SHARES AND SHARE ALIKE

EMMY HENNINGS LOOKS INTO MODELS FOR DIGITAL READING.

IT'S strange, really, that Amazon has given its much-hyped electronic reading device a name that brings to mind the wanton and deliberate destruction of books. Kindle, it’s called. Very Nuremberg, that; very Fahrenheit 451. Fire is the book’s natural enemy: creative labour burned to nothing in a few cruel seconds.
    Either Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a mordant, dystopian wit or – and this is more likely, though not half so dramatic – his company sees its new device as lighting the first burning torch for a revolution of the written word, comparable to Johannes Gutenberg with his printing press. But Kindle may already be behind the times.
    Released on the US market in November 2007 at the hefty retail price of around US$400, Kindle repeats the monumental error that has cost the global music industry millions over the past few years: Digital Rights Management (DRM). In this case, the pocket-sized reader uses proprietary formatting, locking users into the device and compatible files that are only available via Amazon stores. Books bought via download cannot be transferred to another electronic device or computer, and any misuse on the buyer’s part gives Amazon the right to invalidate all prior purchases; in effect, Amazon retains ownership over any content that you choose to buy from them.
    It seems that Amazon has learnt little from assumptions that have hampered the music industry’s pursuit of digital-era profits. The Independent reported on 9 January 2008 that music sales in the UK fell by 10.8 per cent in 2007, following on from a 14.3 per cent drop in 2006. The figures include legal downloads purchased through stores such as iTunes. Statistics for the Australian market are only available for the six months to June 2007, during which they show a decline of 15.72 per cent in total ‘physical’ sales – CDs, vinyl, DVDs etc. The Australian Recording Industry Association has tried to spin the bad news by pointing to the increase in legal digital sales, which now account for nearly 10 per cent of the total Australian market, but there’s no doubt that the local divisions of the ‘Big Four’ labels – Sony/BMG, Warner, Universal and EMI – are panicking, along with their overseas counterparts. On 17 January, EMI announced that, because of falling profits, it will be cutting 5500 company jobs worldwide and culling its artist roster. Most likely the brunt of this ‘streamlining’, as new CEO Guy Hands referred to it, will fall on regional offices such as Australia, rather than the core US/UK market. Local EMI head John O’Donnell has so far offered no comment on his company’s fate.
    Corporate reaction to the sales downturn has been, consistently, to blame music buyers – or rather, those people who’ve stopped buying music. From a major label’s perspective, the global music market is a lawless ocean, full of pirates who’ve come to the conclusion – ingrates! – that culture should be easily accessible, perhaps even free, or, at the very least, shareable.
    The use and abuse of DRM in the music industry gives us some clue as to how the publishing industry might be dealing – or is already dealing – with the vexed question of digital distribution and the regulation of copyrighted ‘content’ online. Again, the curious choice, ‘content’: a word that conjures up boundaries, whose very sense comes from the implication of fixity and finite volume. One can speak of the contents of a jar, or of a book. But the content of the internet is like referring to the content of outer space: a conceptual and linguistic absurdity. And yet major record labels refer to online music as ‘content’ precisely because they believe – a bit like colonial powers – that the territory they survey can be partitioned into manageable, profit-yielding chunks. Battered for years by the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing, with listeners passing music among themselves and nary a cent making it back to either labels or artists, the music industry set its hopes on DRM to restrict sharing and limit the copying of files.
    The cult of the iPod in particular has presented labels with a real bind. Like Kindle, the iPod functions with proprietary software: you can only upload files to it via iTunes, and any music purchased legally from an iTunes store will only play on an iPod. With the iPod the biggest-selling portable music device on the market, major labels have sought to claw back lost profits by licensing their catalogues to iTunes, and through those stores to iPod users. Still, song sales through iTunes are nowhere near the level of illegal file shares, and listeners remain disgruntled. Non-iPod users are annoyed at being effectively locked out of the biggest online music retailer, and listeners in general resent the punitive, paranoid approach that has characterised the music industry’s attempts to deal with file sharing. For instance, though EMI licensed its back catalogue to iTunes last May in DRM-free format, users discovered that downloaded tracks were encoded with their full name and account details, which would make them traceable if the DRM-free track showed up on a torrent site or other peer-to-peer network.
