The formerly stable system — the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and reader at the other — is slowly being bent into a pretzel. What the writer writes, how he writes and gets edited, printed, and sold, and then read — all of the old assumptions are under siege. (Birkerts, 1994, 5)
The Great Internet Gold Rush rivals even the legendary Tulip Mania of 1634-37 as a cultural/economic mass psychosis. At least tulips exist. Cyberspace is imaginary. (Robinson, 1998, A11)
In Chapter One, I suggested that online publishing occurred at the intersection of two technologies: digital communication networks and the printing press. Implicit in much of discussion since then is a tension between what is made possible by the two media which arise out of these technologies. Most of the writers surveyed in Chapter Two, for example, described their online publishing activities in reference to traditional publishing: they published online either as a supplement to their print publishing efforts or because their print publishing efforts had largely gone unrewarded. In Chapter Four, we saw that governments grappling with how best to regulate the World Wide Web often use analogies to previous media, including print media, as a guide for their efforts.
In Chapter One, I showed that the path a work of fiction takes between writer and reader differs substantially in print and online (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). This may have given the mistaken impression that the two systems are separate. As we saw in Chapter Two, though, there is some traffic between print and online publishing venues, and we can assume that this will increase as use of the Internet grows. A more accurate way of looking at the two publishing systems is that they really are different aspects of a single phenomenon. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1.
One of the things made clear by Figure 5.1 is how online publishing eliminates many of the people and organizations involved in the traditional publishing process of getting writing from writer to reader, the process known as disintermediation. We have already seen that many individuals who publish their work online do so in order to bypass the difficult hurdles set up by print publishers. In this chapter, I will look at the possible effects that will have on some stakeholders in print publishing who could be affected by this: publishers, designers and bookstores. All three stakeholder groups exist on the left side of Figure 5.1, the side representing traditional print publishing, but are not represented on the right side, which represents online publishing.
As we saw in Chapter Two, many of the writers surveyed claimed that one of the disadvantages of publishing on the Web was that there was so much competition that potential readers would not be able to find their work. This chapter will continue with a look at some of the mechanisms which have been created to deal with this problem. I will show that search engines, one of the first, may not be reliable as they become the basis of portal sites whose main goal is to keep people from leaving their content. This will be followed by a discussion of the lack of critical writing about online writing in print media, which is spawning various filtering mechanisms on the Web.
Finally, I will look at perhaps the second most important stakeholder group behind writers: readers. There is little information on people who read material, especially fiction, online. However, using a study of buyers of print books, I hope to suggest some ways in which readers may approach work published online.
Figure 5.1
The Current Publishing System
The multiple routes a story can take from the writer to the publisher in a world which contains both analogue and digital media. Combines Figures 1.1 and 1.2.
Publishers
Starting in the 1960s, abating somewhat in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, the publishing industry went through a period of great change. Small publishers merged. Large publishers bought out small publishers. Entertainment conglomerates bought publishers of all sizes in order to diversify their interests and give them access to another medium for their vertically integrated product chains. This process is often referred to as “corporate consolidation.” It is a process which has continued to the present day:
A notable deal [in 1997] involved Pearson PLC, which bought Putnam Berkley for $336 million from MCA, the media group controlled by Seagram, and thereby made Pearson’s Penguin communication subsidiary the second largest English-language trade-book publisher in the world. Reed Elsevier was particularly intent upon restructuring with a view to specializing in a limited number of markets. To this end it bought Tolley Publishing from Thomson Corp. at the end of January and promptly followed this up by selling to Random House for approximately $20 million the trade-book division of Reed Books, which included such long-established imprints as William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg, and Methuen. (Curwen, 1999, unpaginated)
More recently, in 1999, “News Corp. agreed…to acquire the Hearst Book Group from the Hearst Corp. for a price estimated at nearly $180 million. The Hearst book units, William Morrow and Avon Books, will be integrated into News’s HarperCollins publishing subsidiary and will form the nation’s second largest trade publisher with worldwide revenues of more than $900 million.” (Milliot, 1999, unpaginated) At the same time, Bertelsmann purchased Random House. (Getlin, 1998, M6) It is at the point where the $80 billion a year publishing industry has been described as one where “The whales are eating the whales.” (Carvajal, undated, unpaginated)
The result has been domination of the book publishing industry by a small number of companies. “Soon Random House will move from Third Avenue to a new corporate headquarters to be erected on Broadway by its current owner,” wrote Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books,
an international media conglomerate which embraces several well-known publishing imprints-including, in addition to Random House and Knopf, Doubleday, Bantam, Pantheon, Dell, Crown, and Ballantine, as well as a number of British imprints. General book publishing in the United States is currently dominated by five empires. Two are based in Germany-Bertelsmann, which owns the Random House group, and Holtzbrinck, which owns Henry Holt, St. Martin’s, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Longmans, Pearson, based in London, owns the Viking, Penguin, Putnam, Dutton group, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns HarperCollins and William Morrow. Simon and Schuster, Scribner, and Pocket Books belong to Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures among other media properties.” (Epstein, 2000, 4)
In fact, the top 8 American publishing houses are owned by entertainment conglomerates. (Tabbi, 1997, 770)
All of the individual publishing imprints remain. Thus, in book publishing, as in many other industries, consumers may believe that they are getting products from a wide variety of sources when, in fact, the number of producers is quite small (although in some cases, imprints which are part of larger companies do have some autonomy).
Some argue that increased concentration in the publishing industry is not necessarily a bad thing. “Size and creativity are not necessarily incompatible,” argued Gordon Graham, then Chairman of Butterworths. (Moskin, 1989, 52) However, others have argued that large publishers tend to be conservative in the books they are willing to put out. At the best of times, “Paper publishing is a risky business. The economics of printing forces publishers to produce titles in large printings. Because per-copy costs drop sharply with volume, small print runs are not profitable. Large print runs, however, mean that more capital is tied up in paper for as long as the copies take to sell — if they ever do. So less capital is available to buy new titles or promote current ones. In the meantime, the costs of warehousing, security, and insurance pile up.” (Rawlins, 1996, 60/61) For this reason, small publishers enter and leave the business with great frequency.
To take advantage of economies of scale, most major publishers are now looking for books which will appeal to large audiences. “Many observers believe that much of the pressure to find the next [literary] blockbuster comes from conglomerates that now control American TV, movie and literary companies… Driven by the bottom line, book companies are chasing a mass audience, just like studios.” (Getlin, 1998, M6) This has driven the price of books which are expected to sell a lot of copies way up: the memoir of rock singer Grace Slick, Somebody to Love?, was reported to have been given a $1 million advance, while Christopher Reeve was given $3 million for his autobiography. (Quinn and Baker, 1999, unpaginated)
Another trend in publishing, one enabled by the ownership of publishing houses by entertainment conglomerates, is to tie books in with work in other media. This means more than publishing novelized versions of films; books are being chosen specifically for their ability to be translated into other media. According to Tabbi, publishing houses “began to concentrate on sure-fire popular titles, not in order to subsidize serious work (the old rationale), but to provide material for the film and entertainment conglomerates with which most publishers are now affiliated. [note omitted]” (1997, 746) Aware of this, authors are adopting strategies to exploit it: “Today…savvy agents sell options on novels and non-fiction tales to [film] studios first, creating an industry buzz. Then they leverage huge advances out of publishers.” (Getlin, 1998, M6)
The results of this willingness to pay increasing amounts in search of a popular hit are inevitable: “…book publishers are cutting back on the number of titles they release. Simon & Schuster’s trade division published 650 titles in 1996 but will publish only 550 this year.” (Stevens and Grover, 1998, 93) The major publishers are not putting as much money into books which offer less likelihood of large financial return, first novels by unknown writers, for instance. “‘New York [the centre of American publishing] is no longer backing mid-level books,’ [professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon Jon] Franklin told the New York Times. ‘A lot of quality books are not given a chance…'” (Link, 1998, 7) In 1989, Ohad Zmora, publisher of Zmora-Bitan Publishers, anticipated “a danger in the growing homogeneity of book lists” as a result of these trends. (Moskin, 1989, 27)
Writers who are no longer being published in print must look for alternative places to have their work distributed. Some will turn to smaller presses. As was made clear in Chapter Two, many will consider publishing on the World Wide Web.
According to a report called “The Rest of Us,” there are 53,000 small and independent publishers in the United States, whose sales totaled $14.3 billion in 1997. (Kinsella, 1999, unpaginated) These publishers are a distinct group within the industry: they tend to publish far fewer books a year; they have smaller profit margins (leading to a more precarious existence); they do not have the advertising budgets of the conglomerate-owned publishers, and; they often have a regional, rather than national or international scope. Independent publishing houses will often put out books by authors who cannot get a contract with a major publisher (although with smaller print runs, less publicity and, for many of the smallest, far less distribution).
