Prime Palaver

by Eric Flint

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Prime Palaver © 2013 by Baen Books

A Baen Book Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-62579-121-4

Prime Palaver # 1

Letters to the Librarian

Eric Flint

December 20, 2000

For this first installment of Prime Palaver, I decided to start by publishing the backlog of letters which I've received since we opened the Baen Free Library, along with my own commentary.

As of today, I've received 123 letters sent to me as First Librarian of the Baen Free Library. All of them have been supportive. I can't possible publish all of them, but I chose a selection which I think reflects accurately the general sentiment.

In the letters which follow, there are three themes which I would like to point out to people.

The first, repeated over and again, is that the major obstacle which little-known writers face is their obscurity. (And almost ALL writers are little known.) Readers are hesitant to spend money on an author they are not familiar with. As I argued in my introduction to the Baen Free Library, that's why authors should welcome the internet -- despite the inevitable piracy which it entails -- rather than dreading it. I can say with great confidence, based on these 123 letters, that I've sold four or five times as many books of my own because of the exposure which the Free Library and Webscriptions have given me than I've lost through putting the books up online for free.

The second -- obvious from the origins of so many of the letters -- is that the internet has internationalized the reading audience to an extent which was unimaginable in the days of purely paper communication. Again, the same phenomenon manifests itself in a different way: whatever income an author loses from the theft which the internet makes possible is more than offset by the expansion of his or her potential audience. Assuming, that is, that the writer is good enough to attract an audience in the first place, and isn't such a numbskull that he or she thinks the best way to build an audience is to lock up their writing ought of sight.

Income doesn't derive from preventing theft, it comes from making sales. A certain amount of loss due to theft is simply one of the overhead costs. Obviously, taking simple measures to eliminate as much theft as possible is sensible. But at a certain point -- and much sooner than you might think -- the measures you take to prevent theft can start cutting your income.

Any retailer in the world, after all, can put an ABSOLUTE stop to ANY shoplifting INSTANTLY. Just require your customers to undergo a full search when they leave your premises -- including body cavities. Yup, no more shoplifting. Congratulations.

Oh -- and, yup. No more customers. Congratulations.

The third point, brought home very forcefully in the letter by Kris Whitney and the last letter by Jimmy, is that the people who will be REALLY hammered by any "crackdown" on piracy are not pirates. They are the people who, like them, suffer from a variety of handicaps. For people who are blind, like Kris, or crippled like Jimmy, the advent of electronic reading has been a blessing. And they will be the ones who first feel the ax, if hysteria over "piracy" is allowed to shape public policy concerning access to free reading material.

Free libraries, electronic no less than paper ones, have always been the sanctuary for society's marginalized people. For most of us, the marginalization was a temporary economic phenomenon which we outgrew as our income reached normal adult levels. But for some of us, that marginal position will remain the lot of a lifetime.

Not the least of the reasons that I despise the arguments of the "tighten the laws!" crowd is that I know exactly who the victims of their policies will be in the real world. It won't be some pirate, twirling his mustachioes. Pirates will always figure out a way to steal. It will be Jimmy and Kris and people like them. Those people have a hard enough life as it is, without my joining the crowd that wants to drop another stone on their backs.

If I can't make a living as a writer by the quality of my writing outweighing any losses I might suffer from theft -- without trampling all over blind and crippled people in order to stop the theft -- I've got no damn business being a writer in the first place. I've still got my tool box, and I haven't forgotten how to be a machinist.

Eric Flint

PS. A word on Jimmy. After I posted his letter in Baen's Bar a few weeks ago, a number of people (including me) began an effort to ameliorate his situation. For further information, please check the following URL: www.readassist.org

Mr. Flint,

Your comments about the value (commercial and moral) of putting free books online are the exact truth.

Without reading Weber's On Basilisk Station on-line, I would never have bought any of his books. Now I have most of them. The same goes to your 1632 -- without reading half the book on-line, I wouldn't have come to appreciate the quality of your work. Now I have 1632 and most of the Belisarius series (and probably some other books as well).

I'm both satisfied with you and other authors with the same attitude, and I'm paying for your books.

Keep the good work

Ofer Imanuel

Software Engineer and a lover of SF and fantasy

Hi Eric

Just a note to say you have my whole hearted agreement for your arguments. I have been a websubscriber since last year (The minute I realized I could get Ashes of Victory a few weeks early) and I think it is money well spent. In fact in your case I loved 1632 so much I bought the hardback and have downloaded copies at a couple of friends who have all gone and either bought it or ordered the paperback once it is out.

In fact if I seriously believed an author didn't want me to lend his book to someone I know would enjoy it, then I probably wouldn't buy any more of his books. One of the great JOYS of reading a book is sharing it afterwards, talking through it with your friends, remembering and quoting passages. trying to guess what comes next.

Every David Weber book I own (and that's everyone published including the Starfire scenario books Stars at War and Crusade) has been lent to between 6-8 people and most of them have started buying their own copies, so tell me WHO is losing money by my "pirating" these books, the Author? The Publisher? The Shopkeeper? Or are they gaining?

I admit I haven't read all the books I've bought but most of them are good enjoyable reads, a few are brilliant e.g. 1632(plug!), and 2 I hated, but that is a better strike rate than I get looking at books in a store and at $10 a month!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think I'll stay a subscriber for a little longer, maybe, possibly at least until Hell freezes over and the Sun explodes. I once had the choice between buying a book or not eating for a day....... I still have the book.

Keep up the good work, and you have my complete support

Mark Jones

Mr. Flint

I am an avid reader of Sci-Fi and Fantasy books who found the Baen website a couple of years ago by accident and have returned regularly ever since.

What attracted me back to start with was the preview chapters of the up and coming novels. This had me doing advance orders for books well in advance of them coming out whereas I used to wait for them to come out and IF I saw them in the shops I MIGHT pick them up.

Then Webscriptions came along and this proved to be a boon as I could now read a book and then wait until it came out in paperback before buying it (1200 novels so far take up a lot of room on my bookcases). I also got to read some work by authors I had never read before (yourself, David Drake, Elizabeth Moon, Steve White, Mercedes Lackey and others) which led me into some mammoth book buying sprees.

Then came the Free Library. What can I say, it's brilliant. I don't know what else can be said about it.

If you manage to loose money on these books I would be amazed (read the first part of the David Drake 'Belisarius' series and immediately bought the 3 books that were in paperback) and astonished. If more publishers tried this sort of innovative technique then maybe more of the younger generations would be lured back into that unfashionable habit of reading a book and stretching their imagination instead of being glued to the TV/N64/Playstation.

Thank you for this great gift that you have given Sci-Fi/Fantasy book reading community.

Simon Howard

Dear Eric Flint

As a hard core science fiction/fantasy fan from Asia or in particular Singapore, I could not agree with your sentiments more:

a) word of mouth advertisement that your collaboration and single books especially 1632 are great

b) that great/good authors will always get their hooks into readers as I'm one person like you , who nows buy certain books to keep even though I've read them ten times eg J RR Tolkien, 3 copies so far.

Please continue your great writing and your library. Will be waiting for hopefully any follow up to 1632 to purchase and keep.

Yours faithfully

Felix Wang

Singapore

Eric,

You make some good points in your introduction to the library. I have been and continue to be a great fan of Webscriptions. It has introduced me to several writers that I may not have found through other means. 1632 is a book that I might not have seen under other circumstances. I've read it at least twice since it came out through Webscriptions in February.

You were right about the comfort involved in settling in with a good physical book. I, myself, am equally comfortable with screen or printed word. I generally read the Webscription selections and then buy a hard copy of the ones that I like. There is something to be said for instant gratification.

My two cents,

Jeff Morrissey

Nicely put. Every point you brought up matches my own viewpoint on this matter. I've been a frequent visitor to the Baen web site and a frequent purchaser of Baen books; I have at least one copy of each of the titles currently in the Baen Free Library (I've got three copies each of An Oblique Approach and In the Heart of Darkness, one set of which I use to hook friends on them by loaning them out), and with maybe one or two exceptions have purchased copies of the titles that I've read as free samples prior to publication. I think it's a great way to expand readership and to introduce those who may not otherwise have the economic resources to purchase books to the world of reading.

Of course, putting titles from the Belisarius series or the Honor Harrington series in the free library is akin to providing a "try it once for free" program for the science fiction equivalent of crack cocaine... :-)

Us poor readers don't have a chance against you authors!

Wu Liu

Hi, in the greater scope of the world it probably isn't that important, but electronic books make a huge difference to me. I am blind, and usually obtain books by scanning the paper copies into my computer and reading them with speech software. This is a very long and slow process; the average paperback is about two and a half hours and a big hardback can be five or more hours.

I am fairly hesitant about trying new authors since the time investment is so high before I can even try reading the book! I have always been willing to buy books if I think there is a good chance that I will enjoy them, and this free library will probably widen the selection of authors I buy because it removes that "is this going to be worth the time?" question.

Thanks for the idea of this library, and I wish you many more profitable books!!

Kris Whitney

Dear Mr. Flint,

I agree whole-heartedly with your arguments about Free Library's. I know from my own personal experiences that I have first read a number of books either from acquaintances or the Municipal Library which I have later purchased for my personal collection. Almost all of those books are favourites which have been re-read many times over many years.

By the way there is one further method that "robs authors", i.e. Second-hand book stores. Authors and publishers don't benefit from these "sales" either.

Congratulations on a very worthwhile idea.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Katz

Ontario, Canada

Just a compliment. I am a very fast reader and enjoy my books very much and therefore read them over and over again. The backside of this is I don't buy many new authors if I'm not sure I will like them. Due to David Weber's first book on the net, I now own the whole series, including the one made available free. However without the preview, I never would have looked at it. This is also true for the sample chapter section. It has exposed me to many new authors that I like and buy their books. I hate purchasing anything sight unseen, this way, I already have an idea that I will like it before I buy it. I think this was a great idea, and I doubt Baen will suffer for it.

Thank you very much.

Sandra Sambirsky

Hello Eric,

I can only say that I agree completely with you on the reasoning behind the Baen Free Library.

I've read a few books, which are available on the Free Library. I also read (a lot of) the sample chapters which are also available. This gives me the chance to read a sample of the works of authors that I don't know.

After I read "On Basilisk Station", I just went out and bought the complete Honor Harrington series. I'm also a fan of David Drake. I must say that I haven't got any of his books, which are not about "Hammer's Slammers". Now I've read "An Oblique Approach" and I must say that I like it very much, so I guess I'll buy that one too (amongst others).

E-books are all very well, but in the end a printed book is so much better (and easier to read). E- books will never replace printed books in my humble opinion.

Best regards,

Mark Van Wambeke

Sir,

I wanted to thank you, the other participating authors and Jim Baen for starting this library. I don't have a lot of money to play with. So I get very frustrated at local bookstores where many store clerks do not know anything about science fiction or fantasy and I spend money on a book where the only interesting things that happened are in the first chapter. This way, besides checking the chat room, I can look at a author's 1st book and see if I like his or hers style of writing. Without spending the dough and then finding I hate the thing. Which means I don't spend the money on a book I like and figure I can eat cheese sandwiches for a while so that I can get the rest of whatever they have written.

Yeah, you guys and my dentist make a lot of money from me. Though I doubt you bought a new x-ray machine from what I last paid.

Thanks again

Elizabeth Trussell

Thank you! By visiting the Baen sight I have already picked out my next book purchase. In the book store I go to, the shelves are so packed I don't have time to look through a lot of authors. I go back to the ones I've read over and over. Joint ventures between authors helped. Anne McCaffery, started me on Jodie Lynn Nye and Elizabeth Moon. David Weber was recommended by someone filing his books at the store. The first of Moon and Weber's I read were both well into their series. I bought all back issues of each after that. Ringo's new book I would not even have seen without this site and I will buy it as soon as I get the cash.

You are giving me something beside a dustjacket, that I don't alway have time to read, to base my reading purchase on.

THANKS, June

First (and I'm sure this is going to be the opening paragraph of most of your letters), congratulations on a great experiment. Baen is leading the way in e-publishing, and I can only dream that the other publishing houses will follow. You guys have the right attitude -- price, delivery method, and selection are all in line with what people want.

That said, I have a quibble with one of your statements. You equate piracy and lending. The difference is a big one -- when you lend a book to someone, you can't read it until you get it back. This isn't true for piracy. You may have lost a sale if the receiver of the goods doesn't mind the format, because the distributor won't be bugging him to return the book.

I'm afraid we're raising a generation of people who think that art magically appears, that everything is free, and that any artist who doesn't produce for the sheer joy of it is somehow less than everyone else. We've seen it most recently with the new definition of "sharing" that's cropped up in the Napster debates.

As we all know, there's no technological solution to piracy. It's going to keep happening and it's going to get easier. The only way to fight it is to attack people's sense of entitlement -- get them to see that what they're doing IS dishonest.

You guys are going about this the right way. By making material available free and at reasonable prices you keep people aware that this is a store where things are purchased, not a buffet table at a dinner party.

Bill

Eric,

Just an interested comment on your editorial on the Baen site.

I agree with the "free samples sell books" note. As another example, I read some of the free chapters on the Baen site, and they tuned me into an author called David Weber. I then joined webscriptions and read "On Basilisk Station". I've subscribed to about 4 months so far mainly picking ones with James Schmitz, David Weber, and Elizabeth Moon. But I've dropped about $A100 on Weber books in the meantime filling in the holes. (I am already a possessor of a number of books from the other 2).

<grin> Must get around to sampling books by Eric Flint.......

Nice editorial.

Ross Lane

PS. Dunno how many times I've rebought books over the years either. I recently went and rebought all the Lensman series again, and I know for a fact that my family has worn out 2 full sets of the Narnia series (and the current box is a little frayed).

Dear Eric,

I would like to express my appreciation to you for taking the lead and to Jim, David and David for their kind cooperation. After being a lurker on the bar for a while, it's obvious that Jim has created a community with many neighborhoods. Since I enjoyed Webscriptions so much, I've taken every reasonable opportunity to direct people to the Baen website and sign-up. Now, you've given me an even better tool.

Cheers,

Bob

I commend you on your forward thinking. Piracy will always be with us but I believe you are correct when you state that most people would rather be honest than not. I am following the evolution of ebooks closely and am somewhat dismayed by the attitude of other publishers. Their idea seems to be to sell books at very small discounts from the street price of hard copy. The savings realized by not having to print, bind and distribute books, never mind the lack of returns, will not be passed on to the consumer but will rather be almost entirely retained by the publishers and perhaps the authors. Direct electronic distribution of books can result in a substantial increase in profits to authors and publishers alike and still allow for a large reduction in price.

Living in Canada, I am faced with popular fiction pocket books prices often exceeding $10 and hard covers approaching $40. Where I used to buy hardcopy books by the dozens in a year, I might now only purchase 4 or 5. On the other hand I have purchased every book on your Websubscription list since last January (which amounts to some 60 or so books). Even for someone who has voracious appetite for the printed word, price does matter.

As to the future, if there is any industry which has a natural synergy with the internet, it is publishing. With prices of various ebook readers forecast to approach $100 within a year (Franklin is already close to that now), the future for ebooks should be boundless. Piracy is a function of cost. Make prices fair and reasonable and few people will bother.

I think other publishers would do well to copy your business model. By operating as you do, you have gained a faithful subscriber who will always come back for more.

Please carry on with your good work!

Paul Elmgreen

I just received the Baen newsletter with your "soap box" um, what is the right word here, dialogue? Sounds good.

I have to agree with your viewpoint. When Baen first came out with webscriptions, I immediately downloaded "On Basilisk Station". I read it -- then went out and started building my Honor Harrington Library. The only HARDCOVERS I don't have (3) are the ones that are only available in paperback, but I have them too. Then I started on other Weber books.

Then I downloaded Lisanne Norman's "Turning Point" onto my brand new Palm Pilot -- I have all those in paperback now.

Then I got involved with Telzey and friends by Schmitz -- yep, I'm in the process of getting them in print!

Right now it's "The Survivalist" series by Ahearn, the first one of which was offered as a freebie to introduce readers to the series -- these seem to be almost impossible to find in print -- but my e-library of them is steadily growing! And I will continue to purchase them until I catch up!

Then there are all the e-publishers out there who are introducing me to even more new authors!

The whole point is that while I enjoy being able to download and read on either my computer, or my palm pilot, I still pay for most of my books. And when I find an author I may have passed up in the store, silly me, I can always go back for more. And sometimes, all right a lot of the time; I have both the e-book version and the print version. Yeah, I'm double spending, but with my favorite authors being able to pick up either version, depending on what is convenient, lets me catch up on that pile I want to read that much faster. Then again -- I sometimes buy both the print and audio version of some authors too.

Does this mean I never borrow or lend a book - no way! If I recommend a book and let someone borrow it chances are they are a "readaholic" like me and will probably want their own copy anyway! And most of the people I borrow from have the same tastes I do -- I rarely pass on getting a copy of a book I enjoy. Re-reading a book is always a pleasure -- I always find deeper nuances the second or third or tenth time around.

By the way - I enjoyed "1632", another Baen download, so much, I am keeping my eye open for more by this author! Looks like I'm in luck.

Great idea - and great attitude - Thanks!

Lorri-Lynne Brown

I was just reading your 'Introducing the Baen Free Library' and noticed something I had to laugh over.

"Buggy whip makers went out of business because someone else invented something which eliminated the demand for buggy whips -- not because Henry Ford figured out a way to steal the payroll of the buggy whip factory."

I hate to tell you but they sell MORE buggy whips now than they ever dreamed of doing before Henry Ford came along... though I must admit that very few of them are used for the advertised purpose. Grin!

Thank you for working with Baen books and for your support of the WebScription service. I know that I've ended up buying far more books than ever before and that most of them are by authors that I wouldn't have given a second glance at if not for WebScriptions.

Also, thanks for your own books. I enjoy and own most all of them and am busy filling in the few remaining gaps.

Yours,

Kirk Sauber

Thanks Eric,

Read the e-book, bought a hardcopy as well. Look forward to buying my hardcopy of the next Belisarius book. In fact I think every one of the e-books that Baen have put up that I've read right through I've bought the hardcopy. Those I couldn't read for style etc I didn't buy so this works for me.

Keep up the good work,

Regards,

Ian Birchenough

As an Author your actions in initiating free library are very commendable and realistic. I have read Baen's free samples for years now ,and you are correct! They have led to purchases of many books that caught my interest. While having the free library will certainly be great , I hope that Baen will not abandon free samples , after all , not knowing the ending is a definite lure to purchase.

Good fortune in this new enterprise and congrats to another Baen leadership example on line.

My God, Eric!! What is the world coming to? Common sense is popping out all over! Run and hide, the Therbligs are gonna twiddle the Farsartas if this keeps up.

Like you, I cut my teeth on the Heinlein "Juveniles" e.e. "Doc" smith and Robert E. Howard. I used to haunt the library hoping and praying for something new to crop up. And, like you, I now have my own copies of all those books, so no author or publisher lost any money on my account.

In my honest opinion, the Nervous Nellies who are whimpering and crying about "internet piracy" have a serious case of cranial/rectal insertion syndrome.

You might want to pass this little tidbit to those folks. I am the reason that they are in "business." Without me, the publishing business would not exist, and as a result, there would be a lot of writers in the food stamp line. Who am I? I am the dude that is fondly called a "Customer." Without me, they don't exist. If they (excuse my bluntness here) piss me off, I don't buy the books. Keep me happy, I buy the books, and buy the books, and buy the books. I very carefully do not count the number of books I own, nor do I calculate how much I have spent on them. Just a hint, both numbers would be pretty significant if I did.

I will certainly use the Baen Free Library to check out authors I may not be familiar with, but it won't be to download or replace my books. Computer screens are fine, but they ain't books! Not now, not ever. Sorry, letting my prejudices show here.

Ok, enough of my babbling and soap boxing. Oh, I almost forgot. Thanks to you and Mr. Baen for putting the free library up for me, the customer.

Warmest Regards,

Larry Lanning

Eric, I think you and Jim are just wonderful. What a great way to move into the future. Three cheers for optimism! After all, if everybody thought men couldn't go to the moon....

The first science fiction I ever read was loaned me by a friend. It was the first english book I read that I liked (hey, it was not homework). I have been buying books ever since. Reading science fiction and fantasy is how I learned most of my english (and watching american movies, of course, but that's not quite english). And now I work for the Canadian foreign ministry, where bilingual people are really appreciated (you know we have 2 official languages up here) and trilingual (maybe I should start to read in spanish....or arabic!)

Most books I get from libraries or used bookstores are those impossible to find, out of print! I want to have the WHOLE series!!! kind of books. And when I find an author I like, I just can't wait for the library to get it, never mind the french translation, I need it NOW, so I buy it.

So congratulations to all the folks at Baen, others may hide shaking in the closet from the great monster internet, but you're riding the wave! And having a lot of fun I hope.

Thank you, and keep up the good work! I want more....more...MORE :-)

Anabelle Lacharité

Mr. Flint:

This letter is to express my deepest and most sincere gratitude, to you and Mr. Baen, for creating the Baen Free Library and, before it, Baen Webscriptions. I am so very happy that you have done these two things. I am so thankful that I am almost teary-eyed, a little bit, and I just had to write this letter.

I am what you call, I guess, a bibliophile, a great lover of books, and I have been such since I first learned to read so many years ago. Although I have siblings, and a mother and father, most of my life has been spent in loneliness and isolation. I have been afflicted with severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis since before I was three years old. I have never gone to school, and did not have friends or playmates---aside from my sisters and brother---while I was growing up. But I had books, my wonderful, beloved books.

With books I learned a great many things. About America. About the world. About life itself. There were virtually no limits to what a person could do with, or because of, books. With historical novels I could easily visit the past; with science fiction I could see the miracles of mankind's tomorrow. With fantasy I could encounter places and beings that only our intellect tells us could never exist and yet somehow just might have been real, if only we merely took the time to wonder, and perhaps believe.

Ah! I could tell you endlessly how wonderful I think books are---they have been my greatest teachers, friends and companions, for almost my entire life. I could sing the praises of both the written word and the imagination and skill of the person behind that word, but I assume that you, as a writer (and no doubt reader) already know how precious books are.

The point of this letter is, as I said, to thank you for what you have done. You, by bringing books to the electronic age, have given me an immeasurable boon---you allowed me to continue my reading.

I am, for the most part, used to all of the many things my misshapen body has made me unable to do, but about three years ago my affliction started making it difficult for me to hold open books. Now I cannot hold them open, at all, and for a long while I was in deep despair, because I thought my enjoyment of books had come to an end. I feared that I would be forced to get both my entertainment and information solely from the television, that my mind would turn to mush as I, out of necessity, was force-fed a diet of soap operas, game shows, and wrestling. I shuddered at the thought that I would never read again.

But then, God invented computers---well, the realization that there was such a thing as electronic reading came to me as almost a message of divine wisdom. I was fortunate enough to get a computer, and then, this past January, a Rocket e-book. Now reading was just a trackball click away, or the tap of a stylus; I could enjoy books again, and indeed, I firmly believe that e-books are a reward from God. E-books are still relatively new, I know, and the selection of titles is not massive---yet, but the transformation from paper to plastic is a Godsend to me. I cannot think of a better reason for me to spend my hundred dollars a month on, than books. E-books, to be more exact. By creating webscriptions and the Baen Free Library you have saved both my spirit and my sanity.

Last month---September---I confess, I went a little book crazy. I spent $70 on Baen webscriptions. My father was not too happy when he found out (he feels that books are a luxury, not a necessity) but, since it was my allowance I used and not his money, he was mollified. And I was ecstatic. I purchased the novel "Frost". And then "The Year of the Warrior". And "The Vlad Tapes"; "1632"; many, many others from Baen, over 30 titles in all. I was especially happy to get "Destiny's Shield". It just reached out and grabbed me. I was a tad dismayed to find out that there were two titles in the series that came before it. I started reading it anyway, installed on my REB, got all the way to chapter six and then, about four days ago, I went to

Baen's website (for the first time in a couple of weeks) and I saw that it had changed, been updated. Imagine my surprise and sheer delight when I saw those first two titles that I didn't have, and they were free!!

I felt like it was christmas, or my birthday, or like I was saying positively to Regis Philbin, "Final answer."

Forgive my enthusiasm, but books mean the world to me, especially science fiction and fantasy titles, and for a while I thought they were gone from me forever. I am more grateful than words can truly express. You have my sincerest appreciation, and I hope that the BFL and Baen Webscriptions never ends, that other book publishers will wise up and do something similar to what you've done, and, if you see David Weber, tell him to consider putting his novel "The War God's Own" online.

