Why Is This Hill So Steep?

by Steve Jordan

  I also learned about the concept of designing web pages to be compliant with federal regulations providing protections to Americans with disabilities, and the importance of adhering to formatting standards. The office was operating multiple computers, seemingly with a different operating system and set of programs on each one, connected through “sneakernet,” and using the desk phones as modems for the computers. Even in 2001, I knew they could do better, and I talked the boss into modernizing the office systems. I arranged to have DSL and a networked file server installed, and standardized their multiple computers with the same operating systems and software for easier maintenance and support, and consistent documents produced by any station in the office. I acted as the office IT manager for my duration there, improving their workflow and products and saving them thousands of dollars in IT needs.

  During this time, I had done my web research, and developed the first generation of my own e-book sales websites. I closely followed the e-book industry, in order to optimize my sales model and improve my e-book products. The site has undergone two new generations since then, keeping up with sales trends and site design developments to present the most attractive marketing package to customers.

  When work began drying up at the contractor, I resigned and, after just a few bounces, ended up at a Washington. D.C. non-profit maintaining their web site and digital documents. The company maintained a vast collection of documents on their website, which gave me the chance to learn the ins and outs of a content management system, and what it meant for digital documents.

  These positions, working closely with digital document creators, controlling networked printing systems, organizing and standardizing hardware and software in business environments, developing websites, and producing my own digital documents, have kept me closely in touch with the various disciplines that have shaped the e-book industry since the 1990s.

  ~

  I think the Connections approach is essential to understanding what has transpired in the e-book industry over the past two decades or so, to create the situation we e-book fans daily lament over. Some of it is also important in order to understand how the effects that have adversely impacted e-books can be countered and corrected. Many people do not immediately see the need to understand the historical significance of a present-day object or movement, but there’s an old saying: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Many new players are entering the e-book arena every day, and these players, as much as the veteran players, stand to do as much damage as good if they pay no heed to the mistakes of the past, and continue to make them into the future. E-books could continue to founder on the rocks for another decade or more, or even slip finally into the depths, not to resurface again until all of the villains have passed on, history has been forgotten, and a new world, a few generations removed, can try again.

  Personally, I don’t want to have to wait that long.

  And so, this text illustrates the many, sometimes complex and sometimes thoughtless elements that have worked to keep e-books down for so long. The elements are presented roughly in order of their impact on the industry, which was sometimes chronological, sometimes technological, and sometimes dependent on another element’s actions, but all ultimately interrelated and significant. These aren’t presented as dry facts and footnotes; rather, it is the history of e-books from the perspective of someone who has walked alongside it, even when he was not aware of it, for the past thirty years, to suddenly find himself an evangelizer and authority on e-books to those on the outside looking in.

  I offer my perspective on the painfully-plodding history of e-books to those who seek to enjoy e-books, and possibly to be a part of the developing industry. Hopefully, a full understanding of the many elements involved will help us to guide e-books back off the rocks, and onto a course that will result in a happy, healthy industry in time. At the very least, it will hopefully stave off another twenty years of what we just went through. (I couldn’t take another of those, myself.)

  1: Traditional publishing—The Castle mentality

  Once upon a time, in the 1400s—

  —Okay, our story doesn’t really begin that far back. But the simile applies, so let’s pull up our leggings and get set for a quick history lesson. Back in the 1400s, feudalism ruled in most of Europe. Men with money bought or grabbed land, and bought or grabbed men to help them hold on to it. They constructed community homes called castles, where they and their most trusted men, their women and their servants would live.

  Outside the castle were the peasants, the people who worked the land owned by the landowner, providing the food for the landowner, cloths and leathers for clothing, and assorted knick-knacks for daily living. In exchange for this work, the peasants received a modest share of the food and goods, and protection from outsiders… in theory. In practice, however, the share of goods were often meager, depending on what was left after the landowner and his trusted inner circle had their share… and the amount of protection given to those outside the castles was often minor to non-existent. (In fact, after a time, most landowners tended to respect other landowners’ property, so there was rarely anything to be seriously protected against.)

  For the peasants who lived outside the castle walls, the choices were few: You either did your local landowner’s bidding; or you left his land, and in exchange for living on a new piece of land, you had to work for that local landowner; and things were rarely any better from one landowner to the other. A third possibility was to do something that would get you into the castle as one of the landowner’s trusted inner circle. But this was even more difficult to accomplish, as you had to have a skill or possession so impressive as to beat out all of the other peasants who wanted into the castle as bad as you. In general, the majority of the peasants would never see the inside of the castle throughout their lives.

  The landowners were well aware that their resources, their comforts, and their space, was finite. In order to maintain their standard of living, therefore, it was in their best interests to keep most of the peasants outside of the castle and out of their valuables, maintaining a distance whilst meting out resources, and trying to maintain enough of an air of authority and promised security to convince the peasants not to leave and work someone else’s land.

