Re: NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-books

From: "jon" 
> joseph harris wrote:
>>
>> Come on Jon, there is no way a bookshop can offer such a selection. Many of the older books can be ordered. But whether they are available or not is a matter of business, not of spite from publishers or creators.
>>   
> Welcome to the vicious circle: 'we don't make older books available 
> because people won't buy them >> we don't buy older books because 
> they're not available'. A paperback book isn't that much bigger than a 
> CD: 

A modern thin jewel case is approximately 4cu in, and the old ones app 11cu in. The smallest paperback I have here - Gower's The Complete Plain Words is just under 20 cu in and less than half the size of most blockbusters [the wrongly called 'Bestsellers'], while a fairly medium reference - the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs - is around 54 cu in. A large number of books in a bookseller are hardbacks, which are normally with thicker covers, of larger page size and more expansively laid out.

Do you want to try that one again Jon?

if a bookshop was genuinely devoted to quality rather than turnover 
> they could easily keep a range of good older works in stock. After all, 
> second-hand bookshops do it all the time.

Pardon? Is that a serious argument? the job of a seller of new books is to sell new books; the job of a second hand, used and antiquarian bookseller is to offer all that older stuff. Unused older books can also be found in remainder stores at very good prices. 

It no more makes sense for a seller of new books to sell the long tail or used, than for modern homes to have their toilets in an outhouse.

>> And I doubt you can find much i nthe way of old recordings i nrecord shops. Revival pieces are newly minted, and the 1721 piece, if really there, will be from a recent recording. Again you can order things if they are still in stock at the publishers or distributors.
>>   
> This has already been responded to.

But inadequately. There are millions of past recordings that no record store holds, and millions that have never been digitalised. The vinyl retro covers a tiny part of the range. Even now the weekly outpouring is to great for any store to hold copies of them. Do a comparison between the catalogue of recordings and the stock in any record store at any moment.

>> As to accusing publishers and booksellers of 'forcing untried' new products on unsuspecting customers... New book titles in the US alone are in the hundreds of thousands. No shop can stock all of one year's titles, let alone back to the year dot. And do you want decent books, or all the truly untried and unfiltered. This is already becoming a massive problem with ebooks, and they have hardly taken off yet.
>>   
> But this is exactly what eBook distributors CAN do. Storage space and 
> management issues are negligible, and if the stuff they want is there 
> the public will find it soon enough: they will even build their own 
> tagging paths to make it easier for others.

This is incorrect. To store all the books in existence digitally requires immense server space, and one store would never be safe. It is a costly and difficult exercise to bring past books to useable digital format. 

You might be able by search to find a book you know about. But the task of classifying in excess of ten million books in over one hundred languages is immense and very costly. There are issues of quality in ebooks - and there are not only different digital file formats, but many different ways of presenting an ebook. It has already become far more complex than the print book, and the difficulty of finding a way of compensating good online stores that specialise is going to make it - indeed there are already complaints - to find books on given subjects. Even more the quality is more difficult to ascertain.

But don't let the practical difficulties stop you.

> 
>> As to the rather funny idea of 'untried'; those are the living culture. All famous and liked authors started 'untried'. You are suggesting a full stop to new creation. Is that what you mean?
>>   
> I make an exception for non-fiction; but if all today's novelists, poets 
> and playwrights stopped writing forever I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep 
> over it. 

And your opinion in 7 billion opinions is to be the only one that counts?

>Since 99% of all writing is rubbish, 

Do you want to define 'rubbish'? 

>why don't we embrace the 
> stuff that's stood the test of time? Because it's not available any 
> more, that's why. How many 'famous and liked' authors from, say, 1983 
> can you find in a typical bookshop today?
> 
> Jon.

A 'typical bookshop' is not the place for them. A specialist bookshop might well carry the best information across many centuries, never mind 1983, but mostly likely in relatively modern publishings. I don't quite understand what you expect. The world doesn't dish stuff up on a plate. You have to stir yourself to find the unusual, or the little demanded.

A bookshop is a business, as is a publisher [even the big ones, even the small], and a writer is *your* employee. What would you think of your boss if he didn't want to pay you, and told you that you write rubbish?

By the way, how isa book that no publisher has thought worth republishing standing the test of time. I'd love to know. There may be a few exceptions. But I think the number of books in copyright in the US alone is extimated at between 5 and ten million [but if nayone has a more certain figure I would be grateful]. Something like 300,000 new titles [maybe more] are were published in 2009, and a further 700,000+ that are reprints or out of copyright. 

The actual number of new writings in ebooks is not known, but it is clearly growing fast. Big publishers are now making their long tails available in POD. Have you sought the books you want extensively?

Joseph


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