Click to pay

Did you know that going digital can make an industry more conservative? Not that any “content”-related industry really has a choice. Film, music, porn, computer gaming, newspapers, photography, telecom, TV all have felt the dread squeeze of the digital world.

Why squeeze? Because user access to digitised “content” (still within the disapproving quotation marks, you will note) tends to the lowest price: that is, free. If you charge, you may lose consumers, or be undercut, or simply encourage piracy.

The Internet paywalls erected by The New York Times and The Financial Times have caused a reported 66 per cent drop in their Internet readership. This is despite the example of The Wall Street Journal, whose paywall is said to work because the paper offers specialised content for business and finance professionals. Netizens say they might pay $5 a month for access to the NYT and FT both — but the NYT alone charges $15.

What does this have to do with books? No, this is not about ebooks, though of course digitisation of book content makes it easier to steal. Here I will rehearse parts of an argument assembled by modestly successful UK author Ewan Morrison in a speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last weekend. An abridged version was published in the Guardian on August 22 as “Are Books Dead, and Can Authors Survive?”

The first part of that headline is silly. No, books are not dead. The second part is interesting.

First, Morrison says, “Generation Y” has been weaned away from paper. So the paper book doesn’t have many years of life left. Thus, digitisation.

Next, books — whether paper or pixels — are increasingly being purchased from online retailers. This is great for consumers because they can instantly buy in one place a book that is two days, five years or 10 centuries old, or yet to release. This is the “long tail” theory of retail, where instead of trying to sell millions of one item, a retailer can sell a few units each of a million items.

But is it good for authors? If ebooks are cheap, and retailer margins high, royalties will tend to shrink. What’s more, a midlist author in the long tail, one of the vast majority who are neither bestsellers nor duds, may find that only a handful of his own books have sold, so the money he earns is even tinier.

Finally, if revenue per copy shrinks, publishers will be less inclined to pay advances on author royalties. Big advances make headlines — or used to, until the economic downturn — but only the big names get big advances. Even a modest advance can be important to a writer trying to make a modest living from his or her writing.

There is one kind of solution available, in the revenue model of digital giants like Google: don’t charge the consumer, make the advertiser pay. If an author can connect directly with lots of online readers, advertisers may pay to place ads where his readers might see them. (But the author will need hundreds of thousands of hits to prosper.) Or, deliver a chapter at a time and charge for the next one. Or, potentially, self-publish an ebook and sell it directly.

Does any of these seem (a) workable and (b) likely to produce works of lasting quality by non-bestseller writers? Morrison says no, and I agree.

Net result, conservative thinking. The publisher stops thinking long-term and pushes predictable bestsellers and series. Writers write what the market wants. This kind of thing has already happened, Morrison points out, in all the industries listed in the first para of this column. Now it is writers’ and readers’ turn to pay.

(rrishi.raote@bsmail.in)