Apocalypse Soon

Walrus Online Exclusive: Excerpts from Jon Evans’ first novel, Dark Places, as well as his upcoming novel, Invisible Armies.A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

Newspapers, with their readerships and profit margins being hammered by television, free dailies, and the Internet (Yahoo! News and Craigslist, among others), have been forced to adapt or die. Even the august New York Times now has more readers online than “onpaper” (for the moment a neologism). The broadsheet’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., has speculated that in five years’ time it might stop producing a print edition. Magazines are way ahead of him. Many scientific journals don’t bother printing physical copies. Premiere, once one of Hollywood’s mightiest arbiters, recently announced that it will henceforth exist only online. Slate, an online mag covering politics and current events, is turning a profit, and long-established titles like the Atlantic and the New Yorker give selected content away for free, using the web to drive subscriptions. If you thought the Internet revolution ended with the dot-com flame-out in 2001, think again. We are witnessing the beginnings of a massive tectonic shift.

Book publishers, however, stand apart, aloof, shielded perhaps by the dismal failure of electronic books. After a decade of hype and development, e-book sales have achieved the dizzying market share of 0.2 percent for full-length books. It seems that books, unlike newspapers and magazines, are protected from the encroaching digital revolution by some kind of moat. Let’s examine that divide — but first, let’s take a closer look at what it guards. What exactly is a book?

From the time of Gutenberg until about twenty years ago, any non-academic could have answered this question without hesitation: a book is a bound sheaf of pages. If the pages are blank, it’s a notebook; if they’re full of factual information, it’s a reference book; if they tell a made-up story, it’s a novel. The bound sheaf of paper is not just an artifact, it’s an icon of civilization.

Enter the Internet, muddying definitions everywhere. Enter Project Gutenberg, which puts out-of-copyright classics online. Enter book-length blogs and online literary experiments. Enter reference works that “live” online, constantly changing and growing, but that occasionally also result in paper editions — works such as The Java Tutorial, a technical manual that explains the intricacies of an Internet programming language. A book is the text, not the form in which the text is rendered — we’ll leave to literary theorists the implications of non-linear hyperlinked texts — and the online version of a book can be the “master copy,” the bound sheaf a mere textual snapshot, already stale when printed. Online reference works can make use of endless space for appendices, unlimited full-colour graphics, examples that run on the user’s screen, discussion boards, and chat rooms. Given this interactivity and timeliness, why would anyone want to buy, say, The Java Tutorial onpaper?

And yet people do. The book is a worldwide bestseller for technical manuals. The physical Java Tutorial is, compared to what’s freely available and downloadable online, limited in scope and out of date; but its readers — overwhelmingly web programmers — purchase the bound sheaf version anyway. What is going on here? What is keeping the big bad twenty-first century from the publishing industry’s nineteenth-century castle walls?

Both e-books and sheaves of paper have pros and cons. Sheaves never lose battery power; you can flip through them quickly, use them as bricks, or take them to the bath; and they are still relatively cheap. On the other hand, digital readers can store hundreds of e-books, including those available for free, and their contents can be updated, searched, and annotated. In the near future, the number of digital readers will skyrocket, and making copies for friends will be simple. All things being equal, you’d expect e-books to have grabbed a significant share of the book market by now. So why haven’t they?

The answer is simple, and if you’re a publisher, not at all comforting. The enormous and lasting success of ink on paper is almost entirely due to one thing: contrast. Ink on paper has almost perfect contrast, allowing the average eye to make out small shapes such as letters with little strain. Luminescent pixels on lcd screens represent a tougher challenge. The eye has to work for its input, a slow and subtle strain. This is no big deal if you’re reading a few pages over the course of several minutes, but if you’re devoting yourself to tens of thousands of words — in other words, if you’re devoting yourself to a book — reading from an lcd screen is a physical burn.

Of course, many say there’s more to it than contrast, that there’s something special about paper, something sacred; that people like the feel of paper, the smell, the cover art. All of which is true, and similar arguments were once made about vinyl records. Until a few months ago, I was a great champion of the “tactile experience,” of holding the thing and its art in your hands. Then I went browsing through a Borders bookstore in California, where I saw and experienced a Sony Reader.

The Reader isn’t a revolution in and of itself. For $300 all you get is a tiny display and a clumsy interface. Reading a book on this would be deeply annoying — but it wouldn’t be a strain. Instead of an lcd screen, it boasts “electronic paper,” the ink highlighted in soothing contrast, as if it were onpaper. As I stared down at the Sony Reader, for the first time in my life I could envision myself abandoning paper for digital books. It was a revelation.

Suppose Apple released an electronic-paper iTome, I thought, and suppose it was easy to use, reasonably priced, and allowed one to switch between text and audiobook on demand. Suppose, further, that it was convenient, even sexy. Would there still be something sacred and special about bound sheaves of paper? Or would we soon see them supplanted by iTome on the subway, in the classroom, even curled up beside the fireplace?

