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When book publisher Simon & Schuster decided to offer a short novel by author Stephen King exclusively online, the company saw it as a way to draw attention to its growing stable of traditional printed books, some of which are also being offered now in electronic or e-book format.
What they got was more akin to a riot at an over-sold rock concert. Servers downloading King's 16,000-word novelette were smoked within minutes. Weeks later, the company, along with the rest of us, is still trying to figure out what it all meant.
Was the public's reaction to Riding the Bullet just a Stephen King phenomenon, or did it reveal an enormous pent-up demand for electronic books?
Last month author and media commentator Jon Katz published a long critique of electronic book publishing on Slashdot. Katz says that if publishing houses think they can just distribute print books online, they're making the same expensive mistake that newspaper publishers made by misunderstanding the interactivity of the Net.
Katz is an author of nine old-fashioned paper books, including the latest, Geeks. But he believes that old-economy publishers -- both newspaper and book publishers -- have completely missed the point when it comes to electronic publishing. Are they looking at it solely as a new distribution medium? Or (worse) are they threatened by how the economics of non-paper books might affect their businesses?
Katz says the first thing they need to do is understand that the reason people flock to the Internet is not because it is a billboard or a one-way pipeline into their heads, but rather because it is an interactive medium. Katz says that unless publishers understand this they will continue to miss the whole point. And, if they continue to miss the whole point long enough authors and readers will simply use the net to route around, past, and over these lumbering dinosaurs.
I don't think it's clear that this does anything for publishing. It doesn't really move the form online, and to me the most dangerous thing about it is I think he's misperceived what interactivity really is. …The newspaper industry is really a wonderful example of that, because something like 2,000 Web sites are attached to papers now, and I believe two of them are profitable -- The Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News [Mercury Center]. And none of them makes any money, and newspapers have over the last five years, they still exist, they're still a force, but they've become marginalized. They're just not as important to people. And this is despite spending billions of dollars putting up these kinds of useless, static Web sites. If you took that same money, and I'm sure you know this from your experience, and you applied it to making papers better, they might be in a much stronger and more vibrant position.
I'm really far from convinced that sort of dumping books online usually for free in this form. I think what you're selling is fat e-mail, not books, and I also think you're sending a message to the public that if the publisher doesn't care about the form of the book, why on earth should you?
Katz on e-publishing and interactivity:
Publishing houses don't even link their Web sites to anything else on the Web. They think their secrets are going to spill out. I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public.
And the reason that they dislike it [interactivity] so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. These companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.
You really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. It reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business.
Katz on doing it right:
I think this culture can make a lot of money for companies. People are willing to pay for things. People are willing to pay for things providing they get choice and options. And the CD metaphor is a wonderful metaphor for what open source is doing to business. These people are lying, are not saying they'll never pay for anything. They're saying they're not going to pay 15 bucks to buy 12 songs, only three of which they want. But they will pay smaller amounts to build their own CDs, and buy songs that they do want. And so, the obvious answer for a company that's awake is to put this stuff out there in a way that gives the customers many, many more options. You know, make your own CDs, or buy a song as opposed to a whole album. Buy small chunks for a cheaper amount. You want to give people reasons for paying money -- make it cheaper, make it effective. And you want to condition people to paying for music, but in a fair way, in a way that benefits them.
Katz on convergence:
I feel with publishing, I don't see any sign that they even grasp what interactivity is, and I think the problem with publishing novellas like this is they create the illusion that they're actually doing something different, when in fact they're just doing something very similar that's not going to work for them. I would like to see publishing find some format that mixes the digital distribution along with print, and actually enhances the form of the book.
Another obvious boon of publishing online is they can keep books in print forever. You know, that they don't have to go out of print. You know, I have one of my books that was actually literally shredded, and taken to warehouses and melted down. [And] you can update books. You can show the public how writing is done, let them participate. You can use them to advance interest in a book. There's lots of things you can do online with book publishing.