For the most part, independent and conglomerate-owned publishers have different stakes in the migration of publishing to the online world. One area in which this is clear is in the double-edged sword of opportunity and threat.
Consider the possibility of publishing books online. This has the advantage of cutting out printing and distribution costs, a substantial saving. “A piece by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker pegged the cost of printing, binding and distribution at about 18% of the list price of a hardback — $4.50 for a $25 hardback. While this is probably about right for many publishers, even this number is high for a large publisher with reasonable efficiencies. In actuality, a well-run publishing company can expect to pay about 10%-15% of a hardback’s list price for manufacture and distribution — $2.50-$3.75 for that $25 hardback.” (Eberhard, 1999, unpaginated) Include the 55% discount which goes to the retailer (ibid), and the economic advantage seems clear.
Despite this, online publishing has not been widely accepted by the mainstream: “Despite a range of initiatives in new media and considerable rhetoric, U.S. publishers have yet truly to embrace the potential of digital publishing. Attempts are sporadic, and lack a cohesive, clear strategy, business model, management structure or decision-making process.” (Abraham and Lichtenberg, 1999, unpaginated) This may be understandable for the larger publishing houses, which may not be willing to jeopardize their current profitability for an uncertain future (a cost/benefit analysis which echoes that of writers contemplating publishing online). However, smaller publishers could benefit substantially, not only financially. The large publishers already have national, or even international promotion and distribution, so the Internet holds little new for them in this area; the small publishing houses, on the other hand, could greatly benefit from the potential international audience which they could receive from being online.
While there is the carrot of increased profiles and profits, the Internet also holds out the stick of increased competition. As we have seen, individual writers are, in effect, becoming their own publishers by putting their writing directly onto the Web. It is not uncommon to hear stories like: “Late last summer, [professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon Jon] Franklin put up Bylines, a pay-per-read site, on the World Wide Web to sell his own out-of-print books and make available other original work previously ignored by print publishers.” (Link, 1998, 7) One somewhat controversial report “claims that consumer magazines have lost 61 million readers in the past year, and it blames the Web for the loss of many of them.” (Bennett, 1999, unpaginated) As we have seen, the issue of quality keeps readers away from some self-published work on the Web: “The elimination of the publisher’s filtering/editing function is all too obvious in some of these endeavors…” (Solomon, 1989, 109) However, the fact that online distribution greatly decreases the cost of publishing, a savings which can be passed on to the reader, makes Web-based works more attractive to potential readers.
Large publishers, especially those which are part of an entertainment conglomerate, are in a strong position to weather this competition, whether or not they ultimately employ the Internet themselves. These publishers have large enough profit margins that they can lose readers and still make money. In addition, where they are part of a conglomerate, the parent company can cover their losses while they adjust to the new publishing environment, and they have sources of revenue other than publishing (for instance, tie-ins with other media). Because their profit margins are much smaller and they do not have other sources of funds to fall back on, the independent publishers are in a much worse position to handle serious competition from the Web; if they lose many readers, they will quickly become unprofitable.
Competition from the Web may already be hurting alternative newspaper publishers.
The functions of the alternative press are being usurped by thousands of independent on-line publications springing up all over the Web. The costs involved in setting up a Web page are minimal and the potential audience is immense, making the imperative of ambivalent alliances considerably less urgent. The gay community can get its message out without having to share space with punk rockers, and the alternative arts scene can represent itself without appearing next to advertisements for phone sex. In effect, the emergence of alternative news media on the Internet has made publications like The Village Voice and Hour all but irrelevant. (Friedman, 1997, 177)
Content is not the only way in which the alternative weeklies are being challenged by the Web. According to Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newspapers, “alternative weeklies’ revenues from personal ads have slowed in the past two years, possibly as a result of competition from singles sites on the World Wide Web.” (Walljasper, 1997, 94) As with books, most mainstream newspapers are parts of chains, many of which are part of entertainment conglomerates, putting them in a much better position to weather the competition developing on the Web than independents.
The inevitable conclusion is that small presses have much to lose if they do not embrace the Web, and even more to gain if they do. “‘I’ve said this before, but now I say it with even greater assurance of its truth: Any independent publisher that does not have some plan to make use of the Internet as a publishing medium, and not just a marketing medium, will likely not be around five years from now,’ said Aron Trauring, publisher of Maxima New Media and the Jewish Heritage Online Magazine.” (Link, 1998, 7)
One aspect of the Web which publishers large and small are embracing is its usefulness as a means of promotion. For example, posting a first chapter online in a strategic place, such as the Alt.books.mysteries newsgroup, is often “10 times more effective than an ad in the subway,” director of online marketing at Time Warner trade publishing Greg Voynow claimed. (Martin, 1999, unpaginated) Mystery novels seem especially well suited to promotion through interactivity: “Every month, Avon’s site…features a short mystery — without the ending. Visitors to the site are invited to solve the crime and write their own conclusion or simply continue the story with more clues. Entries are sent via e-mail; the best one earns its writer three free Avon mysteries weeks in advance of their publication dates.” (ibid) While publishers are at the forefront of these efforts, individual writers may also develop initiatives which help promote their work.
Consider the case of author Lisa Scottoline. Months before her April HarperCollins release, Mistaken Identity, hit the shelves, Scottoline posted the legal thriller’s first chapter on her Web site and invited the entire world to take a crack at editing it. The established author’s unprecedented request for input received hundreds of responses and caught the press’s attention, earning Mistaken Identity valuable early exposure. More important, many of Scottoline’s online editors no doubt felt a sense of involvement with her book — and it doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to see the sales potential of that. (ibid)
Allowing potential readers to take on writing or editorial functions radically changes the relationship between writer and reader and reader and text. Mari Florence, publisher at Really Great Books takes this even further. She
envisions a future in which some mysteries would span several media. For instance, a metropolitan newspaper could run a serialized mystery story every day and invite readers to go to one or more online sites for clues to solving the crime. The readers could determine the story’s outcome with the help of the online clues. Ultimately, the entire story could be published as a book — which would, of course, be marketed and sold online. (ibid)
Aside from new forms of promotion, the Internet holds the potential solution to one of the most serious problems with the traditional publishing industry: the policy of returns. Publishers print a specific number of copies of a book based on their estimation of how many the public will buy. Bookstores ask for a certain number of copies of each book based on their estimate of how many copies they will sell. If these estimates are low, the bookstore will ask for additional copies; if the number of requested copies exceeds the original print run of the book, the publisher may decide on a second printing. If, however, the estimates are too high, and the bookstore cannot sell the number of books it has ordered, it can return the unsold books to the publisher, which must refund what the bookstore paid for them. These books are sometimes sold to remainder stores (the ones which frequently have a banner proclaiming “Big Book Sale” in their front window), which sell them to the public at deep discounts. Most often, however, they are simply destroyed. (While this destruction is extremely wasteful, it is absolutely necessary for the industry; if all of the books which were returned were to be put on the market at huge discounts, the ability of publishers to sell new books at the full price would be seriously undermined.)
Returned books are a large part of the publishing industry. “According to statistics released by the Association of American Publishers, 1998 return rates dropped 5.1% from the previous year, to produce a new overall average return rate of 31.6%.” (Quinn and Baker, 1999, unpaginated) As it happens, the return rate did not drop because more people were reading books, but because, “publishers have dramatically scaled back first printings.” (ibid) Still, the important point to be made is that approximately one in three books which are published and sent to bookstores are subsequently returned and, for the most part, destroyed. When you take the bestsellers, like Danielle Steele or Stephen King, authors who can expect to sell out print runs of millions, out of the equation, the return rate for books may be closer to 50%. This represents a substantial unrecoverable cost to publishers, not only because of the cost of printing the books which are ultimately not sold, but also for shipping and warehousing them. Online bookselling holds the potential of decreasing the rate of books returned to publishers, offering them a potentially spectacular financial savings.
Even before the advent of the World Wide Web, computers had a substantial effect on the production of books. As explained in Chapter One, since Gutenberg, each character in a printed page was represented by a metal block called type. To create a line of writing, a human being had to take a metal block for each letter and put it into a row. These rows were then stacked one on top of the other and placed in a wooden frame (and, ultimately, covered with ink and pressed on a page). This was known as the setting of type, or typesetting. The only major advance in the process in the 500 years before the introduction of the computer occurred in the 19th century, when a mechanical device automated the selection and placement of type.
This process changed in the 1970s, when optical typesetting machines, known as phototypesetters, were introduced into newspapers and publishing houses. With these machines, a type font was placed on a transparent plastic disc, which spun in a drum. An operator typed in the words which were to be set; a laser chose the letters from the spinning disc. The characters were flashed onto a chemically treated piece of paper, which had to be processed with chemicals in a way similar to photographs in order to bring out the characters. This process was sometimes referred to as “cold type,” although it really didn’t resemble the “hot type” of the metal blocks in any appreciable way. Among the differences between the two systems are: typesetting machines automatically justified lines, while justification with hot type had traditionally required the judgment of the setter, and; using paper tape or another storage system allowed the setter to reset a block of type, making changes as necessary, with relative ease, while, with metal type, changes required the physical resetting of a line since the medium had no storage capability. Cold type setting machines changed the nature of typesetting: what was once a skilled profession became little more than glorified typing.