  One of the ways landowners did this was to convince the peasants that those in the castle were their betters, special by way of birth or right, and deserving of their respect and service. Often they adopted titles, like Lord, King, Master, etc, to more formalize the difference between themselves and their workers. Other landowners maintained control by physically dominating and intimidating the peasants, making it hard or impossible for them to do anything but what the landowners told them to do. Thus, by either psychological or physical manipulation, did the landowners stay in power. Needless to say, it was no fun to be a peasant at the time… but great fun to be a lord.

  It was a precarious balance of social and economic systems, constantly under threat by either side: If the landowners were too cruel or stingy, or too weak, their peasants would not work well, or deserted them, and the valuable land went fallow; or they might storm the castle and take over, temporarily gaining the stored valuables inside, but usually ruining their local economy in the process; and if the landowners didn’t know how to manage, all the industrious work of the peasants could be wasted, their work uncompensated. But this was the way of the world, and it persisted for centuries, even after the beginnings of the Enlightened Age created a new Capitalist society that heralded the things to come.

  ~

  The abbreviated history lesson was required in order to illustrate the parallels between the old feudal society, and the modern western publishing system as it has stood for roughly the last century. The ironic fact is, despite the greater knowledge of a newer age, and the publishing industry’s image as generally being led by the more learned of men, publishing’s feudal system was inspired by the same fears as the 1400s landowners, and has been maintained w
ith essentially the same tools.

  The printing revolution kicked off by Gutenberg’s wonderful invention actually took a few centuries to stabilize into the well-run capitalist machine that we are all familiar with today. Previously, documents were created by individuals working manually to reproduce texts, whose work rarely extended much past their local area, and quality and subject matter were all across the board. As the young printing industry developed, it had a few major roadblocks to overcome, including the image of books as “elite luxury” items, the low literacy level of the bulk of the population, the challenges of international markets, and the cost of the books themselves.

  The 1700s saw many of these challenges taken on by the more forward-thinking nations in Europe, as well as the Founding Fathers of the new nation to the west, the United States of America: New laws were set down to enact a semblance of control over individual published works, as an incentive for more creators to create; known as copyright laws, they established a period of time wherein a published work would be considered by law to be exclusive to the creator, and thereby guarantee any profit from the work to him. Thanks largely to copyright law, it became possible to make a decent living off of writing and publishing your own work.

  Inspired by publishing’s newfound ability to make money, individuals banded together to form the first publishing houses, organizations set up to make a major business out of publishing. Most of the first houses would be dedicated to certain types of content, or to satisfying a particular class of individual with the content they craved. The content itself could be anything, from the most cherished of fine literature and reference books, to the “penny dredfuls,” cheaply-made pocket-sized books that often contained racy and unrespectable stories… the equivalent to today’s tawdry romance novels and cheap pornography.

  By the 1800s, publishing houses were establishing themselves as respectable businesses throughout Europe and the Americas. They banked upon their status as learned men, and leveraged that reputation heavily, to the extent that certain publisher’s works might be sought out by those in the know, as being more carefully edited, more appropriate to the audience, and more finely crafted products. It might have been commendable to have written a book; but to have it published by a major publisher was especially impressive, and such an accomplishment earned writers more respect with their peers. At this time, those houses could be thought of as Big Publishing (which I shall also refer to hereafter as Big Pub), an industry in its own right.

  The 1800s into the 1900s saw Big Pub, like many businesses, taking liberties with the somewhat lax controls over businesses and trade in general, to establish exclusive agreements with their partners, essentially agreements to work together to maximize profit, and incidentally to quash the efforts of competitors, wherever possible. This was the beginning of the movement to marginalize all writing and publishing outside of the established Big Publishers and their partners: At the business end, contracts and trade agreements forced outsiders to either play ball with Big Pub, or go home; and at the consumer end, access to content was being increasingly restricted to the output of Big Pub.

  There were, of course, small outfits that still produced printed matter… a basic printing press could be operated by a single person out of a garage or basement, and there was nothing Big Pub could do to prevent that. In order to combat the threat of the little guys, therefore, Big Pub took the elite track: Essentially they waved their credentials, highlighted their expensive printing machinery and ensconced themselves into modern and ostentatious offices, and began a subtle campaign to convince the public that their trappings were a reflection of the quality of their product; and in fact, absolutely required to make printed matter a quality product. This campaign was even applied to prospective authors, used to cajole a desired author to work with a particular publisher over another, and thereby cement their superiority over others. Anyone outside of their sphere of influence was by extension considered of lesser quality or authority, or at least influence, among authors and consumers, and incidentally marginalized at the retail level to suggest a lesser quality and popularity. This created a self-perpetuating process of outsiders simultaneously supporting and clamoring for entry into Big Pub’s inner circles, and maintaining the status quo of the industry within and without.