Katz on e-book technologies:
Certain [electronic] tablet forms that I can see working, because they are in effect like a book. They open up, and you go from one page to another. You can store a bunch of books and matter in there. They're designed actually to look like books. So in a way, some of those ideas are not destroying the idea of the book, they are actually just moving the form of the book to a different form. And I can see people commuting on a train or, you know, having a tablet that has a couple of books in it and scrolling page to page. I mean I don't think people are going to want to read books on PalmPilot or a computer.
Katz's advice to publishers:
I think it's almost a panic response. I think publishing would do very well to sort of stop, pause, and experiment very, very cautiously before they make such a radical statement about their own value of books.
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Pizzo: Jon, that's an oversimplification. Your piece was quite long and detailed, and you raised a lot of interesting points. Can you just kind of give me your Reader's Digest summary of it and we'll go from there.
Katz: Sure. Well, you know I've seen a number of institutions try to respond to the Internet, you know, from network television to newspapers, and I think the closest cousin to publishing is the newspaper industry, which was another industry that was very slow to react to the Internet, didn't like the Internet, and when it did react, I think it reacted in a way that ended up cannibalizing its own product. You know, these institutions like publishing and newspapers, it's fine to experiment with the publishing, and I'm truly not critical of that impulse, but the basic idea seems to be the reading of interactivity, and the Internet is if you take your product and you just dump it online, and then they haven't figured out how to charge the Stephen King thing through. I think they really undervalue the whole idea of the book. I think they end up cannibalizing their own book. I mean half the people who got the Stephen King book got it for free, and so are they now going to turn around and pay 15 bucks for an e-book or a rocket book?
You know, I don't think so. I mean the Internet culture, people love free stuff, especially free stuff from a best-selling author like Stephen King, although I sometimes think that, you know, if you sort of, you know, just put your butt online, 200,000 people would probably get it for free. I don't think it's clear that this does anything for publishing. It doesn't really move the form online, and to me the most dangerous thing about it is I think he's misperceived what interactivity really is.
Interactivity isn't really about the form in which you deliver. It's about the content. It's about a different relationship between the vendor and the consumer. And so I think they see it as a kind of short-term -- well, you know, here comes the Internet let's just make everything digital. I'm really far from convinced that sort of dumping books online usually for free in this form. I think what you're selling is fat e-mail, not books, and I also think you're sending a message to the public that if the publisher doesn't care about the form of the book, why on earth should you?
Pizzo: Well, don't you think, though, Jon, that what we're seeing is across the board. It's not just the publishing industry. I come from the newspaper world, where I was a reporter for years, and as the Internet started to emerge onto the scene as a real viable competitor, traditional newspapers were really caught between a rock and a hard place. What were they going to do? They couldn't ignore this thing. It was getting entirely too popular. And yet they really had only one product to serve up, and that is their news. I mean, what were they suppose to do?
Katz: Well, I think that the essential question is that what newspapers did not do is they did not make newspapers better. They did not look at interactivity, they did not look at the new competition and say, "Well, what can we do to make this product more valuable, more interesting?" For example, they could have experimented more radically with graphics. They could have returned better writing. They could have covered the culture and technology much more aggressively and much more usefully. They could have realized they could no longer be in the breaking news business because the Internet comes out every second, and they still haven't quite got that message.
I think there are a lot of things -- I can't think of a major newspaper in America that responded to all this competition by really making itself dramatically better, so much better and more interesting that people would want to cling to the form of it. Now at the same time, it makes great sense -- I mean there are certain things with newspapers and with publishing, too, that obviously work in tandem, you know, that where you could have a print and a digital component. Newspapers lend themselves, you know, to things like TV listings online, classifieds online, you know, chats and discussions online, but of course there hardly are three newspapers in America that even put e-mail on the end of their story in the year 2000. So this is not a culture that really wants to understand interactivity, which is really about rising expectations from the part of the consumer. Interactivity teaches people to expect more, to participate more, to be more involved. And none of these things are things that publishers have thought through.
