Since Jeff Sparrow took over as editor of Overland in 2007, he has been working to increase the magazine’s presence. Part of his approach has been to publish the full contents of recent issues — free — on the Overland website.
Jeff explained his reasoning in a recent post to Overland‘s new blog:
[S]ubscribers to Overland are inevitably becoming more like subscribers to public radio stations. You can listen to 3RRR or 3PBS for free but people who really care about what such stations are doing recognise that they should manifest that support by becoming a subscriber.
In the case of public radio, the act of subscription becomes an expression of community as much as simply a cash transaction.
An Overland sub is a little different (in that you do actually receive four copies of the journal) but it reflects the same sentiment. People who think that arguments about the politics of culture and the culture of politics are important will, we hope, continue to subscribe, even if it’s physically possible to read the entire journal without paying a cent.
This is a really interesting approach. As he says, “[f]or most of the twentieth century, a magazine subscriber was part of an exclusive club”, in which new members were essentially sponsored in by existing subscribers. That paradigm is gone now. If the content is good, people will find it.
The web presents an opportunity for small publications to put themselves before a broader audience. If Jeff can get the word out about the web editions, and get some buzz going in the blogosphere, I think he’ll start to see an increase in subscriptions to the print version.
It’s like hitting the tip jar on a blog you like. I think he’s onto something that may very well be a successful business model.
As Walter Lippman recently made the case for pay differentials in Cuba I would suggest that this ‘free’ model is objectively counter-revolutionary. Marxist China gives away far too much already – and Lenin never gave away wheat-grain to Sweden during the famine of 1921-2. Infantile -ultra leftism can only be regarded with contempt by all Marxist revolutionaries.
Well, it all remains to be seen. The argument, though, is not mine — it’s one that’s been made for some time by Cory Doctorow, the SF writer and Boing Boing guy.
He puts it quite well in an article for (of all things) Forbes, which is here:
“When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. [snip]
Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”
The point that Doctorow doesn’t (as far as I’m aware) recognise is that his argument rests on the absence of a technology that makes onscreen reading viable. This is, of course, the holy grail of Amazon and similar companies (cf the Kindle) and one imagines that it will eventually be developed. As soon as someone comes up with a machine on which you can read text as comfortably as on paper, then the ‘win-win’ aspect of Doctorow’s argument (that is, that people who start reading the digital versions of his books will generally find their way to the paper version) disappears.
That being said, I still think the community radio comparison probably holds. There’s no necessary reason to subscribe to 3RRR but people generally do.
I won’t keep banging on about this (it’s a topic that’s preoccupied me a lot and it’s good to vent, but it’s probably not that interesting to anyone else) but one final point.
One of the problems with the digital revolution to date is that the new technologies don’t necessarily replace the old ones, they just supplement them. At the last MWF, I had a drunken conversation with a Crikey editor and someone from Bookseller and Publisher and they were saying the same thing: your core publication remains but increasingly you have to provide content for new platforms — but still with the same number of staff. So everyone (well, not Crikey) still has a dead tree version but then you have to have a webpage and a blog and then video and audio links and twitter feeds and blogs and so on. What’s more, the new technologies require updating far more often. You can bring out a literary journal quarterly but a blog needs content daily.
In some ways, it’s analogous to the way that, in daily life, pagers and email and cell phones don’t end up saving anyone time (which was their original promise) but just make everyone perpetually busy. Once upon a time you simply accepted that it might take a colleague a day or so to return a phone call. Now, everyone is on-call twenty four seven.
It’s the same in publishing and I think it’s probably unsustainable.
“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales”
This is an argument that music companies need to realise (I’m sure that they do, they just won’t admit it).
Funny reading this as I recently subscribed to Overland for pretty much the kind of reasons given above. Likewise involved with community radio, and agree with the comments by Sans Blog. Maybe I’m old fashioned and like tangiable things, but I doubt I’m really alone in that.
Chris M, I too doubt you are alone. Even with viable technology for onscreen reading, booky people just really like handling and looking at books. Books aren’t there merely by default.
There’s something seductive about the smell of a brand-new hard cover book which I don’t think digital technology will ever match (at least in my lifetime).
Just to play devil’s advocate, people did say that about vinyl records, too.
I mean, I’ve recently got an Ipod for the first time and it’s completely changed the way I listen to music. Not necessarily entirely for the better (for instance, it completely destroys the idea of the album) but it’s hard to imagine going back to life without it.
I don’t think publishers can be too complacent about loyalty to the printed word. When something like the Kindle becomes cheap enough and allows you to read on an interface that’s not backlit and looks a lot like paper, well, I think all bets are off. Wouldn’t you be a little seduced by the ability to download any book from anywhere around the world almost instantly? To be able to travel with one machine the size of a phone that contains your entire library? Certainly, some readers will be.
