by Eugene Volokh [i], VESOFT/UCLA
Presented (KEY-NOTE) at 1995 SCRUG Conference, Irvine, CA
Published by The Yale Law Journal, May 1995.
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PART 1 OF 4
Introduction
It's easier for the rich to speak than it is for the poor. It's also easier to speak if what you're saying, or singing or drawing, has mass appeal. Publishers will only invest in a product if the expected returns exceed the expected costs. If your work lacks a wide audience, publishers may be hard to find; and even if you can get a small publisher to back you, distributors may be unwilling to let you use their scarce shelf space. Getting access to nationwide radio and TV is harder still. People with unorthodox tastes lose out, and even those in the mainstream suffer when potentially interesting work isn't produced because of (rational) predictions that it won't be a hit.
Many have pointed to these problems -- the bias in favor of speech of the rich, or of speech endorsed by the rich, and the relative blandness of much mass media.[1] The perfect "marketplace of ideas" is one where all ideas, not just the popular or well- funded ones, are accessible to all. To the extent this ideal isn't achieved, the promise of the First Amendment is only imperfectly realized. And, some suggest, because current First Amendment doctrine is premised on an open-market metaphor that isn't valid, the law should be adapted to this brutal reality.[2]
My thesis is that (1) these two problems are directly linked to the fact that speaking today is expensive; (2) new information technologies, especially the "information superhighway"[3] or "infobahn,"[4] will dramatically reduce the costs of distributing speech; and, therefore, (3) the new media order these technologies will bring will be much more democratic and diverse than the environment we see now. Cheap speech will mean that far more speakers -- rich and poor, popular and not, banal and avant-garde -- will be able to make their work available to all.
To support this view, I will, in Part I, describe what I think will be the likely information future and the market forces that will make it inevitable. I'll focus on how the infobahn will change the existing forms of communication: music, books, newspapers, magazines, and television. (Though the new, truly interactive media -- electronic bulletin boards, Internet mailing lists, and Internet news groups -- are an extremely intriguing topic, lack of space keeps me from discussing them.[5])
In Part II, I'll suggest some social consequences of these technological changes, each of which might be relevant to thinking about the First Amendment:
(1) {Democratization and Diversification:} Many more people will be able to make their speech widely available, including many who can't afford to do so today; and listeners will have much more choice than they have now.
(2) {The Shift of Power Away from the Intermediaries:} Control over what is said and heard will shift from the intermediaries -- publishers, book and music store owners, and so on -- to the speakers and listeners themselves. Private parties will thus find it harder to use their market power to stifle speech. Listeners will find it easier to become well-informed about the issues in which they're interested. On the other hand, it will be easier for people to choose only the information they know they want, and to ignore other topics and other viewpoints. And the extra diversity of speech may reduce social and cultural cohesion.
(3) {Mixed Effects on Poor Listeners:} Poor listeners will be able to enjoy many of the benefits of the new order, but may to some extent be shut out from other benefits.
(4) {Substantial Changes in Advertising in the Media:} There'll be more no-advertising and low-advertising media; advertising will be better targeted to people; newspapers will lose a lot of classified advertising income; and political advertisements might change significantly.
Finally, in Part III, I'll briefly explore some of the possible First Amendment implications of these changes. My ultimate conclusion is that the First Amendment of today will not only work well with the new information order -- it will work better than it ever has before. But I'll also discuss ways in which the new technologies might undercut some of the assumptions that underlie the existing doctrine, and might lead to public pressure for legal changes.
I. Cheap Speech
A. Music and the Electronic Music Databases
1. The New System
a. What It Will Look Like
I want to start by discussing how the new technologies will change popular music. These changes may be less politically momentous than the similar changes that I think will happen in print and video. But the music industry will probably be the one that changes most quickly; and in any case many of the things I say in this section -- about cost savings, increased choice, information overload, and so on -- will apply equally well to the others.
