节选自First Monday 2001年的老文章，全文见http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/。
欢迎翻译：）

Restructuring the Publishing Value Chain and the Publishing Industry

There are a number of structural changes that are taking place in the publishing industry. The 1980s and early 1990s were a troublesome time for those concerned with diversity in publishing. We saw the rise of national bookstore chains and the increased homogeneity of offerings from one bookstore to another in the retail marketplace. In publishing, there seemed to be a trend to blockbuster bestsellers that crowded out a much larger and more diverse range of works. It appears that fewer mid-list or niche books are being published, and those that are published are staying in print for shorter and shorter periods of time. There are lots of reasons for this. In brick-and-mortar-based bookselling, display space is at a premium. Publishers pay inventory taxes on warehoused books that they haven't sold. Large inventories of unsold books are a liability. The problem of inventories was aggravated by changes in tax and accounting practices, instigated by decision in Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue [24].

Network-based bookselling (Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Borders Online, and a host of other players) is putting all publishers on a somewhat more equal footing as far as finding readers. There's an infinite amount of virtual "display space" available, and books can become visible to potential purchasers in new ways through searching or recommender systems [25]. A university press or small publisher can be as accessible as a major commercial publisher, or nearly so, through these Web sites. At least in theory, author self-publishing (the ultimate "small press") becomes more practical as these kinds of sales outlets are combined with electronic delivery (eliminating the up-front investment in producing physical books and arranging for order fulfillment), though there are still a number of barriers to this [26]. In the past few years we have seen the emergence of a large number of digital "vanity presses" to serve authors who don't want to take the final step to full self-publishing but who cannot find traditional publishers or don't want to work with traditional publishers. These self-publishing services often provide the authors with greater control and much more generous royalties than traditional publishers.

The major problem with self-publishing or vanity publishing is still finding readers, particularly when the quality of the offerings through these channels is so variable (and often poor) [27]. Self published or vanity published non fiction books probably have the advantage over other materials like fiction or music if they are to be discovered by searching content or reviews. Returning a work of non-fiction in response to a query about coffee growing in South America is likely to be less subjective and easier to assess than a piece of music that is claimed to "sound like" John Coltrane or to appeal to Coltrane fans. Some self-published books can find at least some audience without the need for expensive advertising campaigns. There are still, of course, questions of authority and quality, but there are ways of at least partially addressing these concerns through reviews and recommender systems. Online bookselling using truly massive inventories of traditionally published works has been a great success with readers, though many of the companies involved are not yet profitable. The weaknesses of this model are the need (and cost and delay) of delivering the physical goods that are purchased, and the limited ability to browse (partially compensated for by the availability of tables of contents, reviews, reader comments, images of covers, sample chapters, and other surrogates). The success of author self-publishing, or digital vanity publishing, seems less clear, with perhaps a very few exceptions.

These trends should at least in theory lead to the publication of a greater diversity of books and a greater visibility of this diversity to the book-buying public - though hard data supporting these claims is still scarce. And as long as these electronic booksellers are delivering physical books, there's still the problem of keeping material in print. Network-based bookselling helped to address the problem of making a wider range of material available to readers; digital books will address the problems of inventory and delivery.

The cost of keeping material "in print" electronically for delivery or print on demand is small (although the tax and accounting implications have yet to be fully resolved, as far as I know), at least until the material must negotiate a format and standards transition, at which point an investment is necessary. Out-of-print material also seems to be coming back into print for electronic delivery through the efforts of tiny niche companies such as Boondock Books, as well as major players like Bell and Howell Learning Systems (formerly UMI) or Netlibrary. If it becomes possible to keep a bigger backlist alive for sale electronically without paying tax on it as inventory and having to treat it as an accounting liability, then the development of a market in these electronic materials will again reshape publishing in complex ways. While it will help publishers to make more works available for the long term, it may create new problems for authors. Authors who got return of copyright for their works when the publisher took them "out of print" will be out of luck in the new digital world of delivery on demand. They can remain in limbo forever, making pennies in royalties from the occasional electronic sale. Because of this, new contracts between authors and publishers are now often framed in terms of a specific length of time, rather than an indefinite period until a work goes out of print, and such terms are a hotly contested area of negotation.

There are also some fascinating social questions about the nature of authorship and audience here as we think more broadly about digital books, as opposed to electronic distribution of print books. For example, what are the reader expectations about updating published work? Is an author ever really "finished" with a book (other than perhaps a novel) in a world of electronic distribution? Recent attempts to translate printed reference works such as the Electronic Encyclopedia Britannica to the network environment are already encountering these issues, particularly reader demand for continuous updating of articles [28]. We are also seeing a series of experiements that create dialog between the author and his or her readers, either following the initial publication of a work in digital form [29] or as a part of a more extended publication "process" [30]. Similar experiments have also been conducted in electronic journal publishing.

