Tim O’Reilly’s Con­text for the Comment

Skin­nier, nar­rower, fainter: 2012 is mer­ci­fully start­ing to blur and go wonky, break­ing up into wavy lines and scoot­ing col­ors. Daily it gets harder to care, even about all those Top 10 lists dumped on us in the past weeks.

 

And now, even bet­ter, we’re declar­ing the Pre­dic­tion Period to be closed.

You know this time of year in pub­lish­ing. It’s as if the Holy See in Rome had issued Pre­dic­tions for Pub­lish­ing Urbi et Orbi – the car­di­nals are everywhere. ‘Tis the sea­son when pub­lish­ing peo­ple are seized, red-faced, with great spasms of prog­nos­ti­ca­tion nobody asked for. Everybody’s a psychic.

 

Lis­ten to Jonny Geller. UK book­shops have been halved in seven years. There’s our present tense and ten­sion. More than enough with­out what-if-ing about the future that lies before us. Let’s try under­stand­ing what’s already hap­pened first.

I must say, the O’Reilly “I don’t give a shit” line has been the per­fect dis­trac­tion from all the soothsaying.

It’s the diss heard ’round the Predict-o-Rama, one of our best lead­ers in the busi­ness, the vision­ary Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, in a fine inter­view with Steven Levy for Wired — so many good things to say — and sud­denly, boom, empha­sis mine:

I don’t really give a shit if lit­er­ary nov­els go away. They’re an elit­ist pur­suit. And they’re rel­a­tively recent. The most pop­u­lar author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Her­man Melville writ­ing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writ­ing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfel­low writ­ing long nar­ra­tive poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old con­struct. And now we’re get­ting new forms of enter­tain­ment, new forms of pop­u­lar culture.

Care­ful, you could be tram­pled by Eng­lish teach­ers run­ning scream­ing into the night.

Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Cre­at­ing the Next Big Thing is a fine interview.

For exam­ple, on Apple, O’Reilly tells Levy:

They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with mul­ti­touch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball for­ward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from some­one else, but it stops now.” That atti­tude cre­ates lockup in the indus­try. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo pre­cisely because they try to own too much.

On Ama­zon:

Ama­zon is clearly try­ing to own the entire stack. They ate most of the retail part of the stack, and now they’re try­ing to eat the pub­lisher part of the stack. On the other hand, Ama­zon is doing so many good things—their cloud-computing ini­tia­tives have been earth­shak­ing, and I give Jeff Bezos great kudos for get­ting the pub­lish­ing indus­try to move seri­ously toward ebooks. I am so impressed with them. I just wish they were a lit­tle less ruthless.

And about the Web, itself:

I had no idea it would be as big as it became. I still remem­ber in 1993 my part­ner Dale Dougherty orig­i­nally wanted to do Global Net­work Nav­i­ga­tor as a quar­terly online mag­a­zine. And I remem­ber say­ing to him, “Dale, I think peo­ple will have the web browser open on the desk every day. We have to think about them access­ing it every day.” I had no idea that it would be every minute.

Now, O’Reilly jumps onto Google+ to announce:

And to top it off, I’m wear­ing OATV port­fo­lio com­pany Betabrand’s “Exec­u­tive Hoodie” in the photo :-)

Pin­stripes, no less. And this is the same Tim O’Reilly, remem­ber, who in a per­sonal bio on the O’Reilly.com site wrote:

I read a lot (I recently counted more than 5000 books in my house) — science-fiction, his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, clas­sics, and books about big ideas. I buy busi­ness books but rarely read past the first chap­ter. I read enough tech­ni­cal mate­r­ial at work that I try to avoid it at home. One of my favorite kinds of book to dis­cover is the best­seller of a bygone era, the books that didn’t quite make it to clas­sic sta­tus but still reached mil­lions of peo­ple. They can often tell us more about the unique sen­si­bil­ity of an era than the time­less classics.

So what gives with his appar­ent denun­ci­a­tion of lit­er­ary fiction?