Must go, now. Supper's done---my mother cooked meatloaf. Typing is very hard for me to do---which is why I don't go into chat rooms---but I wanted to let you know how very happy you have made me.

Sincerely,

Jimmy

Prime Palaver # 2

Letters to the Librarian

Eric Flint

January 16, 2000

Since an article got published in slashdot.org, the Library has been flooded with hits and I received about 200 letters within 24 hours.  But even before that happened, I was receiving so many letters that I simply haven't been able to respond to most of them individually.  What I want to do in this installment of Prime Palaver is address a few of the questions which get brought up most frequently in the various letters which I receive.

Three, in particular:

1. Will we carry out-of-print books?

2. Will we carry unpublished material?

3. Will we expand the available formats?  (Most commonly, the question involves PDF.)

Let me take them one at a time.

Publishing out of print material in the Library

We will start putting some out-of-print titles in the Library, but only on a very limited and selective basis. At the moment, the only one planned is David Drake's Old Nathan.

I well understand the reasons that people would like to see OP titles in the Library.  So would I.  But you also have to understand the practical realities involved.  The problem with "long lost" titles is that they are relatively expensive to put into electronic format, because they usually don't exist in that form. That means a lot of "hand labor" scanning in the old hardcopy, proofing them, etc.  Or, even if they do exist in electronic format, unless it's something that Baen Books published recently (when it started doing everything "in house") the material has to be obtained from someone else, who will charge money for it.  (And then, usually, the material has to be "reworked" electronically to make it usable for Baen.)

For something like the Free Library, which by its nature brings in no direct income, doing very much of that is obviously not financially possible.  For that reason, the only out-of-print titles we will be putting up in the foreseeable future will be a few titles by established authors which might serve as a "drawing card" for the Library.  I'm sorry if that seems excessively cold-blooded, folks.  But, as the man said, "facts are stubborn things."  And the fact is that we can't afford to do any more than that.

Publishing unpublished works

The answer here is unequivocal, and there will be no exceptions: the only thing that will be put in the Library are works which have previously been published in paper form.  And then -- except for possibly a few OP titles whose rights have reverted back to the authors -- only titles which were originally published by Baen Books.  We will not publish any manuscripts.

This is, in short, a library -- which is not the same thing as a publisher's slush pile.

All right.  Having put the matter as bluntly as possible, I now want to take some time to talk about it.  Because the question involved actually cuts right to the heart of the whole issue which produced the Free Library in the first place.

Let me begin by explaining what is, always has been, and will always remain -- regardless of technology -- the central "transmission belt" between authors and readers.  That transmission belt can be called "the editing process" and it is every bit as essential to publishing as writers and readers.  The people who do the various jobs associated with that process go by different terms.  They are called: publishers, editors, readers, proofreaders, typesetters, etc., etc.  The specific names (as well as the specific functions) may change somewhat over time, as technology changes.  But the basic function is absolutely essential and remains the same: some mechanism has to exist to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Or, to put in more modern parlance, the real "bandwidth problem" is that there is far -- FAR -- more junk being produced in the way of fiction than there is stuff worth reading.  I know that statement, coming from an established author, inevitably sounds arrogant.  But...

Sorry, it's just a fact.  And if you don't believe me, you are welcome to set up your own online publishing house and solicit manuscripts.  You will shortly be amazed at the stuff that pours in.

Mind you, not all of it will be bad.  A fair amount of it will be decent, and some of it will be quite good.  You might even stumble across something which is very good.  But --

Heh.  You won't believe (until you try it) how much work you'll do sorting through it all.  And it is work, just like any other kind of work.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.  Or, truth to tell, a "free library."

That's the whole problem in a nutshell.  People who blather that electronic publishing will remove the "artificial barrier" between the "auteur" and his or her adoring public are blowing smoke.  I guarantee you that the first thing that would happen if someone actually managed to "liberate" publishing and publish every piece of fiction being written immediately on the internet -- is that a demand would be instantly created for some kind of company which provided the public with the ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL service of hacking through all the weeds to find the stuff worth reading.

Well.  Actually.  Those companies already exist.  They are called publishers.  That's what they do -- and will keep doing, regardless of technological advances, until such time as someone invents a robot which can do it instead.  Don't hold your breath.  Anybody who thinks something which is even as relatively "simple" as proof-reading can be done by "artificial intelligence" has never seen the weird stuff that happens when you simply let a manuscript go through with nothing more than a spell-checker at work.  (And God help you if you let a grammar-checker get out of control...)

Here's what would happen if I threw open the Library to unsolicited manuscripts:

1.  I would get flooded with stuff, much of it -- even leaving aside the quality of the writing -- completely unsuitable for this web site.  (All kinds of poetry, philosophical/political tracts, tech manuals, you name it -- stuff that has no relationship to science fiction or fantasy at all.)

Simply downloading that stuff would be time-consuming enough, much less the labor of sorting through it to eliminate everything which is inappropriate for a SF/F library.  That's my labor we're talking about -- and my labor, beyond a certain point, doesn't come any more free than anything else.  I've got a mortgage to pay, not to mention putting food on the table and taking care of my family's medical bills.  And none of the stuff involving Library work brings me a thin dime.  Not directly, at least -- and my creditors aren't going to be satisfied with vague speeches on my part about the "long term" benefits of making free copies available to the public.  I don't even want to think about their reaction to the inane slogan "information wants to be free."  Something along the lines of: Maybe it does, buddy.  But that refrigerator you bought from us AIN'T free -- so pay up or we're repossessing it.

2. Hokay.  But let's assume, for the moment, that I've decided to do all that work.  Now I've got a mass of unpublished manuscripts neatly stored away on my hard drive.  (I leave aside the fact that I'd very soon have to buy additional memory to store all of it.)

Now what?

You think I could just somehow "put it up" on the Library?  Heh.  Not hardly.  The manuscripts would arrive in a jillion different formats, some of them downright exotic and almost all of them unsuitable as they stand for putting up in the Library.  Which means I'd have to send them to Baen's staff and they would now have to expend a lot of labor on the task.  None of which, again, brings in a dime.  So who's going to pay their mortgages and food bills and medical bills?

THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH.

Every single step along the way requires labor -- and labor, in the real world, has to get fed and clothed and housed.  There are no munchkins or leprechauns out there ready and willing and able to do the work for "free."

3. Hokay.  But let's assume, for the moment, that Baen Books and its staff agreed to do it.

Now what?

I'll tell you what: interest in the Library would plummet like a stone, because now I would be transferring the labor of sorting through all the junk onto the shoulders of the readers.  Which is also labor -- and labor which 99% of them would be quite unwilling to do.  Very few people are going to be willing to spend hours in front of a monitor slowly working their way through the electronic equivalent of a slush pile.  Trust me on this one, people.  They won't.  Professional readers and editors do it because they get paid to do it.

The point to all this is that there is no "magic recipe."  I understand full well that what is driving most of the enquiries I've gotten on this subject is the frustration of the authors involved.  They've been trying to find an outlet for their writing -- which is a thankless task if there ever was one -- and are hoping that somehow this Free Library might serve the purpose.

But it won't.  Not even for them -- and for me, it would be a nightmare.  I've been an unpublished author myself (for more years that I like to remember), and I know exactly how frustrating an experience it is 99% of the time.  But...

That's life in the real world, folks.  I'm sorry if that sounds heartless, but it's just the plain, unvarnished truth.  Every publisher in the US, whether of a magazine or books, gets flooded with hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts -- sometimes that many in a single month.  Most of them those publishers do eventually read through this "slush pile," as it's called.  But, to be honest, it's a relatively low priority.  The meat and potatoes of what almost any publisher produces are writings from already established authors.  Not more than perhaps 1-2% of the material submitted to a slush pile will ever get published -- and that usually takes many months (years, often enough) to sort itself out.

This much I will say, to brighten this otherwise dark picture.  I am convinced that if anyone has written something which is good enough to get published that it will eventually get published -- provided they have the tenacity to keep plugging away at it.

But it does take a lot of tenacity, believe me.  I was writing for five years before I got my first novel published -- and that novel sat in the slush pile for almost two years before it even got read.  In the meantime, I collected a fair number of rejection slips from other publishers.  But, eventually...

The novel did get read, and the editor liked it.  After that, things finally started moving.

Every single professional author I know personally has basically gone through the same experience.  If there are any "short cuts," I don't know what they are.  What I do know, for sure, is this: if you do write well enough to get published, the worst mistake you can make is to get obsessed with finding a "short cut."  There aren't any -- or, if there are, the chances of stumbling into it are equivalent to winning the lottery.

Just keep plugging away, as disheartening as that experience often is.  Keep writing and keep sending in your manuscripts to established publishers.  Do NOT try to "find an angle."  Or, if you do, at least make sure you keep your efforts to a minimum.  Because that is also labor -- and the time and work you spend trying to find the "angle" doesn't come free, either.  It's time and work you are not spending doing what might really get you published.

And there endeth the sermon.

Expanding the available formats

We have no plans at present to expand the formats available, although we are looking into the question of whether some additions or changes might be helpful to readers who are blind or otherwise disabled.  If we make any changes or additions, that will be our top priority.

Since most of the questions around this involve PDF, I can say that we will not be adding a PDF format in the foreseeable future.

The reason is as simple as it gets.  This Library is maintained through the good graces of Baen Books, which is (for all practical purposes) owned and operated by a man named Jim Baen. One of the "perks" of Jim's status is that he gets to make the final decisions.  And Jim detests PDF.

In his own words:

A few words on .PDF:

Adobe Acrobat ==>> pdf files. I don't know what all the perceived virtues of Acrobat are, except that supposedly it will suck Word and spit Word Perfect or something. Why I don't like it:

Acrobat allows you to design and print pages as if you were the editorial staff of Time Inc. complete with pictures and flowing text and captions in funny types and whatnot, just exactly the way the Publications Design Department wants. For this reason (I suppose) Design Depts just love it to pieces and flog it everywhere, and assume that everyone else will love it and its output too.

The thing is, it is not what you would call empowering to the end consumer. What it does, is generate files, .pdf files, that are extremely opaque to standard word processing software, so that if, for example, you downloaded Time's table of contents, you would be stuck with that appearance: no changes allowed, or possible. Can't change the margins, can't change font sizes, can't grab text for pasting, can't anything.

Thus if we wanted to present a PDF file we would have to make every single decision that God intended for users to make for him (or her! or her! But I digress...:).

Anyway, the text would have to be X wide, placed to the pixel just so with an anchor point there on the screen when you look at it. Straight jacket city. Now me, I find this anathematic. Sometimes, when my sinuses are going, I don't much care about proportions or whatever: I want everything bigger than everything else, starting at 16 point on-screen. I want my text to be whatever size I find comfortable!!!

But with PDF you cannot do that. What you see is what you... see. And for some reason the designers always use a font that might be called Ten Point Terminal Myopic because it will print nicely on paper. Of course if you want to just read it on a screen, too bad. Squint.

This is why we offer, at my insistence and in spite of my cohort's mild negativity, RTF files. Why? Well, bluntly because Word reads them. So do some other word processing progs, I'm told. This means that those word processors treat .RTF files as native, and you can do anything with them that your wp prog can do with its files. Pick fonts, pick margins, font-size, color, color background, space between lines -- anything. Now it seems to me that this is the way text should be offered: just exactly the way you want it. In a sense, you become a publisher when you read a Baen e-file text.

Saint Jimmy

And there it is.  You don't have to agree with Jim, of course, but one of the perquisites of putting stuff up for free is that you can do it however you want.  That ought to be obvious, but I was rather astonished by the rudeness of a number of the letters which brought up this issue.  (Not all, of course.  Most people who raised it did so quite politely.)  Quite frankly, the writers had the manners of boors.  The kind of people who march into a party and immediately start complaining because the free liquor isn't what they like.

Fine.  Go somewhere else.  If you don't like the free stuff -- BUY your own brand.

Sheesh.

As I said earlier, we are making an attempt to accommodate the special needs of readers who suffer from disabilities such as blindness.  But, to be blunt, we don't consider the problems which some people have because they choose to use a less common system such as Linux to be in the same category.  If you don't like Microsoft products, or WordPerfect, or whatever, that's certainly your prerogative.  But you don't have the right to demand that the rest of the world has to accommodate you -- especially when you're not paying for it.

Eric Flint

January 14, 2001

Oh.  One last thing, which I keep forgetting to announce here.  In addition to the complete titles offered here in the Library, there are two other sites on the web where people can go to sample (free of charge) a number of titles produced by Baen Books.

The first is right here in the Baen web page, if you haven't noticed it already.  If you select "Our Publishing Schedule," you will find that most of the books listed have a number of sample chapters available.  (Look for the little icon next to the title which looks like a book.)  Those can be read free of charge.  You won't get the entire book, but you'll get enough of a sample to determine if it's something you'd like before plunking down your money.

In addition, with the permission and co-operation of Baen Books, Joe Buckley maintains a site known as Dahak's Orbit. That site contains sample chapters from various works-in-progress which in many cases haven't yet been published (or even have a definite publication date).  Again, complete titles are not available -- but enough to give you an idea if it's something you'd enjoy.

The site can be found at: http://dahak.ne.client2.attbi.com:8080/

Prime Palaver # 3

Letters to the Librarian

Eric Flint

February 4, 2001

I received a very nice letter from a lady named Cynthia Higginbotham in response to my last column, which I think would be of interest to a number of people. With Cynthia's permission, I'm posting major excerpts from it here. My response to her letter comes at the end.

Dear Mr. Flint:

I stumbled on the Baen Free Library shortly before Christmas and was very impressed -- impressed enough to hop over to Webscriptions and buy my husband several months of e-books for Christmas. BTW, we're both avid science-fiction readers from way back.

I have some comments and possibly useful information about some of the topics you addressed in your second letters column.

Publishing unpublished works:

...guarantee you that the first thing that would happen if someone actually managed to "liberate" publishing and publish every piece of fiction being written immediately on the internet -- is that a demand would be instantly created for some kind of company which provided the public with the ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL service of hacking through all the weeds to find the stuff worth reading.

A very to-the-point answer -- however, I would like to point out that there are archives and resources for publishing your own manuscripts on the internet. There is a hell of a lot of free fiction published on the Internet by people who love to write and know they can't sell what they write -- because they don't own the characters they are writing about. It's called "fanfiction"; some of it is very good, rivaling published works, and most of it is crap. (Sturgeon's Law applies). I write some myself, so I have learned a little bit about how to publish and promote one's self on the Internet.

So, for people looking for a place to publish their manuscripts on the web, and actually get people to come read it...

(1) Have your own website and make your fiction available there -- and make damn sure it's valid HTML that won't choke whatever odd browsers people might be using. Presenting text information is what HTML is designed for, you shouldn't need fancy browser-specific tricks to present your stories. If you make it available in other formats (e.g., all my fanfics are available in Palm format, too), proof-read it before publicizing it. Nothing turns off potential readers faster than not being able to read your work.

(2) Once you have a website, you can promote it. List with relevant search engines--for example, Anime-based fanfiction sites should list with Anime Turnpike (www.anipike.com), etc. Get on RELEVANT Usenet discussion groups and talk about your story (read group FAQ to avoid stepping on group taboos, first). Find relevant web forums to mention your stories -- but always, be polite and intelligent. Rudeness & immaturity is a great way to convince people they don't ever want to read *anything* by you.

(3) Upload some or all of your stories to the major relevant archives, and make sure there is a pointer (URL) back to your website in everything you upload -- if people like your stuff, they will come to it looking for more. - Archives include Usenet groups; for example, rec.arts.anime.creative is the place to post anime-related fanfiction. There are groups for most other popular fanfiction and for original fiction of various genres. - The largest fanfiction archive on the web, Fanfiction.Net, (www.fanfiction.net) also accepts uploads of original fiction.

Fanfiction.Net brings me around to my next point: FF.net accepts anything that resembles a story that isn't outright plagiarism; it's largely automated, no editing. As a result, one does have to wade through a lot of crap to find the gems. This is also true of the bazillion or so websites dedicated to fanfics/original fiction. As you might have predicted, word-of-mouth (word-of-net?) becomes very important in deciding which author's work to go look at-- I don't have the time to waste reading a lot of crap for free. So, one thing that has happened is that well-respected authors or site maintainers maintain lists of sites or stories that they think are good. I like author X's work, I know she writes good stuff, so I suspect that the stuff she likes might be worth looking at, and so I check out author Y. I believe Jerry Pournelle once predicted that something like this would happen with the Internet. He was right.

Anybody who thinks something which is even as relatively "simple" as proof-reading can be done by "artificial intelligence" has never seen the weird stuff that happens when you simply let a manuscript go through with nothing more than a spell-checker at work. (And God help you if you let a grammar-checker get out of control...)

I can usually tell when a manuscript I've been asked to review has been run through a spell-checker but not proof-read; the pattern of misspellings is distinctive -- all legitimate words, just not the RIGHT word.

As for grammar-checkers... One of my fellow fanfic writers has voiced the opinion that Microsoft Word's grammar-checker was written by someone on acid. <grin>

(snips)

But, to be blunt, we don't consider the problems which some people have because they choose to use a less common system such as Linux to be in the same category. If you don't like Microsoft products, or WordPerfect, or whatever, that's certainly your prerogative. But you don't have the right to demand that the rest of the world has to accommodate you -- especially when you're not paying for it.

You have it available in HTML, what the heck are the Linux users complaining about? If you only put the books up in MS Word format, I could see what they might be complaining about, but that's not the case. BTW, I am a Linux & a Palm user and have no problems.

...Well, it would be nice if your Palm content was plain vanilla DOC format rather than "marked-up-for-MobiReader" DOC format, but since you provide the MobiReader free for download and my Palm can run both it and the reader I *really* prefer for other stories, no problem.

Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope you found some of this helpful. Oh, and I've really enjoyed the Belisarius novels you and David Drake wrote. <grin>

Cynthia Higginbotham

Eric's response:

I know I shouldn't have included Cynthia's last paragraph, since there's no reason to do so except as a shameless plug for one of my own books. For which transgression of good taste I estimate I will lose [calculate, calculate] about three nanoseconds of sleep tonight.

Oh, quit griping. This stuff's all free and nobody's making you read this anyway.

As for the heart of Cynthia's comments, I think she's done an excellent job of laying out the best way for people to try to use the internet as a means of self-publication. Just to make my position clear, I'm not opposed to anyone doing that. For one thing, a number of people write simply for the pleasure of it, with no intention of trying to get their material published by a commercial publication. For them, Cynthia's comments should be most helpful.

Nor would I make the blanket claim that it never leads to any professional publication. Who knows, it might. My only concern, in my earlier column, was to caution people from thinking that online self-publication is really a significant avenue for getting published by a commercial publisher. It isn't. For that, the best method is still the ancient but tried-and-true system of putting a hardcopy MS in an envelope and mailing it to whatever publisher you think might be interested.

That's a long shot, true -- going by sheer statistics. But it's a lot less of a long shot than trying to use the internet. Publishers and editors are a lot more likely to look at their own slush pile in their own office than spend endless hours in front of a monitor scanning the mountain of stuff available on the internet.

And that's enough said on this topic. I'm starting to feel uncomfortably like a nag, which (I'm convinced) is another fate worse than death.

Prime Palaver # 4

Macaulay on copyright law

Eric Flint

September 1, 2001

These are two speeches given by Thomas Macaulay in Parliament in 1841, when the issue of copyright was being hammered out. They are, no other word for it, brilliant — and cover everything fundamental which is involved in the issue. (For those not familiar with him, Macaulay would eventually become one of the foremost British historians of the 19th century. His History of England remains in print to this day, as do many of his other writings.)

I strongly urge people to read them. Yes, they're long — almost 10,000 words — and, yes, Macaulay's oratorical style is that of an earlier era. (Although, I've got to say, I'm partial to it. Macaulay orated before the era of "sound bytes." Thank God.)

But contained herein is all wisdom on the subject, an immense learning — and plenty of wit. So relax, pour yourself some coffee (or whatever beverage of your choice) (or whatever, preferably not hallucinogenic), and take the time to read it. The "oh-so-modern" subject of "electronic piracy" contains no problems which Macaulay didn't already address, at least in essence, more than a century and a half ago.

I should note that Macaulay's position, slightly modified, did become the basis of copyright law in the English speaking world. And remained so (at least in the US) for a century and a half — until, on a day of infamy just a few years ago, the Walt Disney Corporation and their stooges in Congress got the law changed to the modern law, which extends copyright for a truly absurd period of time. Which — those who forget history are doomed to repeat it — is a return to the position advocated by Macaulay's (now long forgotten) opponent in the debate.

Eric Flint

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 5TH OF FEBRUARY 1841

by Thomas Babington Macaulay

On the twenty-ninth of January 1841, Mr Serjeant Talfourd obtained leave to bring in a bill to amend the law of copyright. The object of this bill was to extend the term of copyright in a book to sixty years, reckoned from the death of the writer.

On the fifth of February Mr Serjeant Talfourd moved that the bill should be read a second time. In reply to him the following Speech was made. The bill was rejected by 45 votes to 38.

Though, Sir, it is in some sense agreeable to approach a subject with which political animosities have nothing to do, I offer myself to your notice with some reluctance. It is painful to me to take a course which may possibly be misunderstood or misrepresented as unfriendly to the interests of literature and literary men. It is painful to me, I will add, to oppose my honourable and learned friend on a question which he has taken up from the purest motives, and which he regards with a parental interest. These feelings have hitherto kept me silent when the law of copyright has been under discussion. But as I am, on full consideration, satisfied that the measure before us will, if adopted, inflict grievous injury on the public, without conferring any compensating advantage on men of letters, I think it my duty to avow that opinion and to defend it.

The first thing to be done, Sir, is to settle on what principles the question is to be argued. Are we free to legislate for the public good, or are we not? Is this a question of expediency, or is it a question of right? Many of those who have written and petitioned against the existing state of things treat the question as one of right. The law of nature, according to them, gives to every man a sacred and indefeasible property in his own ideas, in the fruits of his own reason and imagination. The legislature has indeed the power to take away this property, just as it has the power to pass an act of attainder for cutting off an innocent man's head without a trial. But, as such an act of attainder would be legal murder, so would an act invading the right of an author to his copy be, according to these gentlemen, legal robbery.

Now, Sir, if this be so, let justice be done, cost what it may. I am not prepared, like my honourable and learned friend, to agree to a compromise between right and expediency, and to commit an injustice for the public convenience. But I must say, that his theory soars far beyond the reach of my faculties. It is not necessary to go, on the present occasion, into a metaphysical inquiry about the origin of the right of property; and certainly nothing but the strongest necessity would lead me to discuss a subject so likely to be distasteful to the House. I agree, I own, with Paley in thinking that property is the creature of the law, and that the law which creates property can be defended only on this ground, that it is a law beneficial to mankind. But it is unnecessary to debate that point. For, even if I believed in a natural right of property, independent of utility and anterior to legislation, I should still deny that this right could survive the original proprietor. Few, I apprehend, even of those who have studied in the most mystical and sentimental schools of moral philosophy, will be disposed to maintain that there is a natural law of succession older and of higher authority than any human code. If there be, it is quite certain that we have abuses to reform much more serious than any connected with the question of copyright. For this natural law can be only one; and the modes of succession in the Queen's dominions are twenty. To go no further than England, land generally descends to the eldest son. In Kent the sons share and share alike. In many districts the youngest takes the whole. Formerly a portion of a man's personal property was secured to his family; and it was only of the residue that he could dispose by will. Now he can dispose of the whole by will: but you limited his power, a few years ago, by enacting that the will should not be valid unless there were two witnesses. If a man dies intestate, his personal property generally goes according to the statute of distributions; but there are local customs which modify that statute. Now which of all these systems is conformed to the eternal standard of right? Is it primogeniture, or gavelkind, or borough English? Are wills jure divino? Are the two witnesses jure divino? Might not the pars rationabilis of our old law have a fair claim to be regarded as of celestial institution? Was the statute of distributions enacted in Heaven long before it was adopted by Parliament? Or is it to Custom of York, or to Custom of London, that this pre- eminence belongs? Surely, Sir, even those who hold that there is a natural right of property must admit that rules prescribing the manner in which the effects of deceased persons shall be distributed are purely arbitrary, and originate altogether in the will of the legislature. If so, Sir, there is no controversy between my honourable and learned friend and myself as to the principles on which this question is to be argued. For the existing law gives an author copyright during his natural life; nor do I propose to invade that privilege, which I should, on the contrary, be prepared to defend strenuously against any assailant. The only point in issue between us is, how long after an author's death the State shall recognise a copyright in his representatives and assigns; and it can, I think, hardly be disputed by any rational man that this is a point which the legislature is free to determine in the way which may appear to be most conducive to the general good.