Desktop publishing systems, which became widespread in the 1980s, further changed the nature of print production. With these, words which had been entered into a computer could be set in type on the computer, where pages could be designed and from which they could be printed out. While this originally had to be accomplished by an exchange of computer discs, digital communications networks further streamlined this process: “As almost anyone in contact with the publishing world knows, electronic transmission of documents has become the norm in the “developed” world. Authors e-mail manuscripts to publishers; publishers e-mail to editors who e-mail back corrected versions, and final copy is often e-mailed to the printers.” (Mermelstein, 1999, unpaginated) Because it was no longer necessary to key the words into the typesetting machine, a critical source of error was eliminated from the printing process. Furthermore, changing from regular type to italics, the size of type or the style itself became trivially easy. Producing professional-looking type was now a simple skill which anybody could acquire. As a result: “Typesetters and mechanical artists have vanished…” (Crawford, 1998, 27)
In the 1980s, British typesetters, through a very strong union, entered into contracts with newspapers which required that they type into computers all material which would appear in the newspaper — that is, everything they would have had to set in the old system — even though it had already been typed into the computer by the writers. While this maintained employment levels for typesetters, it was an absurd make-work project which clearly showed how unnecessary the profession of typesetting had become.
A similar change in the profession of design occurred. With metal type, the typesetter was, by necessity, also the designer of the page (an example of Ursula Franklin’s holistic technology type). Phototypesetting systems essentially split the process into two distinct functions: the design of pages and typesetting. Designers would get the elements (graphics and photographs prepared for print — which required a new profession — in addition to type) and decide how to put them together. Members of another new profession — paste-up artists — would then take all the elements and put them on a board as per the instructions of the designer. (A photograph would be taken of this page, which would then be used to make a plate which, when inked, would be used to imprint the image of the page on paper.) This breaking down of the production process into discrete steps mastered by different individuals is a good example of how a technology changes from holistic to prescriptive.
The introduction of desktop publishing had a more ambiguous effect on the profession of page design. Using programmes such as Pagemaker or Quark Express, it became possible to take the type on the computer and place it directly onto the finished page. With digital scanning systems (and, increasingly, digital photography), all graphic elements could also be placed on the page on the computer screen. In fact, with some of the most advanced systems, the finished page is put directly onto the film from which the printing plates are made, the type never having been printed into hard copy (although more often the intermediate step of printing the finished page occurs). Paste-up artists, like typesetters before them, are no longer necessary. This is a great boon for individuals and small publishers “because the computer encourages the democratic feeling among its users that they can serve as their own designers. Anyone can experiment with type size or style when the computer provides the fonts and drops them into place at the writer’s request. Anyone can create and insert his or her own illustrations with the help of automated drawer programs. The new technology thus merges the role of writer and typographer…” (Bolter, 1991, 66) In larger publishing houses, part of the role of page designers has been given to editors, who can now develop the look of a page as well as working on the words. However, most professional organizations maintain a separate design department, partially because many editors balked at the increase to their workload, partially out of recognition that “professional” design requires specific skills which are not likely to be found in generalists.
Desktop publishing and online distribution have given individuals and small organizations powerful design and distribution tools. To the extent that they will be doing design themselves, their work will compete with that of professional designers. It is not clear, however, that they will displace the professionals; after all, larger organizations will likely always need their services. Moreover, the explosion of Web pages has led to a huge increase in jobs for Web designers. Since the design principles and tools are largely similar, it is not unreasonable to believe that many of the designers who can no longer find work in print will be able to find work in online publishing.
At present, then, designers seem to have the best of both worlds: not only is there a lot of work for them in traditional print publishing, but new work is opening up in designing online publications, corporate Web pages, etc. Looking at Figure 5.1, which shows the current state of publishing, with traditional and Web systems existing side by side, we can see that designers could get work from both. Thus, today’s page designers could be expected to support Web publishing, since it expands their economic opportunities.
This seems to be part of a transitional period, however. As publishing migrates to the Web, many commentators expect that fewer books will be published in traditional form (ie: on paper). Thus, many of the design jobs on the left side of Fig 5.1, the side representing traditional publishing, will disappear in time. The question facing page designers will then be: is the number of jobs newly available online large enough to offset the number of jobs which will be lost in traditional publishing? The answer to this question will determine whether or not they support the new technology; all of a sudden, their stake in it is not so certain.
Let us take this scenario one step further. The much-touted advantage of the Web is that it gives individuals the power to create and disseminate their own work. Imagine a Web swamped by hundreds of millions of personal pages, all of which have been designed by their individual creators. As reading and writing were necessary for citizens to be able to participate in society in the 20th century, visual literacy will have to be taught alongside traditional literacy in school because visual literacy will be necessary for citizens to be able to participate in society in the 21st century. [1] In such an environment, “designer” as a separate category of employment will largely, although not entirely, disappear, since what were once specialized skills will become skills most people will need to have. (The reason it won’t entirely disappear is because some people will be better at it than others, and some people and organizations will always be willing to pay for such superior skills.) In such a case, it will be in the interest of designers to oppose the use of the Web for publishing, since their livelihood will be decimated. Note, this is exactly the same technology, used in exactly the same way, as it was when designers first supported it. What has changed are the social structures around the technology.
Of course, it is reasonable for a stakeholder group to act on clear short term goals rather than nebulous, iffy long term problems (even if, ironically, the technology in question which they support in the short term has the potential to destroy the group in the long term). For our purposes, it is important to note that the interest a stakeholder group has in a technology can change as the social structures around the technology change, even if the salient features and uses of the technology itself have not changed.
This may seem speculative, but there is precedent for this process in publishing. Before Gutenberg, written knowledge was kept alive in scriptoria, places where manuscripts were literally copied by hand. The scriptoria were often monasteries, but commercial scriptoria also existed. When mechanical type was perfected by Gutenberg, the need for hand copied books disappeared; within 100 years, the scriptoria had all but disappeared with it. The monks presumably returned to spiritual pursuits. Many of the commercial scriptoria workers, however, simply transferred the design skills they had learned from that profession to the new profession of typesetter/printer (Katz, 1995 and Lehmann-Haupt, 1957). The copiers of that age must have gone through a similar process of assessing their interests that modern designers will go through.
There is one further complication to this picture. Web surfers have the ability to control the fonts, type size and display of graphics on their computer screens; when text is saved and printed out, the computer user can add graphics and change fonts, type styles, etc. In essence, a second level of design occurs with material delivered online, a level where the reader becomes the designer. Of course, this never happened with print books, since the reader bought the books in a fixed form. As we have seen previously, for a variety of reasons, most people do not read large amounts of text off a computer screen, they print it up before reading it. When a reader prints out material received by digital distribution, he or she effectively becomes a printer, with control of all of the design parameters. In the long term, this could have a devastating effect on the printing profession. It also suggests that paper producers will have to face changes in paper consumption over the long term, shifting from newsprint and other professional types to the standard 8 1/2 by 11 sheets which are used in the home.
