To me, It seems as though authors today, are starting to have the same types of struggles that musicians are having. With music, you can "steal" it off the internet in just about 10 seconds, with books, more and more people are discovering access to copies, scans, or "google previews" than ever. I know some people who have even torrented their books for class. Not to mention the kindle and all these electronic books that you buy for about 140$ and download books for quite a bit less than the physical copy. According to this article....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461542987870022.html#ixzz10oqmSafI
When an author's book gets sold in a store, they receive twice the amount of money as if their book sold online for an e-book or something of the sort. This obviously means as downloading books becomes more popular, authors are going to really be struggling. As if that isn't enough the article also says that publishers are not approving as many book deals as they used to, especially new authors that they haven't heard of before. Therefore authors that are trying to get their name out there, are struggling the most because they are having to go to smaller independent publishers who don't pay nearly as much.
As far as the "fixity of the text" goes, authors not only struggle money-wise, but they also have to toss and turn over the fact that anyone could easily get their book off the internet and tweak it to how they want. Why people would want to discredit the book? I don't know, there's just those kinds of people out there.
All of this obviously didn't used to be a problem, because books never used to be available to download on the internet. If you needed a book, you had to buy its physical, white pages and black ink book. Or you had to go to the library of course. For research purposes you always need to get different sides to one topic therefore to do good research you had to put the physical books in front of you. Now we have people who take important excerpts out of books and put them online, people who scan the books and make them into PDF's, (kinda like the books we read for this class) Which to me, being born when I was is pretty dang awesome. Because now I don't have to go pick up the book, I don't have to pay for it, and I don't have to read it all. However how do we really know that these excerpts and things really are the important content out of the book?
we really don't.
"Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point of another." (Johns)
Books take a lot of time, effort, and patience to get from the writer, to the reader. That is why I say, those poor authors because we are now basically trying to get rid of the whole system, so we can save a trip to the bookstore/library.
You're right about authors not getting paid enough with the lower prices of books for new technology. I mean, the fact that you can get books for so cheap on the kindle is even more appealing than its hi-tech attributes. In regards to copy writing, even though the internet and torrents make it a lot easier to copy somebody else's work,I think it was still pretty easy to do even before we had all these technological means of doing so.
ReplyDelete"However how do we really know that these excerpts and things really are the important content out of the book?" I like this point you brought up since I've thought about this before. We have these assigned readings out of books, which is nice because we don't need to buy at least 30 different books, but so much learning is missing from this as well. Without the context and ability to flip though the book, and see what else it has to say, much of the context is lost.
ReplyDeleteI agree that much of the context was lost when doing this. However, much of the context was not necessary "usually" to the class. I mean how many times have we gone to class sat there for an hour and could have been there five minutes to get all the info needed---All the time. I like to think of excerpts as the five minutes. This is conflicting though, I mean yes it is cool that I don't have to buy a book but it's not supporting an author. If that is someones job they should be paid for what they gave me.
ReplyDeleteLike the post and the comments above, I too am interested by what this disassociation of credit will mean to the future of writing. Like all social battles, it seems that this one has already been lost, all that is left is to tell people. There do not exist good gatekeepers anymore. As such, we will eventually have to find a balance of value otherwise we risk losing out on what would otherwise exist if not for financial and economic pressures. Few writers die rich, you know.
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