material on which the information was printed.
In order to read a written work, the reader needed to have physical access to the medium containing the text, with the most recent significant technological advance being the printing press. Gutenberg's device made copying a text cheaper, facilitating the mass production of the written word.
New industries sprang up to profit from the transportation of the physical repositories of information:
- publishing companies
- the Postal Service
- academic journals
But what happens when creative works gain the ability to bypass these “retailers” and interact sans middlemen with their audience?
The ability to read a text is increasingly transcending the barriers of time and space. Previously, readers had to physically possess a text at the moment and place where they wished to read it.
Now, readers with Internet access can discover new information as soon as it is compiled. “Out of print” or “coming soon” cease to exist because the texts need not be transferred to a physical medium.
A reader with an Internet connection has the entire library of un-copyrighted human written language at her disposal. By connecting the world in real-time and fostering collaboration between people, the Internet has drastically changed the way readers encounter and experience texts.
In this paper, I will examine
- the changes the Internet brings to traditional print media,
- the effects of a dynamic and comment-friendly realm online
- the tools an author can use to foster the community around his work.
The traditional process of creation and spreading of creative texts falls well short of adequate in dealing with the explosion of the Internet.
When third-party commercial interests control the means of dissemination and consumption, printing and distributing an artist's creative work requires an extremely high amount of guesswork and financial investment.
Publishers do not wish to waste resources like
- bookmaking material
- marketing costs
- advances
on authors whom they believe to produce unprofitable content.
The Internet changes this dynamic. When hardcopy publishers no longer control the means of production, the Internet becomes a virtual proving ground for new creative talent.
Blogger and publicist to Internet personalities Ryan Holiday comments on this change in distribution methods on his Web site:
As digital distribution breaks apart traditional content forms, you're going to hear all sorts of whining about how harmful it will be. "Downloads ruin the sanctity of the album." "Blogs aren't as objective as real journalists." "They'll never replace the smell of a good book." The fact of the matter is that all these "forms" exist as a function of the physical constraints of distribution. It is extremely dangerous to assume that "they way things were" is and will continue to be the best or the most reliable. (Holiday)
In other words, the distribution of digital content adds a new dimension to the way a reader encounters a text.
In Holiday's view, the result will be a Darwinian environment (like the one that existed pre-Internet) that has one more species of access to information: the Internet.
Many third party distributors have gained a reputation as being purveyors of exceptional content in the creative realm.
Magazines provide a good example: if an author's book is printed in The New Yorker, a decision-maker at The New Yorker deemed it worthy for publication.
The packaging (marketing) surrounding the work influences the perception of its quality.
It is worth noting that I chose to cite Holiday here to illustrate first-hand the implications of the new type of publisher-less content distribution.
The value of Holiday’s ideas has passed no other litmus test than his and my own. He and he alone decided his argument was valid enough to post. I speak to the validity of his assertions by citing them here, without relying on the reputation and expertise of a third-party publisher.
Authoring and distributing content to a massive audience online has become, quite literally, “free and easy.” The number of authors people can read will soon be virtually unlimited, as more and more authors make their creative work available online for public consumption.
The cream of the crop can rise to the top without any extra financial investment from the publisher or reader.
New economic theories address the change that “unlimited shelf space” brings to traditional media distribution channels.
In the article in Wired magazine that spawned his landmark book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson cites the change the Internet brings to content distribution.
In his words, the problem is that “we live in the physical world, and until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too.” (Anderson Wired).
A movie theater will not show a movie unless it attracts 1,500 people over two weeks, and a record store will only stock CDs that will potentially sell 2 copies over the course of a year (Anderson Wired).
Those prices function as the average “rents” necessary to turn a profit in each respective business. Because they are businesses that exist in one specific location, the pool of potential movie-goers or record buyers is limited to the population able to travel to their sites.
“In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all” (Anderson Wired).
These changes are a symptom of the “flattening” of the world, a term coined by New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman in his book The World is Flat.
Friedman explains the rise of the Internet as a vehicle for every person on earth to eventually become both consumer and contributor to the virtual repository of information.
In a chapter on Blogging, Friedman details the implications of every person on earth becoming a journalist Blogger. As he says, “These Bloggers have created their own online commons, with no barriers to entry” (Friedman).
Anyone can become a publisher, and if they attract a large enough following, leverage the community they have established online into traditional publication through old media channels.
If the costs of producing content are virtually zero, financial barriers hampering the distribution of new content fall.
On an Internet where every user can access every other user's published content, a much more varied system is beginning to emerge.
Instead of the very best writers receiving the majority of the attention, the interests of each particular user will play a much bigger role in the decision to patronize a creative work.