The reasons for the changes will be very simple: There's lots of money in them. The existing music distribution system is inefficient, both for consumers and for musicians. For consumers, in particular, it has three problems:
{Cost:} Music costs more than it could -- consumers must pay about $8-$15 for a new album, though musicians generally see less than 10% of this in royalties.[6]
{Choice:} Consumers get a smaller selection than they could -- many titles, especially ones that are relatively old or that appeal to relatively small markets, aren't available in most places.
{Convenience:} To buy music, a consumer has to take the time and trouble to go to the store.
And these problems translate into problems for musicians. High cost, low availability, and inconvenience of buying mean fewer sales.[7]
These inefficiencies aren't the result of some sinister plot or even of market irrationality. They are an inevitable consequence of the existing distribution system. People today must buy music on some tangible medium, such as tape or CD. This means they generally have to go to the music store (inconvenient), which has only limited shelf space (lowering the choice). And the tangible medium has to be created, imprinted, distributed, and sold (costly).
The infobahn, once it delivers high-speed two-way communications to private homes, is a far superior way of delivering music to the consumer. It will work something like this:
(1) Using your computer -- or perhaps your TV set, with a keyboard, a touch-screen, a mouse, or even voice activation -- you access an electronic music database. This database (actually, there'll probably be several competing databases) will contain virtually all the music that's available in electronic form.
(2) You choose the music you want, by album name, by song title, by artist, by composer or songwriter, or by genre. You might even ask the computer for suggestions, based on the artists or albums you tell it you like. (This would be done using judgments entered into the computer by reviewers.) You can also browse in some way, perhaps looking only at music of a particular kind, or music that has gotten good reviews. You can then play the music, to make sure you really want to buy it.[8]
(3) Once you decide you like it, you download the album to a digital recorder connected to your computer. Your bank account gets automatically debited.
This would mean:
{Cost:} Once the music is recorded -- which even nowadays costs fairly little[9] -- the only significant other costs will be advertising costs, royalties, the cost of electronic distribution, and the cost of the recording medium (which will be supplied by the customer). There'll be no need to spend money to create the tangible recordings, ship them, and sell them. Assuming cheap electronic transmission (an assumption I'll try to back up shortly), a CD-quality album may well cost as little as $3 to $5 -- a $1 royalty,[10] plus amortization of the recording costs and advertising costs, plus the $1 or $2 that the customer will have to pay for the recording medium. An artist who's willing to pocket less money to get more customers might be able to charge $3 or less.
{Choice:} You'll have close to the whole music library of the world at your disposal. Copyright owners will be able to sell to any infobahn-connected consumers, not just to the ones who have access to a store that's willing to stock the work. Because there'll be no shelf-space limitation -- computer storage is cheap, and getting more so -- it won't matter how esoteric your tastes are; there'll be room for nearly everything.[11]
{Convenience:} You'll no longer have to drive to the music store or wait in line. You'll also be able to select what you want more conveniently, because you'll be able to easily pre-listen to what you're buying,[12] and because you'll have readily available reviews. The copyright owners will benefit from this, too, because whenever consumers read a good review or like a song they hear on the radio, they'll be able to buy the music instantly, or at most have to wait until they get home.
b. Why It Will Look Like This
{Music Database Operators:} There's a lot of money to be made here. In the United States alone, there were 425 million albums sold in the first six months of 1994,[13] at an average cost of over $10 each, including both the more expensive CDs and the cheaper, lower sound quality tapes. The sales volume should increase as costs go down, and the convenience of buying the product from home should raise volume even more. Skimming even, say, ten cents per transaction would mean, at today's rates, almost $100 million yearly.
Mail-order CD catalogs -- including computerized ones, such as {cdconnection.com,} which is accessible either directly through your modem or through the Internet[14] -- are already the first step towards the system I describe. They attract customers by offering a large selection,[15] slightly lower prices,[16] and the convenience of home shopping, partly countered by the inconvenience of having to wait for the CDs to arrive by mail.[17] Direct downloading should provide even greater cost savings, selection, and convenience.