A great deal of money is at stake in restructuring distribution channels. For a mass-market printed book, about half of the retail price goes to parties "downstream" from the publisher, that is retailers and wholesalers [31]. There's also the cost of accepting returns, an unusual and costly book industry practice under which a bookstore can return unsold books to the publisher for a refund. Internet-based bookselling and, later, digital book delivery will eliminate this cost. For Internet-based booksellers, there's still a lot of cost in obtaining and delivering the printed book, though the aggregate cost chain from publisher to consumer is reduced. Sales of digital books eliminate most or all of these costs, depending on the marketing model and how many intermediaries remain active in the sales chain [32].

As relationships among publishers, consumers, and retailers change, and sales, shipping, and delivery costs become much smaller with network sales and electronic delivery, the changing economics will mean greater profits to publishers or electronic retailers, larger royalty shares to authors, and even reduced prices to consumers [33]. We can expect to see major struggles around how the newly available dollars are divided, particularly in author-publisher relationships (where some of the major publishing houses are now offering very generous royalty percentages to their authors for digital publications) and with the growing alternatives of self-publishing and a multiplicity of upstart small publishers putting pressure on the large established industry players. There will clearly be a reconsideration of what value publishers add for various kinds of authors, and what authors should be willing to pay for that value. One of the most fascinating questions will be how the level of public recognition that an author enjoys relates to the potential value that a publisher offers. In addition, new claimants are emerging to demand a share of the revenues from the restructured e-book distribution chain. For example, Gemstar, which has made it clear that it wants to control not only reading devices but also the retailer services that offer content to these readers, speaks of collecting 10-20% of the revenue from e-books licensed to Gemstar reading devices.

We should be mindful that e-book readers are not just for books; they are for newspapers and magazines as well, where the daily or weekly printing and distribution of "disposable" paper is a very large cost. If these e-book readers permit newspapers to eliminate paper, printing, and delivery costs for large numbers of subscribers, this will have a big impact on profit margins.

The used book market has always annoyed publishers (and sometimes authors as well), because they don't receive any revenue from these sales due to the first-sale doctrine. For most types of books this isn't enough money to worry about, but there are a few niche markets where resale by book purchasers represents a significant economic impact for publishers, such as textbooks, where perhaps 20% of the sales are in the used market. Publishers do many things today to keep the used textbook market at bay, such as releasing new editions of popular textbooks every few years. Electronic delivery, in conjunction with technological control of content, could wipe out these resale markets overnight and yield significant revenue opportunities [34]. We can expect these types of books to be early targets for transition to digital forms, not only because of the enhancements that the digital medium offers the author for more effective communication, but for economic reasons as well.

Finally, e-books promise another kind of restructuring in the publishing markets. In general, publishers do not know their customers; a complex chain of wholesalers and retailers serve as intermediaries. Retailers accept cash, further contributing to the anonymity of readers. Publishers sell very few books direct to readers in the print world. In a world of e-books, particularly where there may be few cash transactions, publishers may get to know and track the behavior of their consumers for the first time. Certainly network-based retailers will be able to track their customers better because few will be anonymous. We may see more direct purchasing from publishers. Network digital book retailers may actually pass transactions through to publisher servers (along with purchaser identity information), or may simply report this information while supplying the books to readers directly from retailer servers. There may be compelling reasons why one wants to register ownership of an e-book with the publisher [35]. One can even imagine downloading a new e-book and having that e-book provide its publisher with an inventory of the other e-books stored in one's personal library. Another important point to recognize is that digital rights management systems can report actual viewing usage, which is a very different thing than purchase patterns.

The privacy implications here are substantial, particularly if one is skeptical about the confidentiality of the records of transactions with publishers and booksellers in a world where many more such records exist and may even be remarketed or sold as assets [36]. Recently there have also been a number of attempts by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to obtain book purchasing habits, the most notorious perhaps being Ken Starr's pursuit of records of Monica Lewinsky's purchases at Kramerbooks in Washington D.C. There have been others dealing with purchase records for books detailing methods of manufacturing drugs, for example [37]. Libraries have been skeptical of legal protections for a long time, even though library circulation records have been protected under various state laws. Best practices in libraries keep circulation records for books only until borrowed items are returned; most libraries do not maintain a record of books that have been borrowed and returned, and thus cannot make such records available even under subpoena.

Again, the culture of books may be a bit different, and may give rise to stronger commitments by publishers and retailers to protect consumer privacy, and even ultimately to support strong legislation protecting this privacy. All of the same issues apply to music as it comes to be marketed across the network - but people are likely to be far less concerned with the privacy of their listening habits than of their reading habits.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/