Like other stakeholders, retail bookselling outlets are not a homogenous group. There are two distinct groups within this category: chains and independents. The chain stores (Chapters and Indigo in Canada) are usually housed in very big buildings, with a large number of books on a wide variety of subjects. Independent bookstores, by way of contrast, are usually small and often specialize in a specific type or genre of book. The two types of store are in direct competition for readers: “Today, the 800 or so superstores [in the United States] owned by Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Borders and Crown control almost 50% of all bookstore sales. As a result, hundreds of independent bookstores have closed.” (Mann, 1997, 15) In Canada, Chapters owns 54 megastores and 210 mall stores. (Ross, 1999a, C1)
As the chains expand the number of their stores, independents are closing shop. Independent bookstores in Canada which have closed in the last five years include: Albert Britnell Bookshop (Toronto), Sandpiper Books (Calgary), Bollums Books Ltd. (Vancouver), Printed Passage (Kingston, Ont.), Edwards Books & Art (Toronto) (Gibbon and Stueck, 1999, B1); Mary Scorer Books and Heaven Book and Art Cafe (Winnipeg), Food for Thought and Books Canada (Ottawa) (Ross, 1999b, C1); The Book Cellar and Ulysses Travel Books & Maps (Toronto) (Stoffman, 1999a, C6), and; C. Johnson Bookseller (London, Ont.) (Strauss, 1999, B1). Most recently, Duthie’s Books in British Columbia was forced into restructuring which was expected to lead it to close all but one of its regional chain of stores. (Dafoe, 1999, D4)
A similar trend can be seen in the United States. In San Francisco, “Crown closed three years ago, as did Cottage Bookshop in Larkspur around the same time, and Books Revisited went belly up two years ago.” (High, 1999, unpaginated) Other closings include A New Leaf and New Albion Bookshop. (ibid) Since 1991, membership in the American Bookseller’s Association, which is largely made up of independents, has fallen from 5,200 to 3,300. (Gaudin, 1999, unpaginated) Reflecting on this trend, Celia Duthie, current owner of Duthie’s Books, commented, “Fifth Avenue in New York used to be such a fabulous place, lined with bookstores like Scribners, wonderful places. Now they are all gone and you’ve got a Barnes and Noble every three blocks. If that’s not fascism, I don’t know what is.” (Dafoe, 1999, D4)
A large part of the chains’ advantage over independent bookstores is economic; because one buyer can purchase books for all the stores in the chain, they get volume discounts which they can pass on to consumers. According to Ross, the chain bookstores “squeeze publishers for discounts [they] can pass onto consumers, and keep the cash flowing through.” (1999b, C1) This is especially true of the bestsellers which make up much of the chain stores’ sales. In order to make their discounts as deep as possible, the chains work on slender profit margins: “Analysts estimate that Chapters’ net income for 1999 will be in the $10-million range — not a high percentage on $500-million in sales.” (ibid) Independent retail outlets, by way of contrast, do not have access to the economies of scale available to the chains, and cannot discount books sufficiently to match their prices. Moreover, because of their size, the chain stores (especially the megastores) can stock far more books than any independent. A reader looking for a specific book might go to an independent specializing in that subject, but most readers just browsing will tend to go where there are the most books to consider.
This has an effect on what books are available. Since independent bookstores owe their allegiance to a specific region, they often support the work of local writers. For instance, Bill Duthie, founder of Duthie’s Books, was described as “a pioneer who agreed to stock and sell B.C.-written books, and acted as unofficial author’s agent and salesman when required.” (Stueck, 1999, B4) Chain bookstores, whose buying decisions are made from a central office, cannot have the same level of commitment to local writers. (In fact, to the extent that they need national or international bestsellers to maintain their sales volume, they actively exclude small presses and local writers.)
Concentration at the retail level goes hand in glove with concentration at the manufacturing level. As we saw above, publishers are looking increasingly for bestsellers from authors with reputations; booksellers exploit the blockbuster phenomenon by pushing books with authors with reputations (partially by giving them favourable positions on the floor, arranging signings, et al, but also simply by stocking far more copies of such books). This has changed what books are sold: “Between 1986 and 1996 the share of all books sold represented by the thirty top best sellers nearly doubled as retail concentration increased. But within roughly the same period 63 percent of the one hundred best-selling titles were written by a mere six writers – Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, and Danielle Steele – a much greater concentration than in the past and a mixed blessing to publishers who sacrifice much of their normal profit, and often incur losses, to keep powerful authors like these.” (Epstein, 2000, 9)
Because bookstores are looking for quick profits, they are returning unsold books to publishers at an increasing pace, even books with a substantial reputation for quality:
The Los Angeles Times, in its year-end list of the best books of 1999, called Morgan [a biography of J. P. Morgan written by Jean Strouse] ‘a riveting detective story and a masterpiece.’ Morgan was short-listed by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, Business Week, and other general-interest publications as one of the best works of nonfiction of 1999. But when these lists appeared nine months after Morgan was published, fewer than one thousand copies were on hand in the 528 superstores of the Barnes and Noble chain which, together with Borders Books, the second-largest chain, dominates the retail book trade. With Christmas a month away Barnes and Noble had apparently decided that in a year when millions of Americans were obsessed with the stock market, Morgan was nevertheless an unlikely Christmas gift. On the day the New York Times list appeared, copies of Morgan were no longer on display in Barnes and Noble’s branch four blocks north of the Random House building on Third Avenue. It was Strouse’s literary agent who visited the Third Avenue store that day, noticed the omission, and called it to the attention of the store manager, who ordered fifty copies. Thereafter, the chain as a whole restocked Morgan.” (ibid, 5)
The rapid turnover of books in stores is likely to have two effects. In the short run, it will drive readers to the Web to find books that are no longer being stocked by the chains, even if they came out recently and had good reputations. Coupled with the way publishers are cutting back on the number of books they are offering, the other likely effect will be to drive authors to self-publish, perhaps some on the Web.
In the past, publishers would nurture books in the hope that they would become profitable in the long term. Many twentieth century writers whose work was not immediately successful became respected as masters of their craft because their publishers kept their books on their backlists, including Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner. The current rate of turnover means that books which aren’t immediately profitable are allowed to quickly go out of print. “In 1999 some 90,000 books-many worthless, many others valuable-went out of print, according to the vice chairman of Barnes and Noble.” (ibid) As we saw in Chapter Two, a couple of the surveyed writers put their work on the Web which had been allowed to go out of print; this may increase.
Online booksellers complicate the retail book market: “Canada’s independent booksellers are in survival mode, struggling to meet competition from Chapters’ wildly successful megastores and from new book sources on the Internet…” (Stoffman, 1999a, C6) The largest online booksellers have access to economies of scale similar to that of retail chains, so they can afford similar discounts. Thus, although online booksellers are in direct competition with bricks and mortar book chains generally, the independent bookstores are the first casualties of the competition.
Online booksellers have many advantages over physical booksellers.
John Gambrill enjoys browsing at his local bookstore, but when he wanted a specific tome for his son last Christmas, he was forced to search further afield. Even then, Nomads of Niger was out of stock at the larger bookstores in Vancouver, too.
Finally, the retired engineer turned to an Internet bookseller and, almost immediately, the photo essay book turned up.” (Strauss 1999, B1)
Online booksellers can have far more books in their catalogues than physical stores, even megastores, can have in stock; this makes the Net a good place for people who want something obscure to look. The books need never become unavailable because copies are not physically present in a bookstore. In addition, the Web is a good place to look for books by foreign publishers; by accessing their site, readers have the opportunity to find books which are unlikely to be stocked by any physical retail outlet. Then, there is the convenience of shopping online: “It saves me a trip to the store, [and] it’s here the next day…” (Strauss, 1999, B9)
Another advantage online booksellers have over physical retailers lies in the strange return policy of the publishing industry. As we have seen, “Many more books are published than there is retail space for, and few of us buy books anyway. So a publisher lets retailers return unsold copies to increase the chances that they can afford to carry new titles. Occasionally as much as half of a mass market fiction print run of half a million copies is returned and destroyed. With the ever-rising tide of new books, the average newsstand display time for a title is now around a month.” (Rawlins, 1996, 61) Because online retailers do not have to stock as many books (since they can order them directly from the publisher as order requests come in from readers), they do not have to tie up as much capital in buying books which ultimately will not be sold.
Estimates vary, but some believe that online book sales will become quite substantial quite soon. “According to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., on-line book sales in the United States will reach $3-billion (U.S.) in 2003 — 18 per cent of the retail market. In Canada, Forrester estimates sales of about $200-million.” (Ebner, 1999, B9) According to Chapters Internet President Rick Segal, “on-line sales will generate as much as 15 per cent of Chapters’ sales within five years…” (ibid)
A large part of the reason traditional booksellers are moving online is the competition from native online booksellers, which has been taking sales away from physical stores, to the point where it threatens some of their existences. One prediction is that by the year 2005, half of books sold will be sold online. (Wolf and Sand, 1999, 112) The dominant player in online book sales is Amazon.com.
Amazon.com was established in 1995. Estimates suggest that it currently has 10 million customers. (Stone, 1999, unpaginated) Given the international nature of the Internet, it should come as no surprise that the company’s customers come from 150 different countries. (Coffman, 1999, unpaginated) The amount of books available from the online retailer is staggering: “Amazon offers a selection of over 3 million titles, including all 1.5 million English language titles currently in print, as well as everything listed in Books Out of Print. That’s more than 17 times the 175,000 to 200,000 titles available at your local Barnes and Noble or Borders and way more than the 20,000 to 40,000 titles you might expect at a typical neighborhood bookstore.” (ibid) The online bookseller’s sales can be impressive: “In the last 3 months of 1998 alone, Amazon shipped some 7.5 million books, CDs, and videos — enough to fill a bookshelf 101 miles long.” (ibid) To the extent that the books it sells are not available at physical stores, Amazon.com could be increasing the readership for books. However, to the extent that Amazon.com sells bestsellers or other books which are available from (or can be ordered through) traditional booksellers, the company is taking sales away from them.