Setting up a music database shouldn't be much harder than starting a mail-order CD business today; and it should be much easier than starting a chain of music stores. Like the U.S. Mail, the telephone system, or the Internet, the infobahn should let any business be accessible through it.[18] The database operators will have to buy computer equipment and design some software, but this shouldn't cost much. Even a database operator who gets only, say, 1% of the total market can make almost $10 million yearly by charging a $1 mark-up (which will still save consumers a lot of money). Ten million transactions yearly -- thirty thousand daily -- can easily be handled even today with relatively cheap equipment.[19] And the low cost of setting up a database should keep competition high and consumer prices low.
{Copyright Owners:} There's also profit here for copyright owners. The new system will let copyright owners exploit markets that were closed to them before: people who would pay, say, $5 for electronic delivery of an album but not $10 for the album in the store (cost);[20] people who didn't have access to stores that stock the album (choice); and people who otherwise wouldn't have taken the trouble to go the record store, or who had meant to buy an album they heard on the radio but had forgotten about it by the time they got to the store (convenience). The electronic database operators would easily be able to pay the copyright owners royalties as high as what the owners get from music store sales, if that's what it takes to get the owners to sign up.
This will become especially true when, as some copyright owners join, others will also find themselves pushed to join by competitive pressures. Once even a few albums become available for $5 rather than $10, albums that sell for $10 will be at a significant disadvantage. Though music isn't fungible -- loyal fans of New Kids on the Block might not think Tom Waits an adequate substitute -- some product substitution will doubtless occur.[21]
{Consumers:} As I mentioned in the previous section, consumers can also benefit greatly from the new system. True, any change -- especially one involving computerization -- risks alienating customers, but the new system can be made very user- friendly.[22] The system needn't be any harder to use than an ATM; and, as with the ATM, which has probably saved billions of person- lunch-hours per year, the new system's benefits should be substantial enough that people will learn to use it.
Moreover, the physical advantages of music store layout -- the ability to browse, and the possibility that one will stumble over something good that one hadn't even thought of buying -- can be made available on the home computer, too. The software can easily have a general "Browse" (or "Browse The Kind Of Music I Like") feature, if this is what the users want. The software can also have other useful features -- such as a convenient pre-listen mode, or cross-references to reviews[23] -- that many music stores do not have. And if people really need human help, the software can, at the touch of a button, switch to a voice connection with an operator at the central database location.[24]
{Technology:} The new setup will require a good deal of new technology, but what's not here yet is coming soon. There's already music being sent through the Internet.[25] Digitally recorded music is simply a collection of data, no different (from the computer's point of view) from your WordPerfect document. There's no reason it can't be sent down the wires to your home.[26]
Once the music arrives -- in data form -- at your home, it will need to be recorded on some high-quality medium.[27] Two familiar media are nonstarters: Normal analog audiotape is too low-quality, and CDs are read-only. But two recently introduced technologies -- digital compact cassettes (DCCs) and MiniDiscs -- might have what it takes. They both provide sound quality as good as that of a CD; you should be able to download music to them from your home computer, and then play it at home, in your car, or in your Walkman. Today they cost a lot,[28] but prices are expected to fall with new innovations and economies of scale,[29] just as they did for normal CD equipment.[30]
To use this system, people will need a computer, but there are already an estimated 30 million home computers installed today.[31] The cheapest ones now cost about $700,[32] and, of course, this money will buy you many more features than just home music delivery.
Moreover, even people who can't afford a home computer and a home digital recorder might still use the system through public music vending machines. These machines may cost more than the home versions, because they'll need to be more resilient (and probably more theft- and vandalism-proof); a fragile keyboard interface might have to be replaced by a touch-screen interface, or by something similarly robust. Still, this shouldn't be especially difficult or expensive -- consider ATMs, video games, and public lottery ticket machines. So long as there are millions of people who don't have home computers and home digital recorders, there'll be plenty of incentive to tap this market. And some music stores already have computerized music catalog machines (called Muzes)[33] -- the music vending machines would basically be that, plus an infobahn hookup, a credit or debit card reader, and a recorder.
