➻ New York Public Library president Anthony W. Marx had an op-ed in The New York Times this week about E-Books and Democracy, and the evolution of how publishers are handling the sale of e-books to libraries. As Marx tells it, there really is no standard yet:

Many issues still need to be sorted out. Five of the Big Six [publishers] are making their entire e-book inventory available to us to choose from, while Macmillan is offering only a limited selection. HarperCollins allows us to lend each e-book we acquire only 26 times per title; Penguin and Simon & Schuster offer one-year licenses; and Random House sells licenses without time limits but charges much more per license. (In all cases, an e-book can be borrowed by only one patron at a time.) Prices charged to libraries vary widely according to the kind of license agreement, and we hope they will be reduced as demand increases.

What he makes clear in the end, though, is that we’re all in this together and that as e-book delivery becomes more standardized in libraries, it should create and support civic sense as much as dollars and cents.

We have every interest in seeing that publishers remain sustainable enterprises and that authors are paid fairly for their work. But those economic imperatives must be considered alongside the role of libraries in a democratic society. The challenge is to ensure that the information revolution provides more, not less, access for the public.

The last point is the key one, and one I fear is often lost when we’re discussing the changing business landscape of the publishing industry.

➻ The demise of the music industry has long been held up as a harbinger of what’s to come for publishing. But, as Evan Kindley brilliantly portrays in his review of three recent books—The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture by Timothy D. Taylor, MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, and Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity by Chris Ruen—the rise of the MP3 file that ate into the industry’s profits was less an insurrection than an historic accident. What begins as a story of the changing nature of what it means to “sell out” and the Chiquita Banana Jingle quickly becomes an article on the commercial history of music and the compression of sound:

To begin with, Sterne shows that the MP3—that technological Trojan horse which has laid waste to the music industry—was the product of decades of corporate-funded research intended to increase profits. “Telephonic transmission drove research into hearing for much of the century,” Sterne writes; companies like AT&T were concerned to maximize their existing infrastructure, using the available bandwidth to carry as many calls as possible without going beyond the threshold of intelligibility. This led them to finance research in the fledgling field of “psychoacoustics” (part of a general trend toward corporate research and development in the early part of the 20th century, as Sterne notes). “The more AT&T knew about human hearing, the more income it could extract from its infrastructure,” Sterne writes. By 1924 it had quadrupled its system’s capacity, “with minimal modifications of infrastructure and no price increase.” The company’s basic research into human hearing led to innovations in the technology of “compression”: i.e., the simplification and reduction of an audio signal to its most essential elements.

So the MP3 format has its roots in telephony efficiency, not file sharing. In fact, the infrastructure to share music didn’t yet exist:

These smaller, simpler files are much easier to distribute via “end-to-end networks” like the internet, in which “the vast middle of the network does relatively little to its traffic … while devices at the ends of the network do the important work.” MPEG (the acronym stands for “Motion Picture Experts Group,” the name of the organization that originally set the standard for the format in the late 1980s and early ’90s) files were meant to be unobtrusive, unheralded players on the global field of multinational corporate synergy: “Like a person who slips into a crowd, the MPEG audio was designed to disappear into the global network of communication technologies.”

They were not designed initially to be traded by consumers. Sterne points out that “at the time that MPEG came together, there was no world wide web, no internet as we know it today.” In a diagram of “Digital Audio Distribution Modes (Current and Proposed)” created by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1990, “there is no slot … for lateral exchange of recordings, nor even an inkling that it might be an issue, no discussion of mass customization, and little discussion of portable media beyond car radios.” The NAB had their eyes on digital broadcast and cable, not file sharing; the extreme ease with which MP3 files can be copied and played on a range of devices was the end result of a concern for “interoperability” across different industrial platforms.

Thus, Sterne argues, “the MP3’s rise to global preeminence was a product of contingency, accident, and opportunity”: it was not an inevitable logical step in the forward march of technological progress or late capitalism, but a fluke, an accidental collision of mutually conflicting corporate interests.

And like Marx writes of publishers and libraries, the relationships—cultural, commercial, and civic—are being redefined and reset before our very eyes, and it behooves all of us as creators and consumers of art to take part in the process.