We may now, therefore, I think, descend from these high regions, where we are in danger of being lost in the clouds, to firm ground and clear light. Let us look at this question like legislators, and after fairly balancing conveniences and inconveniences, pronounce between the existing law of copyright, and the law now proposed to us. The question of copyright, Sir, like most questions of civil prudence, is neither black nor white, but grey. The system of copyright has great advantages and great disadvantages; and it is our business to ascertain what these are, and then to make an arrangement under which the advantages may be as far as possible secured, and the disadvantages as far as possible excluded. The charge which I bring against my honourable and learned friend's bill is this, that it leaves the advantages nearly what they are at present, and increases the disadvantages at least fourfold.

The advantages arising from a system of copyright are obvious. It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright. You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives. Of these persons few will be found among the rich and the noble. The rich and the noble are not impelled to intellectual exertion by necessity. They may be impelled to intellectual exertion by the desire of distinguishing themselves, or by the desire of benefiting the community. But it is generally within these walls that they seek to signalise themselves and to serve their fellow-creatures. Both their ambition and their public spirit, in a country like this, naturally take a political turn. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.

There have been times in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions. It was thus in the time of Maecenas and Pollio at Rome, of the Medici at Florence, of Louis the Fourteenth in France, of Lord Halifax and Lord Oxford in this country. Now, Sir, I well know that there are cases in which it is fit and graceful, nay, in which it is a sacred duty to reward the merits or to relieve the distresses of men of genius by the exercise of this species of liberality. But these cases are exceptions. I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles. I can conceive no system more certain to turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests.

We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. My honourable and learned friend talks very contemptuously of those who are led away by the theory that monopoly makes things dear. That monopoly makes things dear is certainly a theory, as all the great truths which have been established by the experience of all ages and nations, and which are taken for granted in all reasonings, may be said to be theories. It is a theory in the same sense in which it is a theory that day and night follow each other, that lead is heavier than water, that bread nourishes, that arsenic poisons, that alcohol intoxicates. If, as my honourable and learned friend seems to think, the whole world is in the wrong on this point, if the real effect of monopoly is to make articles good and cheap, why does he stop short in his career of change? Why does he limit the operation of so salutary a principle to sixty years? Why does he consent to anything short of a perpetuity? He told us that in consenting to anything short of a perpetuity he was making a compromise between extreme right and expediency. But if his opinion about monopoly be correct, extreme right and expediency would coincide. Or rather, why should we not restore the monopoly of the East India trade to the East India Company? Why should we not revive all those old monopolies which, in Elizabeth's reign, galled our fathers so severely that, maddened by intolerable wrong, they opposed to their sovereign a resistance before which her haughty spirit quailed for the first and for the last time? Was it the cheapness and excellence of commodities that then so violently stirred the indignation of the English people? I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honourable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company's monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essex's monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

Now, I will not affirm that the existing law is perfect, that it exactly hits the point at which the monopoly ought to cease; but this I confidently say, that the existing law is very much nearer that point than the law proposed by my honourable and learned friend. For consider this; the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration. A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years. But it is by no means the fact that a posthumous monopoly of sixty years gives to an author thrice as much pleasure and thrice as strong a motive as a posthumous monopoly of twenty years. On the contrary, the difference is so small as to be hardly perceptible. We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action. It is very probable that in the course of some generations land in the unexplored and unmapped heart of the Australasian continent will be very valuable. But there is none of us who would lay down five pounds for a whole province in the heart of the Australasian continent. We know, that neither we, nor anybody for whom we care, will ever receive a farthing of rent from such a province. And a man is very little moved by the thought that in the year 2000 or 2100, somebody who claims through him will employ more shepherds than Prince Esterhazy, and will have the finest house and gallery of pictures at Victoria or Sydney. Now, this is the sort of boon which my honourable and learned friend holds out to authors. Considered as a boon to them, it is a mere nullity, but considered as an impost on the public, it is no nullity, but a very serious and pernicious reality. I will take an example. Dr Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr Johnson's works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the doctor's servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman's Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook's shop underground. Considered as a reward to him, the difference between a twenty years' and sixty years' term of posthumous copyright would have been nothing or next to nothing. But is the difference nothing to us? I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had to give five or six guineas for it. Do I grudge this to a man like Dr Johnson? Not at all. Show me that the prospect of this boon roused him to any vigorous effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances, and I am quite willing to pay the price of such an object, heavy as that price is. But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson's none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is, that my honourable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely any perceptible addition to the bounty. Why, Sir, what is the additional amount of taxation which would have been levied on the public for Dr Johnson's works alone, if my honourable and learned friend's bill had been the law of the land? I have not data sufficient to form an opinion. But I am confident that the taxation on his Dictionary alone would have amounted to many thousands of pounds. In reckoning the whole additional sum which the holders of his copyrights would have taken out of the pockets of the public during the last half century at twenty thousand pounds, I feel satisfied that I very greatly underrate it. Now, I again say that I think it but fair that we should pay twenty thousand pounds in consideration of twenty thousand pounds' worth of pleasure and encouragement received by Dr Johnson. But I think it very hard that we should pay twenty thousand pounds for what he would not have valued at five shillings.

My honourable and learned friend dwells on the claims of the posterity of great writers. Undoubtedly, Sir, it would be very pleasing to see a descendant of Shakespeare living in opulence on the fruits of his great ancestor's genius. A house maintained in splendour by such a patrimony would be a more interesting and striking object than Blenheim is to us, or than Strathfieldsaye will be to our children. But, unhappily, it is scarcely possible that, under any system, such a thing can come to pass. My honourable and learned friend does not propose that copyright shall descend to the eldest son, or shall be bound up by irrecoverable entail. It is to be merely personal property. It is therefore highly improbable that it will descend during sixty years or half that term from parent to child. The chance is that more people than one will have an interest in it. They will in all probability sell it and divide the proceeds. The price which a bookseller will give for it will bear no proportion to the sum which he will afterwards draw from the public, if his speculation proves successful. He will give little, if anything, more for a term of sixty years than for a term of thirty or five and twenty. The present value of a distant advantage is always small; but when there is great room to doubt whether a distant advantage will be any advantage at all, the present value sink to almost nothing. Such is the inconstancy of the public taste that no sensible man will venture to pronounce, with confidence, what the sale of any book published in our days will be in the years between 1890 and 1900. The whole fashion of thinking and writing has often undergone a change in a much shorter period than that to which my honourable and learned friend would extend posthumous copyright. What would have been considered the best literary property in the earlier part of Charles the Second's reign? I imagine Cowley's Poems. Overleap sixty years, and you are in the generation of which Pope asked, "Who now reads Cowley?" What works were ever expected with more impatience by the public than those of Lord Bolingbroke, which appeared, I think, in 1754? In 1814, no bookseller would have thanked you for the copyright of them all, if you had offered it to him for nothing. What would Paternoster Row give now for the copyright of Hayley's Triumphs of Temper, so much admired within the memory of many people still living? I say, therefore, that, from the very nature of literary property, it will almost always pass away from an author's family; and I say, that the price given for it to the family will bear a very small proportion to the tax which the purchaser, if his speculation turns out well, will in the course of a long series of years levy on the public.

If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,—my honourable and learned friend will be surprised,—I should select the case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's works? But, Sir, will my honourable and learned friend tell me that this event, which he has so often and so pathetically described, was caused by the shortness of the term of copyright? Why, at that time, the duration of copyright was longer than even he, at present, proposes to make it. The monopoly lasted, not sixty years, but for ever. At the time at which Milton's granddaughter asked charity, Milton's works were the exclusive property of a bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's shop, and at Tonson's price. Whoever attempts to undersell Tonson is harassed with legal proceedings. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment. And what, in the meantime, is the situation of the only person for whom we can suppose that the author, protected at such a cost to the public, was at all interested? She is reduced to utter destitution. Milton's works are under a monopoly. Milton's granddaughter is starving. The reader is pillaged; but the writer's family is not enriched. Society is taxed doubly. It has to give an exorbitant price for the poems; and it has at the same time to give alms to the only surviving descendant of the poet.

But this is not all. I think it right, Sir, to call the attention of the House to an evil, which is perhaps more to be apprehended when an author's copyright remains in the hands of his family, than when it is transferred to booksellers. I seriously fear that, if such a measure as this should be adopted, many valuable works will be either totally suppressed or grievously mutilated. I can prove that this danger is not chimerical; and I am quite certain that, if the danger be real, the safeguards which my honourable and learned friend has devised are altogether nugatory. That the danger is not chimerical may easily be shown. Most of us, I am sure, have known persons who, very erroneously as I think, but from the best motives, would not choose to reprint Fielding's novels, or Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Some gentlemen may perhaps be of opinion that it would be as well if Tom Jones and Gibbon's History were never reprinted. I will not, then, dwell on these or similar cases. I will take cases respecting which it is not likely that there will be any difference of opinion here; cases, too, in which the danger of which I now speak is not matter of supposition, but matter of fact. Take Richardson's novels. Whatever I may, on the present occasion, think of my honourable and learned friend's judgment as a legislator, I must always respect his judgment as a critic. He will, I am sure, say that Richardson's novels are among the most valuable, among the most original works in our language. No writings have done more to raise the fame of English genius in foreign countries. No writings are more deeply pathetic. No writings, those of Shakspeare excepted, show more profound knowledge of the human heart. As to their moral tendency, I can cite the most respectable testimony. Dr Johnson describes Richardson as one who had taught the passions to move at the command of virtue. My dear and honoured friend, Mr Wilberforce, in his celebrated religious treatise, when speaking of the unchristian tendency of the fashionable novels of the eighteenth century, distinctly excepts Richardson from the censure. Another excellent person, whom I can never mention without respect and kindness, Mrs Hannah More, often declared in conversation, and has declared in one of her published poems, that she first learned from the writings of Richardson those principles of piety by which her life was guided. I may safely say that books celebrated as works of art through the whole civilised world, and praised for their moral tendency by Dr Johnson, by Mr Wilberforce, by Mrs Hannah More, ought not to be suppressed. Sir, it is my firm belief, that if the law had been what my honourable and learned friend proposes to make it, they would have been suppressed. I remember Richardson's grandson well; he was a clergyman in the city of London; he was a most upright and excellent man; but he had conceived a strong prejudice against works of fiction. He thought all novel-reading not only frivolous but sinful. He said,—this I state on the authority of one of his clerical brethren who is now a bishop,—he said that he had never thought it right to read one of his grandfather's books. Suppose, Sir, that the law had been what my honourable and learned friend would make it. Suppose that the copyright of Richardson's novels had descended, as might well have been the case, to this gentleman. I firmly believe, that he would have thought it sinful to give them a wide circulation. I firmly believe, that he would not for a hundred thousand pounds have deliberately done what he thought sinful. He would not have reprinted them. And what protection does my honourable and learned friend give to the public in such a case? Why, Sir, what he proposes is this: if a book is not reprinted during five years, any person who wishes to reprint it may give notice in the London Gazette: the advertisement must be repeated three times: a year must elapse; and then, if the proprietor of the copyright does not put forth a new edition, he loses his exclusive privilege. Now, what protection is this to the public? What is a new edition? Does the law define the number of copies that make an edition? Does it limit the price of a copy? Are twelve copies on large paper, charged at thirty guineas each, an edition? It has been usual, when monopolies have been granted, to prescribe numbers and to limit prices. But I did not find the my honourable and learned friend proposes to do so in the present case. And, without some such provision, the security which he offers is manifestly illusory. It is my conviction that, under such a system as that which he recommends to us, a copy of Clarissa would have been as rare as an Aldus or a Caxton.

I will give another instance. One of the most instructive, interesting, and delightful books in our language is Boswell's Life of Johnson. Now it is well known that Boswell's eldest son considered this book, considered the whole relation of Boswell to Johnson, as a blot in the escutcheon of the family. He thought, not perhaps altogether without reason, that his father had exhibited himself in a ludicrous and degrading light. And thus he became so sore and irritable that at last he could not bear to hear the Life of Johnson mentioned. Suppose that the law had been what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it. Suppose that the copyright of Boswell's Life of Johnson had belonged, as it well might, during sixty years, to Boswell's eldest son. What would have been the consequence? An unadulterated copy of the finest biographical work in the world would have been as scarce as the first edition of Camden's Britannia.

These are strong cases. I have shown you that, if the law had been what you are now going to make it, the finest prose work of fiction in the language, the finest biographical work in the language, would very probably have been suppressed. But I have stated my case weakly. The books which I have mentioned are singularly inoffensive books, books not touching on any of those questions which drive even wise men beyond the bounds of wisdom. There are books of a very different kind, books which are the rallying points of great political and religious parties. What is likely to happen if the copyright of one of the these books should by descent or transfer come into the possession of some hostile zealot? I will take a single instance. It is only fifty years since John Wesley died; and all his works, if the law had been what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, would now have been the property of some person or other. The sect founded by Wesley is the most numerous, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most zealous of sects. In every parliamentary election it is a matter of the greatest importance to obtain the support of the Wesleyan Methodists. Their numerical strength is reckoned by hundreds of thousands. They hold the memory of their founder in the greatest reverence; and not without reason, for he was unquestionably a great and a good man. To his authority they constantly appeal. His works are in their eyes of the highest value. His doctrinal writings they regard as containing the best system of theology ever deduced from Scripture. His journals, interesting even to the common reader, are peculiarly interesting to the Methodist: for they contain the whole history of that singular polity which, weak and despised in its beginning, is now, after the lapse of a century, so strong, so flourishing, and so formidable. The hymns to which he gave his imprimatur are a most important part of the public worship of his followers. Now, suppose that the copyright of these works should belong to some person who holds the memory of Wesley and the doctrines and discipline of the Methodists in abhorrence. There are many such persons. The Ecclesiastical Courts are at this very time sitting on the case of a clergyman of the Established Church who refused Christian burial to a child baptized by a Methodist preacher. I took up the other day a work which is considered as among the most respectable organs of a large and growing party in the Church of England, and there I saw John Wesley designated as a forsworn priest. Suppose that the works of Wesley were suppressed. Why, Sir, such a grievance would be enough to shake the foundations of Government. Let gentlemen who are attached to the Church reflect for a moment what their feelings would be if the Book of Common Prayer were not to be reprinted for thirty or forty years, if the price of a Book of Common Prayer were run up to five or ten guineas. And then let them determine whether they will pass a law under which it is possible, under which it is probable, that so intolerable a wrong may be done to some sect consisting perhaps of half a million of persons.

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir, any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed, I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honourable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN A COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 6TH OF APRIL 1842.

by Thomas Babington Macaulay

On the third of March 1842, Lord Mahon obtained permission to bring in a bill to amend the Law of Copyright. This bill extended the term of Copyright in a book to twenty-five years, reckoned from the death of the author.

On the sixth of April the House went into Committee on the bill, and Mr Greene took the Chair. Several divisions took place, of which the result was that the plan suggested in the following Speech was, with some modifications, adopted.

Mr Greene,—I have been amused and gratified by the remarks which my noble friend (Lord Mahon.) has made on the arguments by which I prevailed on the last House of Commons to reject the bill introduced by a very able and accomplished man, Mr Serjeant Talfourd. My noble friend has done me a high and rare honour. For this is, I believe, the first occasion on which a speech made in one Parliament has been answered in another. I should not find it difficult to vindicate the soundness of the reasons which I formerly urged, to set them in a clearer light, and to fortify them by additional facts. But it seems to me that we had better discuss the bill which is now on our table than the bill which was there fourteen months ago. Glad I am to find that there is a very wide difference between the two bills, and that my noble friend, though he has tried to refute my arguments, has acted as if he had been convinced by them. I objected to the term of sixty years as far too long. My noble friend has cut that term down to twenty-five years. I warned the House that, under the provisions of Mr Serjeant Talfourd's bill, valuable works might not improbably be suppressed by the representatives of authors. My noble friend has prepared a clause which, as he thinks, will guard against that danger. I will not, therefore, waste the time of the Committee by debating points which he has conceded, but will proceed at once to the proper business of this evening.

Sir, I have no objection to the principle of my noble friend's bill. Indeed, I had no objection to the principle of the bill of last year. I have long thought that the term of copyright ought to be extended. When Mr Serjeant Talfourd moved for leave to bring in his bill, I did not oppose the motion. Indeed I meant to vote for the second reading, and to reserve what I had to say for the Committee. But the learned Serjeant left me no choice. He, in strong language, begged that nobody who was disposed to reduce the term of sixty years would divide with him. "Do not," he said, "give me your support, if all that you mean to grant to men of letters is a miserable addition of fourteen or fifteen years to the present term. I do not wish for such support. I despise it." Not wishing to obtrude on the learned Serjeant a support which he despised, I had no course left but to take the sense of the House on the second reading. The circumstances are now different. My noble friend's bill is not at present a good bill; but it may be improved into a very good bill; nor will he, I am persuaded, withdraw it if it should be so improved. He and I have the same object in view; but we differ as to the best mode of attaining that object. We are equally desirous to extend the protection now enjoyed by writers. In what way it may be extended with most benefit to them and with least inconvenience to the public, is the question.

The present state of the law is this. The author of a work has a certain copyright in that work for a term of twenty-eight years. If he should live more than twenty-eight years after the publication of the work, he retains the copyright to the end of his life.

My noble friend does not propose to make any addition to the term of twenty-eight years. But he proposes that the copyright shall last twenty-five years after the author's death. Thus my noble friend makes no addition to that term which is certain, but makes a very large addition to that term which is uncertain.

My plan is different. I would made no addition to the uncertain term; but I would make a large addition to the certain term. I propose to add fourteen years to the twenty-eight years which the law now allows to an author. His copyright will, in this way, last till his death, or till the expiration of forty-two years, whichever shall first happen. And I think that I shall be able to prove to the satisfaction of the Committee that my plan will be more beneficial to literature and to literary men than the plan of my noble friend.

It must surely, Sir, be admitted that the protection which we give to books ought to be distributed as evenly as possible, that every book should have a fair share of that protection, and no book more than a fair share. It would evidently be absurd to put tickets into a wheel, with different numbers marked upon them, and to make writers draw, one a term of twenty-eight years, another a term of fifty, another a term of ninety. And yet this sort of lottery is what my noble friend proposes to establish. I know that we cannot altogether exclude chance. You have two terms of copyright; one certain, the other uncertain; and we cannot, I admit, get rid of the uncertain term. It is proper, no doubt, that an author's copyright should last during his life. But, Sir, though we cannot altogether exclude chance, we can very much diminish the share which chance must have in distributing the recompense which we wish to give to genius and learning. By every addition which we make to the certain term we diminish the influence of chance; by every addition which we make to the uncertain term we increase the influence of chance. I shall make myself best understood by putting cases. Take two eminent female writers, who died within our own memory, Madame D'Arblay and Miss Austen. As the law now stands, Miss Austen's charming novels would have only from twenty-eight to thirty-three years of copyright. For that extraordinary woman died young: she died before her genius was fully appreciated by the world. Madame D'Arblay outlived the whole generation to which she belonged. The copyright of her celebrated novel, Evelina, lasted, under the present law, sixty-two years. Surely this inequality is sufficiently great—sixty-two years of copyright for Evelina, only twenty-eight for Persuasion. But to my noble friend this inequality seems not great enough. He proposes to add twenty- five years to Madame D'Arblay's term, and not a single day to Miss Austen's term. He would give to Persuasion a copyright of only twenty-eight years, as at present, and to Evelina a copyright more than three times as long, a copyright of eighty- seven years. Now, is this reasonable? See, on the other hand, the operation of my plan. I make no addition at all to Madame D'Arblay's term of sixty-two years, which is, in my opinion, quite long enough; but I extend Miss Austen's term to forty-two years, which is, in my opinion, not too much. You see, Sir, that at present chance has too much sway in this matter: that at present the protection which the State gives to letters is very unequally given. You see that if my noble friend's plan be adopted, more will be left to chance than under the present system, and you will have such inequalities as are unknown under the present system. You see also that, under the system which I recommend, we shall have, not perfect certainty, not perfect equality, but much less uncertainty and inequality than at present.

But this is not all. My noble friend's plan is not merely to institute a lottery in which some writers will draw prizes and some will draw blanks. It is much worse than this. His lottery is so contrived that, in the vast majority of cases, the blanks will fall to the best books, and the prizes to books of inferior merit.

Take Shakspeare. My noble friend gives a longer protection than I should give to Love's Labour's Lost, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre; but he gives a shorter protection than I should give to Othello and Macbeth.

Take Milton. Milton died in 1674. The copyrights of Milton's great works would, according to my noble friend's plan, expire in 1699. Comus appeared in 1634, the Paradise Lost in 1668. To Comus, then, my noble friend would give sixty-five years of copyright, and to the Paradise Lost only thirty-one years. Is that reasonable? Comus is a noble poem: but who would rank it with the Paradise Lost? My plan would give forty-two years both to the Paradise Lost and to Comus.

Let us pass on from Milton to Dryden. My noble friend would give more than sixty years of copyright to Dryden's worst works; to the encomiastic verses on Oliver Cromwell, to the Wild Gallant, to the Rival Ladies, to other wretched pieces as bad as anything written by Flecknoe or Settle: but for Theodore and Honoria, for Tancred and Sigismunda, for Cimon and Iphigenia, for Palamon and Arcite, for Alexander's Feast, my noble friend thinks a copyright of twenty-eight years sufficient. Of all Pope's works, that to which my noble friend would give the largest measure of protection is the volume of Pastorals, remarkable only as the production of a boy. Johnson's first work was a Translation of a Book of Travels in Abyssinia, published in 1735. It was so poorly executed that in his later years he did not like to hear it mentioned. Boswell once picked up a copy of it, and told his friend that he had done so. "Do not talk about it," said Johnson: "it is a thing to be forgotten." To this performance my noble friend would give protection during the enormous term of seventy-five years. To the Lives of the Poets he would give protection during about thirty years. Well; take Henry Fielding; it matters not whom I take, but take Fielding. His early works are read only by the curious, and would not be read even by the curious, but for the fame which he acquired in the latter part of his life by works of a very different kind. What is the value of the Temple Beau, of the Intriguing Chambermaid, of half a dozen other plays of which few gentlemen have even heard the names? Yet to these worthless pieces my noble friend would give a term of copyright longer by more than twenty years than that which he would give to Tom Jones and Amelia.

Go on to Burke. His little tract, entitled the Vindication of Natural Society is certainly not without merit; but it would not be remembered in our days if it did not bear the name of Burke. To this tract my noble friend would give a copyright of near seventy years. But to the great work on the French Revolution, to the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, to the letters on the Regicide Peace, he would give a copyright of thirty years or little more.

And, Sir observe that I am not selecting here and there extraordinary instances in order to make up the semblance of a case. I am taking the greatest names of our literature in chronological order. Go to other nations; go to remote ages; you will still find the general rule the same. There was no copyright at Athens or Rome; but the history of the Greek and Latin literature illustrates my argument quite as well as if copyright had existed in ancient times. Of all the plays of Sophocles, the one to which the plan of my noble friend would have given the most scanty recompense would have been that wonderful masterpiece, the Oedipus at Colonos. Who would class together the Speech of Demosthenes against his Guardians, and the Speech for the Crown? My noble friend, indeed, would not class them together. For to the Speech against the Guardians he would give a copyright of near seventy years, and to the incomparable Speech for the Crown a copyright of less than half that length. Go to Rome. My noble friend would give more than twice as long a term to Cicero's juvenile declamation in defence of Roscius Amerinus as to the Second Philippic. Go to France. My noble friend would give a far longer term to Racine's Freres Ennemis than to Athalie, and to Moliere's Etourdi than to Tartuffe. Go to Spain. My noble friend would give a longer term to forgotten works of Cervantes, works which nobody now reads, than to Don Quixote. Go to Germany. According to my noble friend's plan, of all the works of Schiller the Robbers would be the most favoured: of all the works of Goethe, the Sorrows of Werter would be the most favoured. I thank the Committee for listening so kindly to this long enumeration. Gentlemen will perceive, I am sure, that it is not from pedantry that I mention the names of so many books and authors. But just as, in our debates on civil affairs, we constantly draw illustrations from civil history, we must, in a debate about literary property, draw our illustrations from literary history. Now, Sir, I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works, to third-rate and fourth-rate works, a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. It is impossible to account for the facts which I have laid before you by attributing them to mere accident. Their number is too great, their character too uniform. We must seek for some other explanation; and we shall easily find one.