I don’t think printed books will ever disappear (there’s still plenty of people who only buy vinyl) but it’s not out of the question that they will no longer be the interface of choice for most readers. And that will pose real issues for almost everyone in publishing.
“Just to play devil’s advocate, people did say that about vinyl records, too.”
And they will outlive the CD, mark me words young whippersnapper. I’ve a cupboard full of music, maybe 1000 LPs and singles that get a regular workout. And about 3000 hours of mp3s.
CDs pfffft! I never liked the shitty little brittle buggers and their cheapest-most-exploding-plastic-we-can-find “packaging”, and their tiny weeny little squares of artwork. What a poxy pile of crap. Seriously, don’t get me started.
Jeff, I think that partly depends on whether you see it as a dichotomy or not. I think both forms can and do exist concurrently. Personally I would never resist, much less dispute, the seductions of technology, but I wouldn’t dispense with actual paper books either. I think a bigger threat will come from the moralising (by which I mena ‘investing with moral qualities’, not ‘preaching’) we can already see glimpses of in the pejorative ‘dead tree’ rhetoric, as natural resources thin out. The day may come when books are against the law simply because they are made of paper, though I’m very glad I’ll be dead by then.
I’ve always thought the the theatre-cinema-TV trajectory was a closer analogy for books than music technology. People predicted the deaths first of theatre and then of cinema, but both have kept thriving for their unique qualities. I think books will too. As objects go, vinyl records just don’t have the mystique of books, and (like their technological successors but unlike either books or live performance of any kind) are really just all about content delivery, a means to an end. The other thing about content delivery technology is that as it becomes obsolete, so do the machines you need to run it. Turntable, anyone? VCR? Floppy disc?
Fark, I’ve got to do something about the way my fingers think the word ‘mean’ is spelled.
I like the subscription-as-support idea – it’s why I subscribe to RTRfm (Perth community radio), so I could definitely see subscribing to a quality magazine or journal even if the content is available online for free.
Or there’s the idea of supplying a pdf to subscribers who want it. Craft magazine (USA) offers it to international readers, since it takes ages to mail hardcopies out. You can print the pdf out yourself if you don’t like reading onscreen.
Wierd PC – it was ‘menas’ yesterday too, wasn’t it?
“This is an argument that music companies need to realise ”
I disagree, Sans Blog. The thing is that putting something online for free may increase sales of that particular song or book, but it reduces sales of songs/books in general. If artist X has something online for free I may find them when I otherwise wouldn’t, and that inspires me to buy something from them, but that replaces a CD I would have bought from someone else. And if half the time I’m listening to free music then overall I will only buy half as many CDs. Likewise my books read (and bought) a year has plunged since I got online, because so much of my time goes here.
For an individual artist it may make sense, but for a music company, not so much, because there is a fair chance the music you’re not buying is from one of their other artists. The consumer benefits by getting work they appreciate more, but for producers its a net loss, unless we can persuade previous non-readers (of anything much) to start reading something.
The theatre analogy is an interesting one, though, because I think you could argue that theatre has become culturally less important. That’s not purely a technological thing but technology might have something to do with it. And it does seem plausible that cinema has entered something of a decline. When Grand Theft Auto came out there was quite a bit of chatter about it: the fact that the launch of a computer game was creating the kind of buzz that previously had been the sole preserve of Hollywood.
I mean, I take the general point. I love books as objects. There’s something inherently pleasurable about a room surrounded with books, all of which are sites of memory in a way that a website never can be.
But I do think we haven’t seen the full impact of the digital revolution on book publishing yet.
Great points PC.
It’s worth noting that books have been around for a lot, lot, lot longer than vinyls or LPs. The fact that the basic book form has withstood various historical events suggests that the computer revolution won’t kill it either. It may in fact tend to reinforce the book’s durability.
Computers are supposed to be machines that can do everything you tell them to – they’re a multitasking tool. Well, the existence of a multitasking tool doesn’t invalidate the single task tools which have been in existence before it.
There may come a day when technology similar to the iPod comes out allowing us to download books from all over the world. At the moment, though, computers are large, clunky, slow to download, and the formatting of the websites tends to be unreliable or ugly.
Speaking from my own experience, I enjoy blogging and I enjoy making the occasional personal publication/zine for distribution to friends and/or random victims. The blog is read by the most people, but I have much more control over the formatting of a zine, and it feels much more personalised when I give it to people.
Might this be one example of an emerging trend? Could the rise of computers and computer-books also see a rise in small-press, personalised publications? Who knows, but stories of the death of the book are greatly exaggerated.
PC, I doubt books will ever be banned on environmental grounds. Look at it this way – your library is a sort of carbon store. Of course printing a book on old growth is an outrage, and even many plantations are environmentally damaging, but in moderation there is nothing wrong with planting some trees, having them store carbon while they grow, turning them to woodchips and then a book that stores the carbon for another century or gets recycled after ten years.
