Sure, people sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.
What are your thoughts on paywalls and the decision that many newspapers have taken to make their content free?
This is a big topic, but let’s just say that in nature there’s no free lunch so somebody’s paying for it somewhere and the question is, ‘Who?’ If I do some writing and I put it on the Net and everybody else reads it for nothing, then I have actually paid for it, because it’s my time, my crappy little lunch that I’ve eaten to keep myself alive, my Internet communication – I’ve paid for that. It’s actually not free. How the primary creators are going to get remunerated – that’s the issue, and music has already hit that wall. I think people are more inclined to pay for a book, though, because they’re more likely to think it represents work – work by them, because it takes longer to read a book than it does to listen to an MP3.
Much of the discussion surrounding ebooks tends to revolve around emotive issues, such as not being able to read them in the bath, get them signed, or showcase them on your bookshelf, and the cosmetics of electronic versus paper text, but a lot what you’ve said about them has to do with their wider, social implications and you’ve speculated that the availability of e-books is actually increasing reading.
Well, you can’t do much on the Net without being literate. One of the good things about e-readers is that kids are more likely to think they are “cool” and may actually find it easier to isolate pieces of text and read them, especially if they have learning disabilities of certain kinds.
One very interesting – and refreshingly unsentimental – argument that you’ve made for paper books is that they make it more difficult for people to track what you’ve been reading.
Security agencies worry about libraries. They tried to target U.S. libraries – make them hand over the list of who had borrowed what at the library. But the thing about online stuff is that it is very spyable. It is extremely spyable, despite all the security precautions and whatnot. Where there’s a lock, there’s a key.
And reading has always been an inherently political act. Do you think e-books will make certain texts more available to readers in places where those books are perhaps censored? Or banned?