Online bookselling offers many advantages over in-person stores. One is purchasing convenience:
Amazon opens shop everywhere an Internet connection exists. Increasingly that means right on your desk at work and in your study at home and anywhere in the world you live. Best of all, it’s convenient. It waits patiently for you to come use it whenever you want, whether it’s 2:00 p.m. in New York, 11:30 at night in Bangkok, or 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning in Mexicali. You don’t have to do anything special to use it. You don’t have to get in your car, or find a parking space, or put up with surly, underpaid clerks. Just fire up your computer and click. (ibid)
Another advantage pioneered by Amazon.com is payment convenience: “With the site’s 1-Click feature, once you’ve registered (which includes providing your credit-card number), Amazon recognizes you each time you visit and lets you order with a single click of the mouse. No lengthy shipping addresses to type in. No passwords to recall. For frequent shoppers, 1-Click saves time.” (Turner, 1999, unpaginated)
Another technique enabled by online bookselling which Amazon.com pioneered was that of getting other Web sites to agree to affiliate with it. With this program, any Web site which refers to a book can have a link to Amazon.com, where Web surfers can then buy the book. The creators of the originating page get a percentage of any sales which arise out of their referrals to Amazon.com. Any Web site could, in theory, be affiliated with Amazon.com: a nurse’s association could connect to it through listings of medical texts; chess sites through books on chess; clothiers through fashion books and magazines; and so on. The affiliate model “is now a proven way for booksellers to cooperate with other retailers or information purveyors to grow sales for everybody.” (Shatzkin, 1999, unpaginated) If it becomes successful, this model could be a boon for smaller producers and booksellers. “An intelligent and informed specialist in business books, for example, might persuade some appropriate Web sites that it is a better choice for an affiliate relationship than Amazon. That is a new opportunity for independent booksellers.” (ibid) However, to the extent that Amazon.com has already established itself as the site to affiliate with, this must be considered an uphill battle.
The theory by which many people judge Internet companies is that, because several intermediaries can be eliminated from the sales chain, they are in a better position than bricks and mortar stores to make money. Yet, despite some impressive numbers, Amazon.com, like many online companies, is losing money. “In the quarter ended March 31, Amazon.com counted net sales of $293.6 million, a 236% increase from the same quarter last year, before music and video sales were added to the site. It posted a loss of $61 million, compared with a $10.36 million loss a year earlier.” (Deck, 1999, unpaginated) The amount of losses Amazon.com incurs on an annual basis are even greater: “Amazon ran a net loss of $75 million last year, and another $200 million could go out the door this year.” (Koselka, 1999, unpaginated) Nor is Amazon.com unique in this regard. “…a Publishers Weekly analysis of four e-retailers [including Amazon.com] that report their results show that online book sales rose 322% in 1998 to $687.1 million.” (Mutter, 1999, unpaginated) Yet, “The four e-retailers reported a combined net loss of $227.5 million in 1998, a 370% increase over 1997. Losses at bn.com increased 511% in 1998, while Amazon had a 384% increase. Fatbrain was the only service to report a faster increase in sales (256%) than losses (209%). Borders.com reported a 75% increase in its net loss last year, to $10.5 million. The four online bookstores had accumulated losses of $275.9 million for 1997 and 1998.” (ibid)
There are many possible reasons for this. One is the deep discounting of books, which means that the company sells many of its books at or close to a loss. Volume sales wouldn’t help, because the more books the company sold, the greater its potential losses. Moreover, in order to compete, other booksellers, including physical stores, would have to lower their prices to similar levels: “Amazon.com triggered an online bookselling price war last week when it announced that it would sell all New York Times bestsellers at a 50% discount… Within 24 hours, Barnesandnoble.com, Borders.com and Booksamillion.com all instituted bestseller discounts of at least 50%.” (Zeitchik, 1999a, unpaginated) While good for readers in the short term, this kind of discounting threatens the financial viability of many book retailers.
Another possible reason for the losses of online booksellers is the amount they spend on advertising: Amazon.com “invested 22% of its total revenues on sales and marketing in 1998, while bn.com spent more money on its sales and marketing efforts, $70.4 million, than it earned in total revenues.” (Mutter, 1999, unpaginated) The theory is that losses today will pay off in the establishment of the biggest readership base tomorrow. As Candice Carpenter, head of iVillage explains, “This is a land grab. You want to put your stakes in the most valuable property you can as fast as you can because it’s not going to be there tomorrow.” (Fox, 1999, unpaginated)
Despite not making a profit, Amazon.com is heavily supported by the market. In a single year, the price of Amazon.com stock went from $11 per share to $105. (Streitfeld, 1998, unpaginated) In early 1999, the company, which has never made a profit, was valued at $23 billion. (Fox, 1999, unpaginated) In addition, it is diversifying its product base, with the purchase of Exchange, which runs bibliofind.com, which “has a database of more than nine million hard-to-find and rare books, and lists thousands of independent dealers and retailers,” and Musicfile.com, which “has more than three million items of hard-to-find recordings and music memorabilia,” (“Amazon buys into rare books, music,” 1999, unpaginated) and investments in Drugstore.com, an online seller of medications and consumer medical supplies, and Homegrocer.com, an online seller of groceries, among other companies. (Stone, 1999, unpaginated)
The upshot of all of this financial wheeling and dealing is that Amazon.com is likely to be able to weather losses from the online sales of books for a long time. On the one hand, it will continue to have large cash infusions as long as the market is willing to support it while it continues to lose money. On the other hand, as bookselling becomes a smaller part of its overall business, the losses it incurs when it sells books become less important.
This is bad news for independent booksellers, who cannot afford substantial losses. Even if they band together, they are not likely to be able to afford the discounts necessary to compete with the major booksellers. They are likely to find themselves shut out of substantial online sales, which will increasingly compete with them.
In the long-run, losses for even Internet companies are not sustainable. According to Stone, “no one doubts that there will be some consolidation of the crowded field [of online booksellers] in the months ahead.” (1999, unpaginated) In the physical world, this often means merging failing companies and combining their assets. However, to the extent that online booksellers have the same fundamental asset (a catalog of published books), mergers do not seem to offer any advantages. Some companies, then, will simply disappear. Cutthroat competition between online booksellers is good for consumers in the short term since it drives prices down. However, when the smoke clears and a small number of booksellers are left, we can expect prices to rise, not only to stem future losses, but also to pay for past losses.
Bookstores have a couple of different strategies for coping with online competition. Most chain megastores have a coffee and pastry outlet in their store (each Chapters, for instance, has a Starbucks coffee counter (Gibbon and Stueck, 1999, B2)). Chapters and Indigo offer “plush customer seating,” encouraging their customers to read books or magazines in comfort, as well as hosting events such as “the occasional string quartet.” (Southworth, 1999, B9) Independent store Bolen Books “holds singles evenings a few times a year as a way to draw shoppers, who get a 10-per-cent discount that night… A gift registry was launched recently that has been popular for Father’s Day.” (Strauss, 1999, B9) Duthie’s Books has been involved in “sponsoring readings, lectures and events such as Bard on the Beach, Vancouver’s summer Shakespeare Festival.” (Stueck, 1999, B4)
These, and other efforts, are attempts to make going to a bookstore a social event. Segal claims that, “People go to a bookstore much like they go to movies or they go out to eat. It’s a destination…” (Ebner, 1999, B9) You will recall that existing media structures continue to flourish in the face of competition from new media only to the extent that they can establish advantages over the new media. Bookstores are trying to use their physicality — something no online bookseller will ever be able to duplicate — to their advantage. However, the closure of so many independent bookstores suggests that the price at which books are sold will always be a critical factor in the success of book retailers, no matter what other advantages they offer, another factor which puts the independents at a distinct disadvantage.
Another possible response to the challenge of online booksellers currently being explored by physical bookstores is sometimes referred to as on-demand printing. “Xerox’s idea is to set up sophisticated printer/binder and packaging units at various strategic points, just as many cities are now well-equipped with photocopying centers, usually at walking distance in busy areas. The copy would be downloaded into the unit from an on-line source and a finished, bound, and packaged book, brochure, pamphlet, or ‘special edition’ would come out at the other end.” (de Kerckhove, 1997, 114) The Xerox DocuTech 135 is touted as being able to print and bind a paperback book in a minute, a book which “looks identical to its offset brethren.” (Stoffman, 1999b, J10)
Printing on-demand could solve many of the problems of the current physical distribution system. Returns could be minimized, for instance, since it would no longer be necessary to have a lot of copies of a large number of books in the store. Stores need never run out of copies of a book, since they could download as many as they need from their online source. Books need never go out of print, since storing digital copies takes far less space than physical copies (which would change the retail market in another way: “In the U.S., Lightning Press, owned by the wholesaler Ingram’s, has made a specialty of such [on-demand] reprints, undercutting second-hand bookstores as a source of out-of-print volumes.” (ibid)). Readers would benefit, since, “The market for regional and specialized artists should also expand. Today, these artists get limited shelf space because of the high risk of returns and warehousing costs. Once their work is digitally stored, their books or records are effectively always in stock in any store with an on-demand system.” (McNish, 1994, B6) In effect, any bookstore could make any book available over the Internet available to their customers; bookstores would have to compete, then, on price and such intangibles as quality of service, convenient location, et al.
