Ewan Morrison: オンライン消費者の無料至上主義が文化を殺す

We are talking today books and authors and the crisis in the publishing industry. Last month at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the well known Scottish writer and film maker Ewan Morrison made an incredibly provocative speech about the death of books and the death of the author. Ewan Morrison, welcome to Tech Crunch TV.

Thank you, Andrew.

So Ewan, what’s going on? Are the book…is the book and are authors really dead?

Well, they’re not getting there yet, but they’ve just launched themselves into the digital world. And I was quite surprised to find over the last year and a half just the kind of the impact that the changes that going digital has had on publishing. Most of all, I think is what most people call the digital squeeze that Amazon has been putting on publishing houses.

This has been going on for about ten years, but we’re really seeing it now because these publishers are cutting back on marketing and they’re cutting back on author advances. And when you cut back on author advances, you’re really depriving authors of a way of making a livelihood. I mean, yes, there have been huge changes in the way that books are made and can be distributed.

You can write a book and get it up online in about an hour. Or rather, you can get it online in an hour. It still takes a year to write the the damn thing, though. So one of the problems is, if you get rid of authors’ advances, then basically, as a publishing house, you’re banking on two things, which is your existing back list and the possibility of somehow discovering brand new talent out of nowhere.

And really, throughout the twentieth century, what we’ve seen is the mid-list writers, if you like, the ones that that aren’t necessarily hugely successful immediately. These are like the research and development department, all of the publishing house. And if you get rid of those guys, then really there’s no way of getting your quality literary material.

I’m thinking of some writers here who were mid-listers, you might have heard a few of them. A guy called Don DeLillo wrote five books that nobody had really heard of but he was sustained by a publishing house throughout that time. Another guy called Phillip Roth, you know as well. So I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by cutting costs because of digital pressure.

But are you, and you brought up Amazon at the beginning of this conversation. Are you saying this is all Amazo
n’s fault? Is it the publisher’s fault, is it the Internet’s fault, is it the consumer’s fault it?

Oh, it’s well, I would point the finger at three different targets here which would be Google, Amazon and the consumer. Lets just start with the consumer. It a general sort of ethos as part of the digital revolution that we should be getting culture for free as Chris Anderson says. You know, I was very taken and shocked you know by his…

Although Chris was paid I think $500,000 for his book on frame.

Well, there you go. Well, that was a sizable advance. And I believe it still retails at a price above free. You know, but I’m kind of…here’s where Amazon comes into this. Because I’ve recently noticed that a lot of writers in my country have started to sell…

And your country, of course, is Scotland, right?

Scotland, yes, but largely in the UK as well.

That’s your country?

Well, I’m a Scottish nationalist, personally. I’ll stand up for Scotland over England any day. But I was quite surprised to find how quickly writers have been taking to the whole Amazon Kindle self publishing thing. Because advances are being slashed, writers are thinking, “Well, to hell with it. I’ll just dump the publishers.

I’ll get 70% of royalties…sorry…yes, royalties from Amazon.” But what happens then and what I’ve seen even in the last week is three novelists who used to retail at around ten pounds are now self-publishing at two pounds and at ninety-nine pens and the market’s pretty quickly getting clogged up with extremely cheap and somewhat desperate writers who are struggling in the long tale and this is something which Amazon is encouraging and Amazon would quite like to put the publishing houses out of business and probably will do so.

Because Amazon only ultimately at the end of the day makes forty-nine percent of his income from actually selling the books. It sells everything from you know, inflatable beds to pencil sharpeners to wheels, and with that financial base that it’s got, it can easily put excessive pressure on the publishing house to lower their costs, already it squeezes the publishing houses.

But you and a lot of people in our, quite a large part of our audience would argue view that the publishers are not providing any value so that the book that sells for ten pounds versus the book that sells for two pounds…where’s the eight pound difference? What is the value that the publisher is providing?

Well, I think this is a very consumer skewed attitude–really. We have to look at publishing houses in a different way and see them as kind of stables for talent. That’s one thing publishing houses sometimes forget when they’re talking about exactly how they operate. Basically a publisher will take a risk on ten authors and one of them will pay off.

And this has been going on for about fifty years. So really, what you’re getting is you’re getting a stable of talent that good work can come from.

So they’re like venture capitalists. They make a bet and one out of the ten turns into a Delilo or a Philip Roth, and they’ll lose on most of the others.

Well, or over, you know, a 30 or 40 year period some of those others will also, you know, come to fruition and they’ll start winning the awards and raising the profile of the publisher. But really, we’re seeing a paradigm shift where the publishers are kind of giving up on that. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the consumer does want culture for nothing.

And I think this is across the board. We’ve seen the damage that it’s done in the music industry. I don’t have to quote the stats, but the music industry is half the size, I think, you know, that it was ten years ago. We’ve seen vast cuts in film funding. And really, you know, if you look at independent music, I remember being a Generation Xer that we had a very thriving independent music scene.

Now, you know, it’s…we’re just getting the dregs of the mainstream.

So what is the solution? Is it to reeducate the consumer? Is it to arrest them for stealing or perhaps arrest them for buying stuff that’s too cheap?

Well, it’s practically impossible to enforce these laws on piracy. I would rather that we had a good look at the business practices of Google on YouTube and Amazon and actually start taxing them at the source and making them therefore have to police the content on the sites that they provide you service that would be a start.

Other things I think when you ask the consumer to just behave themselves, it’s quite tough, you know, we’re in a recession and everyone wants to a discount deal on every single thing, Wal-mart, a vacation of life if you like. It’s no
t really fair to ask the consumer to do that. I know very civilized middle-class people who nonetheless weekly rip videos for their kids just to keep the kids quiet, it’s a standard practice.

What we might have to look at is for publishing to move towards a model a bit like cable TV or maybe a publishing house decides to provide 25 titles a year for a you know I had them make them and redistribute money to writers. That’s my main concern, really. I don’t really give a damn about, you know, what the consumer you know is getting for ninety-nine pens.

I’m more concerned about the profession of writing and if you destroy the economic base on which writers can survive and if you destroy the funding for research, you know, whether you write fiction or a non-fiction look at the impact on journalism recently with a sixty-eight percent reduction in the last year in the New York Times readership.

In my country it’s been twenty to twenty-seven percent. Now, the cuts are going to start happening in quality. Foreign correspondents are really not going to be able to do their own research so they’ll just have to go from press releases from governments. So we’re seeing a real fall-off in quality.

So you will finally this might not be in your nature or in your national characteristic, but do we have any reason to be optimistic here? about the future of writing and the author. Can technology actually result in an ecosystem whereby a young DeLillo or a young Phillip Roth will be able to realize a living and to bring their wonderful art to readers, or is that just impossible?

That’s absolutely impossible and it’s a contradiction in terms. Also, as a European, I look at the Internet and it’s a model for extremely aggressive American-style capitalism.

In France for example, they have a thing called l’exception culturelle, which is basically a culture tax to preserve to save French cinema, French writing and even French cuisine, you know. Germany has a price-fixing thing on books, which has made it nearly impossible for Kindle to start up in Germany.

All because they value culture more then they value capital and so really this whole question of the internet being free, you know I see it this use of the word free very much the same way that I see the way Americans use “free”, you know. America is not the land of the free I’m afraid, it’s the land of the free market and we’re all suffering because of this kind of mentality