The music industry as we knew it, with its shaky ad hoc compromises between art and commerce, is never coming back, but that’s no reason to resign ourselves to resentment or bad faith: we may yet look back on this time as the era of the emergence of a new politics of music. “The story of MPEG,” Sterne writes, “poses standards as an as-yet-unresolved issue of political representation in the development of new communications technologies.” The standards for the technologies that will shape music listening for the next fifty years are being set today; if we want them to represent us, we will have to find ways to make our presence and interests known to the people who write code and broker distribution deals as well as those who produce and consume music.

If you’re interested in music, business, the music business, the commercial history of sound, or just like a good story, Kindley’s article is definitely worth a full read.

➻ In a critique of another rapidly changing industry, “the news,” Paul Tucker wrote recently about A Thousand Braying Asses: Kim Gordon & Churnalism’s Busy Sewer at The Quietus. Tucker begins by bemoaning the way music websites turned by Lizzy Goodman nuanced profile of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in Elle into sensational headlines that focused entirely on her split from bandmate Thurston Moore, and ends up on Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.

Lizzy Goodman put the hours in. She conducted research, drew on previous meetings with Gordon, sat and spoke with her (presumably at some length) and then went away and wrote the piece for Elle. And then, hungry for content, content, content, the music website community scrambled to reproduce a small part of it, as if it was some kind of scoop. This sort of thing is not reporting, it’s selective cutting and pasting.

Like the pieces it spawns, this practice is everywhere.

[...]

editors send press releases to writers asking, “Will you write this up?”, the subsequent rewrites are then picked up by other editors, writers rewrite the rewrites and so it goes on until, barely transformed and rarely investigated further, a single snappily written press release has become news, featured on the front page of every website whose readership might have a vague interest in its contents.

This is the sort of detrimental practice that people like Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh have rallied loudly against in science journalism. It might seem odd to bring up science reporting at this point – no doubt the efficacy (or otherwise) of certain cancer drugs is infinitely more crucial than whether or not Jai Paul’s debut album has leaked – but regardless of the subject matter, journalism without a basic and objective curiosity is not journalism at all.

And here’s where Pope comes in:

In his satirical poem ‘The Dunciad’, Alexander Pope decries the mediocrity that he sees in the publishing world of 18th century London. New printing methods mean that many more people are suddenly able to print and reprint work without resorting to methods that are prohibitively expensive or even legal. In Pope’s London, the resulting cultural stagnancy is reflected by rivers of effluence that flow down the streets.

Meanwhile, London’s booksellers and publishers vie for attention by taking part in contests: which bookseller can urinate the highest; which political hack can make the biggest splash by diving into a ditch full of the city’s faecal matter (“Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around / The stream, be his the Weekly Journals, bound”), and so on. Amid these scatological scuffles are the writers, wailing en-masse with no other purpose than to see which can create the loudest racket. The result? “Now thousand tongues are heard in one loud din/ The Monkey mimics rush discordant in.” Sound familiar?

Admittedly things are not, nor have they ever really been as bad as all that; Pope was a conservative figure, and something of a snob. Almost 300 subsequent years of novels, poetry and journalism, as well as countless other published forms, prove him to be wrong. The thing is, Pope was wrong because enough people put those newly available tools to good use, and many of today’s publications are doing the same with the tools of our time. But by resorting to the kind of methods that see exemplary reportage reduced to a torrent of sensational headlines about a person’s marriage breakdown, we all risk drowning in effluence of our own creation.

I am in agreement with Sturgeon’s Revelation that ninety percent of everything is crap, and that even with the internet—perhaps especially with the internet—we still have to seek out, dig for, and discover the good stuff and pay the rest little mind. But it’s helpful, as Tucker is doing here, to call out the crap every once in a while and make sure we’re not making too big a splash diving into it.

➻ And to that end, Maria Papova has some Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers gathered over on Brain Pickings. Henry Miller has both my favorite:

Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

And, as my wife would tell you, the one I ignore most often:

Work on one thing at a time until finished.

Stephen King, who recently won his second National Magazine Award in fiction for his story Batman and Robin Have an Altercation in Harper’s Magazine, also has a good one:

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Though, I have to say… if he weren’t up on the rooftops, I might have actually heard him and stopped overusing adverbs as much as I do.

➻ If you’d like to celebrate the 5th of May with some reading this weekend, Galleycat has a list of Free Books for Cinco de Mayo.

➻ Or maybe it’s time for a breather.