Many bookstores expect to be the strategic points at which printing on-demand will take place. The problem with this scenario is that there is no reason to believe that bookstores would have to be such central points. Relatively inexpensive printing equipment already exists; when the cost of binding equipment comes down enough, any corner store will be able to do on-demand printing. For that matter, as bandwidth increases and the price of hardware and software comes down, there seems to be no reason why individual readers will not be able to download, print and bind their own books. “As for the idea of bookstores printing books, I have to wonder why anyone thinks that there would be bookstores if that [personalized books without large print runs] were even to happen… In any event, if authors can reach their readers directly, then both bookstores and publishers will become obsolete.” (Crawford, 1998, 27)
The final method by which bookstores hope to compete with online booksellers is to go online themselves. The Canadian Booksellers Association “has set up its own Web site, cbabook.com, billing it as Canada’s biggest bookstore. The site still needs fine-tuning, but members like [owner of Melfort Books and past president of the 1300 member CBA] Ms. [GailMarie] Anderson are thinking of developing an on-line presence for their store, which could hook into the group’s site.” (Strauss, 1999, B9) A chain of linked pages could give independent booksellers a substantial online presence. Moreover, a system whereby any store in the online chain could order books from any other store in the chain might help to counteract the advantage megastores have in their ability to stock a greater number of individual volumes. “‘The Net is probably the single most valuable access channel for independent booksellers,’ [Indigo founder and CEO] Ms. [Heather] Reisman said, noting they can expand their sales on-line…” (Ebner, 1999, B9) In another venture, Canadian independent booksellers have joined with Southam publishing to sell books online. “Consumers who visit the site will be able to order books from approximately 100 booksellers that currently have the capability to fulfill orders over the Internet, said Sheryl McKean, president of the Canadian Booksellers Association. Other CBA members who don’t yet have that capability will be able to list information about author tours, readings and other events on the site.” (Renzetti, 1998, C2) In the United States, “A group of 900 independent booksellers is banding together to jump into the e-commerce fray that made a Goliath out of Amazon.com and battered small-town Davids.” (Gaudin, 1999, unpaginated)
But, of course, the major chains are also going online. Moreover, as we have seen, individual writers are bypassing the whole system by publishing directly on the Web.
While online sales may seem like a good defense against online booksellers, and, as a consequence, may allow some booksellers to continue to exist as corporations, they may, at the same time, be undermining their ability to maintain their physical stores. “One has to wonder, ironically, how long they, including Chapters’ own Chapters.com, will permit the existence of even Chapters’ own bookstores, with their more costly real-estate locations, staff that must do more than pick and pack, and the breadth of stock that customers expect them to have on hand.” (Greaves, 1999, D6) As the costs associated with physical stores increase, and as more people get comfortable with buying products online (and secure and effective payment systems develop), we can expect more book sales to immigrate to the Web. The question is, how much will be left for physical bookstores?
Traditional media can be considered a response to the vast amount of information being produced and stored by human beings. Editors of newspapers decide which articles to run; book publishers decide which books to put out; record companies decide which artists to sign; and so on. In traditional media, organizations which serve as information filters are sometimes referred to as gatekeepers. Some think that gatekeepers assure the quality of work in a medium by not allowing “bad” work through their gate, but this is only partially true: a tabloid newspaper is a gatekeeper in exactly the same way as a “quality” newspaper; the publisher of romance fiction is a gatekeeper in exactly the same way as a publisher of serious fiction. Gatekeepers are not concerned with the difference between high and low culture, only with information which contains the esthetic qualities which satisfy their requirements. Gatekeeping organizations establish brand identities; information consumers seek out these organizations because of the brand, and return to them as long as the information they supply consumers fulfills their needs.
According to Levinson, “The problem with the gatekeeper — whether unavoidable in the case of mass media or optional in the case of online publication — is that it cuts off the flow of ideas before the intended recipients, the readers, have a chance to select them.” (1997, 134) While this is certainly true, many people seem willing to accept this situation in order not to have to go through the process of searching through vast amounts of information themselves. The choice seems to be between an imperfect gatekeeping process which will give people some, but not all of the information they could want and searching through a huge amount of information without any guarantee that they will find anything of value at all.
As we have seen, traditional media are attempting to position themselves as gatekeepers in the electronic world, using it to sell the information which they produce. However, the World Wide Web has also spawned native gatekeepers. These are known as portal sites. A portal site is a home page (defined here as the first page to come up on your screen when you connect to the Web through a browser [2]) which opens out onto a
relatively self-contained site. One of the problems with attempts to make the Web a commercial medium is that a surfer can move out of one’s site with a click of her or his mouse. Portal sites, rather than being doorways into the larger Web, are actually meant to keep people within a single site. For instance, “[Search engine] Excite capitalized on that flaw — the overwhelming volume of information — by creating shortcuts for its users, logging the most popular searches, and organizing them into corresponding channels (lifestyle, sports, shopping, etc.). The hope was that people would stick around longer as they burrowed through the channels, eyeballing ads on the way.” (Robischon, 1998, 41) By expanding its content in this way, Excite did increase how long people stayed at the site: users viewed an average 39.5 pages in 1998, up from 29.3 two years earlier. (ibid) This meant a potentially substantial increase in advertising revenue, since each of these pages would carry ads.
Some estimates suggest that portals will be big business: “…by 2003, portals are expected to grab 20% of all Web traffic and $3.2 billion in Web advertising dollars.” (“Analysts Foresee ‘Portal Melee,’ 6) Not surprisingly, given this trend, traditional media are investing in existing portal sites: “Snap is part-owned by NBC; and GO Network is jointly run by Infoseek Corp. and the Walt Disney Company” (Robischon, 1999, 80), or creating their own, “Knight-Ridder Inc. is preparing to transform its U.S. newspaper Web sites into a national network of regional Internet portals, hoping to target advertising to people who use the sites as their first stop in cyberspace.” (Associated Press, 1999, B5) The Washington Post and The New York Times both intend to create portal sites. (ibid)
Although many Internet portals began as stand-alone sites (for example, Compuserve), many search engines are currently morphing into portal sites. Search engines were once simply a single page which allowed computer users to search a database of Web links. Given the great need for tools with which to find information on the Web, it is understandable that “Search engines are the most visited sites on the Web, handling millions of requests a day, and can thus charge a premium for advertising banners.” (Rowland, 1997, 325) In a medium where revenues can be scarce, search engines are an important exception. “Search sites alone accounted for 35 percent of the $335.5 million total online advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 1997…” (Robischon, 1998, 40) As the Web grows, the importance of search engines grows with it: “…Yahoo!s numbers are impressive: while the average old-media audience size remains relatively flat, Yahoo!s users have more than doubled in the past year.” (Behar, 1998, 48)
Since they were already getting a large amount of traffic for their search engines, the companies which ran them decided to add content, more or less as we have seen with Excite. The strategy seems to have worked. In 1997, 4 million daily pageviews, mostly for its search engine, were logged by Excite; a year later, less than 40% of Excite’s 40 million pageviews used the search button (the rest used its channels). (Robischon, 1998, 41)
While much of the material on search engine turned portal sites is original, a lot of it is also paid for by the owners of the pages being linked to. “Most on-line consumers are probably unaware that the most valuable real estate on a [search engine guide] usually goes to the highest bidder rather than the best content provider.” (ibid) This is a serious problem for those who can only afford to be listed on the search engine’s database (which is usually free). “Surely being linked to the Yahoo home page — as are Visa, Reuters, GIST TV, Travelocity and even Apartments.com — offers a distinct advantage over competing services, subtly stashed, albeit alphabetically, several levels within the Yahoo bowels.” (Weiss, 1999, 30) Moreover, this practice corrupts the concept of the gatekeeper: readers choose publications because they trust the editors of the publication to give them the best possible information in the category to which the publication belongs. As Robischon points out, allowing sites to buy space on a search engine’s home page “not only reduces the variety of choices available to web readers, but creates an environment where profitability trumps editorial quality.” (1998, 41) There is a fundamental conflict between offering a neutral search service and paid content; “A powerful and credible classification system for the Internet must be divorced from preferred providers — heck, they never even should have dated.” (Weiss, 1999, 30) This conflict could undermine the faith people put in the results of searches done through search engines which have become portals, although there is no evidence that this has yet happened. [3]
One other serious potential source of conflict arises out of the fact that traditional media corporations are buying into portal sites. “On My Yahoo!, for example, users interested in technology will find material from just two sources: the Reuters/Wired Digital News Service and Ziff-Davis Inc., publisher of Yahoo! Internet Life, PC Week, and other computer trade magazines. What’s not disclosed is that Softbank Corp., the Japanese company that bought Ziff-Davis in 1996, also owns a 29.3 percent stake in Yahoo!” (ibid, 44) Whereas other portals favour paid content over unpaid content, Yahoo! seems to have taken this one step further by entirely eliminating unpaid content in some categories from its database. Were this kind of conflict of interest better known, it would completely undermine Yahoo!’s reputation as a neutral gatekeeper.