    Most people regard the copying of a file purchased from iTunes to, say, a CD for their stereo or car as a given right and, though there are ways around the copy-restrictions imposed by iTunes and the record labels, the fact that those companies have deliberately set out to make things difficult for listeners has laid bare their profiteering preoccupations. Record companies are alarmed at the global slump in music sales not because they conceive of creative labour as something worth paying for in and of itself, still less because they are concerned at the diminishing income of artists (you won’t see any lamentations over the penury of low-selling acts in the annual reports). No, record companies conceive of recorded music as something they own exclusively (and the law supports them), and they are incensed by what they see as a growing disrespect, on the part of listeners, for their proprietary relationship. The reaction has been proprietary devices and a series of show trials for music ‘pirates’, designed to scare the public into paying for music downloads.
    Yet approaches to DRM for music are changing and interestingly enough Amazon may well have a significant part to play. It was announced on 11 January that Amazon has acquired rights from both Warner and EMI to sell DRM-free music licensed by the companies through its Amazon stores, following on from EMI’s earlier licensing deal with iTunes. Keen to break iTunes’ monopoly over online sales, Amazon is now able to provide listeners with what they have long demanded: digital music that can be played across different devices and file formats, and copied without restriction.
    So why then has Amazon entered into the realm of digital publishing lumbered with the same old ideas? Perhaps we should not expect a corporation to have learned from another corporation’s mistakes. Each one thinks it can outsell its rivals: when technology is at stake, the best application for the most number of users is not an issue. The device that will profit, even at long-term damage to an industry, is paramount.
    In the conflict between music listeners and record labels lies a great philosophical difference: the difference between music as a social experience to be shared – listened to and talked about with friends or, increasingly, among strangers connected by the internet – and a more atomised understanding where individual listeners build up a private collection and speak of it to no-one. In the labels’ dreams, no-one has ever recorded an album to cassette for a friend, or burned a CD, or shown any similar disregard for copyright. Everyone dances to their iPods alone.
    Of course, the labels are dreaming, and publishing houses might do well to learn from their folly. One could argue that reading is a far more individual experience than listening to music, and yet a healthy, sustainable culture of reading is a collective undertaking. We share books and, through them, knowledge, memory and opinion.
    Imagine a scenario in which the rise of electronic reading devices was tied to proprietary software – where the digital book you just paid for could not be copied to your computer, or shared with a friend unless you lent your Kindle (or similar device) to them. Each ‘use’ of a book would have to be paid for, separately, and sharing your collection would be difficult. The prospect sounds completely unappealing – and yet this is the unwieldy model that the music industry has pursued. Falling sales are only part of the picture. Peer-to-peer file sharing, more than any other factor, has shaped the evolution of the internet’s social model when it comes to music – a model that incorporates blogging, MySpace and message boards, among other things. It is the benefits of this model that major labels have prevented themselves from reaping, thanks to their narrow approach, severely weakening their own chances of surviving in their current form.
    What are these benefits? And how might they apply to the publishing industry, particularly in Australia?
    Smaller independent record labels have been able to take advantage of an online environment where the rapid spread of information (both music itself and the chatter around it) creates a huge ‘buzz factor’ for artists, particularly new artists. The advantages of the internet hype machine are overrated: the cycle of discovery-acclaim-dismissal runs at warp speed, a parody (or perhaps a paragon?) of consumer capitalism’s ability to create demand out of thin air and then consign its creations to the garbage pile as something newer and shinier comes along. But small labels (and by analogy, small publishers), with less money tied up in each release and few if any shareholders to please, are more able to meet initial listener (or reader) curiosity with material such as free MP3 files and videos which serve as introductions to an artist’s work. The internet has, in some ways, given independent labels what they have long wanted: parity of distribution with the majors. Many have made the switch online with dynamic websites, easily accessible back catalogues and a recognition factor, even if it’s a niche one, with which the majors cannot compete. Nobody blogs excitedly about the latest release from Sony/BMG, but specialist local labels such as Preservation, Room40 and Feral Media command a loyal audience.
