The future of newspapers? Who knows? But there is one.

I don’t know where books are going. I don’t know what will happen to newspapers. But I am confident that both will survive and perhaps even prosper in the new environment we find ourselves in. John Lanchester’s article in the London Review of Books on the future of newspapers is well worth reading. Among other things, he reminds us that the future cannot be foreseen:

As for the new media, they are clearly a work in progress, and it would be premature to say what their impact will be on the fundamentals of public and political life. Their impact on private life is more apparent, and seems to focus on an increase in the number of ways for people to meet and connect, both online and off. In some ways, the story of text messaging is a parable for the way the net has evolved. SMS messaging was taken up by Nokia in Finland as a way of allowing engineers to communicate short, factual messages about where they were, what they were doing and how long it would take. Nokia then made the service available on their phones, since, well, there it was, so you might as well let the punters have a go. They were amazed to see the spike in data traffic which suddenly showed up. The reason: Finnish teenagers were using SMS to organise their social lives. From there, texting hasn’t looked back. Nobody decided what the purpose of SMS would be, it just evolved. It would be hard to deny that texting is a new thing; also hard to argue that it has fundamentally changed the world. I’d say that’s roughly where we are with the journalistic uses of the new media. Their democratising and decentralising effects have barely begun, and aren’t going to go away. In a sense, the WikiLeaks episode(s) shows both what the digital media can and can’t do. Its release of information is unprecedented: but it is not journalism. The data need to be interpreted, studied, made into a story. For that we need . . .  the press.

And the elimination of printing and distribution costs is profound. Lanchester explains that the New York Times could give its subscribers for free four Kindles with worldwide 3G per year coverage for the costs it currently expends in printing and distributing its newspaper:

If newspapers switched over to being all online, the cost base would be instantly and permanently transformed. The OECD report puts the cost of printing a typical paper at 28 per cent and the cost of sales and distribution at 24 per cent: so the physical being of the paper absorbs 52 per cent of all costs. (Administration costs another 8 per cent and advertising another 16.) That figure may well be conservative. A persuasive looking analysis in the Business Insider put the cost of printing and distributing the New York Times at $644 million, and then added this: ‘a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.’ Taking the lower figure, that means that New York Times, if it stopped printing a physical edition of the paper, could afford to give every subscriber a free Kindle. Not the bog-standard Kindle, but the one with free global data access. And not just one Kindle, but four Kindles. And not just once, but every year. And that’s using the low estimate for the costs of printing.

I might even subscribe if they did that. Though my e-reader is not a Kindle.

The e-book will open a new front in an ongoing legal revolution.

The New York Times reports today that “[f]or a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com‘s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.”

An e-book that works well is a dream of mine.  At any given moment, I literally am reading 25 different books.  Whenever I travel, one of my toughest choices is which 2 or 3 I’ll bring with me.  Not only are my infinitely wide, but my moods change constantly.

But as the e-book takes hold, expect a new wave in the copyright wars.  With more and more books being published in electronic form, they’ll be as easy to copy and disseminate as music is now.  So illegal copying and distribution will be inevitable.

In addition, the cutting and pasting of portions of books will create a whole new set of questions regarding fair use.  We will witness the resurrection of the commonplace book:

“Commonplacing is the practice of entering literary excerpts and personal comments into a private journal, that is, into a commonplace book or, to use a 17th century synonym, a silva rerum (“a forest of things”).  Typically the excerpts were regarded as exceptionally insightful or beautiful or as applicable to a variety of situations, and so as such they are often especially quotable. . . . The practice of commonplacing can be traced back in the European tradition to the 5th Century B.C.E. and the Sophist Protagoras.

Historically commonplacing has played an important role in education, and it has served as a vital tool of erudition.

“Boys … had to keep notebooks or commonplace books in which to record, and then learn, idioms, quotations, or figures useful in composition or declamation. Not a little of that wide learning and impressive range of quotation adorning Elizabethan literature comes from these commonplace books.” Schools in Tudor England, by Craig R. Thompson (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1958): p. 16, cf. 44.

“Students with literary tastes, in days when books were hard to come by, kept ‘commonplace’ or notebooks into which they copied out verses or prose extracts that particularly appealed to them.” The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965; reprint of the 2nd ed., 1956): p. 49.

–Norman Elliott Anderson, Commonplacing in the Spiritual Traditions

Will a professor’s commonplace book require permission for the reprinting of every excerpt?  There inevitably will be questions about when the excerpts are too long, though I would imagine a collection of excerpts that are small enough and together comprise a wholly new work (a literary collage) should be considered transformative enough to constitute fair use.  Inevitably, though, there will be lawsuits arising in particular situations.

Charges of plagiarism, no doubt, will also increase.  I strongly suspect that some of the recent incidents of plagiarism involving respected writers were the results of the inevitable errors that creep into works that require an enormous amount of research.  A quotation taken during research from one work is mistaken at the writing stage as a paraphrase and ends up verbatim in the finished product.  Someone spots the quotation (a process that will be even easier when the texts themselves are all electronic), and, voilà, charges of plagiarism fly through the blogosphere and plague the historian for the rest of her career.

These legal problems are inevitable.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Law is a product of the material circumstances in which it arises, not an abstract set of truths brought down and imposed on reality.  When the material circumstances change, the law will have to change.  We are living through the most profound change in the availability of information since Gutenberg.  The law will change, and it will be a very interesting ride.