I think that when you take -- I mean, Stephen King is going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in any form. I mean, you know, what's the difference? Why give it out, why reduce his writing to e-mail form?
Pizzo: Well, of course, one thing that both publishers of newspapers and publishers of books have in common is that they are traditional corporations, and as such they are closed shops. They are certainly not subscribers to the broad open-source concept, and all their sites reflect that. I mean one of the things I think when you say, "Make their product better by putting it online," would include, I would assume, providing links to information that's outside of that particular publisher's corporate empire.
Katz: Well, that's right. I mean publishing houses don't even link their Web sites to anything else on the Web. I mean, because, they think their secrets are going to spill out. I think interactivity involves many, many things, and one of the things that it involves is, you just got to, it involves the way the company is structure. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them.
Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public. You know, doing the Geek book I would have been personally quite happy to put my book contract up on a Web site and put my rough draft to show editing chapters and give people a chance to vote on the title and let them read a couple of sample chapters and get that kind of feedback.
As it happened, you know, I did that book in a very interactive way, getting a lot of e-mail from people in the course of research and putting a lot of their voices in the book, but interactivity ultimately demands of companies that they change the way they are structured. And the reason that they dislike it so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I mean I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. I mean these companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.
And I think the Open Source ethic, which is spreading like a virus all over the place -- I mean a virus in a positive sense, if a virus can be positive -- I think there's an openness. I mean, you really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. I mean it reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products for free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business.
Pizzo: Well, of course, you pointed out in your article as well that this wave has also swept over the music industry. I mean, with MP3 and music pervasive now on the Net, the record industry, which has held a death-grip on its copyrights and its properties, now is beginning to lose that grip.
Katz: And it's beginning to lose it in the silliest and most self-destructive way. I mean I think this culture can make a lot of money for companies. People are willing to pay for things. People are willing to pay for things providing they get choice and options. And the CD metaphor is a wonderful metaphor for what Open Source is doing to business. These people are lying, are not saying they'll never pay for anything. They're saying they're not going to pay 15 bucks to buy 12 songs, only three of which they want. But they will pay smaller amounts to build their own CDs, and buy songs that they do want. And so the obvious answer for a company that's awake is to put this stuff out there in a way that gives the customers many, many more options. You know, make your own CDs, or buy a song as opposed to a whole album. Buy small chunks for a cheaper amount. You want to give people reasons for paying money -- make it cheaper, make it effective. And you want to condition people to paying for music, but in a fair way, in a way that benefits them.
What the record industry is doing is just a George Custer response to the Internet. They're using an 18th-century legal model, which just can't work anymore -- finding individual users and suing them, usually teenagers, or threatening them or trying to throw them in jail. This is ridiculous. This is like standing in front of a hurricane, you know, with a rain jacket. It's not going to work, and I think that the companies that are offending (traditional) media, are interactive companies that are being innovative and creative and getting in front of them.
I feel with publishing, I don't see any sign that they even grasp what interactivity is, and I think the problem with publishing novellas like this is they create the illusion that they're actually doing something different, when in fact they're just doing something very similar that's not going to work for them, I would like to see publishing find some format that mixes the digital distribution along with print, and actually enhances the form of the book.
Pizzo: Well, you know, as a fellow nonfiction author myself, one of the positive signs I see in online publishing is the ability of a publisher and an author to keep a book updated, constantly. I wrote a book about 12 years involving the S&L industry and the S&L fraud that swept that industry, and I mean the book was really outdated the day it hit the stands, and I would have loved to have a way to continue to pump prosecutorial information as people went to jail or didn't go to jail, or whatever. It would have really enhanced that story line because people could have followed it in a real-time way.
Katz: Well that's right, and another obvious boon of publishing online is they can keep books in print forever. You know, that they don't have to go out of print. You know, I have one of my books that was actually literally shredded, and taken to warehouses and melted down. There are a lot of things that you can do online, you know. Really interactive Web sites. You can update books. You can show the public how writing is done, let them participate. You can use them to advance interest in a book. There's lots of things you can do online with book publishing.