Sure enough, O’Reilly addressed it in a pri­vate indus­try email exchange. He has given me per­mis­sion to use what he wrote there about the com­ment. (Jour­nal­ists who fol­low this list agree to request per­mis­sion of list mem­bers to use their com­ments in pub­lic set­tings.) One rea­son I’m glad O’Reilly spoke to the remark is that, in doing so, he pointed to a strong Char­lie Rose Show, a con­ver­sa­tion aired in Novem­ber. O’Reilly wrote:

If any­one saw the ses­sion I did on Char­lie Rose, you will have some con­text for this remark (which was part of a larger dis­cus­sion, excerpted for max­i­mum impact, as I should have expected…).  Ken Auletta and Jonathan Safran were hand-wringing to the tune of “who will pay for the kind of things we do if the big pub­lish­ers go away.”  Jane Fried­man and I were respond­ing: “If peo­ple want what you do, you’ll find a way to get paid. But no one owes you con­tin­u­a­tion of the cur­rent play­ers and busi­ness model.”  And I was point­ing out that pop­u­lar art forms come and go — clas­si­cal music was once pop (Franz Liszt elicited reac­tions akin to those to the Bea­t­les), and that the lit­er­ary forms of today might one day be less important.

Here is the Rose show in ques­tion, and if you have 33 min­utes, it’s a good one to watch. It’s no secret I’m a fan of Rose’s work, and O’Reilly here is part of the kind of show that demon­strates why.

The con­ver­sa­tion unfolds on lev­els that are excel­lent for laypeo­ple out­side pub­lish­ing to hear but fully viable for us book­ish folks who fol­low the pre­dic­tions and prat­falls of the dig­i­tal dynamic with excru­ci­at­ing, incre­men­tal care.

(For all of us who hate our col­leagues’ end­less social-media entreaties to “Buy my book!” there’s a nice moment in the show’s setup at 4:36 with Yale’s David Kas­tan, in which we read the pro­duc­ers of the 1623 Shake­speare folio insist­ing that the reader pur­chase it: “What ever you do, buy.”)

In the wide-ranging dis­cus­sion on the show, O’Reilly says to Rose and the other guests at 28:28 in the tape:

There’s this cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of the quote-unquote “lit­er­ary author.” It really mat­ters to a rel­a­tively small num­ber of peo­ple. It’s an elit­ist thing. There’s pop­u­lar fic­tion, there is seri­ous non­fic­tion which is in the same cat­e­gory as seri­ous report­ing of all kinds.

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta inter­venes and says to O’Reilly, “You’ve used this phrase ‘elit­ist’ twice in this con­ver­sa­tion. What do you mean by that?”

O’Reilly:

What I mean is the notion by some group that their favorite activ­ity is so impor­tant that it needs to be protected.

Auletta:

What if it were defined dif­fer­ently, as a group that says, ‘This is part of…preserving the culture?’”

O’Reilly:

Take clas­si­cal music. What we call clas­si­cal music today used to be pop­u­lar music. Franz Lizst was like the Bea­t­les. And now clas­si­cal music is in this ghetto of this very small num­ber of peo­ple who are play­ing for each other and say­ing, ‘We should be sub­si­dized because we’re this impor­tant cul­tural phe­nom­e­non.” And the fact is that the music that will be remem­bered from our era and will be the, quote, “clas­si­cal music,” is the pop­u­lar music of today.…Look at clas­sic authors. Dick­ens. Lit­er­ally there were riots when the new edi­tion of a book came out, peo­ple try­ing to get it in far­away places, (when) the new fas­ci­cle came out from Bleak House.

Auletta then asks how O’Reilly’s sup­port of NPR and PBS jibes with his com­ments on self-declared cul­tural work. Auletta says:

One of the things they do [“they” being PBS and NPR] is basi­cally sub­si­dize, in part, the cul­ture with some gov­ern­ment support.

O’Reilly:

The amount of gov­ern­ment sup­port for PBS is rel­a­tively small. A huge part of the sup­port comes from peo­ple who care about it. It’s not actu­ally a sub­si­dized activ­ity so much as it’s sub­ject to mar­ket forces and there’s a set of peo­ple who say, “I want that, I like it, I want to pay for it.” And you see this with new tech­nol­ogy plat­forms like Kick­starter where peo­ple are say­ing, “Hey, would you like this? Would you pay for this?” It’s this incred­i­ble new direct mech­a­nism for authors and other cre­ators to say, “Would you care about what I want to produce?”

Here, Jane Fried­man picks up the con­ver­sa­tion and goes back to the use of the term “elitist.”

This is not the host of the Ether here at JaneFriedman.com, by the way, but the for­mer Harper­Collins CEO, now chief of Open Road Media.