Finally, it shouldn't be a problem to charge people electronically for using the service. The system could ask for a credit card number when you access it -- much as is done today for phone sales, or for {cdconnection.com} computer sales -- and get it confirmed while you're shopping. Better yet, it could charge you through your infobahn provider, much as 900 numbers now charge through the phone company. Music vending machines could accept credit cards or debit cards. And even more convenient forms of electronic payment may soon be available; electronic payment could be a boon to many businesses, and the market demand for it has generated a good deal of research and investment.[34]
2. How the New System Will Change What Is Available
The new distribution technology will do more than just make music cheaper and easier to get. It will also radically change {what} music is available.
I've already mentioned one way this will happen: The music databases will provide access to albums that stores otherwise wouldn't stock. Even if there are 50,000 fans of a particular kind of music throughout the country, a music store might expect there to be only a handful of these people among its customers. It can't afford to use shelf space for material that appeals to so few people. But electronic databases can carry even albums that appeal to only a tiny fraction of the market. The result will be more diversity for the listeners (even if not all of them may take advantage of this diversity).
But electronic home distribution will do more than eliminate the bottleneck of music stores. It will also greatly reduce the power of the music production companies (the "labels").
Electronic distribution will drastically lower up-front distribution costs. Even today an artist can make a commercially viable master recording for as little as $1000.[35] With electronic distribution, once the master is made, no more money needs to be spent on tangible copy production, distribution, or sales. An artist will no longer have to persuade a production company that his product is worth the investment. He'll be able to create it himself and submit it to the electronic databases; and once it's in the databases, the work will be as available as if it were in every music store in the country.
Many artists will probably still prefer that someone else pay for recording and editing the album (especially if they want a more-frills recording), and they'd probably like to have someone invest in advertising. Labels will thus still survive, and the artists will still have to persuade the labels that their works will sell enough to justify the investment.
But the needed investment will be much less than it is today. Less money will have to be recouped, so the labels will be more willing to back material that has a small likely audience. And even if no one is willing to invest, the artists may still be able to pay for the recording themselves, go without advertising, and hope it sells through word of mouth, good reviews, or radio play (especially the custom-mix radio, which I describe below). Advertising is better for the artist than no advertising; but even no advertising is better than the current system, where without a label an artist essentially can't make the music available to the public at all.
3. Dealing with Information Overload
The great obstacle to consumers getting what they want will no longer be that there are too few products available; it will be that there are too many. The new system, by reducing barriers to entry, will make much more material available to consumers. Some of it will be good; most will be junk.
This, of course, isn't a new problem. Tens of thousands of books and CDs come out yearly. Most of us have had the experience of going to the store and not knowing what to buy. But we've made do, largely because the information overload has spawned professionals -- reviewers, radio programmers, and decisionmakers at the record stores and the labels -- who help us wade through the material. These people's job is to find what they think we'll most like, and tell us about it, play it for us so we can decide for ourselves, or try to sell it to us.
The new system will reduce the role of the record stores and the labels, but the other sources of information will remain. Rather than sending its work to production companies, hoping for a contract, a musical group will send it to reviewers. The reviewers will probably specialize in particular genres, and there will probably be quite a few of them, of varying reputations.
Some of these reviewers will, like music reviewers today, write for newspapers, magazines, and such.[36] Other reviewers will select albums that they recommend and e-mail sample songs to their clients. The clients will then be able to listen to the songs at their leisure, and, if they like what they hear, buy the album (perhaps after first listening to the whole album) at the touch of a few keys.
Still other reviewers will write brief reviews -- perhaps even just give numerical ratings -- for the music databases; they might also compare the music to other albums or artists.[37] This will let database customers search for, say, "New Reggae that has gotten a thumbs up from at least two reviewers," or "Songs that someone who likes Tom Waits might enjoy." This class of reviewers will probably be paid by the music database operators.[38]
{Custom-Mix Cable Radio:} The most valuable review service, though, will be something akin to cable radio today. The virtue of radio as a selection tool is that it's outside your control, and can therefore familiarizes you with material you didn't know about. This, of course, is also its vice. You have some selection over what's played -- you can listen to a given station or a given show. But the selection is limited. Even in a big radio market you might find that no station quite satisfies you.
