ARTS & FARCES internet

Novelist Ewan Morrison told the attendees of the Edinburgh international book festival that books—as we know them—will be dead within 25 years, brought to their end by the digital revolution. The Guardian published a condensed version of his argument a couple weeks ago.

More importantly than the death of paper books, according to Morrison, will be “the end of ‘the writer’ as a profession.” He writes, “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart,” arguing for the necessity of the traditional publishing system of advances and royalties.

Especially advances.

Morrison fears that writers will follow their musician, filmmaker, journalist, and photographer brethren in a “... dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings…,” blaming it mostly on piracy and Amazon, Apple, and Google. His piracy statements and citations are misguided (on his part) and propaganda (on the part of those he cites). Chiding authors who leave traditional publishing, Morrison maintains, desperately, that things must remain the same: “Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to ‘go it alone’ in the long tail.” Yes, authors desperately need editors; but publishers? Not so much; especially not the big, corporate houses. It’s been decades since publishing houses actually nurtured emerging talent.

James Bradley, also a novelist, thinks Morrison’s screed should be read “as much as provocation as thesis,” and argues that paper books will evolve from consumer good to prestige object.

Bradley, like Morrison, falls into the piracy trap laid by the entertainment cartel and its fact-free propaganda. The entertainment cartel loves to cite each incident of piracy as a lost sale. It’s become something of a mantra, as if like the politicians they bought, if it’s repeated enough people will believe it. But it’s a lie; and a particularly nasty one at that. There’s scant evidence that piracy leads to lost sales; almost all of those sales would never have been made to begin with. Emerging evidence indicates that “pirates” are the media companies’ best customers.

In July, Douglas C. Merrill, Google’s former chief information officer and now EMI’s chief operating officer of new music and president of digital business, used his keynote address to tell attendees of the annual CA Expo in Sydney that after profiling the behavior of file sharing service users he discovered that those “thieves” were also iTunes’ best customers. “That’s not theft, that’s try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it….”

There’s trouble in Apple’s iOS content walled garden. The Financial Times, instead of giving Apple 30 percent of its in-app subscription revenue has launched an HTML5 web app. Currently, the website is optimized for the iPhone and iPad but that’s just the first cut. The website will soon offer a clippings service allowing users to time-shift article reading. The Financial Times employs a metered access system—up to 10 articles per month are free for registered users.

The website itself is impressive, looking almost exactly like the native app. The user is prompted to add a bookmark to their home screen in Mobile Safari and the site loads full-screen, without browser chrome. This is an important development for HTML5.

By the end of the month, Apple will start charging publishers 30 percent for in-app subscriptions and simultaneously require subscriptions to take place in the iTunes App Store instead of directly with the publisher. More importantly, Apple solely determines what content it considers to be appropriate for use on its devices.

The Financial Times isn’t exactly an impulse purchase, so the benefits of Apple’s frictionless iTunes App Store ecommerce likely won’t be missed. The publisher would almost certainly rather maintain a direct relationship with its subscribers, retaining information about those subscribers for itself.

The Financial Times told Robin Wauters, writing for TechCrunch, that writing multiple native apps for multiple platforms is “logistically and financially unmanageable.”

Writers who worked for free for Huffington Post figure they’re owed a pretty big slice of Arianna Huffington‘s slice of the online publication’s sale to AOL in February for US$315 million. Said writers have been carping—presumably also for free—in virtually any online forum that will listen and now they’ve upped the ante by filing a class action lawsuit demanding US$105 million. That’s one-third of the Huffington Post sales price.

The lawsuit is spearheaded by Jonathan Tasini, no stranger to the courts when lots of writers are concerned. Tasini was president of the National Writers Union, 1990-2003; I was a member of the union during part of that time and found it to be singularly ineffective in a dispute with a publisher. It was discovered during Tasini’s tenure as president of the union that Employers Mutual Insurance, the union’s health insurance provider, was operating fraudulently and wrongfully denying insurance claims. Tasini was also the lead plaintiff in New York Times Co. v. Tasini. In 2001 the US Supreme Court found in favor of Tasini and other plaintiffs who had challenged the republishing of their work in electronic databases without permission.

