The other day I wrote I hate books, in which I suggested we should move wholesale from printed to electronic media. Now today I’ve come across an interesting article about the turmoil of the publishing industry. It’s a long article, and interesting to read, but look at this snippet:
But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.
[Via : The End.]
It’s so wasteful — all those resources used up to create and transport books ‘on spec’, only for them to end up being shredded.
There has to be a better way.
Link via Courtney on Twitter.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I generally agree that they should go digital providing we all retain the same rights, but in practice books come with DRM and restrictions about lending the books to other people, printing, quoting, etc.
Lessig’s Free Culture talks about the restrictions put on his own books (‘you may not copy text to clipboard, you may only use the Read Aloud feature to hear 3 pages per day’). http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/
Stallman’s ‘Copyright vs Community’ talk goes into some detail about this, and does this essay http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It’s a strange thing to consider when it comes to digital books.
That whole DRM is a major concern around books. I was unable to be given a PDF copy of the book Maria Langer and I *wrote* because of the DRM. Such foolishness!
My vision, of course, is of written material (maybe books or maybe some new format) where the author receives a fair compensation for their work and where readers can read it on any device at any time and without difficulty.
It’s not exactly “waste” because I’m sure much — if not all — of it is recycled. The US has huge recycling programs and uses waste paper for a wide variety of products.
But imagine my horror when of the 25,000 copies of my Leopard book originally purchased by Apple Computer, Inc. they returned 16,000 copies because the marketing program they had set up didn’t go quite as well as they expected. Returns and negative royalty numbers aside, all I kept thinking of was 16,000 copies of a 600-page book that would wind up in a shredder.
Ack. 16 out of 25 thousand – that must have been a huge shock for you, and an unpleasant one.
I had had no idea about the shredding until I read the article I quoted above. I’d never really thought about where books go to die.
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