It is the law of our nature that the mind shall attain its full power by slow degrees; and this is especially true of the most vigorous minds. Young men, no doubt, have often produced works of great merit; but it would be impossible to name any writer of the first order whose juvenile performances were his best. That all the most valuable books of history, of philology, of physical and metaphysical science, of divinity, of political economy, have been produced by men of mature years will hardly be disputed. The case may not be quite so clear as respects works of the imagination. And yet I know no work of the imagination of the very highest class that was ever, in any age or country, produced by a man under thirty-five. Whatever powers a youth may have received from nature, it is impossible that his taste and judgment can be ripe, that his mind can be richly stored with images, that he can have observed the vicissitudes of life, that he can have studied the nicer shades of character. How, as Marmontel very sensibly said, is a person to paint portraits who has never seen faces? On the whole, I believe that I may, without fear of contradiction, affirm this, that of the good books now extant in the world more than nineteen-twentieths were published after the writers had attained the age of forty. If this be so, it is evident that the plan of my noble friend is framed on a vicious principle. For, while he gives to juvenile productions a very much larger protection than they now enjoy, he does comparatively little for the works of men in the full maturity of their powers, and absolutely nothing for any work which is published during the last three years of the life of the writer. For, by the existing law, the copyright of such a work lasts twenty-eight years from the publication; and my noble friend gives only twenty-five years, to be reckoned from the writer's death.

What I recommend is that the certain term, reckoned from the date of publication, shall be forty-two years instead of twenty-eight years. In this arrangement there is no uncertainty, no inequality. The advantage which I propose to give will be the same to every book. No work will have so long a copyright as my noble friend gives to some books, or so short a copyright as he gives to others. No copyright will last ninety years. No copyright will end in twenty-eight years. To every book published in the course of the last seventeen years of a writer's life I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives; and I am confident that no person versed in literary history will deny this,—that in general the most valuable works of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth of Nations, to Addison's Spectators, to almost all the great works of Burke, to Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, and, with the single exception of Waverley, to all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives. Can he match that list? Does not that list contain what England has produced greatest in many various ways—poetry, philosophy, history, eloquence, wit, skilful portraiture of life and manners? I confidently therefore call on the Committee to take my plan in preference to the plan of my noble friend. I have shown that the protection which he proposes to give to letters is unequal, and unequal in the worst way. I have shown that his plan is to give protection to books in inverse proportion to their merit. I shall move when we come to the third clause of the bill to omit the words "twenty-five years," and in a subsequent part of the same clause I shall move to substitute for the words "twenty-eight years" the words "forty-two years." I earnestly hope that the Committee will adopt these amendments; and I feel the firmest conviction that my noble friend's bill, so amended, will confer a great boon on men of letters with the smallest possible inconvenience to the public.

Prime Palaver # 5

Letters to the Librarian

Eric Flint

September 1, 2001

As a rule, as will be obvious to anyone who's read anything I've posted here, I fall on what you might call the "free and loose" side of the debate on electronic "piracy."  (I put the term in quotation marks because it's an absurd term to begin with.  Pirates are murderers, rapists and robbers. Online "pirates" are brats stealing chewing gum and scribbling graffiti on garage doors.)

Occasionally, however, some blithering idiot mistakes my position for his own. So I get, from time to time, letters of "congratulations" which reflect the failure of the sender to have either understood my position — or much of anything else involved in the issue.

Normally, I respond to these with a polite demurral and an explanation of the error involved.  Now and then, however, the attitude of the sender pisses me off enough that I let 'em have it. At which point, invariably, they complain bitterly about my "rudeness."

Indeed, the sender of the two letters posted below — who shall remain anonymous — complained about my responses. He informed me sternly that I clearly lacked "people skills," and that was no doubt the reason I found volunteer labor less efficient than professional.

No doubt. I bow to his wisdom. (I did not bother to respond to that final sally.) But I remain astonished at people who think they can begin a response to a point of mine by saying (see below) Bullshit! — and then get outraged when my own response is equally sharp.

I swear to God, what is wrong with some people? If you choose to play hardball with me, fine. But no complain because I sent a fastball across the plate. Wait'll you see the slider...

For whatever purpose it might serve — deter cocksure jackasses, if nothing else — I am posting below the exchange I had with this charming fellow. His messages are in italics, mine in regular font.

Eric Flint

To: Librarian@baen.com

Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 12:51 PM

Subject: a huge irony

There is a HUGE irony in Larry Niven having an ebook available for download thru the wonderful Baen electronic library... You see, Larry (along with Harlan Ellison...and I forget who the 3rd person was) just last week was involved in shutting down one of the better private FTP sites that specialised in ebooks.

As a direct result, many people have sworn to NEVER AGAIN *BUY* a book by any of these authors. As far as the ebook newsgroup and FTP users were concerned, Larry et.al. had just burned the local library.

Because as is implied in the essay on the Library "Home" page, that's exactly what ebooks are (regardless of origin or distribution control): library books. Free samples for trying out authors we might otherwise never read; free use for people who can't afford to buy books in ANY form. Either way, future sales for any author who gains new readers. Take away the library, and it DISCOURAGES reading now and in the future.

Readers buy books. No readers, no sales. D'oh!!

And yes, there are a few authors who fervently wish libraries were outlawed (including at least two major SF writers I know of, one of whom said so to my face!) but we'll leave them to their dark ages.

ERIC'S RESPONSE:

I don't know the details of the case you're talking about, but I'm wondering if what was involved is that the site did not ask Niven's permission. If so, then he has my blessing. You should not misunderstand my position. My books belong to me, not to anyone who chooses to steal them. And theft does not stop being theft simply because technology makes it easy. What would you think if I advanced the proposition that we should eliminate the concept of "murder" because some poisons are undetectable? Or that rape using drugs is not "really" rape because the victim doesn't remember it?

Bah. These are the sophistries of villains, as Heinlein once put it.

My books are the product of MY labor, not yours or anyone else. If I choose, as I did with the Free Library, to donate them for free public use, that's one thing. If someone else chooses, without my permission, to make a pirate copy of them that's another thing entirely. Mind you, in practice I probably wouldn't bother to do anything about it unless the site involved was trying to make money from selling my work. But the moral issue is unequivocal. I have nothing but contempt for the "information wants to be free" bullshit. That's the prattle of ignorant juvenile delinquents (who don't, as a rule, even have the excuse of being juveniles).

Eric Flint

PS. As for Niven, he has expressed to me in emails his basic agreement with the philosophy behind the Free Library. Which is why I suspect that you're giving me a very one-sided picture of what happened in the case of this unspecified site.

SECOND EXCHANGE:

Original Message

To: Librarian@baen.com

Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 1:06 PM

Subject: and as to out of print titles...

You say in one of the letters columns:

[NOTE from EF: what follows immediately is a quote from something I wrote.]

"I well understand the reasons that people would like to see OP titles in the Library. So would I. But you also have to understand the practical realities involved. The problem with "long lost" titles is that they are relatively expensive to put into electronic format, because they usually don't exist in that form. That means a lot of "hand labor" scanning in the old hardcopy, proofing them, etc. Or, even if they do exist in electronic format, unless it's something that Baen Books published recently (when it started doing everything "in house") the material has to be obtained from someone else, who will charge money for it."

Bullshit! Go to any of the more active ebook newsgroups and request a book, and someone who owns it in hardcopy will VOLUNTEER to scan it. And if you ask, eventually someone else will VOLUNTEER to proofread it... It may not get done this instant, but who cares, it's not like out of print books care if they're made available this instant or next month or next year, and whaddya want for free??

These people are EXPERIENCED at the task; they're hardly amateurs. So long as you won't be charging for the resulting download, they'd be happy to help. Why not take advantage of an existing labour pool that is also a reading audience and potential to expand your customer base?

Yeah, there's a lot of hand labour involved. But it doesn't have to cost Baen a single red cent. And guess what, it would garner Baen a lot of goodwill, which means more future customers, because no matter how they first encountered a given work, ultimately, readers all BUY books.

(I tellya, sometimes the corporate mindset is SOOOO blinkered...)

ERIC'S RESPONSE:

Well, I hadn't read this letter before I addressed the first, or my response would have been a lot less polite. Let me try to explain to you — pearls before swine, I suspect — what the moral issue involved is.

Has it ever occurred to you, in your solipsistic paradise, that such labor as proof-reading is done by real people — with bills to pay, just like you? What you propose, on one level, is that I substitute the systematic use of unpaid labor for theirs. Leaving aside the fact that doing so would be illegal (a major violation of minimum wage laws, for starters), I wouldn't do it in a million years anyway.

Leaving aside the ethical issues, because it would also be completely impractical. I can, in good conscience, use some volunteer labor for some projects which would never be done otherwise. Such as getting Niven et. al's FALLEN ANGELS into the Library. But leaving aside everything else, such volunteer labor is incredibly time-consuming and inefficient. You pronounce in your letter that such volunteers are "hardly amateurs." What a laugh! My friend, I have worked with volunteer scanners and proof-readers, when it was appropriate. The amount of extra work it loads on me is enormous. The work is NEVER done anywhere nearly as smoothly and as well as it is by professionals.

This is not a sneer at volunteers, it's simply a recognition of reality. (If you don't believe me, by the by, take a look at the "quality" of most of the stuff which is put on line by thieves.) Arrogant as people like you invariably are, you seem to think that anybody can easily do a good job of scanning and proof-reading old books. I can assure you, as someone with considerable experience at it, that the opposite is very much the case.

But let us pursue the matter further. The issue gets deeper. If I become dependent on volunteer labor to accomplish something, then I also willy-nilly make myself a hostage to the whims and opinions of my volunteers. This poses no insurmountable problem, perhaps, in certain kinds of charity work. But, dealing with publication, it would constitute a massive threat to freedom of the press. Not an immediate one, of course, but a corrosive agent does not stop being corrosive simply because it takes some time to work.

The existence of such "humdrum" folks as the professionals who do all the behind-the-scenes labor involved in publication is, I have no doubt, beneath contempt for such magnificent personages as yourself. But drive them out of existence and you have destroyed one of the prerequisites of freedom of the press as a practical proposition. To wit, that if I can put together the wherewithal to publish something, I can publish whatever I want because I can pay someone to do the work that I can't do. I don't have to cater to anyone.

Let's go further still. I didn't bother to deal with it in my letter that you cite, because I thought it was self-evident. Obviously it is not, since you are clearly oblivious to the fact (established by law, as well as morally correct) that I cannot simply at MY will choose — using whatever form of labor — to reissue whatever O/P title strikes my fancy. Except for something which is already in the public domain, those titles belong to someone else (or their estate) and I would first have to obtain their permission to do so. As a rule, that requires paying them.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, sir. You advance a proposal which presupposes that you can get what you want for "free." Well, it may be "free" to you but it certainly isn't free to anyone else. It's not free, first, for the person (or their heirs) who did the initial work of writing the book.  Or do you think that books spring full-blown from the brow of their creator, without labor, as happens in mythology? And it's certainly not free for me, because your proposal blithely assumes that I will be willing to donate many hours of my labor gratis for your entertainment.

What gives you that presumption? I know what I'm talking about, too. I spent, at a guess, three times as many hours getting Niven et. al.'s FALLEN ANGELS into the Library as I did for any other title. Why? Precisely because, in that instance, I had to use volunteer labor. Mind you, I much appreciate the effort those volunteers made. All credit to them. But only someone who lives in a virtual universe thinks that volunteer labor is anywhere close to being as efficient as professional labor. And all the various "dropped stitches" had to be fixed... by me, or by the two other PROFESSIONALS who donate some of their labor to the Library. For which neither I nor they got paid anything.

And now you insist that we do this on a full time basis? For what possible purpose, pray tell? So that you can be spared the horror and indignity of paying a few bucks for some books? And, meanwhile, we can't pay our mortgages — and I'm quite certain you aren't volunteering to pay it for us.

Get a life. Or don't, I can't say I really care. But do not presume to encroach on mine.

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 6

Eric Flint

April 15, 2002

Jim Baen and I set up the Free Library about a year and half ago. Leaving aside the various political and philosophical issues, which I've addressed elsewhere, the premise behind the Library had a practical component as well. In brief, that in relative terms an author will gain, not lose, by having titles in the Library.

What I mean by "relative" is simply this: overall, an author is far more likely to increase sales than to lose them. Or, to put it more accurately, exposure in the Library will generate more sales than it will lose.

As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.

Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.

What the Free Library provides-as do traditional libraries, or simply the old familiar phenomenon of friends lending each other books-is a way for people to investigate a new author for free, before they plunk down any money.

That was the premise behind the Free Library, when I first set it up. At the time, since I had no experience to go by, I was basing that on common sense as well as Jim Baen's experienced judgement as a longtime publisher.

Now, with a year and a half's experience with the Library actually established and running, our original assessment has been demonstrated in practice. The Library's track record shows clearly that the traditional "encryption/enforcement" policy which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that, based on FACTS.

Let me begin by posing a simple question. Does anyone have any real evidence that having material available for free online-whether legitimately or through piracy-has actually caused any financial harm to any author?

The entire argument for encryption rests precisely upon this PRESUMPTION. A presumption which has never once been documented or demonstrated-and which, to the contrary, has been cast into question any number of times.

I am about to cast it into question again. Here are a number of facts which you should consider:

1) The first title to go up into the Library was my own novel, Mother of Demons. That was my first published novel, which came out in print in September of 1997. At the time it went into the Free Library, in the fall of 2000, that novel had sold 9,694 copies, with a sell-through of 54%.

As of today, according to Baen Books-a year and a half after being available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions and no questions asked-Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies and now has a sell-through of 65%.

(An aside on publishing terminology. "Sell-through" refers to that percentage of books shipped which are actually sold. Many books are never sold at all, but are returned to the publisher. Sell-through is therefore always expressed as a percentage. "Net sales" essentially refers to the same thing, in absolute numbers.)

I would like someone to explain to me how almost doubling the sales and improving the sell-through by 11% has caused me, as an author, any harm? The opposite is in fact the case. Mother of Demons began its life as a typical first novel, with very modest sales and sell-through. Today, it has better than average sales and much better than average sell-through-a change that took place simultaneously with the book being available for free online.

To be sure, most of that improvement is not due to the Library. It's simply due, I'm quite sure, to the fact that I've become a better known author in the meantime. Still, it is impossible to argue that the Library has hurt me any. To the contrary, I think there is every reason to believe that the added exposure the Library has given me helped the sales of that book-as well as all of my other books.

And the exposure is considerable, by the way. The fact that being in the Library does not seem to have hurt sales of Mother of Demons in the least-to put it mildly!-is not due to the Library's obscurity. Quite the opposite, in fact. There were more than 130,000 visits to the Free Library in the last quarter of 2001-almost 1,500 a day.

To date, my best-selling title (as a solo author) has been my novel 1632. That book came out in hardcover in February 2000, and was reissued in paperback in February 2001. I put it in the Free Library at the same time as it came out in paperback format.

Today, more than a year later, the paperback edition of 1632 has a net sales of about 34,000 copies and has a sell-through of 88%. If being available for free in the Library has hurt me any, with that book, I'd be puzzled to see how.

Let's now look in closer detail at the progress of another title in the Library, a novel I co-authored with David Drake: An Oblique Approach, the first volume in the Belisarius series. I think these figures demonstrate the impact of the Library more clearly than any other.

An Oblique Approach went into the Library a few days after Mother of Demons-i.e., it's been available for free for a year and a half now. That novel first came out in paperback in March of 1998. (There was no hardcover edition.) Here are the royalty figures on that novel, beginning with the first period for which figures are available and ending with the last. The first column gives you the royalty period; the second, net sales of the book as of that period; the third, the current sell-through; the fourth and last column, the new sales which took place during that reporting period:

The most interesting-and unusual-aspect of these figures are the ones on the right, in the column titled "sales this period." From the beginning, An Oblique Approach has enjoyed an excellent sell-through, so it would be surprising to see much change there. (The average for SF paperbacks in the industry as a whole is no better than 50%, and probably a lot closer to 40%. In short, in terms of sell-through, An Oblique Approach is doing almost twice as well as the average.)

The overall sales figures are not especially surprising either. An initial "out of the gate" sales figure of about 30,000 is nothing outstanding, but is eminently solid for a paperback title. (The average paperback sells, traditionally, about 15,000 copies-but the actual figure has probably been lower for several years now because of a "soft" market.) And, given that the standard experience is that 80% of a book's sales happens in the first three months, it's not surprising that the sales are concentrated in that period. In the next period, January-June 1999, the novel had a solid 5000-plus sales. Thereafter...

What usually happens. Within a year after a novel comes out, the sales usually drop right through the floor. Thereafter, sales steadily dwindle away. And, sure enough: in the third and fourth periods, An Oblique Approach sold considerably less than a thousand copies each period-835 and 795 respectively, showing the expected slow and steady drop.

It's what happens next that is significant. Because, all other things considered, those "sales this period" figures should have kept steadily dropping. Slowly, perhaps, but what most certainly shouldn't have happened is a sudden rise in sales-and a rise which increases in the next period.

Nor can this be explained, as the sharp rise in sales of Mother of Demons perhaps can, as the result of me becoming better known as an author. David Drake, not me, is listed as the lead author of An Oblique Approach-and Dave has been a very well known SF author for twenty years. Granted, my increasing popularity as a writer was undoubtedly responsible for some of that increase. (Just as, for that matter, the fact that Dave's popular Lord of the Isles and With the Lightnings series started coming out during this period undoubtedly attracted some readers also.)

But... but...

Nonsense! Between the January-June 2000 reporting period and the period one year later, the sales for that title-which had now been out for two years, remember, long past the time when it should have been selling very much-were suddenly almost 250% higher. (239%, to be precise: 1904 compared to 795.)

What happened in the interim? Well, obviously I can't "prove" it, but it seems blindingly obvious to me that it was the fact that An Oblique Approach went into the Library in the fall of 2000 that explains most of that increase. It would certainly be absurd to claim that being available for free somehow hurt the novel's sales! I can guarantee you that most authors would be delighted to see a two-year-old title suddenly showing a spurt of new sales.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the second volume in the series, In the Heart of Darkness, shows much the same pattern. In the Heart of Darkness went into the Library at the same time as An Oblique Approach, a year and a half ago. In the last period before it appeared in the Library (Jan-June 2000), Heart of Darkness sold 1,704 copies. A year later, during the equivalent reporting period, it sold 1,886.

The difference is certainly not as dramatic as the difference in sales of An Oblique Approach, much less the near-doubling of sales which Mother of Demons experienced. Still, the mere fact that sales increased at all instead of declining is significant.

Before I move on to my next point, I want to take the time to emphasize the significance of these HARD FIGURES. I stress "hard figures" because those people arguing the "encryption/enforcement" side of the debate NEVER come up with hard figures. Harlan Ellison, for instance, screams that he has "Lost sales!" because of piracy-but, to the best of my knowledge, has never once even tried to demonstrate that this is true. Not once has he done more than endlessly assert the "axiom" that since a title of his was pirated he "must therefore" have lost sales of that title.

I think my hard figures demonstrate how absurd that claim is. It does not follow that simply because a copy is available for free that sales will therefore be hurt. In fact, they are more likely to be helped, for the simple reason that free copies-call them "samplers," if you will-are often the necessary inducement to convince people to buy something.

There's a different analogy which I think, in many ways, captures the reality even better. Anyone who has ever bought a car-new or used-knows perfectly well that one of the standard techniques used by a car salesman is to offer you the opportunity to take a "test drive." So far from being concerned that a test drive represents "lost mileage," car dealers know damn good and well that it's often the test drive which closes the sale.

Does it always? Of course not. Usually, in fact, people simply take the test drive and wind up walking away. Does the car dealer then start moaning about "lost sales," or whine about the mileage he's given up on a new car?

Hell, no. The dealer just shrugs his shoulders, writes it off to the inevitable overhead expense of his business, and offers the next customer a test drive. But if car dealers followed the moronic practices of most publishers (and, to the best of my knowledge, the entire music recording industry) they would sternly refuse to let anyone even sit in one of their cars-much less give it a test drive-unless they'd already paid for it.

I leave it to you to imagine just how long such a car dealer would stay in business. Sadly, the common sense of lowly car dealers is beyond the grasp of the supposedly sophisticated publishing industry.

As a practical proposition, I look on the Free Library as the literary equivalent of a "test drive." And, by the way, I've gotten many letters from people who've told me that's exactly how they eventually came to buy a book of mine. They heard about me, weren't sure... then tried out one of my novels (and/or another writer's) in the Library, and found themselves happy with the result.

Everyone should remember, also, that the titles available for free in the Baen Library-very much unlike pirated copies-have the following two unusual characteristics:

a) They are readily available in a well-known, well-advertised and STABLE web site. I stress "stable" because one of the inevitable characteristics of pirated copies is that trying to find them is a monstrous headache in the first place. For obvious reasons, those addresses tend to disappear constantly. In fact, every time I speak publicly on this issue I urge my audience-please! be my guest!-to test my claims by going online and trying to steal one of my titles. (The one you find easily and immediately in the Baen Free Library doesn't count, of course. That one is not pirated.) And I confidently advance the prediction that they will soon discover that the amount of time and hassle they have to go through in order to find a pirated copy somewhere of an Eric Flint title-again, excepting the legitimate copy available in the Free Library-is hardly worth the effort.

b) The titles-again, very much unlike the typical pirated product-are in excellent shape, having been professionally prepared, and are available for downloading in no less than five different electronic formats. (For which we even provide the software, if the reader doesn't have it already.)

Try finding ANY pirated copies of which you can say the same, even if you can find them in the first place. As anyone knows who has ever looked at a pirated edition, as a rule they are very sloppy scanned-and-barely-proofed editions which are miserable to read.

And yet... and yet... despite the fact that these COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE copies are available for free-easily, conveniently, and professionally prepared-you have seen for yourself that in no less than four instances I have been able to demonstrate no discernable financial damage done to me as the author. To the contrary, I have been able to advance a very strong case that the Library has helped the sales of those books.

In short, much like a smart car dealer, we not only allow people to "test drive" our writings-we also make sure that the showroom is clean, brightly lit, and the product itself is shiny and sparkling. And is located on a prominent corner on a major virtual boulevard. (And is well advertised-starting very soon, Baen Books will be putting ads for the Free Library in the back of many of its paper titles.)

2) Since we set up the Free Library, I've received a total of 1,161 letters to me as "Librarian." Well over a thousand letters in about a year and a half-and, at a rough estimate, I'd say that about two-thirds of those letters (certainly well over half) state specifically that, as a result of becoming exposed to an author through the Library, the sender of the letter went out and bought some book of theirs in a print edition. Very often, a number of books.

I will grant you immediately that this is purely anecdotal evidence. Still, the fact remains that I have well over a THOUSAND anecdotes. How many does Harlan Ellison have, based on which he filed his now-famous (or, in my opinion, notorious) lawsuit? Five? Six? As many as a dozen?

The thing you should not overlook for a moment is that everyone's argument in this dispute is based entirely on anecdotal evidence. (Except for me, I should say. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only author who has put up free titles and then tracked the actual effect on royalty statements.)

The difference is that I can marshal a huge number of anecdotes to support my viewpoint. My opponents can marshal, at most, a handful. And even that handful is suspect, since they base their logic on the assumption that simply because a title has been pirated that the author has therefore "lost sales." I think that assumption is highly dubious-and is precisely what needs to be proved in the first place. (See my various remarks elsewhere in the Free Library for an expansion on this point.)

Keep in mind the difference, because it's quite significant. Not all anecdotes are equal. I can point to hundreds of letters where a specific person says specifically: "based on reading Book X in the Library, I went out and bought it." Whereas the anecdotes of my opponents are not specific at all. In essence, what they do is simply demonstrate that someone put up a pirated edition somewhere. Fine. But it does not thereby follow that a SALE was lost. Who knows if the person who downloaded that title would have bought it in the first place? In order for my opponents to have anecdotes which carried the same weight as mine-even in quality, much less in quantity-they would have to show statements where a specific person stated that they had intended to buy a copy of Book X but didn't because they found a pirated one instead. If Harlan Ellison has even ONE anecdote of that nature, I'll be surprised.

3) Here's another anecdote. Last April, I attended an international conference in London on the current state of the e-publishing industry. In general, the tone of the conference was pessimistic-accurately reflecting the general state of the industry.