Fried­man picks up the con­ver­sa­tion and goes back to the use of the term “elit­ist.” She says to Auletta:

Ken, I think the elit­ist ele­ment was that books were selected, and it was the edi­tor who selected it, and then it was put into cer­tain book­stores, and the inde­pen­dent book­store, which I am a fan of, was a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing for peo­ple who didn’t know how to find the book that they wanted. Then the super­stores tried to make that better…True lit­er­a­ture and fine non­fic­tion have always been thought of as a very small uni­verse. And what e– has done now — and [to O’Reilly] I’m so glad you men­tioned Kick­starter, which I think is bril­liant, because why shouldn’t peo­ple pay for a book that they want to be writ­ten? It’s a the­ory that any­one who’s grown up in pub­lish­ing thinks is absolutely cuckoo, but it’s not. Because you’re now hav­ing the con­sumer say, “That’s a very good idea, and if a pub­lisher won’t give you that $10,000 advance, we will put up $100 and reach that $10,000.”

Auletta points out, “You can have both.”

Fried­man agrees with him, say­ing that yes, we’ll have both:

There will be for the fore­see­able future be printed books. But I think that the move to elec­tronic dis­tri­b­u­tion of infor­ma­tion and edu­ca­tion and enter­tain­ment is going to come from the e-space.

Auletta ties it by say­ing, “You’re always going to have an eco­nomic issue. And the eco­nomic issue is how do you sup­port things that are important?”

This, unfor­tu­nately, is where the edit of the show had to end the conversation.

Auletta is voic­ing a gen­uinely valid point that seri­ous observers of cul­ture do worry about — and that doesn’t mean they can’t agree with O’Reilly, as well. I’m com­fort­able with the per­spec­tives both men raise here, and nei­ther should be dismissed.

The idea of what Fried­man terms “true lit­er­a­ture and fine non­fic­tion” hav­ing to fight for itself in a market-driven set­ting is not nec­es­sar­ily wrong.

 

Many times in my work in the­ater crit­i­cism, for exam­ple, I’ve wished that the U.S. “legit­i­mate stage” had been required to sur­vive from the out­set on box office sales rather than stag­ger­ing along on a non­profit model com­bin­ing ticket sales and often heavy con­tri­bu­tions and sub­si­dies of var­i­ous sorts. If this had hap­pened, the most impor­tant the­ater might have found its com­mer­cial legs, of neces­sity, instead of suf­fer­ing for so many decades as “the fab­u­lous invalid” of Amer­i­can entertainment.

While I’ve never come to a point of say­ing I “don’t give a shit if seri­ous the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion goes away,” to para­phrase O’Reilly, I do under­stand how he comes to a thought like this about lit­er­ary work.

In his remarks on the email exchange about the Wired inter­view, in fact, O’Reilly adds:

I do regret the turn of phrase that Steven cap­tured in the Wired inter­view.  Espe­cially since I do love lit­er­ary nov­els and other forms of “high cul­ture.” But I do get irked by the sense of enti­tle­ment of some of the practitioners.

And maybe this is one rea­son I’m put out with the Parade of Pub­lish­ing Pre­dic­tors each year at this time. You can hear in so many of these folks that same air of enti­tle­ment in how they weigh in, unbid­den, to announce to us “My Big Pre­dic­tions for Pub­lish­ing in 2013,” etc. This looks like the atti­tude O’Reilly is get­ting at, the smug pom­pos­ity of fad­ing con­trol, old gate­keep­ers and their busy defend­ers show­ing off what they think is their still-expert analy­sis of what’s ahead.

 

Although each day may seem about three weeks long to us in the busi­ness, the under­min­ing of the king­mak­ers has occurred quickly. These prophets are cry­ing in a wilder­ness none of us can read in advance.

And what we can take away from O’Reilly’s excerpted com­ment may actu­ally be the best de-facto pre­dic­tion of all. Maybe it’s the only one worth car­ry­ing with us as we make our fate­ful cross­ing into a new, loom­ing year: The kinds of lit­er­a­ture we may have deemed most valu­able so far? –finally must be made to stand up on their own in the marketplace.

We can’t shove aside the old guard but still beg for their tweedy fiats when we need a mean­ing­ful book posi­tioned for the public.

 

A pro­found work of lit­er­ary fic­tion today could lose its read­ers to a Christ­mas present of soft pornog­ra­phy, a three-book set orig­i­nally con­cocted as vam­pire fan fiction.

Sacred cows may find scant foot­ing on the slip­pery slopes of 2013.

So write your stuff well: the new year will arrive quickly enough.

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Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.