Where environmental factors will be an issue is for newspapers and short-life magazines. For one thing they don’t all get recycled, for another the recycling process uses a lot of energy (and that matters if you are recyling ever week not ever decade) and the transportation costs are also substantial.
Let’s see computers try to come up with an equivalent to the pop-up book, or the paste-on-the-wall magazine. I guess eventually they’ll come up with a hologram equivalent, but who would get the same delight from a hologram pop-up book?
No, the computer may have any number of effects on the publishing world, but these will not be to subtract from the diversity on offer already – they will be to add to it.
It’s very, very rare for me to buy a record company CD these days, Feral Sparrowhawk. I would estimate that nine out of ten of my CDs over the last few years have been bought directly from the musician(s) via MySpace or other websites.
Not only have I found some great relatively unknown artists, particularly Aussie ones, but I have also saved a lot of money which has allowed me to buy more music. And the artists have got full value for their work and not a small contracted royalty.
Also many of the small-studio CDs, I find, sound better overall than the over-engineered, computer-manipulated tracks on the CDs from the majors.
This is a very fair point — and something I remember happening to me, too. However, I agree with PC’s point about books having their own place. I’m someone who relies on marginal notes. That is, I print articles and buy books in large part so I can scribble all over them. This sort of thing probably horrifies genuine bibliophiles, but I know I’m not alone (note the state of the various Law Reports or similar resources in libraries the world over). Until kindle or its analogues allow for us scribblers, then we will continue to buy the ‘real thing’.
“Also many of the small-studio CDs, I find, sound better overall than the over-engineered, computer-manipulated tracks on the CDs from the majors.”
Ah yes, the Volume Wars.
I think this is a great idea and I hope very much it works out as desired. But, my 2c worth: I don’t think of journals and books as equivalent when it comes to what I want to give permanent shelf space to and what I’ll leave lying around the house for a few months then recycle or rip up for the compost. Almost all the journals & magazines go the latter route. (One of many reasons I will continue to subscribe to certain journals is that their entire archives are accessible online to hard-copy subscribers.)
I like books simply because they don’t need a battery, a wi-fi signal, if you drop them they don’t break too easily and I can get them for free from the local library. And the kids can’t muck around and change all the settings. Also, there is that sense of anticipation that you are reaching the end of a book that you desperately don’t want to end. I don’t know if you get that with Kindle.
Oh, the humanity. I finally bought my wife a USB turntable this christmas gone so that she can a) listen to her old vinyl – all of mine have long since vanished into the sharehouse bermuda agnostigon – when in the house, and b) rip them for when she is not. Tears when she realised that the long treasured Pony album had a huge fuck-off scratch across side A.
There already is an iPod like device that can download books from all over the world. All of those iPhones – and iPod Touches – can do this. YMMV on how comfortable you are with the size of the screen as compared to a dead tree. Ideally you’d want a larger screen with a different aspect ratio; Steve Jobs has already derided the idea that Apple should create such a device but you can send yourself insane trying to untangle fake-out Gordian Knots of anything Jobs denies.
On the other hand, Google’s Android OS is being targeted at non-phone handheld devices, so perhaps a touchscreen-driven, book reading application is closer than we think.
The touch screen would then allow SL’s scribbling – must suppress OCD-induced shuddering – or annotation to be just a software update away. It would also seem a given that the 2nd gen Kindle will have touch screen.
I like this idea Jeff, it’s one of the predicaments a journal faces – will people continue to buy a hardcopy of a magazine if it’s up on the web? Add to this the fact that given an editor’s often scratching around for a spare moment of two, there’s not always time to put every piece of writing (that appears in a print issue) on the web as well. Secondly, not everyone – given a choice – consents to web publication along with print publication in any case.
Jeff — small technical point: on quite a few of the overland entries, it’s indicated that there are zero comments, but if I click the ‘comments’ or ‘read the whole post’ link, it turns out that there are actually comments. This seems to be a problem on the archived pages, but not on the front page. I’m using a Mac running OSX with Safari as my browser. It’s entirely possible, of course, that this is confined to Mac users.
Now technical stuff I don’t understand. But thanks for pointing it out — I’ll pass it on to the person who knows about such things.
To continue with the theatre – tv – cinema idea. Cinema experienced a downturn when VHS tapes came out and then when DVDs came out. Both times the figures bounced back. I think new technologies become add ons, not replacements. Some delivery systems become rapidly obsolete (Betamax, laser discs), but not the actual technologies. I still have both a turn table and a VCR, which I regularly use.
Phentrimine is used for treating female infertility.
great to have you back, Assoll! Are you related to the famous “asohol”? – misprint for ‘gasohol’ in a newspaper item on energy policy under Jimmy Carter