What one would optimally want, I believe, is to specify the radio mix more precisely, without sacrificing the element of the unexpected and new that radio can provide. One would like to be able to say, for instance: "I'd like a mix of '60s rock, rock ballads from all decades, bluegrass, songs recommended by a {Rolling Stone} reviewer, and songs that someone who likes the Talking Heads, Paul Simon, and Concrete Blonde might like. I'd also like a small part of the mix to be random rock. And {no Steely Dan!}"[39] People would prefer this approach because it maximizes the chances that they'll like what they'll hear. One doesn't have to be particularly musically literate to know roughly what one enjoys, and to want to hear more of it.
It should be easy to get such a mix piped into your home. You could configure your preferences on your computer, and when you choose "home radio" mode, the computer would pick up a semi-random mix from the electronic databases and play it for you. Within the boundaries set by your preferences, the music would be selected based on the reviews stored in the databases.
Because you can pay for the music directly, you'll have the option of either a free service with commercials, or a paid service with no commercials. There's no reason to think the paid service would be very expensive, since there'll be no transmitter and FCC license to amortize, and since the copyright owners, interested in selling albums, will likely charge little for the rights. Cable radio is already available in some markets, though of course without the preference configuration system; it costs $5 to $10 per month.[40]
You could also set up your computer to automatically store a mix every morning onto a DCC or a MiniDisc; then, you could take it into your car and play it all day in place of wireless radio.[41] It might be a bit of a bother for a person to pop in a new cassette or disc every night and take it to the car every morning. Nonetheless, the extra effort on the consumer's part shouldn't be prohibitive, especially if investing this effort could substantially increase listening pleasure.[42]
If a reviewer has 10,000 subscribers -- and recall that the market is nationwide -- he can make a decent living charging them $5 to $10 {a year,} plus copyright clearance costs, for a custom- mix service based on his reviews. Even with 1000 subscribers, the reviewer can make some money for not very hard work. Alternatively, reviewers can accept advertising, or take money from people who want their material reviewed. Some people might not trust reviewers paid by the musicians,[43] but subscribers will be able to choose between those reviewers paid by musicians, those paid by subscribers, and those funded by advertising.[44]
Of course, like the other screening mechanisms, this will give some people -- no longer the labels but now the reviewers -- some power over what people will hear. A band that once complained "Our music is brilliant but the producers are keeping it off the market" will instead say "Our music is brilliant but the reviewers can't appreciate it."
The power of reviewers, though, is based on people's approval of their tastes. Maybe the people's trust is misplaced, but it's hard for artists to complain that the reviewers' power is illegitimate. Moreover, the reviewers' power is much less exclusionary than the power of the labels: If I don't like one reviewer's taste, I can easily switch to another; if reviewers are neglecting material that at least some listeners -- even small groups of listeners -- would like, other reviewers will step into the breach; and the low costs of providing reviews mean even small markets will have many reviewers serving them.
Though there might ultimately be thousands of reviewers providing their own custom-mix services, I doubt this will cause much of a reviewer overload problem. Reviewers will probably specialize in particular genres or subgenres. Within those genres, people will probably start with the most popular or best advertised mix. People who are satisfied with their custom-mix service will stick with it; people who aren't will easily be able to try someone else, perhaps someone their friends recommend.
4. Will Production Companies Go Along?
I mentioned above that electronic music databases will succeed because both copyright owners and consumers can benefit from them. But many sound recording copyrights are owned by the music production companies. If, as I suggest, production companies will be hurt by the new system, will they be willing to license copyrights to businesses that will likely displace them?
Production companies may well be reluctant to let the electronic music databases get off the ground; but it seems to me competitive pressures will ultimately force them to go along. The new system gives copyright owners a new way of exploiting markets they otherwise couldn't reach. Even if it will prove generally bad for labels in the long term, some small labels -- which may have their sights set more on selling their existing stock rather than on the long run -- will want to take advantage of it. Musicians signing new recording deals may want to take advantage of it, too, because the new system is definitely in their interest; and if the musician has a good enough bargaining position, the label may have to participate even if it doesn't really want to.
