Letter from the President
Winter 2010
By Roy Blount Jr.
What is a book worth? Except for people who find it essential to shop in an actual physical store where someone is likely to know one book from another, the sticker price is a fiction. A $29.95 book, in e-form, may go for $8.99 these days in Walmart—cheaper than, I don’t know, a six-pack of tubesocks? On Amazon, the notion that all e-books should cost $9.99 is regarded by some people as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights somewhere. Then too you may be able to get a brand-new actual paper-and-ink book through Amazon for less than that—fell off a truck or something. That’s where I go when I’ve run out of copies of my books. It’s cheaper and quicker than ordering through the publisher at the author’s rate, and at least I’ve taken one non-royalty-producing copy off the market.
Then of course there is the school of thought that books shouldn’t cost anything, because “information wants to be free.” One thing wrong with that notion is that just as a pie is more than its ingredients (and does anyone other than a child living at home expect pie, or even pie ingredients, to be free?), a book is more than information. It’s someone’s—several people’s—work.
Another thing wrong with “information wants to be free” is that it is espoused, it’s my impression, by three categories of people:
One: People who are paid by universities to teach occasional seminars and write books that not many people would want to buy anyway if they could help it. To send one’s child to one of these universities costs (say) an author maybe $50,000 a year. How about College wants to be free?
Two: People who have invented a high-tech gimmick that has enabled them not to need any more money the rest of their lives. How about High-tech gimmicks want to be free?
Three: People who live at home with their parents.
Another thing about information: it wants to be wrong. For instance, in Robert Darnton’s critique of the Google settlement in The New York Review of Books, he states that “Google will make it possible for consumers to purchase access to millions of copyrighted books currently in print.” That is wrong. The Google settlement gives access to copyrighted books not currently in print.
It does seem sometimes that books don’t want their authors to get any money out of them. British author John Gribdin’s book Get a Grip on Physics, was all over the Web recently because photographs of Tiger Woods’s smashed-up car showed a copy of the book on the floor amid shards of glass. A famous book! People had to have it! It shot from 396,224th on Amazon to 2,268th. Copies were going for $73.
“I am delighted that anybody is reading my books,” said Gribdin. “I just wish it was one that is still in print.”
If the Google settlement were in place, Gribdin could be getting some income from that book. ✦
“It does seem sometimes that books don't want their authors to get any money out of them.”
- Roy Blount Jr.