I was invited to come by the organizers more-or-less as the "devil's advocate." In my own remarks at the conference, I stated that the fundamental obstacle to the success of electronic publishing was the industry's obsession with encryption. The only successful electronic outlet I knew at the time-Fictionwise.com can now be added to the list, from what I can see-was Baen Books' Webscriptions. And that was precisely due to the fact that Baen made no attempt to encrypt its product. As a result, they were able to sell electronic books both cheaply and with no hassle and aggravation to their customers.

I measure "successful," by the way, using the only criterion that means much to me as an author: Webscriptions, unlike all other electronic outlets I know of, pays me royalties in substantial amounts. As of now, I've received about $2,140 in electronic royalties from Baen Books for the year 2000. (The last period reported.)

That sum is of course much smaller than my paper edition royalties, but it can hardly be called "peanuts." Every other electronic outlet I know of, in contrast, pays royalties-if at all-in two figures. My friend Dave Drake has given me permission to let the public know that his best-earning book published by anyone other than Baen, in one reporting period, earned him $36,000 in royalties for the paper edition-and $28 for the electronic edition. And that's about typical for even a successful book issued electronically.

In contrast, Dave earned probably about as much as I did in electronic royalties from Baen for the year 2000. (I don't know the exact figure, but since a lot of my Webscriptions royalties come from titles I co-authored with Dave, I'm sure the amounts are approximately equal.)

At the conference-at least in the public sessions-my remarks were basically greeted with pained silence. But, in private, several publisher representatives told me that they agreed with me-but also told me that trying to get the publishing industry to give up encryption would be impossible. Why? Basically because the corporate bean-counters who now run most of the publishing industry just can't bear the thought of-gasp-GIVING something away for free. Even if it benefits them in the long run.

There was one exception. A gentleman from a publishing house which primarily produces textbooks rose in support of my point. He stated that, much to their own surprise, his company had found that those textbooks which they made available for free online ALSO had the best sales.

4) A disconnected anecdote? No, not really. MIT Press discovered the same thing. A friend of mine sent me a letter recently after listening to the President of MIT on a radio talk show. Here is the relevant excerpt from his letter:

I just have a little more fuel for you to add to the fire. Yesterday on my way home from work I was listening to "All Things Considered" on NPR a little before 5pm CST. They had a story on MIT's offer to create a Web site for most of its classes and to post materials (outlines, detailed class notes, homework assignments, etc) from each course.

Besides being an interesting story in itself on free information on the net the guest, Charles Vest, president of MIT, as an aside mentioned that when college textbook presses (like the one at MIT) put up free e-text copies of their new textbooks at the same time they published the print version, sales of the print versions went UP.

If it works to increase the sale for things as over priced as the normal college textbook...

All right, I'll stop there. I believe I've provided enough evidence to support my point. Making one or a few titles of an author's writings available for free electronically in the Free Library seems to have no other impact, certainly over time, than to increase that author's general audience recognition-and thereby, indirectly if not directly, the sales of his or her books.

I believe it also-I leave it up to each individual to weigh this out for themselves-places such authors on what you might call the side of the angels in this dispute. For me, at least, this side of the matter is even more important than the practical side. It grates me to see the way powerful corporate interests have been steadily twisting the copyright laws and encroaching on personal liberties in order to shore up their profit margins-all the more so when their profit problems are a result of their own stupidity and short-sighted greed in the first place.

I will leave you all with one final anecdote. Napster, of course, is held up as the ultimate "villain" with regard to the so-called problem of online piracy. The letters I received as Librarian were addressed to the issue of books, not music. Yet I was struck by how often-perhaps in a hundred letters-the writers would mention their own experience with Napster. And, in every instance, stated that their purchases of CDs increased as a result of Napster-for the good and simple reason that because Napster enabled them to sample musicians, they bought music they would not otherwise have been tempted to buy because CDs are too expensive to experiment with.

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 7

Eric Flint

April 26, 2002

In the short time since the last Prime Palaver came out (#6), I've gotten a lot of letters. More than usual, because that Prime Palaver was cited on slashdot and was then spread widely across the internet.

A number of questions were raised in those letters, which I thought I should answer. But rather than answering them individually, I decided to take a number of them as the basis for a new Prime Palaver.

In what follows, the material in italics are excerpts from recent letters, followed by my response.

Much as you have stated in your letter (Prime Palaver #6), I find myself taking books for a test drive via the Free Library or Webscriptions. I will often just read the first couple of chapters and see if the book grabs me. If it does, then I go out and buy the printed book. I buy the printed book because I like to be able to read in various locations as opposed to sitting in front of the computer and hitting the page down key.

However, I wonder how the advent of better electronic reader hardware will affect your argument. Once a reader is produced that is as easy for me to use as turning the page of a book, I will probably quit buying print versions and only buy electronic editions (I have only so much space in my house).

When we get to that point, we can worry about it then. I'm not worrying about it now for two reasons:

1. I think we're a lot further away from an electronic reader which is really equivalent to a book than a lot of people seem to be. I could be wrong about that. But the fact remains that the introduction of e-books was not caused by any great consumer dissatisfaction with paper books. In a very real sense, this new technology is a supply looking for a demand -- and, so far at least, not finding much of one.

It remains to seen whether e-books will be analogous to CDs, which did replace vinyl records -- largely because the recording industry conspired to force them on everyone, by the way -- or to things like automatic transmissions and home food processors. In the case of the first, automatic transmissions crowded aside manual transmissions but did not eliminate them; and, in the case of the second, food processors are now found in some homes but have never replaced kitchen knives.

There's a lot to be said for the sheer simplicity of a paper book, when you get right down to it. To this day, I still find it much easier and quicker to look up a word in a paper dictionary or thesaurus than screwing around with the versions available on my computer.

2. But let us assume for the moment that e-book readers do eventually replace paper books altogether. Even in that case, I think all we'd have to do -- at most -- is adjust the way the Library works somewhat. I'm not even sure we'd have to make any changes at all.

One thing you have to understand about this whole controversy is how much of it is sheer hot air. Many authors and most publishers, when they address this issue, give people the impression they're at risk of losing their shirt through electronic "piracy."

That's pure hogwash. Here is the reality:

Every professional in the industry knows perfectly well that, with a small number of exceptions, 80% of the sales of a book are going to happen in the first three months after the book appears on the shelves. And once a book is more than two or three years old, as a rule, it will sell very few copies. By "very few," I'm talking about a few hundred copies a year. That's true even for paper editions today, much less electronic editions -- which today sell maybe 5 or 10 copies a year of that same book.

Granted, some books do better than that. On the other hand, lots of books do worse than that. In fact, it is not at all uncommon to see books going out of print within a year or two after they come out.

So let's examine the math. For the sake of argument, let's say 500 copies of an older title are sold per year at $6.99 each, which is now the most common price for a mass market paperback. That's probably a fairly reasonable average. Rounding off slightly, that's a gross sales of $3500 -- TOTAL. That money then gets split all over the place. The bookstores and distributors will take about half of it (roughly), leaving $1750 for the publisher and author. The author will usually get 8% of the retail price, i.e., out of that total income of $3500 he or she will get $280.

These figures are all derived from paper editions, but I think it's fair to assume that the numbers involved would stay roughly the same even if all books started being produced electronically. Not even the wildest enthusiast for electronic publishing has ever tried to argue that it would produce a major increase in the income of authors.

(The main argument they advance is that it would make it possible for more authors to "get a place in the sun," by removing the bottleneck which they believe paper publishers create in the pipeline from writers to readers. Personally, I'm highly skeptical of the claim, for reasons explained below in response to the different question regarding print-on-demand. But, even if true, no-one is really trying to claim that authors will suddenly see their incomes climb rapidly.)

So. Can we all puh-leese "get real" here for a minute? Granted, $280 is not small change. But it's also hardly the kind of sum which is going to make or break any author's budget, is it? So, in the real world, how much would it REALLY hurt an author to have one -- or even five -- older titles up in the Library for free? When, on the other side of the ledger, that very modest lost income (assuming nobody bought those books, which is highly unlikely) generated sales of new books coming out -- which are NOT available in the Library -- because they enabled lots of potential new readers to sample the writer? Keeping in mind that it's new book sales which keep authors afloat financially, 99.9% of the time.

We do not put brand new books up in the Library, with a few exceptions. My general rule of thumb is that I put a title up in the Library three months after it has come out in paperback and three months after it has cycled through for the last time in Webscriptions. That means, for lead titles, that the reader is given no less than three chances to buy the book before they can get it for free: 1) the hardcover edition; 2) Webscriptions (usually twice, here, because the same title is typically recycled through when the paperback edition comes out); and, 3) the paperback edition.

Furthermore, we don't put all the books in a series up in the Library. For instance, a reader can look at the first three volumes of the Belisarius series in the Library. But if you want to keep following the series, you'll have to pay money for the rest.

(I wouldn't have put up the third book in the series in the Library, by the way, except that Destiny's Shield happened to fall through the cracks in terms of timing and so there was no electronic copy available for sale. After a number of our fans complained to us that they wanted to be able to get the entire series in electronic format, Dave Drake and I agreed to put Destiny's Shield in the Library, since there was no immediate prospect of it being available for sale electronically. Normally, we'll only put up the first two books in a series.)

In short, we've struck what I think is a reasonable compromise with our readers -- and, judging from the results, our readers feel the same way about it. Most people are not squalling brats demanding to have their cake and eat it too, and they're well aware that authors need to make a living and commercial publishers need to turn a profit. As long as readers think that a publisher is selling books in a reasonable and fair-minded way, they'll be satisfied.

Baen Books provides its readers with several ways to "check out" an author before they have to spend any money. They can read sample chapters of almost every book -- usually the first 25% or so of the novel, which is enough to find out if someone is interested in the story. Then, for a number of authors, they can read complete novels in the Library. Finally, for those who get really interested in an author or series, they can either read the snippets posted in Baen's Bar or see them collected in the Dahak site -- before the novel even appears in print.

(Dahak is a web site which collects, with Baen's permission, the snippets of upcoming novels posted in Baen's Bar by various authors. You can find it at: http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/)

Then -- this is the ultimate key to the whole thing -- when the time comes for them to plunk down some money, and they want an electronic edition, they can get it CHEAPLY (for less than a paperback) and in a format which is TROUBLE-FREE. They can download an unencrypted copy in whatever format suits them, and they can then modify or adapt that any way they find convenient to fit their personal needs.

In short, even if we assume that all sales were electronic, there is simply no incentive for anyone -- with a few exceptions, which I'll get to in a moment -- to "steal" an electronic edition.

The key is the cheapness and simplicity of the edition which people buy. It's the combination of the Library and the way Webscriptions works that does the trick.

Why? Because almost everyone understands, on at least a subconscious level, that "time is money." For the great majority of people, "saving" $4 or $5 is simply not worth the time and trouble they would have to go through to find a pirated edition -- even leaving aside the fact that most pirated editions are very poor-quality texts. I am utterly confident that, given the manifestly fair and reasonable way that my publisher sells electronic editions, that 99% of my potential customers will not hesitate to buy whichever of my books they might find of interest. And, what's far more important, the size of that "99%" grows because of the way my publisher sells books.

My income is determined by the absolute number of sales of my books. I get a certain percentage of the retail price of a book in the form of royalties. (Which ranges from 8% for a paperback to my share of the 20% which the authors get for a given month's Webscriptions.) So figure out the math. Let's say that, as a result of the free and easy way Baen combines sales with free copies, my "99%" drops to "98%" -- but the absolute number of sales increases.

What do I care? And why -- talk about ironies -- does an industry which routinely accepts the fact that at least 50% of the books it produces will never get sold work itself into a lather over the possibility that it's losing (at most!) 0.1% due to online "piracy"?

I might mention, as well, that my approach has the additional advantage that at least some of the people who wouldn't like my books get to find out before they've spent any money. That's valuable to me also, as an author, because word-of-mouth works both ways. Someone who has spent money on something they're unhappy with is a lot more likely to denigrate it publicly than someone who was able to check it out for free. In the latter case, there's no hard feelings involved. Someone who bought a book of mine and didn't like it may well to go out of their way to tell their friends it's a lousy book. Whereas, if they read it for free, they're far more likely to say something like: "Well, I didn't care for it -- but, what the hell, check it out for yourself. It doesn't cost anything."

Will there be exceptions? Sure. There are basically four categories of people who will take free copies but won't spend money on them, even on cheap editions. But in three out of four of those categories, the reasons are completely legitimate. As follows:

1. The first category are the only crooks involved. These are the types -- we've all met people like this -- who just get some kind of weird kick out of cheating. They basically steal for the sake of it, not because they're really forced to by any monetary concerns.

But this problem -- which is really what ALL the fuss is about -- is in my opinion picayune. I'm absolutely convinced of two things:

a) Almost all "online pirates" fall into this category -- except for those who are just enthusiastic fans of a given writer and don't realize that they may be annoying the author by e-publishing their stuff. An author can easily deal with such fans by simply sending them an email asking them to cease and desist. It does NOT require rewriting the Bill of Rights or declaring virtual martial law.

b) Leaving aside the fans -- who are typically avid book-buyers -- I doubt very seriously if 95% of these so-called "online pirates" ever READ the book once they've swiped it. And 99% of them never would have bought it anyway, so there's no real material loss involved.

2. The second category are young people. Teenagers, basically, whose income is so low than even $4 or $5 is an obstacle for them. My attitude here is that giving such kids free copies will only benefit me in the long run, in the same way that libraries have traditionally been the way that authors develop a following among young readers. (That's how I became a fan of such writers as Heinlein, for instance.) And, again, they wouldn't have bought a copy ANYWAY -- so where's the harm?

An aside here. I find it amazing how many people involved in this dispute can't seem to understand that, outside of the abstract world of mathematics, you can't subtract anything from zero. The concept of "-1" does not apply here. If an author would not have sold a book ANYWAY, then "losing that sale" is just a meaningless noise.

Being charitable, I will assume that perhaps these authors are confusing the difference between a paper copy and an electronic copy. As peculiar as it seems, some science fiction authors seem unable to grasp the distinction between molecules and electrons. So let me try to walk them through it:

If somebody steals a molecular book -- i.e., shoplifts a paper edition from a walk-in bookstore -- then someone has suffered a loss. The bookstore, directly; and the author, indirectly. That's because molecules take up a lot of space, and require a considerable expenditure of time and effort to move from one place to another. Most bookstores do not carry more than one copy of most titles. So if a shoplifter steals a copy, then NO-ONE ELSE can buy it -- for a period of, usually, several weeks if not months. (Which is how long it would take most bookstores to notice the loss in inventory and order and receive a replacement copy -- assuming they did so at all.) Thus, during the intervening period of time, it is at least possible that the author suffered a lost sale from a potential customer.

But it ought to be blindingly obvious that none of this applies to electronic "shoplifting." Electrons are not molecules. Someone who downloads a pirated edition is not simultaneously preventing someone else from downloading a legitimate copy. So the only possible loss involved comes IF the "pirate" would have paid money for it in the first place.

I submit that, 99% of the time (at least), that is simply not true. 99% of the so-called "online piracy" is, quite literally, meaningless to an author in financial terms. In fact, it probably works to their advantage in the long run simply by increasing their public profile -- what writers often call "audience recognition."

3. The third category are people who, though not young, suffer from basically the same kind of "disability" as teenagers. Only in their case, the disability is a medical one. The biggest category here is probably people who are blind or suffer severe vision problems. As a rule, though not always, these people are also living on a very tight budget.

My attitude toward them is twofold. First, I think you really have to be a complete jackass to begrudge a free copy of your books to people whose lives are already hard enough as it is. As far as I'm concerned, making free copies available to people with such medical disabilities is just part and parcel of being a civilized human being.

Take the book with my compliments. Please. (I might mention, by the way, that my opinion is also that of society at large. The copyright laws exempt, for instance, Braille editions.)

Secondly -- to be completely cold-blooded about it -- even in money terms I probably gain. First, because they would most likely not have bought the book anyway. And, secondly, because this is also word of mouth advertising. Does anyone think blind people don't talk about the books they've read with their family and friends? And, to boot, give it word-of-mouth advertising which is probably even more positive than usual. One of the real problem which blind readers face -- I've gotten a number of letters from them on this subject -- is the very limited availability of popular modern titles in a format which they can use.

4. The final category are people who are "handicapped" in geographic terms. Basically, people who live in areas of the world or have occupations which (for a variety of possible reasons) make it essentially impossible for them to obtain a copy for sale. Either because their income is too low and/or the exchange rate is too steep, or shipping costs are astronomical, or -- simplest of all -- there are neither bookstores nor a reliable distribution network.

Again, my attitude is: Take the free copy with my compliments. To begin with, they wouldn't have bought anything anyway. (Let all of us learn the mantra: zero from zero... is zero.) Secondly...

Who knows? Exchange rates fluctuate, economies improve as well as decline, transportation and distribution networks develop, people change jobs, etc., etc. The day might come when being relaxed about free copies produces a fan base in some part of the world an author never would have expected.

A concrete example, here:

I personally know of at least one group of sailors in the US Navy who have become fans of my writing, over the past couple of years. (And fans of several other Baen authors, as well.) Most of that is NOT the result of sales. The middle of the Pacific Ocean is not the best place in the world to buy a book, for reasons which are obvious. But the advantages of online communication have made it possible for them to read a lot of my stuff. Some of it through Webscriptions, a lot of it for free.

Most if not all of those sailors are young, and they will not spend the rest of their lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And, given the kind of training they will have received, will presumably enjoy a solid income in the years to come. I feel confident that a certain percentage of that income will get spent on some of my books -- a lot more than would have been, had I conducted myself like a stupid dog in a manger, snarling at the world because I didn't understand that:

Zero from zero... is ZERO.

The truth is that there is nothing involved in electronic publishing that really presents any qualitatively new problems, when it comes to the issue of the role of free copies in affecting an author's income. (And let me take the time here, once again, to urge everyone to read the brilliant speeches on copyright given by Macaulay before Parliament back in 1841 -- over a century and a half ago -- which said all that really needs to be said on that issue. You'll find them in the Library as "Prime Palaver #4".)

To illustrate my point, I will use another real-life example:

Until recently, my wife Lucille worked in a steel mill. There are quite a few steelworkers who read a lot, but as a rule they do not read science fiction. If they're male, they're far more likely to read mysteries or techno-thrillers; if female, romance novels.

However, a number of them became curious when they discovered that one of their co-workers was married to a science fiction author. Since I get a certain number of free copies from my publisher, I told Lucille to feel free to hand out some of them to her co-workers.

She did so. Within about a year, those free copies circulated quite a bit through the mill, which, being one of the largest in the United States, had a work force of several thousand people. I wound up being one of the few SF authors in existence with an informal fan club among steelworkers -- many of whom then proceeded to BUY copies of my books. (I'm not guessing, by the way. Several of these steelworkers organized a signing for me at the local Barnes & Noble, as a result of which the B&N staff told me they sold out almost all the titles of mine they had in stock at the time.)

Recently, that steel company went bankrupt. (LTV Steel, and if you think the music recording industry is run by a pack of greedy scoundrels, you oughta take a look at those sweethearts. LTV top management, of course, walked away with millions of dollars in bonuses -- presumably for the good job they did in driving the company under.)

So that informal Eric Flint fan club no longer exists.

No... not there. But those steelworkers did not vanish into thin air. They've been getting jobs elsewhere, and the word of mouth they spread about my writing continues to unfold. Two of them, a married couple, got jobs working in the gambling industry. (He in security, she as a dealer.) They're also friends of ours, and when my wife and I met them for a dinner a couple of months ago, they mentioned that some of their co-workers in the casino had gotten interested in my work -- and, again, because of a free copy which these ex-steelworkers had lent to them.

That's how it works. Authors and publishers, instead of obsessing over "lost sales," would do far better to concentrate on figuring out ways to maximize their audience exposure. And there, if anything, electronic publishing provides even more and better avenues than traditional publishing.

You suggest your physical sales increase even though a book is available online for free. I am curious if people are reading the entire book online and then purchasing the physical copy? If so why? I know that I've borrowed the first couple of books of a series, then read the series and bought the first books just to have the whole set, is that what they're doing? Are they buying the physical one as they like to hold it? Is it that they figure they should pay and buying the book is how?

I've found that the pattern varies widely. People all have different preferences in how they read, and, obviously, feel differently about whatever their "obligations" might be.

What I find most interesting, however, is what seems to be the most common pattern emerging -- judging, at least, from the 1200 or so letters I've gotten. More and more people seem to want a copy of a book they like in both formats: paper as well as electronic.

That's not at all surprising, when you stop and think about it. Each format has its advantages. Most people find paper books easier and more comfortable to read. At the same time, even those people run across situations where having an electronic version is handy. The most common reason mentioned in the letters are the exigencies of travel. Sometimes the travel involved is long-distance, such a vacations; but, often enough, it's simply commuting travel or on-the-job travel. Hauling around a lot of paper books is obviously a pain in the neck. And so people find it convenient to have a number of the books they're currently reading also available to them in a format they can read on an e-book.

Provided, of course, that the e-book wasn't so loaded down with encryption and restrictions as to make it more of a nuisance than it was worth.

I strongly suspect that's the real future we're going to be seeing in publishing, in the decades to come. I don't think electronic books will replace paper books so much as they will become a complementary, parallel format. And I suspect the closest historical analogy will be the way vinyl records and tapes co-existed for decades in music recording. Each had its advantages. Some people listened only to vinyl; some, only to tapes. But most people mixed-and-matched in whatever proportion suited their own preferences and lifestyle.

I enjoyed "Introducing the Baen Free Library" and hope the experiment works out well for all concerned. I'd like to suggest a complimentary experiment: demand publishing of out-of-print titles. My experience as a small-scale publisher of technical works is that the economies of scale in offset printing require print runs of thousands of copies. My guess is that, in the arena where Baen Books sells, the minimum is more like tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies.

[Note from Eric: No, it's not that high. Jim Baen has told me that 15,000 copies is about the minimum print run for a mass market paperback.]

As a result, many fine works go out of print and are only available on the used marketplace (if at all). Demand publishing, which uses print runs of hundreds (or even dozens) of copies, may be able to make some of these works available.

I think the advocates of print-on-demand tend to overstate its advantages -- and rather drastically. No matter how good technology gets, there are just some basic realities -- which ultimately go back to the laws of thermodynamics, when you get right down to it -- which will always make "one-off" production more expensive than mass production. So, while I think print-on-demand will prove a blessing for a lot of "niche" markets, I doubt it will ever play much of a role in mass market publishing.

Out-of-print popular fiction titles are not, I suspect, one of those "niches." The reason is because the cost of producing a book is primarily the start-up cost, not the actual production costs. This is something a lot of people don't understand about publishing, and it's the reason they have such wildly unrealistic expectations for what electronic publishing or print-on-demand might be capable of.

A lot of people seem to think the big cost in producing a book is the cost of the paper, ink, and binding.

Nope. That only becomes true with really major print runs -- i.e., best selling titles which have print runs measured in the hundreds of thousands. And those are precisely the titles which would be the least suitable for print-on-demand.

The major costs, for the great majority of popular fiction titles, basically fall into two broad categories:

1) Money to the writer and the artist who does the cover art. (And don't think cover art doesn't apply to electronic books. It'll be needed for advertising and promotion, if nothing else -- and I'm already getting letters from people asking us to put up better resolution versions of the cover art than Baen's web site currently has available. I won't be surprised if we eventually wind up doing it. People like cover art -- which means, first, they'll get it; and, second, it'll have to be paid for.)

That expense, the money paid to the author and artist, has to be covered regardless of the format: mass-run paper, print-on-demand paper, or electronic. And while it is affected by the size of the print run, in the sense that an author who isn't going to get a big print run won't get a large advance, so what? Relative to the production cost, it's still a significant chunk of the expense.

Nor, by the way, does this change simply because a book is out-of-print. Out-of-print is not the same thing as being in the public domain. Almost all the out-of-print titles which people would like to see reissued in science fiction are still under copyright. That means that a publisher has to advance the money to get the rights, either to the author or to the author's estate.

Yes, the amount of money involved is usually lower than it is with a currently active writer's new titles. So what? The reason the book is out-of-print in the first place is because it stopped selling very well. That means the projected income is going to be relatively low also.

The other major category of costs is what you can call the publisher's overhead. That includes everything that a publisher has to do to stay in business: cover his payroll, his office expenses, mortgage or lease on his building, etc., etc. And, although this is not usually considered an "overhead" expense, you have to include in this an average profit rate which allows him to keep going.