Also, the fact that copyrights in musical works aren't truly exclusive may play a role. A musician can make a recording of a song without the composer's permission, so long as he pays a compulsory royalty (today, 6.6 cents per song per copy).[45] A musician can even intentionally try to make his performance sound just like another musician's performance, so long as he doesn't physically copy the other's recording.[46] Of course, people might still much prefer the Beatles' {Let It Be} to Volokh-trying-to- sound-like-the-Beatles' {Let It Be}; but the fact that new covers of old standards constantly come out will weaken somewhat the copyright monopolist's hold on the market.
Finally, once the system gets off the ground, the lower cost and extra convenience to consumers will lead to pressure for reluctant labels to participate. Even consumers who today are willing to pay $10 for albums at stores may become reluctant to do this once they get used to paying $5 from home.
I recognize this is speculation -- this is a speculative article -- but it seems this situation isn't that far off from classic market competition. To take an analogous case, prices often fall not because the existing market players prefer that they fall, but because new entrants, or small vendors looking for market share, drive the prices down. While large producers may try to stop this, they generally can't.
B. Books, Magazines, and Newspapers
1. Introduction
Text is even easier to send electronically than music, because it requires a good deal less space, and therefore less transmission time; it can even be transmitted feasibly through today's relatively slow communications mechanisms. Some newspapers already put much of their news online.[47] And there are already special electronic-only news services, such as Clarinet Communications' {ClariNews,} which contains everything from business news to sports to a few columnists (such as Miss Manners) and cartoons (such as {Dilbert} and {Bizarro}).[48]
There are also libraries of electronic books. Project Gutenberg at Illinois Benedictine College has created a database of 160 books, including the Bible, {Alice in Wonderland,} and the collected works of Shakespeare, all available free on the Internet.[49] The Internet Bookstore service sells new books from various publishers, including Paramount MacMillan, Oxford University Press, and the National Review. The books sell for about one-third of the print price, and take about 30 seconds to download.[50]
The problem, of course, is that computer screens are harder to read than books. Modern large-screen workstations, with black-on- white display and proportionally spaced fonts, are better than the old 24-by-80 non-graphical displays that most of us still use. Still, they're not as easy to read as a book, and they certainly aren't as portable.
There are two ways to deal with this: Some text might be not only electronically delivered, but also printed out on home printers; and laptop computers might be made so readable and portable that reading text on them will be as easy as reading a book. I'll deal with these two possibilities in turn.
2. Short Opinion Articles and Home Printers
I suggested above that, in the coming years, more and more homes will have a computer, an infobahn connection, and probably a music recorder connected to the computer. But even more common than the recorder will be the laser printer. Laser printers can generate text that's as readable as what you see in a newspaper; today they cost as little as $400.[51] And while people probably wouldn't like hundreds of unbound, single-sided, 8 1/2"x11" sheets of paper coming off their printers -- which is what would be required for a complete book or newspaper -- one to five sheets should be no problem.
There are lots of people who make a living writing short, periodic articles. There are columnists, either daily or weekly, such as William Safire, Mike Royko, and the like. There are comic strip artists. There are also organizations, such as the ACLU, the NRA, and many smaller ones, which periodically send out their ideas -- or at least would like to send out their ideas -- to their members or fellow travelers.
Electronic delivery, assuming it's cheap enough, is a perfect medium for these writers and their readers. The set-up would be simple:
(1) A consumer will run a program on his home computer that will show him a list of available columns. This list would be indexed by author, by topic, and so on.
(2) He can then choose the column he wants; the cost of the subscription will be automatically transferred from his account to the writer's.
(3) Every night, or once every week, a column will be sent to his computer, which will automatically print it.[52]
The writers win under this system, because they can reach readers they never could otherwise: people in areas where no newspaper carries their column, and people who don't subscribe to a newspaper. Moreover, by cutting out the middleman, a columnist may be able to get more per subscriber than he does today. Readers win for the same reasons.