Somehow Tasini and these writers have come to believe that they’re entitled to some portion of the proceeds of the Huffington Post sale to AOL. Near as I can tell these writers willfully agreed to provide articles to the Huffington Post without compensation—no one chained them to a desk and forced them to write—and now they want a piece of Huffington’s pie.

In a press conference earlier today, Tasini said, “In my view, the Huffington Post‘s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation. She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’ We are going to make Arianna Huffington a pariah in the progressive community. No one will blog for her. She’ll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.”

First, I suppose a disclaimer is in order: I live in my RSS reader (currently NetNewsWire) and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Who wants to visit hundreds of websites a day when those websites’ freshest content can be delivered to you automatically.

Now, forget everything you’ve been reading about the death of RSS. RSS is as dead as the web and HTML. Oh, and by the way, this is at least the third time that I know of RSS being declared dead.

It’s amusing to see all the virtual handwringing about RSS being dead because Google’s Chrome browser doesn’t have an RSS reader and Firefox 4.0 won’t have an RSS button in its toolbar by default. Oh, please. I actually wish Apple’s Mail and Safari would lose the crappy RSS integration. It appears to exist only for the sake of a checkmark on some marketeer’s comparison PowerPoint slide.

TechCrunch, when looking at the referrer data for its website, seems to think that Google Reader is the only RSS reader people use. “Drilling down, Google Reader was actually the number 11 overall referrer to TechCrunch in 2010,” writes MG Siegler. “Further, it was way down from 2009—nearly 50 percent. In other words, yes, RSS is slowly dying. At least when it comes to the most popular feed reader sending traffic to TechCrunch.” But Siegler fails to account for the fact that TechCrunch provides a (mostly) full-content RSS feed. The TechCrunch audience segment that reads its content via its RSS feed has no need to click through to individual articles. This is something of which Siegler is clearly aware, when he writes, “Sure, people can read TechCrunch through Reader without clicking through, but why the huge drop unless fewer people were actually reading it that way?” Um, maybe more people are actually using their RSS readers without clicking through?

When Dave Winer, the author of the RSS 2.0 specification, got wind of this something of a Twitter war erupted. After a few, presumed, deep breaths Winer responded in the only way that matters: He set out to reinvent RSS yet again. His idea is to create a blogging tool that outputs only a set of RSS feeds. An archive of anything you write is maintained locally (answering the “where do my tweets go” question) but the content gets pushed out to whatever publishing platforms you choose, “whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after,” as Winer writes.

As Matthew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, notes, “Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time web.” Just as HTML has become part of the web’s plumbing.

If anything, RSS is more crucial today than it’s ever been. Not as an end-user content-discovery technology but as back-end content-delivery plumbing. How do you think all of that web content gets fed to Twitter and Facebook?

Cory Doctorow, having finished yet another novel that none of us will see for a year and a half, bemoans the glacial pace of the publishing industry in a piece for Publishers Weekly. The hardest part of being a writer, as Doctorow notes, is getting the manuscript in on time and being forced to wait 18 months to see a finished book—an “object of commerce” in Doctorow’s words—on bookstore shelves.

Doctorow goes on to explore the wilderness of self-publishing, arriving at the same conclusion I did: “To be blunt: Every piece of With a Little Help that I didn’t pay minute attention to has slipped through the cracks. Not just one or two pieces, but every element I took my eye off, even for a second.” Doctorow pledges not to do this again, not being interested in farming out the tasks that normally fall to the agent and publisher.

Instead, Doctorow plans on focusing his efforts where the money is: Limited editions. “Over and over again, when I describe With a Little Help to people, they fixate on the limited editions” he writes. “I’ve had dozens of emails from people practically begging to buy the US$275 editions I’m doing—and I stand to make US$50,000 or more from them.”