Pizzo: And I suspect that the message that Simon & Schuster and the other publishers got from the Stephen King phenomenon was not that they had to make books better and more interesting, but simply if they are going to produce a book like this online, produce it by someone with a big name.
Katz: Right, someone with a big name and in the process they're going to condition the public, you know, to seeing the book as really like a giant e-mail. They're going to train the public to not be interested in books in the traditional form. They're basically, it's a form of corporate suicide. And that's the shame of it, really. It's that, and the newspaper industry is really a wonderful example of that, because something like 2,000 Web sites are attached to papers now, and I believe two of them are profitable -- The Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News. And none of them make any money, and newspapers have over the last five years, they still exist, they're still a force, but they've become marginalized. They're just not as important to people. And this is despite spending billions of dollars putting up these kinds of useless, static Web sites. If you took that same money, and I'm sure you know this from your experience, and you applied it to making papers better, they might be in a much stronger and more vibrant position.
Pizzo: Well, and what's interesting, of course, is that newspaper reporters remain the lowest-paid workers in America, right there with airline stewards and stewardesses.
Katz: And of course they're also beginning to sort of pour onto the Web for jobs, which is a further drain on newspapers. But this is the model, I mean, it's a perfect model for book publishing to look at, and I got some outraged e-mail from executives saying, "How dare you? We're trying to be innovative." But I've seen this, really, all my adult life. I've seen the same thing happen in media after media; they marginalize themselves in this way by misunderstanding what interactivity really is.
Pizzo: Well, we have a whole host of companies, and maybe as many as a dozen, rushing to market these little book tablets, some of which are going to be wireless and some of which you dial in and download. But they're all trying to port the book into electronic format. I mean, look in your crystal ball. Where does this all go? Are we seeing the end of the printed book?
Katz: Well, I don't think so, but I mean there are certain tablet forms that I can see working, because they are in effect like a book. You know, they open up, and you go from one page to another. You can store a bunch of books and matter in there. And you know they're designed actually to look like books. So in a way, some of those ideas are not destroying the idea of the book, they are actually just moving the form of the book to a different form. And I can see people commuting on a train or, you know, having a tablet that has a couple of books in it and scrolling page to page. I mean I don't think people are going to want to read books on PalmPilot or a computer.
You know, one of the mistakes that people make with technology again and again and again throughout history is overrating how sweeping it's going to be. I mean, anybody who goes to a Barnes & Noble or Borders can see that books are not dying out. People love to go to these places. They love to buy books in bookstores. They love to browse. They love to sit and have coffee. It's a real destination. It's going up. The use is going up in those stores, it's not going down.
Pizzo: So are we going to see an e-book version of Geeks?
Katz: I'm sure that they will publish an e-book version of Geeks and I think we'll see a lot of e-book versions of things, but my own instincts suggest to me, you know, there's a lot of things e-books cannot do that people like to do. That is, put them on the shelf. Pass them on to kids and friends. Save them. Store them. Go to flea markets and browse through them. I mean, it's like television and movies and other cultural forms -- there's this feeling that just because there's an Internet, all these things are going to vanish. You know, I don't think so. I think it's almost a panic response. I think publishing would do very well to sort of stop and pause and experiment very, very cautiously before they make such a radical statement about their own value of books.
Pizzo: And of course that's not the nature of this beast we call the Internet. And fools will rush in and continue to do so, and there'll be a lot of expensive mistakes made.
Katz: Yeah, I think so. I think we're going -- there's going to be in four or five years this amazing reckoning of like all this billions of dollars that gone pouring down the Internet hole.
Pizzo: Well look, so folks can buy Geeks at Amazon and Barnes & Noble?
Katz: Yes, Fat Brain and bookstores, any place.
Pizzo: Well, very good. Well listen, Jon, I want to thank you for spending some time exploring this issue with us and I'm sure that we'll be talking about it again in the months and years ahead because this is far from a settled matter.
Katz: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Pizzo: Thanks, Jon.
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