The Cult of the Amateur. Really?

A book review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

I have been reading quite a lot about the current and near future of the new media, most of it predicting massive and on balance positive changes in our world as a result. As I am working on a dissertation on this subject, I have also been on the lookout for a text that would put forward the antithesis of all these other books, to lend a bit of balance to my study, and so when I saw Keen’s book on the shelf at Waterstones, I grabbed it.

After a long day of train travel with nothing but ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ for company I felt let down. I was expecting something that would, as the promotional quotes claimed, be “thought-provoking” “beautifully written” and “witty”. What I found instead was a book that ran on nostalgia, paranoia and a poor understanding of the media industry.

OK, it wasn’t all bad. The part detailing the dangers to society of Wikipedia becoming a serious information source was interesting, if a little sensationalist. There were also some interesting passages towards the end of the book about how our privacy was being threatened, but most of this was supported by anecdotes that did not directly relate to the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

What really got my goat were the lazy, or perhaps dishonest inaccuracies. It is not good enough, in my opinion, for a serious “IT insider” to claim that the world of Web2.0 has brought confusion between the worlds of entertainment and advertising for the first time. This is a blatant falsehood. Product placement has been around in TV shows and movies for as long as I’ve been watching either, probably since the 60’s.

He also doesn’t seem to understand that consumers behave differently when faced with a free product, than they do when asked to pay a fee. He claims that every ad placed for free on Craigslist equals ad revenue lost in the local print media. Really? Does he honestly think I would have paid £20 to advertise the duvet I wanted to give away for free in a newspaper? He makes the same mistake when talking about freely downloaded music, stating that it is logical to see every illegally downloaded track as a theft of 99 cents from the recording company. Absolute nonsense. If I hear a song by an artist I’m unfamiliar with I might download their entire back catalogue for nothing, deleting the tracks I don’t like afterwards, and I know that this sort of behaviour is common amongst my peers. We would be unlikely to buy four albums at full price on a whim and toss them away if we didn’t like them.

He also seems unable to grasp the concept of subjectivity when it comes to musical taste. The Long Tail of music is dismissed by him for this reason, as he states that the few artists that make it to the mainstream do so as the result of their talent, and that for the most part the rest simply aren’t good enough to generate fans. Poppycock. Anyone who has sat next to an ambient trance, black metal, or Mongolian throat-singing fan with an I-pod on a bus will tell you that what one person sees as talent isn’t the same for everyone else. Keen confesses to not being particularly passionate about music, but this is no excuse for this intellectually bereft section of his book.

He goes on to list the negative effects of illegally downloaded films on Hollywood. This admittedly well-researched piece lists how the different production companies are being forced to cut budgets and produce fewer movies, and cinemas are forced to close. Well I say good! Any industry hub that specializes in making me-too, lowest common denominator products should, in a healthy economy, lose ground.

In fact, Keen fully neglects to mention the influence that the decline in quality in both the film and music industries may have had in driving people to illegally download music. Long before the Web2.0 phenomenon, the establishments of film and music were looking to produce products that would simply sell well, and ignored the artistic merits of their output. This lead to people searching out music that was hard to come by through regular distribution channels long before Napster or the Internet came into play. The result is an argument that overstates the case by ignoring clear facts, rather than illuminating a point of view by explaining forces that may have been overlooked.

In Keen’s defence, he was quite obviously making an argument, and it wouldn’t be realistic of us to expect him to list the pros and the cons of Web2.0 in equal measure as a result. However, the possible usefulness of his approach was undone by his inability to support his claims through accurate and rational discourse. I find myself hesitant to quote this text in my dissertation for fear that these inaccuracies would render the entire book academically untenable.

Somewhat ironically, one of his main arguments is that this new media he is attacking is dangerous because there are no editors, no quality control, and no accountability. He states that as a result the population could find themselves misinformed about key issues, which could have a devastating effect on our society. The existence of this error-ridden book, published through traditional old media channels gives some much-needed context to his claims.

If anybody knows of a book dealing with similar subject matter to Keen’s, but with a more sound argument, please let me know of it.

 

Is Shelfari the way for publishers to harness the power of the LT?

In a post I made on June 7th I checked out different publishers’ websites to see if they were targeting niche markets in line with the Long Tail approach. I discovered that they did not seem to be, but that there was a more subtle technique that they’re probably considering using to do just that.

Shelfari is a book-based online community that allows members to set up their own profile page just like MySpace or Facebook, but the difference is that you can build a bookshelf for all to see. Other Shelfari members can browse through the spines on your shelf and decide if you have enough in common with them to be worth chatting to, or members can weigh in on literary debates at the forums.