This is the category that I find so many people who are advocates of the wonders of e-publishing or print-on-demand tend to get absolutely pie-in-the-sky about. Ultimately, a lot of them seem to think that the publishing/editing side of this industry is basically the equivalent of medieval robber barons demanding tolls from innocent passers-by -- so they can all be gotten rid of.

Sorry, that's nonsense. I don't care what format books get published in -- traditional paper, print-on-demand, or electronic -- you simply can't eliminate the costs of publishing and editing as such. That's because these costs are necessary, not optional.

What a publishing company does, in essence, is this: They do all the work for the public of finding the writers who are worth publishing and making sure that the product is up to snuff by the time it appears for public consumption. That's putting it crudely, but pretty accurately.

People who think you can bypass this process are, frankly, living in a dream world. I'll be blunt. There is so much lousy writing being produced out there that SOMEBODY has to weed through it. What a publisher does is provide that service for the public. That means that the average reader does not, time after time, have to wade through the "slush pile" to find the books worth reading.

But that's just the start of it. Because there is no sharp line between "good stuff" and "bad stuff." When you get to the "gray area" -- which, by the way, includes almost all books written -- you start entering the editing/prepping stage of the business.

I'll use myself as an example. Compared to most authors, I write very clean and polished final manuscripts. (I'm not guessing. I've been told that by editors and production managers with lots of experience.) But no manuscript of mine -- not one -- has ever gone through the production process without getting a fair amount of "prep work."

The first stage of it is editing, as such. When I was a less experienced author, this involved a lot more work from my publisher and editor than it usually does today. But it still involves a fair amount.

Again, I'll be concrete. My latest novel, The Tyrant, is the 13th novel of mine which has come out in print. In addition, I've written a number of shorter-length pieces -- ranging from short stories to short novels -- which have appeared in several anthologies. My editor, Toni Weisskopf, read through the manuscript of The Tyrant carefully. This takes many hours of work -- which has to be paid for, and at the salary scale this level of professional experience is going to get. Toni Weisskopf cannot eat air nor pay her mortgage with virtual money.

Based on Toni's editing, we made a number of changes in the text. Then the book had to be prepared for publication. That meant, first, that another skilled professional -- Nancy Hanger -- had to translate my simple word processing manuscript file into a format suitable for publication -- in either an electronic or paper format. (Actually, what happens nowadays is that everything gets put into an electronic format first, and is then modified for the specific needs of Webscriptions and the printer.)

Nancy Hanger cannot eat air. She cannot pay her bills with virtual money. Note, furthermore, that the cost of her labor -- as with Toni's -- is fixed. Whether the manuscript Toni and Nancy work on winds up being produced in a mass print run or -- theoretically, if Baen did it, which they don't -- for a print-on-demand edition, or for a purely electronic edition, it DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE. The cost is essentially the same.

That's also true for the next stage in the process, which is the proof-reading and correction of errors. Once Nancy has a good "final" publisher-ready text, Baen prints up copies of it and it is distributed to professional proof-readers. (The author gets sent a copy also -- these are called "page proofs," by the way -- and smart authors always proof-read. An author is likely to catch some continuity lapses which a proof-reader might miss because they're focusing on the actual text.)

Again -- it all costs money. And -- again -- the expense involved is basically fixed. It doesn't matter if those hours are spent proof-reading the latest Tom Clancy or J.K. Rowling title, or a title which is going to have very modest sales. The cost is FIXED. Nor can the publisher stint on it, either, because this is part of what the public is paying for. The public will insist -- with its pocketbook -- that any professionally-produced title meets at least minimal level professional production standards.

All right. I'll stop there, because I think I've made my point. There are a lot of other costs which I haven't even mentioned, and those costs are also basically fixed. Just to name two, my publisher can't live on air or pay his mortgage with virtual money either, so his income and expenses have to be covered. And to run a publishing house, he needs a staff which does more than simply the production work. He needs a business manager, for starters. That's Marla Ainspan. She can't eat air either.

And that's the whole problem with most of the expectations people have about print-on-demand. They either never think about this, or they blithely dismiss it. Sorry, you have to think about it -- and you can't dismiss it at all.

A print-on-demand book is still going to cost a publisher quite a bit of money to prepare. And he's not going to do it unless he has reason to believe the income will cover (at a minimum) his expenses. The problem, for a mass market popular fiction publisher, is that -- unlike, say, a textbook or encyclopedia publisher -- he can't charge that high a price per unit. Thus, the level of expenses, most of them fixed, is such that in order to cover it... he pretty much has to have sales numbered in the thousands of copies. How many thousands? That depends on the format. A few thousand, for hardcovers, which have a higher profit margin per unit; probably at least ten thousand for a mass market paperback.

But, if that's true, then what's the point of print-on-demand? If you have to sell 10,000 copies of a book anyway... then why not do a mass print run of 15,000 copies -- which is quite a bit cheaper, per unit, than printing them one at a time? And allows you to use the existing and well-established distribution network instead of creating one?

Which also costs money. Sorry, but there really ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I'm not sure, because I've never examined the question closely, but I suspect the costs of running a print-on-demand establishment would be a lot higher on the distribution end of the business also. Because you'd have to replace a small number of generally low-skilled employees, who are basically just keeping the shelves stocked and collecting money -- a book supermarket, essentially -- with a larger number of better-trained employees providing customers with one-on-one service.

That's the basic reason I'm skeptical that print-on-demand is ever going to amount to much, at least when it comes to mass market commercial fiction. I can see where the economics might make sense for titles which, individually, have a high enough profit margin. But, pretty much by definition, that rules out the "mass market."

To your opponents, used books are the worst crime. The author gets no money, yet money changed hands! I do feel a bit guilty buying used books. But, those authors I like get sales as I rapidly purchase the author's other books or buy their new books as they are released. I'm sure this behavior is no surprise to you.

I am an enthusiastic supporter of the used book industry. I also think those authors -- led, sadly, by the Writer's Guild -- who are currently raising a fuss because Amazon is advertising used copies alongside new ones are... um. I'm trying to be polite about this, which ain't easy. The words which immediately come to my mind are "cretins" and "imbeciles."

Again, the problem is that a lot of people just can't understand the difference between a real loss and a virtual one. Or, as I've put it elsewhere, they really think you can subtract from zero.

An author only suffers a loss from a sale of a used book if two conditions are true:

First, the used copy was bought instead of a new copy.

Second, the used copy leads to no further sales of that author's books.

In the vast majority of instances, these two conditions do not apply. Let's go through this, systematically.

First, why do people buy used copies in the first place? Simply because they're cheaper? As a rule, no -- and the reason is because the "cheapness" is highly relative. That's especially true with used copies bought online, which (at least for paperbacks) are usually as expensive or even more expensive than new copies.

I know whereof I speak, by the way, because in addition to my writing I also do a lot of work as an editor reissuing old science fiction authors. The stories I'm reissuing were written long before the advent of modern computer technology, and are almost never available in electronic format. That means I have to track down a paper copy of the title and get it turned into electronic format. (Either by using a typist or scanning-and-proofing.)

I can only find a copy of these titles used. They simply aren't available in a current edition. (Which is self-evident. If they were still in print, I wouldn't be RE-issuing them in the first place.)

As a result, I've used Amazon's used book service quite often. And, with almost no exceptions, found that the cost of a used book purchased online is higher than what it would have cost me in a new edition.

Why? Because of the same basic laws of thermodynamics I referred to earlier with regard to print-on-demand. A new title, distributed through Amazon, is able to take advantage of all the benefits of mass scale production and distribution. Amazon has that title immediately available, and if you simply add it to other titles you purchased simultaneously, you can drastically reduce the shipping and handling cost. Which, for a single paperback, is a very hefty percentage of the total price. In the case of used books purchased online, more often than not, the shipping and handling charge is higher than the cost of the book itself.

What's the advantage of buying a used copy for $3 instead of $7 -- when you're then going to have to pay $4 in shipping and handling costs? Sure, you have to pay S&H on new titles also. But, because they are new, you can use Amazon's existing distribution network and, at least most of the time, cut the cost a great deal.

You usually can't do that with used books. Not, at least, unless you order all of them at once through the same used bookstore. But in my experience, typically, that's not what happens. I find Title X is being sold by Book Dealer 1, Title Y by Book Dealer 2, etc. So I wind up spending twice as much on shipping as I do on the books themselves. (On average, I'd say the used books I've purchased through Amazon cost somewhere around $8 apiece -- just about the same as if I'd walked into a bookstore and bought a new copy.)

And then... you get a USED copy. Even copies which are in good condition are still thirty or forty years old. Which means you're losing that much in the way of "shelf life" in your own book collection.

So why do I do it? Simple. I have no other option, that's why. And that, right off, is what accounts for a lot of used book sales.

But let's take the case where a book is available in both a new and a used format. Why do people buy the used one?

Simply because it's cheaper?

As a rule -- no. They don't buy the used copy simply because it's cheaper. They buy it because it's cheap enough that they're willing to pay the money -- but WOULD NOT pay the money needed to get that book in a new edition.

Again: Zero from zero... is zero. If someone would not have bought a new copy ANYWAY, the author has lost nothing. In fact, the author is like to have gained -- because if the buyers discover the book is to their liking, they are far more prone to buy a new copy of something else written by that same author.

Duh.

I swear to God, the sheer stupidity of the Writer's Guild's position is mind-boggling. AMAZON IS DOING NOTHING NEW. Used books have been around for centuries. And they have always provided authors with the same very valuable function: much like libraries, in a different way, they provide people with a comparatively painless "entry level" way of experimenting with different authors. They are one of the principal means by which an author expands his or her audience. Any author who doesn't understand that is incapable of seeing beyond their nose.

Again, I will speak from personal experience. NOT ONE of the science fiction authors who became my favorites when I was a teenager arrived at that position because I bought a new book of theirs. I COULDN'T AFFORD IT. So I read library copies... and I haunted the used book stores.

As the years went by, of course, I started buying new editions of their writings. Often enough, over the years, I bought several different copies of the same book. So, in the long run, those authors made money over and over again from the fact that various versions of their writings were available to me at "entry level."

You want what is perhaps the ultimate example of how this can pay off in the long run?

Consider one of those authors: James H. Schmitz. Beginning in the early 60s, a teenager named Eric Flint became acquainted with his writings -- entirely through library and used copies. Thus began what proved to be a lifelong devotion on my part to that particular author.

Beginning in the late 60s, I began buying James H. Schmitz in new editions -- any time I could find them. I did continue to buy used copies of titles which were not available any other way. I didn't even consider used copies, however, if a new one was available. Why? Because I knew by then that I wanted maximum shelf life -- so I could read the book again and again, as the years passed.

I still have, in my library, a copy of a book of his I bought back then: the 1973 Berkley Medallion paperback edition of his novel The Eternal Frontiers. It's... in sad shape. Today, the pages are all yellow, the glue long ago disintegrated, and the book is held together with a rubber band.

But, it doesn't matter. I won't ever have to read that copy of it again -- because, as of September this year, a brand new edition is coming out. A big fancy trade paperback published by Baen Books called Eternal Frontier, which contains that novel along with many other stories written by Schmitz -- most of which have not been reissued in decades.

I edited that book, along with Guy Gordon. Forty-some-odd years ago, a teenager bought a few used copies of Schmitz's writings. Decades later -- directly as a result -- that same person edited the reissue of everything James H. Schmitz ever wrote. (Something which never happened during his own lifetime, by the way.)

"Lost sales." Yeah, right. Forty years ago, James H. Schmitz "lost" a handful of sales to Eric Flint, which might have brought him... maybe a dollar's worth of income. (Actually, more like a quarter. Books in those days sold for 35 to 50 cents. Schmitz would have gotten 3-4 cents for every new copy sold, and I couldn't have "cheated" him out of more than five or six sales because that was as many books as he had in print.)

I don't know the exact figures, but I'm quite certain that as of now -- with five volumes of the reissue in print and two more to come -- the heirs of James Schmitz have received somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000 in royalties. Even allowing for inflation...

"Lost sales," my ass.

Yes, granted, that's an extreme example. But it illustrates graphically my whole point. Used books, like free library copies, are simply an investment in the future for authors. That's all. They are not lost sales. They are really sales stored up for the future -- and earning the equivalent of compound interest.

Do you think other authors in the library would be willing to come forward with similar statistics? I realize this might be unlikely (since many consider money quite private), but people could try to explain away your success with the library as the fluke of a single author whose popularity is on the rise. They'd have a much harder time explaining away multiple authors from the library all showing the same increase in sales (if, indeed, everyone else's sales have also increased).

There are at least two who will -- David Drake and Mercedes Lackey. I just got a letter from Misty telling me that her royalty income for a number of her older titles climbed dramatically after she put a few of her books in the Library. As soon as she gets a chance, she'll send me the raw data and I'll put it up in analytical form in the Library as I did with my own titles. (This will probably take a few weeks, though. Both Misty and I are busy.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Misty's experience is that the titles involved are not in the Library -- in fact, they're issued by a different publisher than Baen altogether. So what seems to be happening here is pure "cross-over." People read some of her Baen titles in the Library -- people whom, Misty suspects, probably never read anything of hers before -- and then started buying a number of her books. And now the results are starting to show up in a different publisher's royalty statements. (Baen's haven't been issued yet for the equivalent period, so we don't know if the same will be true for Baen titles. Probably, but we won't know for a while.)

And, as I said, Dave Drake's agreed to do so also. He sent Baen Books an email yesterday telling them to send me whatever royalty figures on his Baen titles I need to do a comparative study.

It remains to be seen how generalized my experience will prove to be. But if it does prove to be approximately the same -- with at least three different authors, all of them at different stages in their careers and with a different audience base -- then...

Yes. It will become increasingly difficult for people to argue that my results were simply a "fluke."

Mind you, this still wouldn't constitute a genuinely rigorous scientific survey, complete with control sample. It would still be essentially "anecdotal." But the idea that "anecdotal reasoning" is automatically "flawed" is quite false. Decisions based on anecdotal evidence are what people do all the time. Just to name one instance of a decision which is far more important than any book purchase:

It's how everyone chooses their spouse.

Yup, it is, when you stop and think about it. How many people decide to marry someone after conducting a rigorous scientific study of the problem, complete with "control spouse?"

Nobody who ever got married, I can tell you that. Much less happily.

There is a well-known principle in logic which applies to problems being analyzed by anecdotal evidence. It's called "Ockham's Razor." Given two explanations, all other things being equal, the simplest is likely to be the right one.

If several authors start showing a rise in sales of older titles after putting some of their books up online for free... the simplest explanation is obviously that the increased visibility led to those sales. Sure, my opponents can claim "it's all anecdotal" -- conveniently ignoring the fact that their arguments are based on a few very flimsy anecdotes -- but in order to explain those facts they would have to start concocting some pretty complicated and tortuous explanations.

And they would, too. Old titles do not, all other things being equal, suddenly start showing increased sales. Believe me, they don't. Something had to have caused that very atypical phenomenon -- either something simple, common to all the authors involved; or some very complex and accidental concatenation of disconnected circumstances, which all "just happened" to come together at just the right time.

I don't think it's too hard to see which way Ockham's Razor cuts, now is it?

I'm going to end this Prime Palaver, not with a question, but with a statement. Not a statement by me, but by one of the Library's users.

This letter summarizes and puts together in one place what almost all of them say.

I'm writing to thank you for your efforts in maintaining the library, and to add my experience to what is undoubtedly a long and growing list of testimonials. I stumbled across the library about 7 months ago when I was searching the web for the titles of other books in the world of Path of the Fury, which had been one of my favorite books. Although I loved Fury, I had not read any of David Weber's other books. After coming across the library and reading On Basilisk Station though, I've gone out and bought the entire Honor Harrington series, along with the Dahak series and the Bahzell series (even though both books are free in the library!). The library also introduced me to other authors whom I'd never read (including yourself) and I've bought some of the other series that I've sampled in the library as well (such as Mercedes Lackey's Bardic Voices books).

Aside from providing a look at authors and series that I'd otherwise not have read, the library has also been important in another way, as an introduction to books in electronic format (Mobipocket in my case). I had never thought that I would enjoy reading books in electronic format. However, when reading 1632 on my palm pilot, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy and enjoyable it actually is. Because of this, I am now a subscribing to Webscriptions, which I would never have done under my previous impressions.

So, once again thank you (and Jim Baen) for providing this service. It has served to greatly expand my reading enjoyment.

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 8

Eric Flint

April 26, 2002

I got a letter recently from a supporter of the Library in which, among other things, he stated his intention to boycott the writings of Harlan Ellison in retaliation for Ellison's stance on the issues involved with online copyright protection.

It was a very nice letter, overall, but that portion of it had me muttering unkind words. Since I've singled out Harlan Ellison for criticism in my various essays here, I decided I should also make clear publicly my attitude toward "boycotting" Ellison's writings.

I'll start by being my usual crude and impolite self, and then move on to analyze the issues involved.

My gut reaction is: Grow up, dammit.

You're going to refuse to read Ellison's writings because of a stance he took on a public issue?

Fine. I urge you to do the following also:

1. Boycott Homer. We don't know much about Homer himself — effectively nothing, except what we can deduce from his epics. But it's blindingly obvious, from the epics alone, that the man was a public relations toady for the ancient Greek aristocracy, who were a rapacious and brutal pack of barbarians. I'd call him a PR "hack" except... well, it's impossible to call the Iliad and the Odyssey "hack" stories. Whatever were Homer's motives, the works themselves are literary masterpieces.

1. Boycott Shakespeare. The man was a shill for the Tudor dynasty in England.

3. Boycott Dostoyevsky. The man was a reactionary obscurantist and an apologist for Tsarism. (Not to mention a compulsive gambler.)

[3a. And while you're at it, boycott Alexander Solzhenitsyn. See reasoning above. He's as much of a reactionary obscurantist apologist for Tsarism as Dostoyevsky ever was — and without the excuse of being a compulsive gambler.]

4. Boycott...

How far do you want me to go, people? I can pretty much guarantee that before I finished this ridiculous exercise in muddling politics with literature, that I'd be advocating a boycott of 90% of world literature. Probably 99%.

Then, of course, I'd have to move on to music.

Boycott Wagner!

Oh, for damn sure. The man was a rabid anti-Semite and had utterly vile personal morals. (He did, too. Read a biography of him.)

Mutter. Why do I feel like I'm back in a sandbox...?

As it happens, I generally detest the music of Richard Wagner and I gleefully take the opportunity to satirize that composer and his music in my own writings, whenever I get the chance. See, for instance, my short story "The Thief and the Roller Derby Queen" in The Chick is in the Mail, edited by Esther Friesner; or my novel Forward the Mage; or...

Any chance I get, trust me. I also dote on the music of Giuseppe Verdi — who, unlike Wagner, was a very admirable man in his own life, and something of a personal hero of mine. (That also, by the way, finds its way into my writings. The character of "the Big Banjo" in The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage is a thinly-disguised Verdi — and the nickname itself comes from Wagner, who once sneered that Verdi used an orchestra "like a big banjo.")

On the other hand...

I own — and have listened to — every one of Wagner's operas. I even like Tannhauser, and, for that matter, bits and pieces of Tristan and Isolde and the Ring of the Nibelungs cycle. (The "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde is a marvelous piece of music when you're in the mood for that sort of thing. Just make sure you don't read the libretto so you don't understand the grotesque mystical gibberish she's singing. If you understand German and can't avoid it... my sympathies.)

Why? Because I'm interested in classical music and for me to refuse to listen to Wagner would just be childish. As it happens, I probably won't ever listen to a complete opera of his again. (Except Tannhauser.) I did so, found that by and large I detested the music about as much as I detested the man himself, and that was that.

But to go back to my earlier list, although I find Dostoyevsky's politics genuinely repulsive, I am very fond of his fiction. I've read all of his major novels at least once, and many of them — The Brothers Karamasov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils — two or three times. And, unless I die prematurely, I'm sure I'll read them all again at least once before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Or, to move to American literature, I find the politics of Ernest Hemingway a lot more to my liking than the politics of William Faulkner. Yet, as a rule, I dislike the fiction of Hemingway — I find his obsession with issues of "manhood" boring ("c'mon, Ernie, I figured this stuff out by the time I was seventeen; grow up, willya?") — and I adore the fiction of William Faulkner.

Literature is not politics. The only time I will refuse to read the fiction writings of someone whose political views I strongly disagree with is if their actual writings are simply a thinly-disguised veneer for their political program.

To drive this all home, let me conclude this portion of my essay with a final appeal:

For God's sake, whatever you do — boycott Eric Flint!

Oh, fer sure.

Right now, on this issue, I seem to be something of a hero to a lot of people. So what? I can guarantee you that on some other issue I'd infuriate a lot of you. I'm quite sure of it, because I've been infuriating people politically my whole adult life. I'm a socialist, just for starters — and not bashful about it, either.

Of course, once you start boycotting me, you'll probably have to keep going. Just to deal with writers who publish through Baen and who have titles here in the Library:

Those of you who are conservatives will have to boycott Mercedes Lackey.

Those of you who are liberals will have to boycott John Ringo and David Weber. Probably David Drake too, although that gets a bit more complicated. (Screw it. Who needs complications? Boycott him too.)

While you're at it, if you're anywhere left of center, boycott anything published by Baen Books because the publisher himself, Jim Baen, is almost as far to the right on the political spectrum as I am on the left.

Are we having fun yet? Oh, but we've just started!

Because... now that I think about it...

Dave Weber and I will have to start boycotting each other. Which is going to be a tad tricky, since we collaborate so often. And, of course, everybody is going to have to boycott 1633, which we co-authored.

What to do, what to do...

Give it up, that's what you do.

Literature — and popular fiction is no different, there's no Chinese wall separating the two — is not politics. A writer as a political figure and his or her fiction are not the same thing. Their political and social views will, of course, influence their writings. But the way that influence works its way through can get extremely complex, even contradictory. And since no political viewpoint — not even mine, as amazing as it may be — ever captures all of human reality, you will often discover that a writer whose expressed viewpoints on political matters seems stupid or offensive to you still has something to say in his fiction which strikes a chord.

That's certainly true of Harlan Ellison.

Ellison has been a major writer in science fiction for half a century now. That is not an accident, nor is it the product of a cynical public relations campaign. It is purely and simply due to the quality of his fiction. He's an excellent writer, and a very distinctive one, and if you've never read anything by him the loss is yours, not his.

Nor — I've never met the man, but I can guarantee this — will Harlan Ellison be moved in the least by any threats of boycott.

No serious writer ever is. Trust me on this one. Of the various writers who publish through Baen, the two who have probably the most pronounced and publicly-visible political identities are me and John Ringo — on the left and right, respectively. Periodically, both of us get letters or statements in public by someone who informs us they will henceforth refuse to buy our writings because something we said pissed them off.

Whatever else John and I disagree about, on this subject we have exactly the same attitude:

Boycott and be damned.

Both John and I almost invariably go even further and add something to the effect of: "Please do! I like to think my readers can rise above petulance!" Actually, we're usually a lot less polite than that. And the words we use are far more likely to consist of four letters than four syllables.

Harlan Ellison's response will be no different, believe me. And more power to him.

Ellison has taken a public stance on this issue which I find rather abhorrent. And I find his posturing about it even more offensive.

Ellison likes to portray himself as the plucky "little guy" standing up to "corporate interests." He probably even believes it. But the reality is the exact opposite. Harlan Ellison, consciously or otherwise, is serving as the front man for the very same corporate interests he claims to be opposing — and it's no accident that, once you strip away the "underdog" verbiage, his position dovetails so neatly with that taken by the movie and music recording industries who have been the driving force behind the recent spate of repressive legislation.

And it goes further than that. One of the things this "champion of the underdog" has complained about publicly is that — gasp — you don't even need a credit card to set up an email account!

Oh, swell. So now, apparently, he thinks every American citizen should be required to have a credit card to exercise such a simple and basic right as send and receive email...

Gee, I bet Chase Manhattan Bank and Citibank would love that state of affairs. Can we say: "40% interest"?

Champion of the underdog, my foot. Whether he realizes it or not, Harlan Ellison is a mouthpiece for the same corporate interests he claims to be opposing. It's as simple as that.

That's Ellison the public figure. Ellison the writer is something else again.

If you've never read anything of his, I urge you to do so. You might very well discover you like his fiction. Lots of people do, including me. (Depending on my mood at the time, of course. There's a reason that the words "dark" and "edgy" so often appear in descriptions of Ellison's writings.)

I will mention two volumes you might want to investigate:

The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective. This is a very fat volume — about 1200 pages — which is available in a trade paperback edition for about $25. (I believe it's also available in hardcover.) It contains most of his best known stories.