Electronic delivery is also perfect for the public interest organizations. Today, they have to communicate with people by mail, a costly proposition.[53] If the infobahn dramatically cuts the cost, they can increase their impact by writing to their members more often, and by reaching nonmembers, too. If, say, delivering three or four pages costs five cents, the ACLU could offer people a weekly "ACLU Action Letter" for $2.50 a year. Millions of sympathizers might well want to subscribe at that rate, especially if they could do so in minutes from their home computers.
{Technology:} There's every reason to think the cost of transmitting the text will be extremely low. Two information infrastructures of today may be useful analogies: According to a recent estimate, the cost of transmitting 2000 bytes (about a page of uncompressed text) even using today's relatively primitive Internet technology is about 1/6 of a cent;[54] and local phone calls are already free.[55] As newer, faster delivery methods come online, the cost of transmission should fall even below that of the Internet.
The big expense will probably be paper. Paper nowadays costs about 1 cent per page.[56] A daily one-page column might thus cost the consumer as little as 2 cents a day -- one cent for the paper and one for the transmission cost and profit for the sender; this comes to less than $10 a year. The per-item paper costs will go down if the consumer subscribes to more than one item, since the computer can fit several columns or comics onto one page. And even if the transmission costs are somewhat higher, the result might still be quite affordable.
{Consumer Satisfaction:} Consumers should also be satisfied with this format. Print quality should be up to snuff; subscribing will be easy; the columns will arrive automatically on the printer, with no extra keys to punch every morning. Some people might actually prefer a few pages of their favorite stuff to a thick newspaper they must unfold and search through.
Of course, some people may be unwilling to pay even pennies for the columns. They may already be subscribing to a local paper, which is chock full of columns and cartoons and lots of other things. After paying $100 to $200 a year for the subscription,[57] they may not want to pay more.
Nonetheless, the great majority of people do {not} subscribe to newspapers. Many of them might not much like print, but others don't want all the data newspapers provide -- they may find it irrelevant, or they might get it from radio when they drive to work, or they might not have time to read the newspaper every day. They might well prefer paying, say, $25 a year for the few columns and comics they really like.
And even people who already subscribe to newspapers may be willing to pay that much for the columns the newspaper doesn't carry. Twenty-five dollars a year is cheap as entertainment goes, especially when it's entertainment that the reader knows he'll enjoy, and that he can easily subscribe to on a whim. Some people may be deterred by the cost, but lots will not be.
{Speaker Willingness:} Finally, there should be no shortage of willing high-quality speakers. Public interest organizations should be happy to use this medium, and there's every reason to believe they can provide quality (if partisan) commentary to their subscribers.
Existing columnists might be a somewhat different matter. William Safire and Judith Martin (Miss Manners), for instance, already appear in hundreds of newspapers. Their syndication agreements may contain exclusivity clauses ensuring that the columns won't appear in more than one newspaper in each market. These newspapers might be reluctant to let these columns appear electronically in the same markets that the newspapers serve.
Nonetheless, competitive pressures should eventually make more and more of the good columnists electronically available. To begin with, columns could be distributed with geographic restrictions: You can subscribe if you're in Las Vegas but not if you're in Los Angeles. Columnists can thus give their newspapers exclusivity, while still taking advantage of markets in which their columns otherwise wouldn't run.
Newspapers might be hesitant to go along even with this scheme; the electronic distribution system competes with newspapers as a medium, and newspapers may be reluctant to give any edge to their competitor. But recall that every subscriber for a one-cent daily column could be $3 a year in a columnist's pocket. If there are 100,000 extra subscribers the columnist thinks he can reach -- and there are millions of people who read (not just have access to) the highest-profile columnists -- that's a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Persuading columnists to forgo this market could be an expensive proposition for newspapers. Some newspapers might be able to get some columnists to agree not to publish electronically; more might be able to get them to limit distribution to places where the columns are unavailable in print. But not all newspapers would be able or willing to do this in the face of the substantial economic pressure on the columnist to go electronic.
Moreover, good opinion pieces aren't expensive to produce. Not everyone can consistently write informative, readable prose, but neither is the talent remarkably rare. There are probably tens of thousands of people who could do the task. With the electronic medium, each of them will be able to throw his hat in the ring.