There are now a staggering 40+ such sites online, and they’re growing in number. The more successful of them have been invested in by different bookselling organisations. www.Shelfari.com itself was invested in by Amazon in Feb 07. ABEbooks bought 40% of www.LibraryThing.com in 06.

The relationships between book community sites and publishers are now so common that www.booktribes.com quotes its independence from publishers as a major advantage over competition.

These sites work in much the same way as book clubs do. Each site allows its many thousands of members to divide themselves into groups based on interest, then hey presto, each individual is reading books not just out of love of literature, but also a desire to connect to his fellow humans. This naturally causes members to read and buy more books than usual. The book selling sites that are linked to these areas benefit from this.

So this is good news for the book industry. How about individual publishers? Whose books will benefit most? This depends on the rating system on each site, and they are overwhelmingly based on peer review, meaning the quality reads get the biggest boost. So should publishers throw up their hands and simply compete on the level of their products?

That’s not what happened when they let their marketing departments think about book clubs. Many publishers bought up book clubs and various mail order networks to try and cement a customer base for their books (See F&W’s ownership of Reader’s Union). They offered extra value to members: early access to books / discounts / author correspondence or appearances; and the book clubs promised to buy a certain number of books before reviews came out. The system worked.

It seems to me that a similar arrangement is possible for these book-based social networking sites. Although their recommendations are based on peer review, there are ways for sites to promote certain imprints or books while maintaining the customers’ input. Amazon have been doing this for years without generating significant user complaints. I expect we’ll see publishers doing the same with their newly acquired social networks affiliates soon. It’s my guess that consumers will allow a little corporate invasion in return for added features. Would you say that an avid Stephen King fan would sacrifice a chance to ask his idol questions in order to chat in a corporate free zone?

Here are a few more sites I looked at while researching this article.
( www.whatsonmybookshelf.com ; www.swaptree.com book exchange networks)
www.connectviabooks.com ; www.douban.net (Chinese site with English version); www.bibliophil.com (links with Amazon)
www.goodreads.com (bought by monster.com) ; www.x-libris.com (for the Russians)

 

After some consideration…

Having read some more on the subject, I’ve made a list of possible ramifications of the removal of the rights reversion clause from publishing contracts:  

 

1)     Legal teething problems: If the concern from the online writing community over the S&S move is to be taken seriously, then not all authors will accept such a revision of their contracts. This could cause authors to change publishing house rather than signing new contracts with their existing ones, causing a power shift away from innovators like S&S.

2)     Publishers will publish more: Texts will no longer have to be highly market-oriented. Random House and others know that they will be able to turn a profit on an unpopular, or even a bad book if it’s only sold through POD or as an e-book, providing there is no, or a much smaller advance. If the feeling that aggregators of content are going to profit the most from the LT spreads, then this point may well prove true.  

3)     Self-publishing will grow: The reason publishing houses are holding onto these titles for longer is because they will be profitable for longer. This is true because they are under no compulsion to do anything difficult with them to get them sold. No advertising, bulk printing, or marketing. As a result, the writers will probably be able to do their own LT publishing, and will prove more and more successful as the public gets more used to buying books POD and online due to the large publishers’ activity.

4)     Writers’ Union: As more and more writers with less influence get signed up to publishers, they will need to band together in order to stop being exploited. As was the case back in the old days of publishing, many of these ‘alternative ‘writers will not be able to afford an agent to represent their rights, leaving them open to exploitation like so many writers pre-1980’s. The logic of aggregation under the LT may lead small hobbyist writers to form associations to hire an agent between them, or maybe to use the clout of the more successful ones to gain them respect from publishers.

5)     Personalised books: One of the advantages of POD is that people could in theory be able to ask for a personalised copy. That is to say, as their single copy is being printed for them alone, they might ask for a different cover, or font.

6)     A dip in the quality of writing: If an author can expect to get a deal from a publisher who doesn’t expect to sell more than 2 copies of his book a year, then why would he try to make it successful? Surely instead he would rush on to write another rotten novel and pass it on to the next aggregator.

 

Web 2.0 in book publishing?

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/pressreleases/1142792.html

 This article from the Irish press may (at a pinch perhaps) be considered a sign that publishers are drifting towards user generated content. This blog will touch upon the influence of the co-called web 2.0 phenomenon on book publishing, if I and when I can find any. This was an astute marketing move by Gill & Macmillan, combining an awareness of the current saleability of biography with the continued blurring of boundaries between reader and composer.

As the tastes of readers drift towards the daily lives of their counterparts (as the rise in popularity of blogs, and the bestsellers list has shown), will publishers start to call for more non-fiction from non-writers? 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2003520,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10

This guardian article would support the above claim.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=457921&in_page_id=1773

And so would this one if it were published by someone other than the Daily Mail… Could be true though.