Some see portal sites as a betrayal of the populist vision of the Web.
Those who envisioned a ‘networked nation’ of individuals — reaching out to one another and forming online communities — have sometimes been dismayed at the new portals and all-inclusive online environments that seek to be ‘sticky’ websites drawing ‘captive’ eyeballs. Those sites build on convenience (your homepage, your stock portfolio, your free e-mail) to bring everyone to one-stop-shopping locations — and keep them there. But the creators’ vision was that the Web would encourage connections among diverse sites and collaboration among distributed communities, not draw a growing mass audience into ever fewer high-traffic sites. (Johnson, 1999, 86)
For our purposes, it is important to note that individual Web page creators will likely have to ally themselves with a Web portal, losing control of some aspects of the presentation of their work (in particular, the placement of advertising), if they do not want to risk being shut out of the traffic which portal sites will generate. Ironically, although many individuals stated that they put their writing on the Web in order to avoid the gatekeepers in traditional media, this will mean they will have to negotiate publication with new, online gatekeepers.
Bookstores and online booksellers are useful if you know what you want to purchase. However, there is a question readers have to ask before they get to this stage: how, from all of the material available to you, do you choose what you want to read in the first place? Even search engines do not answer this question, since you have to know what you are looking for before you can conduct a proper search. Mechanisms must be developed which allow a reader to filter the vast amounts of information available to her or him and find those which are most useful. Some people think that filtering mechanisms will be the most important aspect of the Internet: “It is this plethora of content that will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the morsels that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.” (Saffo, 1994, 74/75)
A critical establishment has grown up around traditional media. This means reviewers for various mass media (radio, newspapers, television and magazines), but it also includes gatekeepers whose opinions are important enough to be reported in the press (the film executive, for instance, whose comments on trends in the industry get a lot of attention from the media, affecting what filmgoers look forward to viewing), authors of books on the media (including academics), et al. The critical establishment contains the tastemakers upon whom we rely to help us find works of art which we have a good chance of enjoying.
Why do we put such faith in the critical establishment? According to Bourdieu, they have accumulated “symbolic capital.” As opposed to economic or political capital, “For the author, the critic, the art dealer, the publisher or the theatre manager, the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a name for oneself, a known, recognized name, a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects (with a trademark or signature) or persons (through publication, exhibition, etc.) and therefore to give value, and to appropriate the profits from this operation.” (1986, 132) In a sense, critics create a brand for themselves; through experience comparing their opinions to our experience of a work (as well as to the opinions of other critics, or information from other sources), we learn whom to trust and whom we should not.
Unlike a product brand, which sells the product associated with the brand image, the accumulation of symbolic capital allows whoever has enough of it to help sell cultural artifacts created by others to the public. “It is all too obvious that critics also collaborate with the art trader in the effort of consecration which makes the reputation and, at least in the long term, the monetary value of works.” (ibid, 135) There is a symbiotic relationship between critics and the medium on which they report. Still, the relationship is not as airtight as Bourdieu claims; people do go against the critical consensus. Some Jim Carrey films, for instance, have had substantial critical drubbings, yet they have always drawn huge audiences; the critically acclaimed television series Homicide: Life on the Street, on the other hand, was never a popular success.
As a general principle, however, it is clear that the critical establishment has great power to sway public opinion and help create an appetite for specific works of art. Some have suggested that new media will inevitably develop their own forms of critical filters. “With the explosive growth in electronic information, a whole new profession may develop — people who find things — perhaps they’ll be called ferrets. For those who want to rummage for themselves, there may be another new profession — people who organize things. Maybe they’ll be called mapmakers. And everyone will need people who select things, distinguishing the good from the bad; perhaps they’ll be called filters.” (Rawlins, 1996, 55) Sometimes, descriptions of such filters can be quite fanciful: “Even if physical books were to vanish, I can’t help but believe that the craving for quality would create a new job title for the Internet — something like Chief Digitrol (an abbreviation of digital controller, or perhaps a reference to the little troll under the bridge whose eager fingers would always be correcting, correcting, correcting the endless flow of virtuality).” (Crawford, 1998, 27)
Since publishing on the Internet can be trivially easy, criticism will come from a greater variety of sources. “…if using the Internet continues to be analogous to drinking from a fire hydrant,” one writer suggests, “we will probably also begin to see library Web pages providing critical reviews of the literature prepared by librarians and their faculty counterparts in the fields and disciplines of academe. There is a crying need for such sifting mechanisms, and the library can address this need in a strategic way with the assistance of others in the academy.” (“Jim Williams: Librarians in the Cyberage,” 1998, 15) All of these positions essentially help people manage their time by directing their attention to the most important information, a service Esther Dyson, in Chapter Three, claimed people would be willing to pay a lot of money for.
It is also possible for individual readers to become critics. Amazon.com, for instance, runs reviews written by readers of some of the books it carries; this is in addition to reviews it carries by professional critics. Some people will always prefer to listen to professionals, assuming they have greater knowledge than laypeople. However, as Bourdieu rightly points out, being a critic is largely about accumulating enough power, enough symbolic capital, to have your voice carry weight with the public. Some readers may be fed up with mainstream literary criticism and want to read other critical voices, voices which speak more directly to them. It may be possible that a new set of critical standard-bearers will assert a new form of online authority, much as Bourdieu’s critical establishment has authority over traditional media: “Inevitably, some contributors will become more respected than others, either through superior communication skills, greater trustworthiness, or higher social standing. They will then implicitly set standards of acceptability for various things — just as Variety sets standards for many movies and the New York Times Book Review sets standards for many books.” (Rawlins, 1996, 78) The difference is that, as long as the Internet remains accessible as a means of distributing the work of individuals, voices which dissent from the critical consensus will always have a forum.
The expansion of critical voices is important. It offers the potential for increasing the public’s awareness of non-mainstream publications, since, “as every author who has been published in a small press knows (including the present author for some prior texts), such publications rarely find their way into reviews in the major organs, or onto the shelves of big bookstores. The business of publishing does not work that way.” (Levinson, 1997, 125) This will help readers to the extent that it enables them to find books which fulfill their needs which they would not have been alerted about by existing channels of criticism.
This is particularly true of online publications. “Currently, no established trade review publication will review the new [electronic] book format. The standard line from publications like Library Journal and Independent Publisher has been that the magazines have a responsibility to serve the bookseller, and e-books are not sold through bookstores. This closed-door policy has been a frustration for both e-book publishers and authors.” (Link, 1998, 19) Trade publications are not the only ones; few newspapers or other mainstream publications devote space to reviewing electronic publications, and certainly with no regularity. Until such time as print publications are willing to review online publications, the online world will have to do so itself.
One must also be mindful of the danger that certain online arrangements have to undermine the credibility of some criticism. As we have seen, online booksellers try to get a variety of Web sites to affiliate with them.
To take one example, nytimes.com offers a link to barnesandnoble.com next to its online book reviews, and The New York Times gets a piece of the action if anyone buys a book via that route. Because it’s The Times, we can be fairly sure that reviews aren’t skewed to help sales. But it has to be noted that the Times now has a financial interest in that book being reviewed that it didn’t have before. And it’s not coincidental that, as the Online Journalism Review recently reported, while most of the newspaper’s past articles are available online for just one year and can only be retrieved by paying a fee, the Times has made 19 years of book reviews available for free (with the Barnes & Noble ‘buy option,’ of course). (Effron, 1999, 56)
Of course, not every reviewing organization will be as conscientious as the Times; some may spike negative reviews, or choose books they know are more likely to be positively reviewed, or soften harsh reviews, all so as not to jeopardize their potential profits. Readers will never know such a bias exists, since it occurs in the editorial process before critical writing is published. (Perhaps it ultimately isn’t that important, since readers will stop seeking out critics whom they believe are not giving them the best advice — critics whose cultural capital is diminished by the practice — something which might work to the advantage of smaller, independent critical voices.)
Digital technologies also spawn their own filtering mechanisms. One is the web ring. As we saw in Chapter Two, a series of pages on a common theme are linked together; each page must carry an icon announcing the name of the ring to which it belongs, with buttons which will lead to the next page in the ring, the last page in the ring, a random page in the ring and lists of the next five pages, the previous five pages and all of the pages in the ring. “The trend is rapidly gaining momentum — in January [1997], webring.com, a directory for Web rings, listed about 1,000 rings. By September, it listed 18,000, encompassing some 200,000 Web sites. Webring.com estimates that its number of ‘hits’ is going up at a rate of 22% per quarter.” (“Ringing in a New Web Strategy,” 1997, unpaginated) The advantage of Web rings to surfers is that if they chance upon a page on a subject which interests them, they can use the various facets of ring software to find other pages on the same subject.
