There’s an old Jewish joke:
A woman goes into the butcher shop to buy some lamb chops. The butcher says sure, it’s $4.00 a pound. How much does she want?
She says, Four dollars! That’s ridiculous. The butcher across the street is selling it for $2.25 a pound.
The butcher says, fine. Go buy it there.
The woman says, He’s all out. That’s why I came here.
The butcher says, When I’m all out, I’ll sell it at $1.00 a pound!
That is the essence of Malcolm Gladwell’s rather longer and incisive review of the book Free by Chris Anderson.
Free proposes that since digital costs are next to free, let’s call them free. And since so many people are willing to download free content (according to experiments lots more than would be willing to do so than for even a cent), business should give it away and make their money around the free stuff by ummm, well, advertising and merchandising and so on. Therefore producers of content like writers (you can tell it gets personal here) and such like should expect to just give it away. For free. (Get it? Free.)
Would you buy a t-shirt that says, “Lilian Nattel” on it? Would you buy 2 and I’ll thrown in a book? Action figure anyone? Lilian Nattel typing at her desk with real movable fingers?
Gladwell’s observation:
His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?
I especially enjoyed Gladwell’s analysis of Youtube, which is a perfect example and one which Anderson also uses, except that Anderson fails to note that while next to free, the cost of billions of uploads and downloads at Youtube isn’t free but costs hundreds of millions. Advertising wasn’t successful because advertisers don’t wish to advertise with the abundance of unqualified and unscreened material that Anderson lauds. Instead Youtube has had to make contracts with producers of professional material in order to solicit advertisers.
Gladwell also points out another flaw in the “Free” hypothesis, which is that even when certain limitations (like production costs) are eliminated, distribution can be a large chunk of the final tally. Hence not free.
My own take on Anderson’s enthusiasm for the unlimited quantity of material available in the digital age is that it is limited on the receiving end by users’ time and attention. To take the Youtube example, I get frustrated trying to sift through it for interesting material. I don’t have time in my life to see a billion pieces of crap in order to find the good one. No offense to anyone’s pleasure in uploading their child singing Happy Birthday or their own rendition of Thriller. But I’m interested in good music that I haven’t yet been exposed to. I need someone to do the screening and point me in the right direction. And that person has a mortgage and a fridge to fill.
Do we really need more t-shirts or action figures? Wouldn’t it just make more sense to pay people for their expertise?
Full article is here: Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: newyorker.com
Hey, I’d buy a Lilian Nattel t-shirt if you threw in a “free” book.
Everything comes with a price – nothing is free. All gimmicks.
i think there is a tendency to underrate writers, so free is better, because the book one pats for is no better than the free one.
Let’s take Anderson’s equivocation a step further. Labour wants to be free too! “Free” = “not paid for”. Slave labour is unpaid. Freedom = Slavery. Q.E.D. On second thought, let’s not…
Excellent point, Allan!
Emily, I think that writers are underrated in another way. At book festivals and other events, the organizers, caterers, audio-visual people, chair renters, all get paid, but authors (except for the keynote speaker) are expected to speak for free because their books will be sold there. However the major publicity goes to the speakers who are paid. So as an author with a royalty of, say $1 per book, how many books would need to be sold to remunerate the author at the same rate as the caterer? And if the author has to travel and so essentially gives 2 days to the event? It’s patent nonsense.
Thanks, Penlan! I’ll have to think about getting some done up.
This reminds me of the basis in the philosophy book on fame I was reading, that the mass tendency is to miss the difference between quality and bullshit. Youtube is a perfect example of that – and there’s a good reason why bull is free. But if you want quality, you have to pay for it, and I can only hope that eventually there is some recognition of that. And the t-shirts sound cool….
Very good points, Lilian. And that’s ridiculous about the authors not getting paid except in sales. I’d also wear a Lilian Natel t-shirt though, which would generate publicity (however small) for the book. (All publicity is good, right?) But a shame we don’t value our writers more. The publisher should pay for the travelling costs.
Travelling costs are usually paid for, but not the writer’s time. And who can survive on travelling costs?
I agree, Litlove. I think that people do recognize the difference, but they have to be exposed to it first in order to see it.
I read this piece the other day and (again) despaired.
I haven’t written a word since.
Not a word in a book word, anyway.
But I will regain my courage soon.
Nice to know you are reading the NYer up there, too.
Oh Beth–my sympathies. I know what that’s like. You’ll write again and while you’re not-writing I hope that you can do something nice for yourself.