Or, if that price is too steep for you, try the following smaller collection of some of his best stories:

Troublemakers, available in trade paperback for about $13.

I'd recommend a mass market paperback also, for those who'd prefer still a cheaper "entry level" way of investigating Ellison's writings, but...

There isn't any, to the best of my knowledge. Not a current in-print edition, anyway, consisting solely of his own stories. You might be able to find something at a used book store.

And that simple fact leads me to the conclusion of this essay. There's an irony in all this, which is the following:

Because of the kind of stories he writes — short fiction, not novels — Harlan Ellison doesn't "fit" all that well into the modern fiction market. Today, as opposed to several decades ago, the science fiction and fantasy market is entirely dominated by novels. As a result, with some few exceptions, publishers tend to be wary of producing collections of short stories in mass market format. Why? For the simple reason that, as a rule, they don't sell very well.

So Harlan Ellison doesn't get much, any longer, in the way of public exposure for his short stories. Walk into almost any bookstore in the United States, and you will find very few (if any) volumes by Harlan Ellison on the shelves. Far fewer, in proportion to his reputation in science fiction, than any other major SF author I can think of.

Ironically, therefore, Ellison would probably benefit more than any SF writer today from having an open attitude toward making free copies of his writings available online. Because that would give him the "entry level" exposure that he currently lacks almost entirely. It would allow a great many people who have heard of him — but never read anything of his — to find out whether they like his writings.

And many of them would, believe me — and would then go out and buy one of his books. I'm quite certain that if Ellison put up a hefty chunk of his best-known writings for free on the internet, that all of his volumes in print would show a rapid — and rather dramatic — rise in sales.

$25 for a trade paperback like The Essential Ellison is too steep a price for most people to be willing to pay just to find out if they like Ellison's writings. But if they already knew they liked his writings, then it's actually one hell of a good deal. 1200 pages of the writing of one of SF's most distinctive voices over the past half century is a bargain at $25.

Which, of course, is why I bought it myself.

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 9

Eric Flint

May 12, 2002

I'm quoting below a portion of a letter which just came in to the Librarian, since it raises an issue which a number of letters have now raised.

...also i have mentioned the library to some other blind sci fi fans that i know who have a computer and the software to use it and they have all said thanks to you and jim baen for setting up the library but since most of us will not ever buy the books because we can not read the paper ones is there any way that we can help contribute to the authors that have put their books on line ??

thanks jim

I've never tried to carry out a systematic statistical survey of the letters I've gotten into the Library -- which now number about 1400. It'd be an interesting and informative project, obviously. But the labor involved would just be prohibitive for me, given that it would take too much time away from the writing and editing work I do for an actual living.

Still -- if you'll forgive me for lapsing once again into "anecdotal" evidence -- I can tell you for sure that a significant percentage comes from blind people. (As well as, in some cases, people such as Jimmy Grimsley -- see my Introduction to the Library -- who suffer from other medical problems which impede their ability to read.)

Many of them, probably most of them, raise the same issue that Jim does in the letter above -- is there any way for them to contribute financially to the authors they like?

So I decided I should address myself to that issue in this installment of Prime Palaver.

My answer is going to take some time to explain, because it ultimately involves the way I look at the world as a whole. And it's also going to ramble around a bit, so bear with me. I should also make clear from the outset that this is simply my attitude alone. It may or may not be shared by other authors who've put books in the Library. This is my response as a individual, that's all, and it's going to be a lot more personal than other essays I've written here.

I simply don't care.

If a blind person can find a way to send a little money my way -- assuming they want to -- by buying a book of mine in some format that suits them, that's great. But they should feel under no obligation to do so, because, insofar as the term "obligation" is involved at all, it cuts entirely in the opposite direction.

I consider it a fundamental obligation of a modern civilized society to make whatever provisions are necessary to assist those of its members who suffer from especially severe medical problems. And, as a member of such a society, I share in that obligation.

I stress the term obligation, because I do not consider this "charity." As a matter of fact, I basically detest the term "charity" itself.

I detest it because, as a rule, it's an evasion. It implies, at least, that the obligation assumed is a result of noblesse oblige. I.e., that it reflects well on the giver, because the giver was under no obligation to give but did so simply because of their superior qualities.

In a way, of course, being generous does reflect well on the "charitable" person. But not in the aristocratic sense of having a superior personality. It is actually a very plebeian virtue, the old village virtue of a society taking care of its own, and not letting itself get tangled up in a mean-spirited wrangle over who is entitled to what and who is at fault for what and who is... etc. Which, by the way, was the original meaning of the term "Christian charity." It was an obligation, not an option.

I suspect most people would agree with my opening statement, that "a modern civilized society [is obliged] to make whatever provisions are necessary to assist those of its members who suffer from especially severe medical problems." But many people -- perhaps most -- would add a qualification:

Insofar as they are not at fault for it.

Ah, yes. That old -- utterly vile -- aristocratic disclaimer.

"The deserving poor." With the aristocrats, of course, getting to decide who is "deserving" and who isn't.

But in the real world, responsibility cannot be so easily assigned. To a degree, yes. Obviously. Nobody ever forced a man to become an armed robber, or an alcoholic, or a... (Fill in the sin or crime of your preference.)

Not directly, at least. But the factors involved in a person's life which lead them to one or another course of activity are complex. And while criminal or irresponsible conduct should not be excused, the background which produced it also cannot be swept under the rug by those who, because of their own luckier or more privileged life -- for which, oddly enough, they invariably take credit even though no credit is due to them -- found it easy to avoid.

I've never committed an armed robbery, myself. I was born into a middle-class background, was encouraged as far back as I can remember -- by family and school officials alike -- to see myself as a bright and capable boy with any future open to me that I could aspire to.

So I never even thought about mugging anybody, or robbing a liquor store. But -- this is the one thing I will take credit for -- I was never so self-righteous or egotistical or smug as to imagine that, had I been born and raised in a different environment, I might have.

Might have. Who knows? But that "grayness" is where a society's responsibility comes in. Because if a society demands that individuals have to take responsibility for their actions, then it also has the obligation to, as far as possible, remove those conditions which so obviously predispose individuals toward irresponsible or criminal conduct.

So, to give an example, it is utterly irresponsible -- even criminal, I would argue -- for a society to demand that everyone be "drug-free" while...

-- it turns a blind eye to drug use among the wealthy, while viciously penalizing it among the poor and working class. (Check the statistics on the percentage of white stockbrokers serving prison terms for cocaine use -- if you can find any at all -- with the statistics for poor black people from inner city ghettoes. Or white factory workers, for that matter. Or consider the fact that -- to give just one example out of a multitude -- a recent study showed that, in the state of Illinois, a black person was 57 times more likely to serve a prison term for the same felony -- simple possession -- than a white person.)

-- ignores completely -- indeed, even rewards -- the flight of industry to low-wage areas in the countryside or other countries, which has absolutely devastated most of America's inner cities; in short, allows a situation to continue where dealing drugs is the only readily-available avenue for economic advancement, at the same time that it decries the criminality of it all. To call this "hypocrisy" is to slander the term itself.

-- oh, never mind. I could go on and on, and in a different forum undoubtedly would.

But if I've never robbed anybody, I am an alcoholic. So let me examine that question, from the standpoint of "obligations" and "charity" and "personal responsibility." (And if anyone's wondering what all this has to do with blindness, hold your horses. I'm getting there.)

It is now well-established that alcoholism is a physical disease -- not a so-called "mental illness" or "moral failure" -- which is largely due to genetic predisposition. The reason many people are confused about it is because alcoholism is a physical disease -- one of many, by the way -- whose main symptoms (especially in the onset of the disease) manifest themselves in behavior rather than overtly physical symptoms. To simplify, it's a complex metabolic disorder involving liver and brain functions, triggered off by the use of alcohol, to which some people are especially prone because of their genetic heritage.

Yep, that's me. Largely Irish on one side of my family, Norwegian on the other -- both ethnic groups with high rates of alcoholism. Looking back at it, it's now clear to me that I was sliding into the disease as a teenager. As it happens, I didn't particularly like the taste of alcohol. But, at the time, I was living in a rural area where heavy drinking was a cultural rite-of-passage for teenage boys. And, since I was an outsider who'd moved into the area, I felt the pressure probably even more than most boys.

To make things worse, the first symptom of alcoholism is that the individual has an unusual capacity for drinking alcohol and showing few if any negative effects. That's because alcoholism begins as a liver dysfunction. An alcoholic's liver can process alcohol much more rapidly than most people -- which means that you seem to be the person who can "handle liquor" most easily. You can out-drink damn near anybody.

That was true of me, for sure. As a teenage boy in a rural social environment -- the foothills and mountains of central California -- that was my one claim to fame amongst my rough-and-tough country boy peers. My intellectual qualities were more likely to get me into trouble than gain me status.

Yeah, I was fairly small and no great shakes when it came to fisticuffs. Nor, alas, did I have any particular aptitude for the two other skills esteemed by my peers, which were working on cars and seducing girls. (The latter skill, let me add, being far more often boasted about than actually demonstrated in practice.)

But... I could drink. By the time I was sixteen, I had earned my country-boy drinking spurs. Which, in those days, consisted of drinking an entire case of beer in one evening without passing out. (What is it today? I don't know. Probably the same thing.)

I was established. I had my own modest place in the social sun.

So. Where do we want to start playing the "responsibility game" here, folks?

Was I responsible?

Of course. Nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to drink a case of beer in one night. Which I did many more times than once, by the way. I was striving to manage the legendary feat of drinking two cases in an evening. I never managed it, but I did come fairly close a couple of times. I can still remember -- well, sorta -- one memorable night out in the woods when a number of my suitably-admiring and awestruck comrades were cheering me on as I tried -- alas, failed -- to tackle the last six-pack.

Nor, on the other side of the coin, did anyone not warn me of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption. Many people did. And, leaving warnings aside, I wasn't stupid and had plenty of graphic evidence of the dangers. I've forgotten the exact number, but several of my schoolmates died or were badly injured in car accidents caused by drunk driving. (Which is a very common cause of death in America's rural areas, by the way, especially for young people. Statistically, way out of whack with the percentage for the population as a whole.)

But... there was the social pressure, always ferocious for teenagers; and, of course, already the disease was fastening itself upon me.

By the time I was in college, I had matured enough to be much less reckless in the way I drank. I was now in an intellectual big-city environment (UCLA, in Los Angeles), where "manhood" did not have to be proved in such a crude manner. But I was by now a very heavy drinker.

Following the usual pattern with alcoholics, it wasn't until I was well into my thirties that I was finally able to recognize and accept the fact that my heavy drinking habits were not really "habits" at all, but a disease. By then, of course, the addiction itself had settled in thoroughly, and I discovered -- as so many other people had before me, and will in the future -- just how incredibly difficult it can be to overcome a physical addiction.

But, eventually, I managed. Not quickly, nor easily. I quit drinking the first time when I was 35, and stayed off the sauce for some four years or so. Then, unfortunately -- still not really understanding the nature of the disease -- I got overconfident because I seemed to be able to avoid alcohol when I wanted to. So I started drinking again and, within a few months, was drinking more heavily than ever. My life soon became a nightmare, for my wife Lucille and daughter Elizabeth even more than me.

Finally, in 1989, I was able to quit drinking again -- and I haven't had a drink of alcohol since.

That was thirteen years ago. I no longer worry about it. I'm still an alcoholic and will be for the rest of my life, barring some genuine revolution in medicine. (Which would be almost miraculous, given our current level of medical science and technology. The metabolic complexity of a disease like alcoholism makes finding a cure for cancer look like child's play.) But if alcoholism has no cure, it does have an extremely effective -- fool-proof, in fact -- treatment. Don't drink.

I don't. Nor, for many years now, have I felt any urge to drink. Occasionally, for social reasons -- often at science fiction conventions -- I find myself in a bar surrounded by people cheerfully knocking down their favorite alcoholic beverages. It doesn't bother me in the least, nor do I begrudge them the pleasure. I know the statistics, for one thing. The rate of relapse among alcoholics who have managed to stay sober for five years drops below 1% -- a far better rate, in fact, that those for most forms of cancer or heart disease.

I'm thankful, of course, that I didn't hurt anybody in the course of it. Physically, at least, if not psychologically. (I leave aside several young fellows whom I gave bloody noses. What the hell. I got bloody-nosed too, and, besides, they transgressed the country boy code duello. I'm sure they did, although I can't actually remember any of the drunken details. The country boy code duello is every bit as arcane and elaborate as the code in Renaissance Italy. Almost impossible not to transgress, if you're a sprightly lad.)

And I'm sometimes amazed that I survived myself, with nothing worse than a few bruises I picked up once when the car I was in rolled on a country road. (Country boys. We all laughed, solemnly assured each other that the fact we were all drunk is what accounted for the absence of serious injury -- too loosey-goosey, y'know, in our inebriated state, to suffer broken bones -- tipped the car back upright -- not all that hard, since there were six of us in it -- and went on our way. The driver did, however, pay a little more attention to what he was doing thereafter. That night, anyway.)

Most of all, though, there's at least a part of me -- big part, too -- that is oddly thankful I went through the whole experience. Not because I'd wish alcoholism on anybody -- it really is a horrible disease -- but simply because I know it's helped me avoid what I think is perhaps the ultimate of all sins.

At least I'm not -- most of the time, anyway -- a smug, fat-headed, self-righteous jackass who thinks his shit don't stink. And I'm a lot less concerned about other peoples' faults and failures than I am about my own responsibilities.

I'm not really responsible, I don't think, for the disease I suffer from. I am responsible for what I do about it.

And that, in a roundabout way, brings me back to the issue at hand.

At first glance, of course, blindness would seem to have little to do with alcoholism. The first is clearly not the fault of the sufferer, the latter... well, it's murky.

True... up to a point. Alas, the real world is always more complicated and contradictory than the Self-Righteous like to claim.

What about someone who is blind because, through their own reckless conduct, they blinded themselves? Lost their eyesight because of a drunk driving accident -- or got high on some hallucinogetic drug and thought staring at the sun was fascinating? (Just to give two examples.)

Am I supposed to start demanding that blind people who want to read my books for free present me with medical and police testimony attesting to their good character? Prove to me that they are "deserving"?

Bah. Such is the false morality of the Self-Righteous and the Holier-Than-Thou. Such is the logic-chopping and ethic-parsing (parsimony, rather) of small and petty souls. Not for them to consider walking a mile in someone else's moccasins. They don't wear moccasins to begin with. They only wear the spiritual equivalent of Gucci loafers.

It is a fact -- leave all "blame" out of it -- that a modern and complex industrial society will, inevitably, produce a wide variety of instances in which individual people are handicapped, in one way or another. Call it the collateral damage of civilization, if you will.

At times, of course, clear blame and responsibility can be assigned. And with precious little in the way of extenuating circumstances. To give an example, a chemical corporation which -- knowing one of its products is medically dangerous -- conspires to keep that knowledge secret for no reason other than greed.

Yeah, sure, piece of cake. (Although, typically, the law will be far more lenient to the executives of such a corporation than they will to a teen-ager who commits a simple burglary.)

But...

More often than not, there really isn't anybody to blame, as an individual. Unless, that is -- and here is the real danger -- we start twisting the concept of "blame" to suit our own agendas.

I will give you an example. My sister Kathy suffers from a rare form of cancer which, according to the doctors, is almost certainly environmentally induced. My mother was recently diagnosed with the same cancer, although fortunately not in as severe a form and at a much earlier stage of development.

No one is positive, because the cancer is so rare that it hasn't been researched as exhaustively as many others. But the medical experts are pretty sure what happened is this:

Long ago -- over half a century now -- my father was a crop duster for a time. This was right after World War II, when a lot of new insecticides were being enthusiastically promoted by everybody. I stress everybody, because this was long before the modern environmentalist movement began alerting the world to the "dark side" of such things as DDT. My father was just as enthusiastic about them as anybody -- probably more than most, in fact, because his experiences as a pilot in the Air Corps in the Pacific theater had allowed him to see first-hand the ravages of disease and malnutrition in poor countries.

I had been born by then, but my sister was still a fetus. My father used to come home from work, his clothes reeking with the smell of insecticides, and my mother would wash and iron them. And, the doctors are pretty sure, that was the environmental factor which triggered off the genetic change which, many decades later, produced the cancer in my sister -- and, still later in her life, my mother.

Why didn't it strike my father, who was more affected than anyone?

Hell, who knows? There seems to be a definite element of genetic predisposition involved in most forms of cancer. Probably in this one also. So, presumably, he was just more resistant to it -- just as I, perhaps for the same reason or simply because I was no longer in the particularly vulnerable form of a fetus, do not seem to have contracted it either. (Not yet, anyway -- although I do keep an eye out for the symptoms.)

So. Let's start playing the "blame game." Is my family supposed to hire private detectives and lawyers and biological labs to track down the "culprit"? Assuming we could afford it, which we can't. And assuming -- highly unlikely -- that we could figure out which of the insecticides my father sprayed was the villain in the piece, and then -- almost as unlikely -- track down the company officials who produced it at the time.

And, even if we did, then what? What we would find at the end? A mustachio-twirling villain who, finally confronted by his accusers, confessed his crimes?

Well, maybe. But I have a feeling I'd find something else, if I found anything at all. I have a feeling that, in the end, I'd be confronting an old man in a retirement home. Whose only memory of that time was the pride and satisfaction he felt that he was producing a product which was rapidly alleviating diseases and increasing food production. And who had no idea that there was any long-term danger lurking under the surface.

Or... maybe it would be grayer. Maybe I would catch something in his old eyes that made me think he did halfway-suspect there might...

But... it was his livelihood at stake, and, like most people, he suppressed his vague sense that something wasn't quite right.

Just as I, decades ago, suppressed my vague sense that something wasn't right about the way I drank liquor.

What should I then do? Demand that "justice be done?" Strip him of his few assets?

Should I choose, then, to ignore the fact that the product which eventually shattered my sister's life probably enabled the life of another girl somewhere else? Who would have died of a disease, or suffered from lifelong disabilities due to malnutrition as a child?

Tell me, o ye self-righteous ones. Those of you who will instantly point the finger of blame and demand "individual responsibility!" (Though not, as a rule, for yourselves.) What should I do?

Bah. I left the sandbox and its selfish, infantile morality behind long ago. I am an adult, and a member of an advanced industrial society, who does not hesitate to take advantages of all its blessings. But that also requires me to assume responsibility for its ills, as well -- and not try to shift the responsibility onto someone else.

That doesn't mean that I am personally responsible for its ills, of course. I'm not, by and large. But it does mean two things:

First, that as a citizen of such a society, I have a responsibility to denounce and oppose measures which, to benefit a few, would harm the many. (Even if I happen to be included in "the few.") And, secondly, that insofar as I can take measures in my personal life which might make a difference, I should do so.

So, finally, we come back to where we started.

Jim, here's my answer:

I will expect -- I will certainly hope -- that, insofar as advances in technology make it possible for blind readers to pay for my writings, that they will do so. Subject, of course, to the reality that -- as a rule, though not always -- blind people are likely to have a limited budget. Until that time comes, please enjoy my writings. I give them to you freely -- not out of "charity," but because I consider it my obligation to do so.

In immediate terms, for those blind readers who have access to computer technology which can translate paper editions into a format you can use -- and who can afford it -- I urge you to try Baen's Webscriptions service. All of my writings are or will be available electronically either in Webscriptions and/or the Library, and the cost is quite modest. The same is true for most of the authors who publish through Baen Books.

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 10

Eric Flint

May 12, 2002

For this edition of "Prime Palaver," I'm posting a long letter I got recently. I think the points covered are well worth everyone's attention.

Nothing in it surprises me at all. I can tell you that -- like every professional fiction writer I know -- I do all my serious editing of my own writing by first printing up a paper hardcopy and reading that. I write directly on a computer and I do a certain type of editing directly on the screen. Basically, the relatively mindless searching for typos and obvious errors, or sentence-at-a-time polishing. But when it comes time to read a big chunk of a new novel I'm working on so that I can really THINK about it, and consider how I might want to rewrite or reshape it in important ways, I always print a hardcopy. (And, as I said, I've asked other authors and they all do the same thing.)

The reason is because, for whatever complex psychological reasons, there just seems to be something about holding a book in my hands that concentrates my brain. Whereas scanning through text on a screen starts essentially dissolving my concentration. After a while, I'm not reading so much as "scanning." Great for quickly picking up pieces of information or for spotting obvious problems, but almost useless for any "higher functions."

One thing I've also found is that I invariably wind up reading something on a screen much faster than I do on paper. I'm not sure if that's eyestrain. That's the obvious explanation, but I think what's involved cuts much deeper. I will easily spend 8-10 hours a day staring into a screen, while I'm writing, and not feel any eyestrain at all.

I'm not making any general pronouncements about this, because I'm sure there are people who have a different experience. But I strongly suspect that my own preference is the most common one, and I am highly skeptical that the two standard explanations are really adequate.

Those two explanations are the following:

First, that as technology improves and electronic books become as readable as paper books, this "hardcopy preference" factor will fade away.

Second, that there is a generational issue involved, and that as more and more old farts like me who grew up on paper books die off the newer generation "accustomed to reading on a screen" will set the preferences.

I think both explanations, while they contain a kernel of truth, are grossly overstated. For the following reasons:

The "eyestrain" factor is simply exaggerated. I spend most of my working life, as do many people, staring at a screen. Very rarely do I experience any eyestrain or difficulty in reading electronic text. A bit now and then, certainly. So what?  I also occasionally strain my eyes reading paper books.  In fact, the single worst instance of eyestrain I've ever suffered in my life, which required me to stop reading entirely for two weeks, happened when I was a young man long before the advent of computers. That happened because I was cramming too hard for final exams in college -- reading paper texts.

What this argument ignores is that the real difference between a paper book and an e-book is a qualitative difference in the packaging. They are, quite literally, bound in two different ways. An e-book, no matter how sophisticated the technology, only allows you to see one page at a time. Whereas a paper book, in an odd sort of way, actually allows you to see all the pages simultaneously. Granted, you only read one page at a time. But, because of the binding, you can literally grasp the whole thing in your hands and -- this is my experience, at least -- makes it easier for your mind to "wrap around" the entire text. Not to mention the fact that you can flip pages a lot faster than you can scroll through a text on a screen.

The end result, I think, is that the two formats serve two different purposes. And I strongly suspect, although I certainly can't prove it, that eventually psychological researchers will discover that the human brain is essentially "hard-wired" in such a way that it reads the two different formats differently.

If I'm right, in short, paper books are going to be around for a LONG time to come -- because the key is not the "paper" as such but the very different ways that the sheets are bound and packaged, compared to electronic texts. I really think what's going to emerge is a "dual" reading culture, in which people switch back and forth between the two formats for specific purposes. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

As far as the generational issue is concerned, in itself, I mainly think it's a lot of hogwash. I didn't start using computers until I was in my mid-forties, and I didn't have any trouble at all making the adaptations necessary. (Well... not much.) And I know lots of middle-aged people who adapted even quicker and more readily than I did. In the last factory I worked in prior to becoming a full-time writer, I knew at least eight machinists -- two of them older than me, and only one of them a "youngster" -- who'd become enthusiastic computer-users. Three of them liked to build their own, and one of them -- a man in his late fifties -- had developed his own graphics program. All of these men were blue-collar workers, mind you, not scholars or academics or intellectuals of any kind.

And, on the flip side of the coin, as the article quoted in part below shows, researchers have found that modern college students -- i.e., the very same "computer generation" which is supposed to be accustomed to reading on a screen -- have far worse retention when they read that way instead of from paper editions.

So...

Bah, humbug. I think paper books are going to be around for a lot longer than people assume.

And that's enough from me. Here's the letter:

Eric,

Your introduction to the library, and your Palaver #6, are the best pieces I've read by an author/publisher on the advantages of free distribution of literature from which authors would like to make money. (Scholarly journal articles are nearly unique in that their authors aren't paid anything for them and consent to have it this way.) You mention the experience at MIT Press. If the example of publishers of scholarly books can help you make your own case, then an even better example is the National Academies Press, http://books.nap.edu/. It publishes all of its 2,500 books both in free online editions and in priced printed editions and, like you, has found that the free editions stimulate sales of the priced editions.

Here's a brief statement of NAP's rationale: http://www.nap.edu/info/site.html

Here's a longer statement of NAP's rationale, from the September 14, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education. Sorry if this is more than you want to hear, but I'm cutting and pasting because the article is not available for free online:

Academic Press Gives Away Its Secret of Success

By MICHAEL JENSEN

It's been a bad year financially for nonprofit publishers, according to most reports. High returns from inventory by booksellers closing their doors or trimming their stock, combined with sagging sales of what are considered discretionary products in a slowing economy, have forced many nonprofit publishers to rethink their plans and budgets. Even some of the largest and most well-known university presses are whispering about deficits.