Doesn’t sound so bad to me. But the idea is like a can of poisonous snakes to most book publishers, and it’s easy to see why when you consider what’s happening to the music industry. Go to limewire.com, home of “the fastest file sharing program on the planet.” Take a couple of minutes to download and install the LimeWire client, et voilà. Despite the best efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, you have access to nearly every song of the modern era all downloadable free of charge.

This is piracy, clearly illegal and wildly popular despite lawsuit after lawsuit, despite increasingly desperate and mostly failed copyright-protection schemes. If and when e-books and digital readers become ubiquitous, the same thing will happen. The change winds have already begun to blow. Pirated audiobooks and “cracked” e-books, converted to easily shared text, are already available online, if you know where and how to look. Imagine if people could download any book they wanted, for free, onto a digital reader with contrast as good as ink and paper. The entire publishing industry would collapse.

The “free content” folks argue, “information wants to be free.” This sounds good; maybe it even sounds right. But like many slogans it makes no sense. Information is an abstract noun, and for itself it doesn’t want anything. Information is what we do with it, but what if we decide we want it for free? You can’t compete with free. Or can you?


While most publishers tremble and fret, some authors actually want to put their work online. Many in this group are from the forward-looking field of science fiction. If you’re so inclined, you can go online right now and read (for free) highly acclaimed science fiction novels such as Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and the entire oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Science fiction publisher Baen Books has made available a “library” of copy-righted-but-free novels. You may be wondering why these authors and publishers have cut their own commercial throats. But the evidence to date indicates that releasing a book online actually increases offline sales. Readers try and then they buy.

Caveats apply. Such releases are still unusual, and thus they receive unusual publicity. Many readers will begin a book online, decide they like it, and buy a paper copy rather than fight their way through 100,000 low-contrast words. (And, indeed, sales and publicity are the two reasons I want to put my own book online immediately, before the iTome emerges as a replacement force.) But there’s also a growing body of evidence that people often buy paper copies of books after reading them online for free, that many readers actually want to pay authors. I find this reassuring because, scary as it might sound, in the long run it’s the publishing industry’s only hope.

The music business has moved to voluntary payment already. Virtually every song available on Apple’s iTunes store is also available on LimeWire at the same quality, with fewer restrictions, and at no cost. Listeners can download these songs without fear of legal repercussions from any Internet café or public access Wi-Fi hotspot — and yet iTunes’s business is booming. Literally billions of songs have been sold. It seems that an enormous number of people are willing to pay for what they can get for free.

Digital books have huge advantages. Printing and distributing bound sheaves of paper is expensive and not exactly environment friendly. In fact, it’s very strange, in this Internet era, to be shipping text on trucks and railcars. If publishers can cut out those costs and pass the savings on to their readers, basic economics dictates that more books will be purchased and profits will grow.

Unfortunately, once a book is an e-book, once a text has been turned into pure information, then all the copy-right-protection schemes and intellectual-property lawyers in the world won’t keep it from being made available for free. It’s simply too easy to share text across servers, nations, and individual computers. And if publishers don’t convert their paper books to e-books, pirates will. In the not-too-distant future, all books will be freely available, just as essentially all popular music is right now. Readers will decide whether books are worth buying, and if so for how much, often after they’ve read them.

I’m not thrilled about this inevitability. I want to put my first novel on-line for free to hook readers, who will, I hope, go on to purchase my subsequent work. And I want to do it now, while it’s still a perverse and hence noteworthy thing to do, to get physical sales while there’s still a reason to buy bound sheaves of paper. That’s why I’m so frustrated by my publishers’ demurral. They may not like this future, but to fight it is to play King Canute. It’s better by far to try to swim.

Books have always been available for free: libraries, used books, friends’ copies. For the time being, they retain their decorative value, and a house lined with books suggests a well-read owner. But LPs were once a staple of living room decor as well. That space was overtaken by cassettes and CDs, if ever so briefly, but now a computer terminal is often the only thing on display. The question is, will anyone still buy books when payment is purely voluntary? iTunes and the music-industry precedent indicate that the answer is yes — for now.

(One argument for how to save traditional book publishing is to only publish superb books. In 2004, in English alone, roughly 450,000 titles were published. Many of them, perhaps most of them, were, well, quite unnecessary. For books to gain back cultural cachet, the argument goes, a counter-revolution based on quality is necessary.)

If enough people grow accustomed to reading without paying, then authors will have to go back to being financed by wealthy patrons, publishers will wither away, and readers will find themselves trying to sift gems from an ever-growing mountain of self-published dreck. If readers do choose to pay, they will be able to send their money directly to authors, cutting out publishers entirely, and encouraging successful writers to self-publish rather than settle for a percentage. Either way, a revolution is on the horizon.

A new industry will eventually emerge from the chaos. Books aren’t going away, and even bound sheaves of paper will survive in some form. Readership may actually increase — I think it’s safe to say the digital generation doesn’t read as many books as the paper generation, and e-books might change that. But the oncoming digital meteor will hit today’s publishing industry hard, and its dinosaurs are going to die.