Along a similar vein, Anderson uses the digital jukebox player Ecast as an example. Each digital jukebox accesses nearly 150,000 songs, and out of the 10,000 songs in any given month, 99% are played at least once (Anderson Wired).
In other words, in 99 out of 100 cases at least one person liked the particular song enough to pay money to play it at least once (Anderson Wired).
A similar phenomenon exists online, albeit without the help of recording studios and record companies. When a huge sampling of creative work remains available to every Internet user, the distribution of readers of any given work becomes much more diverse and varied.
So too does each reader's taste: when presented with every choice of creative text, each reader reads a much greater variety of texts.
It then becomes the authors' responsibility to ensure their content is disseminated to the largest audience possible.
And then if the author gathers a significant following, distribution channels that use physical resources (book publishers for example) take a different approach to selecting content.
This phenomenon presents both a great boon and detriment to the publishing establishment. Many Web sites offer Web space free-of-charge to any user with an E-mail address.
With such a vast amount of creative authors publishing, promoting, and evaluating their work on the Internet, publishers can pick and choose those with the most extensive fan base.
An established and loyal readership reduces the chances that publishing resources will be wasted on an unprofitable author. The hardcopy print of a creative work, then, becomes but one medium through which readers can interact with a text.
Publishing creative work online has become (and will continue to be) popular because the financial barriers to self-publishing for a large group of people have fallen.
On the Internet a creative work becomes a product that is “given” in the hopes that a more lucrative future arrangement be made.
In the consumer products industry, this business model has proven very effective. The following examples show that distributing a free product initially can indeed boost sales of a more valuable product later:
- Cracker Jack's famous toys in the candy box,
- Gillette's giving away razors to sell the blades later,
- The promotional products industry
But is the policy of giving away creative work to succeed economically a feasible policy for an author? For some well-known authors with already large readerships, early indications show that it is.
Some well-known pre-Internet authors have taken advantage of a cousin of the “free” business model to market their work: the idea of periodical distribution before a novel's release.
Truman Capote distributed the first chapters of his massively successful In Cold Blood in The New Yorker to whet the appetite of readers (Capote).
Ernest Hemingway did much the same thing with For Whom the Bell Tolls, syndicating an excerpt from the book within existing periodicals.
These efforts, as we know them today, succeeded stupendously for two of the most famous authors of the 20th century.
Modern authors use free distribution to market their books as well. Author of the wildly influential economic book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson is about to release another book, dubbed FREE!.
He uses his Blog to promote his ideas to an audience that has already invested in him from his previous book. Although the new book is not completed, Anderson ruminates over the basic ideas for it on his Blog, even going so far as to publish the working chapter titles.
In addition to offering content for free, Anderson incorporates feedback from the community he established around The Long Tail to craft a new hardcopy text. He comments in an interview:
We think of free as scary and radical but this economy has always existed. Previously not dignified as an economy, its currency is not money: It is reputation, attention, respect, fame, fun or money from a superior service after giving away something inferior for free. (IT Conversations)
In the weeks and months leading up to his book launch, Anderson has been commenting on a near-weekly basis on the implications of producing new media for the masses at a relative cost of zero.
Other authors who have already established a community around their published works through traditional print methods have begun experimenting in the online world.
In 2000 Stephen King decided to use the Internet as a means to put a new novel, The Plant, into his readers' hands without employing a publisher.
King released a new chapter every month, and asked for a $1 donation from each person per download (Sherriff).
Each user was presented with three options:
- Prepay using Amazon.com
- Defer payment until later on the honor system
- Decline to pay
Payment was not necessary to download the book. King stated at the outset that if he did not receive three-quarters of expected donations (or 75 cents per person) he would discontinue the experiment.
"If you pay, the story rolls. If you don't, the story folds," said King on his Web site (Katz).
After five months King terminated his experiment. By December of 2000, after releasing six installments, King was only receiving payment from 46% of the readers downloading the chapters of The Plant.
King and his team decided to discontinue the project not as punishment for a sub par response, but in order to give King time to work on developing other projects.
King still profited handsomely from his e-publishing experiment even though his quotas did not reach the participation he had originally intended. Expenses posted on his Web site included
- $140,766.75 for advertising
- $14,000 for 'compositing and design services'
- $102,849.59 for 'Webhosting and maintenance’ (Yates)
Total revenue from the book sale was $721,448.61 (Yates).
So King's net profit was $463,832.27, with no money earmarked for his publishers.
When asked about the implications of the experiment, King took a positive view of the situation. "If we've proved nothing else, we've proved that the guy who shops for entertainment on the Net can be as honest as the one in a retail bricks-and-mortar store," said King (Harrison).
Stephen King, arguably the most popular author in the world, profited handsomely by making his creative works available to his existing fan base over the Internet.
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