So it's almost embarrassing when I tell colleagues that the National Academy Press is on track for a record year in book sales. And it dumbfounds them when I mention that we make every page we publish in print available online -- free.

Ever since new technologies began to hint at the possibility of reading books digitally, publishers have been haunted by the prospect that e-books would make print versions obsolete. The publishers have been trying encryption schemes, lockout mechanisms, and restriction systems to prevent unauthorized access to online material, with limited commercial success. For nonprofit presses, which operate close to the margin, the electronic future has looked like a minefield.

Our experience may calm a few jitters. And it may suggest some ways that nonprofit presses can expand their influence in the electronic age, with relatively small investments and limited risk.

Our press is the publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. We publish more than 200 book-length works per year, and are required by our charter to perform a dual task: to disseminate as widely as possible the works of the academies and to be self-sustaining through book sales and fees for services we perform for internal and external customers.

Those two mandates may seem contradictory, but we have found that, at least for a publisher of scientific and technical analyses and policy reports, doing the first encourages the second: Making our material easily and freely available helps us sell books. Our Web site (http://www.nap.edu) makes more than 2,100 books -- comprising 400,000 book pages -- fully searchable, browseable, and even printable by the page, all free. The material is made available in easily navigable page images, and we are in the process of providing even more easily readable and quickly downloadable page-by-page HTML text. Expanded research tools are in the process of being developed.

Our site is very busy -- from January through mid-August of this year, more than 3.2 million people had viewed more than 28 million Web pages, including 15 million book pages. While those are great numbers in terms of wide dissemination, the more remarkable thing is that, over the same period, we have sold more than 40,000 books through the same site -- something approximating 25 percent of our overall book sales, and already surpassing the number we sold during all of last year. Moreover, our other sales -- via bookstores, an 800 number, fax, and mail -- have apparently not been cannibalized, staying pretty much in line with industry sales.

It would seem axiomatic that giving away pages means that fewer people will buy the books, but that confuses the content with the product. Sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and vanilla are the contents of a pound cake, but quite obviously more than those contents is required to create something pleasing to the palate. It's clear to us that the material we publish -- the final printed book -- has a value quite distinct from the content itself, and a utility independent of any particular page. The handy, readable, formatted, bound volume is still the way most people want to read a book-length work.

Comparing books to food is dicey, of course, but the appetites -- whether intellectual or gustatory -- have similarities. For some kinds of hunger, quickly digested information -- the fast food of the Internet -- serves a number of useful purposes. Doing research on facts, addresses, news, and the like has never been easier. However, in the olden days, before the Web, few of us actually purchased books to learn that kind of information anyway. We went to the library, we consulted an almanac or an encyclopedia, we asked friends, we called the operator, we subscribed to newspapers or magazines.

We bought books we wanted to savor, not data to munch. We bought books we wanted to own, books we wanted to sink into. That's still the case.

Book-length material tends to posit an attitude, a position, or a conclusion; it may hypothesize, assert, or persuade; it may entertain or enlighten; it may surprise or delight. It has, in short, its own context. Extract a page or a chapter, and it's no longer the same product. That's part of the reason that Web technologies, whether they offer page-by-page representations or chapter-by-chapter material in Web-ready form, can rarely compete effectively with book-length works in print.

People are happy to find and browse through online material, but nobody -- and I mean nobody -- seems to be interested in devoting lengthy periods to reading for meaning online. Our server logs indicate that most people skim a book -- they choose a few pages, perform a few searches, print a few low-resolution pages. Apart from the act of printing, that is just library or bookstore-browsing behavior, not a threat to our livelihood.

There is mounting evidence that people will read for facts online and, while they'll read small chunks of material -- articles -- for perspective, few will read anything that runs for more than 30 pages onscreen. And when they do, it's unsatisfactory. Researchers at Ohio State University reported on a study last year indicating that even for college students who are making an effort to absorb as much as possible, material read on a screen is harder to understand than the same material read on paper. Last year, Forrester Research released a report showing that dropout rates for online courses can be as high as 80 percent. Why? In part, the Internet-research company found, because retention is 30 percent lower for material read online than for material read in print. A few months later, Forrester forecast slow growth for both e-books and e-book readers. Why? Because the company found that not only do people generally dislike reading text-heavy documents on a computer screen, but they also retain less of what they read.

The Web's promise is vast and still mostly unrealized, because the dot-com gold rush diverted energy from what the Web is best at: connecting people with ideas. From our perspective, the Web is already the best dissemination engine ever, which has the side benefit of providing vast new markets and audiences for our work. Scientists or program assistants or policy analysts in Goteborg or Kampala or Tulsa can find a policy recommendation or an expert conclusion in our publications -- from a book that they probably wouldn't have found before the advent of the Web. A student in Lubbock can explore Science and Stewardship in the Antarctic, and a teacher in Kiev can browse Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. If any of them want to, they can purchase the book at hand. Enough do so to support our program.

Does all this mean that every book publisher should put its books online at no charge? Alas, few for-profit book publishers are willing to invest money in giving content away. Their business models have profit maximization as the main goal, within which framework good people have to do good work. Opening content up, without locks or timers or payment, is just too outside the paradigm to be considered.

Most nonprofit book publishers I talk with would like to be able to do something similar to what we are doing, and a few are doing so. The Brookings Institution Press is making more than 100 recent books available for browsing via its Web site (http://www.brookings.org/dybdocroot/); to date, more than one million visitors have browsed those titles, and online sales of the books have more than doubled. The MIT Press, the University of Illinois Press, the Columbia University Press, and other innovative publishers have initiatives that include free access to some book-length material. To my knowledge, no book by any publisher has ever sold less than expected because it was available free online.

Only a few nonprofit book publishers have actually undertaken the risk, however, because most have very limited financial flexibility. They aren't blessed, as we are, with a parent institution willing to support a grand experiment, and any loss in today's straitened circumstances would take a big bite out of limited resources.

The "crisis of the monograph," much discussed over the past decade, is at heart a crisis of limited resources. When the editing, production, and marketing costs of a book exceed income from sales, a press loses money. But a large proportion of a publication's cost is its marketing and promotion; if it were easier for books to find their own audience by being more freely accessible, presses might be able to afford to publish the scholarly monographs that are beginning to be too costly to produce. Free online access to the books might help us out of the crisis of the monograph.

It therefore would behoove universities and the other parent organizations that sponsor, support, or otherwise give room to nonprofit publishing houses to consider a small investment that could have a big payoff. With an injection of $100,000 or $200,000 for initial staff and digitization costs -- and, perhaps more significant, a clear statement of institutional support for experimentation in scholarly publishing -- a lot more university presses could make a lot more of their publications available online in ways that would enhance scholarship and knowledge worldwide. It could even enhance their financial status. Successful initiatives like the National Academy Press's seem to show that the risks are not as great as once was feared, and that nonprofit publishing may flourish best when it is most open.

[NOTE: Michael Jensen is director of publishing technologies at the National Academy Press.]

Eric Flint

Prime Palaver # 11

Janis Ian

September 16, 2002

THE INTERNET DEBACLE – AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW

[* Shortly after this article was turned in, Michael Greene resigned as president of NARAS.]

When I research an article, I normally send 30 or so emails to friends and acquaintances asking for opinions and anecdotes.  I usually receive 10-20 in reply.  But not so on this subject!

I sent 36 emails requesting opinions and facts on free music downloading from the Net.  I stated that I planned to adopt the viewpoint of devil's advocate: free Internet downloads are good for the music industry and its artists.

I've received, to date, over 300 replies, every single one from someone legitimately "in the music business."

What's more interesting than the emails are the phone calls.  I don't know anyone at NARAS (home of the Grammy Awards), and I know Hilary Rosen (head of the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA) only vaguely.  Yet within 24 hours of sending my original email, I'd received two messages from Rosen and four from NARAS requesting that I call to "discuss the article."

Huh.  Didn't know I was that widely read.

Ms. Rosen, to be fair, stressed that she was only interested in presenting RIAA's side of the issue, and was kind enough to send me a fair amount of statistics and documentation, including a number of focus group studies RIAA had run on the matter.

However, the problem with focus groups is the same problem anthropologists have when studying peoples in the field – the moment the anthropologist's presence is known, everything changes.  Hundreds of scientific studies have shown that any experimental group wants to please the examiner.  For focus groups, this is particularly true.  Coffee and donuts are the least of the pay-offs.

The NARAS people were a bit more pushy.   They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".

Costing me money?  I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing.  If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet…and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing.

Am I suspicious of all this hysteria?  You bet.  Do I think the issue has been badly handled?  Absolutely.  Am I concerned about losing friends, opportunities, my 10th Grammy nomination by publishing this article?  Yeah.  I am.  But sometimes things are just wrong, and when they're that wrong, they have to be addressed.

The premise of all this ballyhoo is that the industry (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading.

Nonsense.  Let's take it from my personal experience.  My site (www.janisian.com ) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year.  Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975.  When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded Society's Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information.  Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs.  Not huge sales, right?  No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year.  But… that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book.  And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.

Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and libraries. 15 years ago she published a series of books with "Arrows" in the title; she's been getting royalties ever since.  However, one royalty period after putting the first "Arrow" book on Eric Flint's "Baen Free Library" site, she received over triple the normal royalty. [See note at the end — Eric.]  In fact, payment on all her old titles increased, suddenly and significantly, with the only change being the availability of that one free book.  I don't know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record catalogue that dates back to 1965, I'd be thrilled to see sales on my old catalogue rise.

Lackey says "It's what I'd expect to happen if a steady line of people who'd never read my stuff encountered it for free…they started to work through my backlist."  I've found that to be true over and over again.  Every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up.  A lot.

Now, RIAA and NARAS, as well as most of the entrenched music industry, are arguing that free downloads hurt sales.  (More than hurt – they're saying it's destroying the industry.)  Alas, the music industry needs no outside help to destroy itself.  We're doing a very adequate job of that on our own, thank you.

Here are a few statements from the RIAA's website:

1) "Analysts report that just one of the many peer-to-peer systems in operation is responsible for over 1.8 billion unauthorized downloads per month".

2) "Sales of blank CD-R discs have…grown nearly 2 ½ times in the last two years…if just half the blank discs sold in 2001 were used to copy music, the number of burned CDs worldwide is about the same as the number of CDs sold at retail."

3) "Music sales are already suffering from the impact…in the United States, sales decreased by more than 10% in 2001."

4) "In a recent survey of music consumers, 23%…said they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free."

Let's take these points one by one, but before that, let me remind you of something: the music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VHS, BETA, music videos ("Why buy the record when you can tape it?"), MTV, and a host of other technological advances designed to make the consumer's life easier and better.  I know because I was there.

The only reason they didn't react that way publicly to the advent of CDs was because they believed CD's were uncopyable.  I was told this personally by a former head of Sony marketing, when they asked me to license Between the Lines in CD format at a reduced royalty rate.  ("Because it's a brand new technology.")

1) Who's to say that any of those people would have bought the CD's if the songs weren't available for free?  I can't find a single study on this, one where a reputable surveyor such as Gallup actually asks people that question.  I think no one's run one because everyone is afraid of the truth – most of the downloads are people who want to try an artist out.

And if a percentage of that 1.8 billion is because people are downloading a current hit by Britney or In Sync, who's to say it really hurt their sales?  Soft statistics are easily manipulated.  How many of those people went out and bought an album that had been over-played at radio for months, just because they downloaded a portion of it?

2) Sales of blank CDs have grown?  You bet.  I bought a new Vaio in December, and now back up all my files onto CD.  I go through 7-15 CD's a week that way, or about 500 a year.  Most new PC's come with XP, which makes backing up to CD painless; how many people are doing what I'm doing?  Additionally, when I buy a new CD, I make a copy for my car, a copy for upstairs, and a copy for my partner.  That's three blank discs per CD.  So I alone account for around 750 blank CDs yearly.

3) I'm sure the sales decrease had nothing to do with the economy's decrease, or a steady downward spiral in the music industry, or the garbage being pushed by record companies.  Aren't you?  There were 32,000 new titles  released in this country in 2001, and that's not including re-issues, DIY's , or smaller labels that don't report to SoundScan.  A conservative estimate would place the number of "newly available" CD's per year at 100,000.  That's an awful lot of releases for an industry that's being destroyed.

To make matters worse, we hear music everywhere, whether we want to or not; stores, amusement parks, highway rest stops.  The original concept of Muzak (to be played in elevators so quietly that its soothing effect would be subliminal)  has run amok.  Why buy records when you can learn the entire Top 40 just by going shopping for groceries?

4) Which music consumers?  College kids who can't afford to buy 10 new CDs a month, but want to hear their favorite groups?   When I bought my nephews a new Backstreet Boys CD, I asked why they hadn't downloaded it instead.  They patiently explained to their senile aunt that the download wouldn't give them the cool artwork, and more important, the video they could see only on the CD.

Realistically, why do most people download music?  To hear new music.  Not to avoid paying $5 at the local used CD store, or taping it off the radio, but to hear music they can't find anywhere else.  Face it – most people can't afford to spend $15.99 to experiment.  That's why listening booths (which labels fought against, too) are such a success.

You can't hear new music on radio these days; I live in Nashville, "Music City USA", and we have exactly one station willing to play a non-top-40 format.  On a clear  day, I can even tune it in.  The situation's not much better in Los Angeles or New York.  College stations are sometimes bolder, but their wattage is so low that most of us can't get them.

One other major point: in the hysteria of the moment, everyone is forgetting the main way an artist becomes successful – exposure.  Without exposure, no one comes to shows, no one buys CDs, no one enables you to earn a living doing what you love.  Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money.  So I make the bulk of my living from live touring, playing for 80-1500 people a night, doing my own show.  I spend hours each week doing press, writing articles, making sure my website tour information is up to date.  Why?  Because all of that gives me exposure to an audience that might not come otherwise.  So when someone writes and tells me they came to my show because they'd downloaded a song and gotten curious, I am thrilled!

Who gets hurt by free downloads?  Save a handful of super-successes like Celine Dion, none of us.  We only get helped.

But not to hear Congress tell it.  Senator Fritz Hollings, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee studying this, said "When Congress sits idly by in the face of these [file-sharing] activities, we essentially sanction the Internet as a haven for thievery", then went on to charge "over 10 million people" with stealing.  [Steven Levy, Newsweek 3/11/02].  That's what we think of consumers – they're thieves, out to get something for nothing.

Baloney.  Most consumers have no problem paying for entertainment.   One has only to look at the success of Fictionwise.com and the few other websites offering books and music at reasonable prices to understand that.  If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online.  Instead, the industry-wide attitude was It'll go away.  That's the same attitude CBS Records had about rock 'n' roll when Mitch Miller was head of A&R.  (And you wondered why they passed on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)

I don't blame the RIAA for Hollings' attitude.  They are, after all, the Recording Industry Association of America, formed so the labels would have a lobbying group in Washington.  (In other words, they're permitted to make contributions to politicians and their parties.)  But given that our industry's success is based on communication, the industry response to the Internet has been abysmal.  Statements like the one above do nothing to help the cause.

Of course, communication has always been the artist's job, not the executives.  That's why it's so scary when people like current NARAS president Michael Greene begin using shows like the Grammy Awards to drive their point home.

Grammy viewership hit a six-year low in 2002.  Personally, I found the program so scintillating that it made me long for Rob Lowe dancing with Snow White, which at least was so bad that it was entertaining.  Moves like the ridiculous Elton John-Eminem duet did little to make people want to watch again the next year.  And we're not going to go into the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Greene and NARAS, where they pointed out that MusiCares has spent less than 10% of its revenue on disbursing emergency funds for people in the music industry (its primary purpose), or that Greene recorded his own album, pitched it to record executives while discussing Grammy business, then negotiated a $250,000 contract with Mercury Records for it (later withdrawn after the public flap).  Or that NARAS quietly paid out at least $650,000 to settle a sexual harassment suit against him, a portion of which the non-profit Academy paid.  Or that he's paid two million dollars a year, along with "perks" like his million-dollar country club membership and Mercedes.  (Though it does make one wonder when he last entered a record store and bought something with his own hard-earned money.)

Let's just note that in his speech he told the viewing audience that NARAS and RIAA were, in large part, taking their stance to protect artists.  He hired three teenagers to spend a couple of days doing nothing but downloading, and they managed to download "6,000 songs".  Come on.  For free "front-row seats" at the Grammys and an appearance on national TV, I'd download twice that amount!  But…who's got time to download that many songs?  Does Greene really think people out there are spending twelve hours a day downloading our music?  If they are, they must be starving to death, because they're not making a living or going to school.

This sort of thing is indicative of the way statistics and information are being tossed around.  It's dreadful to think that consumers are being asked to take responsibility for the industry's problems, which have been around far longer than the Internet.  It's even worse to think that the consumer is being told they are charged with protecting us, the artists, when our own industry squanders the dollars we earn on waste and personal vendettas.

Greene went on to say that "Many of the nominees here tonight, especially the new, less-established artists, are in immediate danger of being marginalized out of our business."  Right.  Any "new" artist who manages to make the Grammys has millions of dollars in record company money behind them.  The "real" new artists aren't people you're going to see on national TV, or hear on most radio.  They're people you'll hear because someone gave you a disc, or they opened at a show you attended,  or were lucky enough to be featured on NPR or another program still open to playing records that aren't already hits.

As to artists being "marginalized out of our business", the only people being marginalized out are the employees of our Enron-minded record companies, who are being fired in droves because the higher-ups are incompetent.

And it's difficult to convince an educated audience that artists and record labels are about to go down the drain because they, the consumer, are downloading music.  Particularly when they're paying $50-$125 apiece for concert tickets, and $15.99 for a new CD they know costs less than a dollar to manufacture and distribute.

I suspect Greene thinks of downloaders as the equivalent of an old-style television drug dealer, lurking next to playgrounds, wearing big coats and whipping them open for wide-eyed children who then purchase black market CD's at generous prices.

What's the new industry byword?  Encryption.  They're going to make sure no one can copy CDs or download them for free.  Brilliant, except that it flaunts the Bill of Rights.  And it pisses people off.

How many of you know that car makers are now manufacturing all their CD players to also play DVD's?  or that part of the encryption record companies are using doesn't allow your store-bought CD to be played on a DVD player, because that's the same technology as your computer?  And if you've had trouble playing your own self-recorded copy of O Brother Where Art Thou in the car, it's because of this lunacy.

The industry's answer is to put on the label: "This audio CD is protected against unauthorized copying.  It is designed to play in standard audio CD players and computers running Windows O/S; however, playback problems may be experienced.  If you experience such problems, return this disc for a refund."

Now I ask you.  After three or four experiences like that, shlepping to the store to buy it, then shlepping back to return it (and you still don't have your music), who's going to bother buying CD's?

The industry has been complaining for years about the stranglehold the middle-man has on their dollars, yet they wish to do nothing to offend those middle-men.  (BMG has a strict policy for artists buying their own CDs to sell at concerts - $11 per CD.  They know very well that most of us lose money if we have to pay that much; the point is to keep the big record stores happy by ensuring sales go to them.  What actually happens is no sales to us or the stores.)  NARAS and RIAA are moaning about the little mom & pop stores being shoved out of business; no one worked harder to shove them out than our own industry, which greeted every new Tower or mega-music store with glee, and offered steep discounts to Target and WalMart et al for stocking CDs.  The Internet has zero to do with stores closing and lowered sales.

If you think about it, the music industry should be rejoicing at this new technological advance!  Here's a fool-proof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise would never purchase a CD in a store.  The cross-marketing opportunities are unbelievable.  It's instantaneous, costs are minimal, shipping non-existent…a staggering vehicle for higher earnings and lower costs.  Instead, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off, bleeding on everyone and making no sense.

As an alternative to encrypting everything, and tying up money for years (potentially decades) fighting  consumer suits demanding their first amendment rights be protected (which have always gone to the consumer, as witness the availability of blank and unencrypted VHS tapes and casettes), why not  take a tip from book publishers and writers?

Baen Free Library (www.baen.com) is one success story.  SFWA (www.sfwa.org) is another.  The SFWA site is one of the best out there for hands-on advice to writers, but more importantly, over a decade ago they negotiated Internet payment deals for the use of writer's works.  As the Net grew and the music industry continued sticking its collective head in the sand, SFWA made sure its members were protected financially, without losing the opportunities Internet downloading provided.

I have no objection to Greene et al trying to protect the record labels, who are the ones fomenting this hysteria.  RIAA is funded by them.  NARAS is supported by them.  However, I object violently to the pretense that they are in any way doing this for our benefit.  If they really wanted to do something for the great majority of artists, who eke out a living against all odds, they could tackle some of the real issues facing us:

1) The normal industry contract is for seven albums, with no end date, which would be considered at best indentured servitude (and at worst slavery) in any other business.  In fact, it would be illegal.

2) A label can shelve your project, then extend your contract by one more album because what you turned in was "commercially or artistically unacceptable".  They alone determine that criteria.

3) Songwriters have to accept that they'll be paid only 75% of the rates set by Congress for their work on their own albums, or lose the contract.

4) Congressionally set writer/publisher royalties have risen from their 1960's high (2 cents per side) to a munificent 8 cents.

5) Many of us began in the 50's and 60's; our records are still in release, and we're still being paid royalty rates of 2% (if anything) on them.

6) If we're not songwriters, and not hugely successful commercially (as in platinum-plus), we don't make a dime off our recordings.  Recording industry accounting procedures are right up there with films.

7) Worse yet, when records go out-of-print, we don't get them back!  We can't even take them to another company.  Careers have been deliberately killed in this manner, with the record company refusing to release product or allow the artist to take it somewhere else.

8) And because a record label "owns" your voice for the duration of the contract, you can't go somewhere else and re-record those same songs they turned down.

9) And because of the re-record provision, even after your contract is over, you can't record those songs for someone else for years, and sometimes decades.

Additionally, we should be speaking up, and Congress should be listening.  At this point they're only hearing from multi-platinum acts.  What about someone like Ani Difranco, one of the most trusted voices in college entertainment today?  What about those of us who live most of our lives outside the big corporate system, and who might have very different views on the subject?

There is zero evidence that material available for free online downloading is financially harming anyone.  In fact, most of the hard evidence is to the contrary.

Greene and the RIAA are correct in one thing – these are times of great change in our industry.  But at a time when there are arguably only four record labels left in America (Sony, AOL/Time/Warner, Universal, BMG - and where is the RICO act when we need it?)… when entire genres are glorifying the gangster mentality and losing their biggest voices to violence…when executives change positions as often as Zsa Zsa Gabor changed clothes, and "A&R" has become a euphemism for "Absent & Redundant"… well, we have other things to worry about.

It's absurd for us, as artists, to sanction -– or countenance -- the shutting down of something like this.  It's sheer stupidity to rejoice at the Napster decision.  Short-sighted, and ignorant.

Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers.  Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning.  Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there.  Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts.  Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure?

We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful, insisting that any household wanting a copy for the  car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies.

As artists, we have the ear of the masses.  We have the trust of the masses.  By speaking out in our concerts and in the press, we can do a great deal to damp this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs – in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent inability to organize ourselves in order to better our own lives – and those of our fans.  If we don't take the reins, no one will.

Sources:Baen.com, BMG Records, Chicago Tribune, CNN.com, Congressional Record, Eonline.com, Grammy.com, LATimes.com, Newsweek, Radiocrow.com, RIAA.org , personal communications,

* for more information on the Free Library, go to www.baen.com.

* to read Eric Flint's entire article, go to www.janisian.com.

[NOTE from Eric: This statement is slightly inaccurate. Misty Lackey's Arrows books are published by DAW, not Baen, so none of them were put in the Baen Free Library. What happened was that sales of the Arrows books went up dramatically after some of Misty's Baen titles were made available for free. It should be noted that this simply emphasizes Janis' point, it does not detract from it. What it shows is that the "cross-over" effect from putting up some titles for free can affect the sales of non-free titles as well as titles in the Library -- including titles from a different publisher.]

Table of Contents

Prime Palaver # 1

Prime Palaver # 2

Prime Palaver # 3

Prime Palaver # 4

Prime Palaver # 5

Prime Palaver # 6

Prime Palaver # 7

Prime Palaver # 8

Prime Palaver # 9

Prime Palaver # 10

Prime Palaver # 11