On free speech, editorial work, Stendhal, and the future of books

FT (August 15, 2014).

FT published a second summary of the Amazon-Hachette fight (the first one was this). Nothing that was not written in every place on the internet the last week. The piece included a nice pie chart of Amazon's proposal for e-book revenue sharing though. And it reported a couple of opinions that are widely held but largely wrong. I start with Amanda Foreman.

Amanda Foreman, the Whitbread Prize-winning author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire argues that Amazon’s grip on the book market presents “a real and present danger” to consumer choice. “The fundamental principle here is preserving pathways to free speech and freedom of thought in the marketplace of ideas.”

Amazon's grip on the market causes a real risk of estinction for physical bookstores and for traditional publishers as we know them. However, books are only a small part of the marketplace of ideas. Even if books come to be monopolized by Amazon, there are newspapers, magazines, social networks, blogs, and various internet outlets, which will still be open to writers and thinkers of every kind.

Moreover, it is impossible to establish a monopoly in the book industry, because barriers of entry are too low. Digitization is making them even lower. The costs of publishing e-books are virtually nil, as self-publishing demostrates. The costs of setting up alternative e-book formats or distribution platforms if Amazon's grip on the market becomes total are within reach of small start-ups, which would not fail to spring up everywhere, in a monopoly scenario.

So (luckily) there is no chance that Jeff Bezos or Russ Grandinetti will decide what we are allowed to read.

Then there is an anonymous author.

“It’s megalomania,” says one author who asked not to be named, citing past Amazon threats to stop selling his books. “What I fear is . . . we may see a disintegration of the book market. You’ll have no guarantee of quality through a publishers’ imprint.”

This is the fear that only the traditional publishers allow authors to achieve the quality that we are used to see in serious novels or essays. The easy answer is that traditional publishers are not that traditional after all. The current system, under which editors hired by the publishers work with the authors to improve the manuscript, is no more than 100-year old. You know that serious novels and essays existed before.

Homer, William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, or even Charles Dickens had no editors. Sometimes it shows! One cannot read the holy mess that is the final chapter of the Charterhouse of Parma without wishing that Stendhal had some editorial advice. But great authors are usually able to take care of themselves. They are pretty good at self-editing. And they try to achieve quality standards that are higher that what is required by editors. Their models are the great works written by other great authors.

Of course some authors are not so great and really need editorial help. For them, there are alternatives to traditional publishers. Think of the peer-review system in scientific journals. In many disciplines, reviewers do not limit themelves at evaluating the soundness of the empirical results: they intervene on the organization of the manuscript, the flow of reasoning, the quality of the arguments, the balance between different parts, even the style. Many rounds of reviewing are sometimes expected. Authors always curse at reviewers' requests but at the end of the process they have to admit that their manuscript is a lot better than what it was at the beginning. Peer review is gratis, entirely based on reciprocity between authors and the idea that quality of research is important and must be preserved.

I am not saying that peer review is the future of books. It is only an example of how editorial services can be provided by people or organizations that do not work for traditional publishers. There is value in the quality of books, there are people who can do editorial work, and there is no reason that a market could not find a good replacement for traditional publishers if they are going to disappear.