  To be clear, this wasn’t an organized marketing campaign at work; it was psychological warfare, waged in the offices as well as on the streets; comments made here, decisions made there, which seemed to indicate that literature produced outside of the system was no good; and exacerbated by a sales system centered around the publishers that shut out non-publisher material, another implied slight as to its quality. Big Pub used its influence to suggest at any opportunity that any works, other than their own, were not worth looking at, and through their sales and marketing tactics, made sure other elements learned the same lesson. Vendors and consumers alike bought into the campaign, mainly because it profited them to do so… and after awhile, they were spreading the same message, like duly-indoctrinated members of a populist or religious movement.

  So: In order to maintain their sovereignty and retain their property and profits, Big Pub had created a façade, a castle, placing them as the lords of the industry, establishing a clear boundary to keep out the undesirables (the consumers, and to a great extent, all but the authors upon whom they directly profited), and using physical (contracts) and psychological (marketing) tactics to maintain their superior status. The fix was in, and everybody was in on the gag.

  ~

  This is the state of the modern Big Publishing industry: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, being ruled by fifteenth-century thinking. And because this thinking has allowed them to maintain their status quo and profit for so long, Big Pub has seen little or no reason to change, and has steadfastly defended its castle walls against all comers.

  Until recently, there has been little to challenge Big Pub: They had been incredibly successful at establishing themselves as the ones in control of the publishing industry. Big Pub was the perceived nexus of the collaboration between authors, printers, paper manufacturers and retailers, any one of which could have equally ruined the entire industry if it had collapsed on its own… but Big Pub had assumed the position of the brain of the entire organism, the controlling entity, in full control of the entire industry’s actions. Big Pub had calmly and deliberately tweaked every aspect of the publishing process over the decades, and as a result, had reduced the procedure of publishing to rote and formula, from the felling of a tree, to the ringing of the cashier. Their methods were not to be challenged, because they were optimized to provide the maximum return on investment, with Big Pub naturally pocketing the lion’s share of the profits.

  There have been very few challenges to this formula over the past century. A challenge of the early twentieth century, the paperback book, made possible by cheaper printers and improved printing efficiency, threatened to undercut the inherent value of a book as a valuable object… whereas a hardback book was large, impressive and expensive, saying something positive about its owner, almost anyone could afford a paperback book. Big Pub dealt with this challenge by producing its own paperback material, considered to be of a more base nature and lesser quality, in the paperback formats, simply in order to win the money of the less discerning buyer and crowd out the small-time early paperback producers. Later, they would re-release their hardback books in paperback form, again to win increased sales for the original work without having to put in the writing and editing for a new book. Eventually the paperback became a legitimate product in its own right, and the transition from hardback to paperback in the production lifespan of a book became a standard procedure. But the hardback book was always held up as the premium product, to which everyone should aspire, and is to this day.

  Another challenge to the existing publishing industry was the sudden gain of leisure time witnessed in the mid-twentieth century, similar in effect to the gains of the nineteenth century. This result
ed in a surge in the number of hobbyist writers and professional writers seeking to expand their own markets. These writers duly descended upon Big Pub, as they had been pre-programmed to do by Big Pub itself, and quickly began to overwhelm the publishers. The industry responded by augmenting and promoting the value of the Agent, a middleman designed to act as a pre-publishing filter and reduce the amount of material arriving at Big Pub’s door. Although the agent worked for the author in theory, he was really an agent of the publishers, knowing their ins and outs, and negotiating its deals more according to the publisher’s demands than the writer’s.

  It was at this stage that I was introduced to Big Pub, in trying to get my first novel published. I was certainly prepared to deal with turn-downs, critiques and slush-pile realities, knowing what I did about the industry. However, I was not prepared to be told not to bother to send anything at all. It seemed that the publishers were so full of work, and so sure that they were not passing up on a potentially good thing or author, that they were not even accepting submissions. They had totally walled themselves off, and cut the chains that opened the gates. Even their agents were telling me not to bother, as they had plenty of clients already. Big Pub had become completely isolated from the very people who purchased their material, and those who might provide them more material to sell.

  This establishment and successful maintenance of formulaic control has resulted in an industry that is not only complacent, but happy to relish in their complacency, even tying it into their façade of superiority by saying that because they are so good at what they do, they can afford to be complacent. Big Pub has used this strategy to downplay and ignore most efforts to modernize and improve any aspect of the publishing process, ably demonstrating their established formula as superior to any new scheme, and emphasizing their desire to maintain the façade, the castle as they had built it, and defend it against any effort to reduce its sovereignty.