In fact, some software allows readers to, in a sense, become their own critics: “They remember what you have bought and will send you nice little e-mails notifying you when new books have been published in your subject areas or by your favorite authors, or when the next book in the series you are reading has become available.” (Coffman, 1999, unpaginated) These kinds of filtering programs are simple, but they can be effective:
This whole column started from my experience while buying John Hagel III and Marc Singer’s new book, Net Worth, from Amazon. I bought that book because Amazon remembered about my earlier purchase of the [Nicholas] Negroponte book [Being Digital] and assumed that I would like Hagel and Singer’s book too. So Jeff Bezos and crew sent me a little message the next time I signed on to Amazon after Net Worth‘s publication, telling me that it was available. (Chuck, 1999, unpaginated)
As it happens, there are much more sophisticated pieces of software which track not only your personal preferences, as indicated by your purchases, but compare them with a database of the preferences of others. These programs use mathematical algorithms to predict what will interest you; if a large number of the people who have bought the same three books as you have bought a fourth, the computer reasons, you likely will be interested in buying the fourth as well. Not only that, but such analyses can be made across media: if a large number of people who have bought the same three books as you have bought the same CD of music, you likely will be interested in buying the CD as well. (Of course, online sellers with a variety of goods, such as Amazon.com, are more likely to take advantage of this type of software.)
There is one disadvantage to using Web rings or the more sophisticated types of filtering software; because they are based on previous preferences, there is very little possibility for serendipitous discovery. When reading a newspaper’s review columns, it is possible to find a book which wasn’t directly related to one’s interests, but nonetheless was something which the person could find value in. A common method which grad students use to find texts for research (once the card or online catalogues have been exhausted, of course), is to look at books clustered in the stacks around a book which is relevant to the subject. (One other facet of serendipity is that general publications with articles on a wide variety of subjects allow for readers to potentially find articles which they would not have thought they would be interested in, and, therefore, not have sought out; if people can order information online by the article, this will further limit serendipity on the Net.) Readers can adopt strategies for randomizing the results of applying their filters (assuming serendipity is valued for them, rather than thinking of information in strictly utilitarian terms), but it may be that losing serendipitous findings is a price which has to be paid for being able to find useful information in the vast collection of information on the Net.
All of this assumes a fixed text; hypertext adds one additional complication to the question of criticism. A critic will traditionally bolster her or his argument about the worth of a text with specific examples taken from the text. The reader can then compare his or her experience of the text to what the critic has described (among other things, this helps the reader determine if the critic’s opinion was valid, an assessment which is applied to the critic’s subsequent writing). Since a given reader’s experience of a hypertext may be completely different than a critic’s, the criticism may not adequately describe the reader’s experience. Criticism of hypertext or hypermedia is not likely to be definitive; potential readers will likely have to seek out a variety of critical voices in order to get a full sense of what to expect from a work.
To a large extent, the end users of a technology do not figure in narratives about technological development (Pinch and Bijker (1987) and Schwartz Cowan (1987) being notable exceptions). In some ways, this is understandable: much of the development of technology comes from research laboratories, and the choice of problems to work on and assumptions researchers bring to the creation of new technologies is vitally important to their early stages of development. However, many technologies (especially computer-based technologies) go through successive stages of development, introduction into society and further development; the feedback model of technological development which I introduced in Chapter One is a good way of understanding this process. This means that end users, although always a recognizable stakeholder in any technology, now have to be recognized as having a direct influence on the direction a technology develops. In the present case, for instance, we have seen how computer users rejected “push” technologies, forcing the companies which wanted to use them to reassess their strategies for the World Wide Web.
In fact, the interests of the stakeholders who are users of the technologies under study — readers — have been mentioned throughout this dissertation. For example, we have already touched on the fact that, “According to the National Writers Union, ‘income-producing self-publishing on the Net could be a great boon not only for freelance writers, but for readers as well. The ability to earn a living from online distribution of one’s work will encourage a wider range of writers to produce a wider range of materials for a wider range of audiences.” (Godin, 1995, 189) The creation of new forms of filtering mechanisms, to use another example, benefits readers, who would otherwise have a lot of difficulties finding useful information from among the vast amounts of information on the Internet. And, of course, one of the central arguments in this dissertation is that the Internet has the capacity to allow every reader to be a writer, perhaps in a philosophical sense (as with hypertext), but certainly in a practical sense.
I would like to add a few additional points about readers. In 1995, the Canadian Book Publisher’s Council, the Association of Canadian Publishers, the Canadian Booksellers and the Writer’s Union of Canada commissioned a three part study called “Who Buys Books?” which contained some useful information. First, a couple of caveats: people who buy books are not always readers (some people buy books as gifts for others, for instance, or buy books to keep up an appearance of being well read), so the facts aren’t exact. In addition, according to the first study, “Frequent buyers, representing 30% of the total market, account for 70% of all books sold. 61% of frequent buyers are female.” (Hushion, 1995, 2) This is, of course, the exact opposite of the Internet, where the majority of users continue to be men. (This disparity suggests that, as big as they are, online book sales won’t really take off until there are as many women on the Net as men.) In any case, for these two reasons, what is found in the study can only be suggestive, and should not be considered the final word on the subject.
The first study divided buyers into three categories: frequent, occasional and infrequent book buyers. For frequent book buyers, who “are most likely to buy fiction,” (Hushion, 1995, 3) 63% said they bought their last book from a specific store because it was “conveniently located.” (Market Facts of Canada, 1995, unpaginated) This suggests that online booksellers have a tremendous advantage over retailers, since ordering from home, as we have seen, is more convenient for many people than going out to a store to buy a book.
Thirty-five per cent of frequent buyers said that the last book they bought was at a store which did not specialize in books (a card shop, for instance, or a cigar store) because it had lower prices. (Market Facts of Canada, 1995b, unpaginated) In addition, of those frequent buyers who do not buy at bookstores, “52% said they did not because ‘Books are priced higher there.'” (Market Facts of Canada, 1995c, unpaginated) This is supported by an observation from the third study, an overview of studies of book buying habits in the United States: “Excluding remainders, used books, and book club books, close to half of all books sold fell into the [US]$3 to $7.99 price ranges, with an additional 18% under $3.” (Hunt, 1995, 4) This explains why price wars are so important to retail and online booksellers, and suggests that it will always be the case. It also suggests that if online booksellers can establish a reputation for offering the lowest prices, it will give them a powerful psychological advantage over physical retailers. On the other hand, individual writers, without the overheads of even the smallest publishers, may be able to make a living selling their work for even less.
The second study, which divides book buyers into two groups, regular and irregular, offers some hope for publishers: “Book buyers do not regard other entertainment media as competition with reading. It is more a matter of what mood they are in and what need they want to satisfy. Reading is solitary, for long trips, for bedtime. Music is something to enjoy while doing other things (including reading). Films are thought to be more of a group social activity.” (Environics Research Group, 1995, unpaginated) This suggests that new media will not take time away from book reading. This is supported by the further observation that “Almost all book buyers and over half of non-book buyers say they often buy books to receive as gifts. Many of the non-book buyers say they receive enough books as gifts that they seldom have to buy any for themselves.” (ibid) I have yet to hear of anybody who gives an online publication to another person as a gift; we can assume that this will always give physical books an advantage over online publications (although, if consumers can download, print and bind the books themselves, this may not necessarily bode well for bookstores).
The survey offers some evidence to contradict this, however. “The most common obstacle to purchase,” of a book, it claims, “was a lack of time to read [original emphasis].” (ibid) Thus, while book buyers recognize that different media serve different purposes in their life, they also seem to be supporting the suggestion that media consumption is a zero sum game, and that time devoted to reading books is decreasing. It is also worth noting that another important reason people give for not buying books is that they occupy too much space, a problem which is alleviated by the online delivery of digital texts.
One other facet of book buying mentioned in the second Who Buys Books? survey is worth noting: “People prefer to shop at chain (62%), rather than smaller stores (15%), used book stores (10%), campus book stores (5%), corner stores (4%) or bargain bins (4%).” (ibid) This indicates rather strongly the precarious existence of independent bookstores. It stands to reason: as mentioned earlier, independents rarely have the economies of scale of the chains, and therefore cannot discount books as deeply, so book buyers, who, as we have just seen, are sensitive to price, are more likely to shop at the chains. The fact that used bookstores, which offer substantial discounts, are not high on the preference list of book buyers is an anomaly which can partially be explained by the fact that new books are a fetish commodity; used books, no matter how good their condition, are considered less worth having. Buying a used book as a gift (as we have seen, an important reason people buy books) is considered socially unacceptable, and the person receiving such a gift would feel slighted.
More research on the relationship between book readers and electronic text delivery is needed. It should be clear, however, that readers are a stakeholder group which will have an important effect on the direction of this technology.