If the Safires and the Martins don't do it, others will. Of course, they'll have to find their audience, in competition with thousands of others. But finding this audience electronically may be easier than finding a comparable audience with newspapers; and even if most columnists fail, that'll just be because others will succeed.
{The Survival of Newspaper Columns:} Note that, unlike record stores -- which I think will be largely displaced by the electronic music databases -- opinion columns in newspapers will survive. People will still buy newspapers for news and will expect to get their familiar columnists, too. Moreover, an up-and-coming columnist may still prefer to be accepted by a newspaper, with potential access to millions of readers, instead of trying to find his own following on the electronic services. My claim is only that there will be a thriving electronic opinion column market parallel to the newspapers.
3. Ebooks and Books, Magazines, and Newspapers
Home printers, however, will become less necessary once computer screens are developed that are roughly as readable, portable, and lightweight as books. One possibility, which I call an ebook, would be a display that is the size of a small book, folds open like a book, and has the resolution of a book. The technology isn't there yet, but it seems within reach.[58]
You'd connect the ebook to your main computer and download a book from an electronic database to your ebook. Then you'd read it as you would a normal book, but pushing a button instead of flipping pages. There'd be ways, of course, to do all the normal "features" of a book -- go to a particular page, set a bookmark, highlight some text, write a note to yourself on the margin, and so on.[59] And there'd be other features normal books don't have:
* You could search a book for a particular word or concept much more easily than with traditional indexes.
* Foreign-language books would have built-in dictionaries.
* You could easily carry around hundreds of books; the only limit will be the distribution of the material.[64]
A {Newsweek} could deliver news to people that's genuinely current, rather than two or three days out of date. Newspapers will be able to update their stories as news comes in, and will no longer have to be up to a day behind broadcasters. Again, this will help the consumer as well as the publisher; and once some publishers do this, competitive pressures will push others to follow.
Finally, ebooks will give newspaper publishers access to geographical markets that are now closed to them. Today, only the {New York Times,} the {Wall Street Journal,} {USA Today,} and the {Christian Science Monitor} have national home delivery.[65] Ebooks will open the whole country, and eventually the whole developed world, to all newspaper publishers. While many regional newspapers won't get much benefit from this, would-be national publications -- say, the {Washington Post,} or a liberal equivalent of the {Wall Street Journal}, or the entertainment section of the {L.A. Times} -- certainly would; and so would some foreign newspapers, which have a ready market of expatriates and others who are professionally or personally interested in the foreign country.[66]
{Technology:} The ebook would cost much more than a typical book. The cheapest laptop displays wholesale today for about $1100, with the price supposed to fall shortly to as little as $500 or $700.[67] The price will probably fall further, but it seems likely it will always remain fairly high.
One could easily save that much, though, in lower costs for the actual literary works themselves. Working from a customary 10- 15% royalty,[68] and including a mark-up for editorial services and electronic database costs, books that sell today for $5 to $20 could sell for as little as $1 to $4 each.[69] And, of course, the reader will save the costs of driving to the bookstore, trying to track down a book that isn't on the shelves, and finding that the book he wants is out of print.
Scanning old books into computers is hard, but virtually all new books published today must be put into electronic form in order to be printed. Publishers can easily send all new books to an electronic database, so any infobahn-connected home will be able to access them.
The ebook wouldn't have the feel of a conventional book, even if it has the look. People who like feeling paper rather than plastic under their fingertips may always loathe ebooks, or so I've heard from friends with whom I've discussed this concept.
On the other hand, people might prefer ebooks to bulky, hard- to-unfold, ink-smearing newspapers. And while some people will always appreciate paper books (though probably not all paper books) as objects of art, the main purpose of books is to communicate information. The ebook will, I think, be useful enough that many people raised on paper books will switch to it. But even those who wouldn't read it for themselves would buy it for their children, especially given the possible educational benefits of interactive ebooks. And the children, when they grow up, might not be as nostalgic for paper books as today's adults may be.