Taki's Mag

The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan Riding, Dinaw Mengestu, Jack Lamar, and Elaine Sciolino. Scott Turow delivered the after-dinner speech. His theme was, “Will there be books in the future?” I should have gone straight to the bar before he started.

Turow is both a lawyer and a best-selling novelist of crime thrillers such as Presumed Innocent. He’s also the president of the Authors Guild. At the George V, although his Chicago accent was weary from the transatlantic flight, the feisty barrister packed some hard punches. “Any honest assessment of the future must recognize that writing books for a living may well disappear as a profession,” he said, “and with it, for many of the same reasons, libraries as we know them now.” Writers and libraries, and by implication bookshops and publishers, were “endangered species.” This was not the uplifting message we wanted after our gazpacho, braised duck, and Burgundian wines.

Literature, as music did when Napster came along, is waging a life-or-death war with online piracy. Turow admitted that e-books save publishers money on printing, storing, and shipping printed texts. E-books, however, are vulnerable to theft that robs authors and publishers. “The average eighteen-year-old computer geek,” Turow said, “can buy one copy of a book from Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, or Google and remove the encryption and get it posted online. Of course, the pirate sites are far more sophisticated. Under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, there is a device for shutting down these pirate sites, though it’s really just a game of Whac-A-Mole because they spring up under a different name.” Turow said that New York’s Macmillan publishing house sends 4,000 takedown notices to brigand sites every month. (Another publisher, John Wiley & Sons, pays three full-time staff to ferret out the pirates and bring them to book. In 2009, Wiley was demanding that 5,000 illegal e-versions of its titles be removed from the Internet per month.)

For the benefit of those suffering, as I do, from economic dyscalculia, Turow explained how Amazon is putting scribblers and publishers on the breadline. Amazon, which introduced the first effective e-reader, paid publishers fifty percent of a book’s cover price to sell it in an e-edition. Using a hypothetical cover price of $30, Turow continued:

So they were paying publishers, let’s say, $15. They then turned around and sold the readers the e-book version for $10. So they lost $5 on every sale. And nobody believed Amazon was engaged in an effort to subsidize publishers. It was of course an effort to drive out any competing e-reader.…And they were well on their way to monopolizing the market. And once that happened, publishers were not going to be getting $15 for what Amazon was going to be selling for $10.

Not satisfied with crippling book publishers, Amazon is taking on the magazines with the Kindle Single. “Amazon is commissioning writers to write thirty or forty pages for them,” Turow warned. “The author gets seventy percent of the proceeds, Amazon thirty percent. It’s a better deal than any author is going to get writing for an American magazine. But see what happens to the magazine business if this catches on.” And see what Amazon pays when it is the only employer of freelance talent left. Add to that the Googlization of libraries without authors’ permission and the ease with which anyone can read portions of books via Google without paying anyone anything.

Turow predicted the demise of publishers, which meant that “there won’t be advances for writers and books won’t be written and read.” For those of us who make a living from the written word as publishers, writers, or booksellers, this was a bitter after-dinner potion. It was time for a drink, and nothing short of hemlock seemed right.

In Paris shortly after Turow gave us the bad news, President Nicolas Sarkozy staged his eG8 forum in advance of the G8 summit at Deauville. In a way, the Tuileries Internet conference of media moguls from Google’s Eric Schmidt to Rupert Murdoch was the real summit, after which Deauville was a supper of leftovers for the servants. The moguls, even those who’ve facilitated the theft of intellectual property, issued a statement calling for “respect for privacy and intellectual property…cybersecurity, and protection from crime….”

Putting the principles into practice may be difficult, especially in countries such as Russia and China where kleptomania is regarded as a necessary survival condition rather than a mental aberration. Eric Schmidt rushed to defend Internet giants such as his corporation from state interference, saying, “Before we decide there is a regulatory solution, let’s ask if there’s a technological solution.”

He is asking a question he should be answering. The monopolization of the Internet, and thus of electronic publishing, is a condition for which he is part of the cause rather than the way out. In societies that value their written, visual, and musical cultures, the law must protect the creators. The Internet thieves who put our books up for free downloading should be treated just like the shoplifters they are. Those who advertise on sites that sell or give away stolen goods are accomplices in criminal activity and should suffer the penalty. Guarding the Internet against theft, as against the sexual exploitation of children, is no more a violation of freedom of expression than policing the streets against muggers and murderers is a bar to free behavior.

Despite the thieves and the Internet monopolies, writing and publishing may survive. After all, when the pill and the sexual revolution saw most women giving away their favors, the hookers didn’t give up. From the evidence along the Rue Saint-Denis, the bar of the Plaza Athénée, and the alleys of Pigalle, they are thriving.

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