    Can we envisage something similar for small Australian publishers? There has been some talk in the wake of Amazon’s e-book catalogue and, more locally, Dymocks’ new e-kiosks that such purchasing models represent the death of the imprint. Readers browse by author or by title, goes the argument, not by publisher. I would disagree. Particularly when it comes to literary fiction, poetry and specialist non-fiction, readers actively seek out particular imprints. It’s the imprint that helps to distinguish title from title among the morass, and a small publisher’s curatorial approach gives readers a reason to trust its catalogue, even if particular authors are unfamiliar. Rather than throw up their hands at a vision of an unmitigated, unnavigable glut of text, independent publishers can and should build upon the ‘niche recognition’ they already have.
    If this sounds too much like a small business pep talk, consider it this way: the internet excels in building connections between users, but those connections are not a priori, they must be shaped. It is useless to speak of a homogeneous ‘online community’ since we can distinguish between many different online communities. In the local music industry, these might congregate around specific bands, but more often than not they form around online magazines (Cyclic Defrost, Mess+Noise), blogs (Who The Bloody Hell Are They, Lexicon Devil) and forums geared to specific tastes (In The Mix for clubbers, Faster Louder for the rock crowd). Participants are continually navigating between their online and offline experiences of music, and with a mixture of musicians, listeners, critics, broadcasters and promoters taking part, these communities can and do benefit independent artists. Though the internet is not geographically bound, the comparatively small size of the Australian music industry actually becomes an advantage in building online communities that reflect and also influence what is happening ‘on the ground’.
    Imagine a similar model operating within Australian publishing. Might not a small press like Sleepers, which specialises in new fiction, benefit from a participatory online community connected to its literary salons and almanac? Would Black Inc.’s popular Quarterly Essay series be enhanced by a corresponding forum where readers and contributors could discuss the publications in detail? Such discussions might well throw up new writers, surely a desirable thing given the safe-but-staid reliance on ‘reputable’ names that characterises a venture like QE. Part of the reliance on ‘name’ authors stems, of course, from the economic imperative of recouping publishing costs through physical sales, a consideration that could be – at least partially – offset, to the advantage of new and emerging writers, in a switch to online publishing.
    Just as the internet has resulted in a considerable depreciation of the material object when it comes to music, it is worth considering how small publishers might operate if and when books themselves become second choice to a digital alternative. General opinion seems to be that we are a good ten years away from a popular e-book culture or an e-reading device as widespread as the ubiquitous iPod music player. Change happened in the music industry – and it happened fast – because it is an industry wholly underpinned by the evolution of technology, and the resulting interplay between technology and sound. One hundred and twenty years ago a wax cylinder would wear out after a few dozen plays; now lossless audio files can be traded, in theory infinitely, without any degradation of sound.
    Compare with the book, a format almost unchanged over centuries. Books will survive because their technology is so basic and self-contained that it is near impossible to make them actually obsolete – like walls or wheels, they simply are. But the nature of reading will change – is changing – because of the internet. Statistics showing a decline in book sales are often prefaced by the explanation that we are ‘reading less’ as a society, but such a statement is absurd. If anything we are reading more – more text, but fewer books. Our reading strategies have become more complicated: because of hyperlinks we read across texts, moving between them in a considerably less linear fashion than when reading a series of related books in succession. And we do this while barely thinking about it – we have adapted. So will the book.
    Rather than imagining the e-book as simply an onscreen successor to the printed page (and the very materiality of book reading is part of its pleasure – who would volunteer for a migraine by choosing to read, say, the entirety of Capital onscreen?), we might wonder instead how a truly innovative e-book would harness new reading methods. Hyperlink, Flash, embedded audio and video are all possibilities. Such an e-book would exploit, in the best sense, the unique spatiality of the internet, its ability to let us move through information without ever coming up against an edge. Open source coding – already immensely popular and used to great effect by independent media sites and, of course, Wikipedia – offers the possibility of collaborative authorship, a new kind of literary salon. Any successful e-book reading device would, in turn, need to offer readers what they can’t already get from a book itself, namely, the chance to navigate through different texts via hyperlink. Huge storage capacity (your library in your pocket) is a secondary consideration to the possibility of reading material (novels, journals, newspapers) bundled together so that complementary texts can be read in relation to each other. This too is a library model, but it works by navigation rather than just volume.
