It's Okay If You Just Can't Right Now
Plus, some thoughts about the "National Emergency Library."
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Some excellent advice from DongWon Song’s “Publishing Is Hard” newsletter:
“Here’s what I’m going to tell you about making art in these difficult times: it’s okay if you don’t. It’s okay if you don’t have the energy. It’s okay if you can’t think of good ideas. It’s okay if you can’t string words together. It’s okay if you feel bad about your work right now.”
More along the same lines, this time from musician/novelist/screenwriter Nick Cave:
“For me, this is not a time to be buried in the business of creating. It is a time to take a backseat and use this opportunity to reflect on exactly what our function is—what we, as artists, are for… There are other forms of engagement, open to us all. An email to a distant friend, a phone call to a parent or sibling, a kind word to a neighbour, a prayer for those working on the front lines. These simple gestures can bind the world together—throwing threads of love here and there, ultimately connecting us all—so that when we do emerge from this moment we are unified by compassion, humility and a greater dignity.”
Now then: Depending on how much attention you’re paying to news that isn’t directly about the pandemic, you may have seen a story about the “National Emergency Library,” which was basically the Internet Archive announcing that it was going to let people “borrow” unlimited quantities of the print books they had scanned and converted into makeshift ebooks, with the files set to lock themselves back up after fourteen days. Which sounds well and good, until you remember that the Internet Archive’s “library” is more of a file sharing network, and their legal right to distribute electronic copies of books to which other entities—namely, authors and publishers—control the intellectual property rights is a dubious one. Not to mention the moral right, although we certainly will in a moment.
Many media outlets ran with IA’s announcement as the kind of feel good news they’re all desperate to run these days, and that we’re all desperate to read. Authors and publishers, however, were not so ecstatic. As the science fiction writer Chuck Wendig told NPR for their follow-up story:
“The problem with bypassing copyright and disrupting the chain of royalties that lead from books to authors is that it endangers our ability to continue to produce art—and though we are all in the midst of a crisis, most artists are on the razor's edge in terms of being able to support themselves.”
Here’s the thing: Public and private libraries purchase their books, and their ebooks, from publishers, and they get to keep the lights on, and some of that money eventually flows to the authors, and they get to keep the lights on. (Let’s stipulate the long discussion of advances and royalties and the fine details about how and when money flows to authors, so we can move on.) When you “borrow” a file that contains a scanned copy of a book that someone donated to the scanners, or was picked up at a used bookstore, or however the scanner got hold of it, the publishers get nothing, and the authors get nothing.
One tech blog defended the “emergency library” by suggesting, essentially, “Look, it’s not not legal, as far as we can tell, and anyway we think these are pretty crappy scans, so it’s not like hypothetical people would want them if they could get real ebooks, so it’s not like they’re really undermining the market, honest.”
Now, it’s been my experience that the scans are not all that bad, on those occasions when I’ve used the Internet Archive or Google Books to track down old books by dead people, or academic books that have long been out of print, had limited print runs, or both. There’s a disadvantage in that it’s not as easy to highlight passages in a digital reader as it would be with a standard ePub file, but at least I have a copy of, say, Marian Evan’s 1846 translation of David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined.
Even if the files were suboptimal, though, we know that there would be some people out there who would take them anyway, simply because they feel entitled to acquire entertainment without paying for it, and they don’t care whether the book is in the public domain or not.
(As it happens, the book I wrote and published in 2005, The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, is in the Internet Archive. It’s also functionally out of print, and my agent is currently working to get the rights back from my original publisher, with an eye towards doing something else with it. Or was, before *waves hand* all this. In the meantime, if you’re really curious, I personally grant you a dispensation to get that one book, if you let me know what you think afterwards. Except for the errors. Believe me, I know about all the errors.)
One could, of course, compensate for using a file sharing network of dubious legality to get free books by spending that money to acquire more books by other, legal means, and setting that money free to flow to the authors. That would be a reach in the right moral direction, at least. Or one could simply not participate in a file sharing network of dubious legality, and thus avoid the need to engage in compensatory moral behavior.
If you’re reading this newsletter because you’re interested in becoming a published writer, this is an issue that concerns you—and the reason it concerns you goes back to what Chuck Wendig said. For most of us, writing is not a financially lucrative endeavor; for many of us, it isn’t even our primary source of financial support. When we lose potential income because of books downloaded from file sharing networks, it frequently undermines our ability to dedicate ourselves to writing at a publishable level. Not just because we’re not making the money that might better support our writing practice, but also because the publishers, who aren’t getting their money from pirated copies of their books, have a reduced ability to put together the money that goes into acquiring and publishing any new book. That forces publishers to become more ruthless in not publishing books they might find personally interesting, but financially uncertain—and just about every book is a financially uncertain venture, even when the economy is good.
That doesn’t mean you, a writer, should never give anything you’ve written. After all, I’ve given away another book I’ve written, and the vast majority of you reading this column are doing so because I’ve made it freely accessible. There’s a whole discussion to be had about when you might want to consider sharing your writing without the expectation of financial reward, which for the time being we’ll boil down to: I hope you might be interested in buying my next book, when it comes out.
In the meantime, there are real public libraries that will let you check out ebooks now! And many publishers who are giving away some ebooks, and offering significant discounts on others, especially if you order directly from their websites. It’s good to order directly from their websites, whenever possible, because that means less money they have to pay distributors to get the books into bookstores, which is more money they can dedicate to keeping themselves in business. Although: Support indie bookstores, too! Use them to buy books from corporate publishers, for example. Or just because it’s good to support local businesses.
But, too: If you’re not feeling up to buying any new books, or checking out any books from the library right now, don’t worry about it. If you don’t have the mental or emotional energy to dive into a new book right now, if that’s not the thing that would help you get through *waves hand* all this, that’s how it is. As Nick Cave suggests, look for something else, some small thing you can do to feel better connected to your friends, family, neighbors, and other loved ones. In doing so, he writes, “perhaps we will also see the world through different eyes, with an awakened reverence for the wondrous thing that it is. This could, indeed, be the truest creative work of all.”