    The kernel of a web-based (though not yet device-based) library model can be seen in Library Thing, which allows users to catalogue their books and browse the resultant collective ‘library’ via a wide range of search criteria generated by user ‘tags’. A search for the ever-popular Cloudstreet, for instance, brings up tags for ‘blue collar workers’ and ‘Perth’ among more predictable descriptors such as ‘Australian fiction’. Clicking on any of these tags allows you to see lists that have been similarly categorised by users, and so a potentially endless and lateral navigation through subjects and micro-subjects (‘near-drowning’, anyone?) presents itself.
In its current form, Library Thing works as a less sophisticated bibliographic counterpart to the music website Last.fm, which dubs itself ‘the social music revolution’. Last.fm is a multiplatform site that functions as radio station, reference guide, event calendar and public profile. It works by ‘scrobbling’ the tracks that registered users play on their computers or iPods, creating both personal charts and collective data which reflects their listening habits. Through tagging and wikis, users can create detailed information on every track and artist played, and make recommendations to each other. Last.fm ‘groups’, where like-minded listeners can congregate online, are based around genres, record labels, artists, publications or such whimsy as “People with no social lives who listen to more music than is healthy, who are scared of spiders and can never seem to find a pen”. Artists can upload free MP3s for listening, and visiting any user’s profile allows you to listen to a streamed radio station based on their most-played artists. The site represents niche media in excelsis: a massive, collectively generated database made manageable by an infinite number of subdivisions and search methods. It’s both fascinating and useful as a tool for uncovering new artists – new to your ears, anyway, as there’s barely a band in existence that doesn’t have at least a dozen other listeners elsewhere in the world.
    One could argue that the effectiveness of Last.fm lies precisely in the durational quality of music: a three or five minute track is enough to make an initial judgement and, if you don’t like it, you move on. Reading is a more sustained undertaking: to enter a relationship with a writer or text requires more than a few paragraphs. And yet the growing emphasis on the single track or MP3 file has not yet killed more sustained musical projects or made redundant the material object. Vinyl sales, while a small percentage of the total market, are growing every year, and the very non-materiality of digital music files has resulted in a boom for what is commonly referred to as the ‘CD-R scene’. The cheapness and accessibility of CD burning has meant that many musicians – particularly those working within experimental genres – release and distribute their own work on CD-R, often in limited runs with elaborate hand-made packaging. The scene is so well established that most music magazines draw no distinction between CD-Rs and ‘proper’ releases in their reviews pages. One might draw a comparison between the CD-R scene and the world of zines, comics and other DIY publishing – but my personal hope is that the blurring of distinctions in the music industry, where ‘value’ does not equate to format or genre, offers a way forward for publishing, an industry so often stratified by such prejudices.
    There is worth in books, certainly – an irreplaceable worth. Jeff Bezos speaks rhapsodically about jettisoning the book-as-object in favour of ‘pure’ content, while Google Book Search director Adam Smith talks, in a recent cover article for US Newsweek, of his company’s project in terms of “getting rid of the idea that the book is a [closed] container”. But the worth of a book has never lain purely in its contents and, though a bound object, it is not closed. It is a container, certainly, but one which has always referred us to other books, other thoughts, other artworks by its very existence. Rather than a corporate vision of culture as something purchased piecemeal by individuals, we can reaffirm the value of books and reading as a shared experience of learning, one to which each person contributes even if they choose to read alone.

Emmy Hennings is a Sydney-based music writer. She writes regularly for the magazines Mess+Noise and Cyclic Defrost, and keeps a music blog called Fangirl.

© Emmy Hennings

Overland 190–autumn 2008, pp.12–16

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