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John Scalzi sides with the ethicist as to whether it is okay to download a digital copy of a book you already own.

But the point to make here is that these days, people are deciding that when they buy a book or a movie or a piece of music, they're buying the content, not the format. As a writer I don't have a philosophical problem with this, since I write content, not format, even if publishers want that content to fit a particular format. And as a consumer, I think there's a certain point at which you get to say "you know what, I've  paid for this already, and I'm done paying any more for it." Both of these are why I say that if you've paid me once for a book I've written and what you've enjoyed, we're good. Pay me again if you like; I won't complain. But once is enough.

Nathan Bransford does not.

It may seem like it’s a trivial distinction to make when the resulting file from scanning yourself vs. pirating a book is potentially almost the same, but that’s where the line between ethical/legal and unethical/illegal is drawn for a reason. In the first version, you’re adding the value yourself through your own effort (just as taking notes in your own margins adds a form of value). By downloading a file illegally you’re misappropriating that added value from the only people (the publisher and author and e-booksellers) who are legally and ethically entitled to profit from it. That’s why we have copyright law. That’s where we’ve chosen to draw the line.

I see a couple of flaws in both arguments. First, if content is what readers are buying, why are audiobooks separate?    Does the aural component add something new? Further, what about used book purchases and subsequent downloads? There is no remission to the author there, yet you still legally own a copy of the book. Bransford argues that the opportunity cost of converting print into digital (v CD into MP3) makes it unethical because creating your own digital file somehow adds value.

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Association of American Publishers’ stats are released for 2009 and sales fell by 1.8%.   Adult hardcovers had a growth of 6.9% ($2.6 billion) but children and YA fell 5% ($1.7 billion).   I see dozens of sales for YA books right now, many for big amounts.   I wonder if these will prove to be a mistake.   Adult trade paperbacks fell 5.2% ($2.2 billion)

Mass market decreased 4% ($1 billion) and book clubs/mail order fell 2% ($588 million).   Ebooks reached $313 million which represents nearly 4% of adult trade sales.   Audiobooks struggled with a drop of 12.9% ($192).

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An intrepid reader at Mobile Read noted that HarperCollins is selling its books for 20% off. Further, the retail price of the books is a dollar less.    But this morning, a notice went up that the site is under maintenance and you can’t buy.   I love the idea of the publishers selling direct at a discount but I can’t help but wonder if this violates some kind of pricing deal with the retailers.   Note to HarperCollins: those prices were right for me. I would buy at those prices.

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A reader sent me i09′s assessment of the how the Google Books Settlement will affect readers.   io9 believes that there will be both a retraction of content (authors refusing to allow Google to display their work) and an expansion (as orphaned works get displayed because the rights’ owner can’t be found).

More importantly, I think we could see a renaissance in contemporary pulp fiction. We can once again have access to weird, unusual stories that are both awesome and not sustainable under publishing’s current blockbuster model. Writers of small and midlist SF books could start making money on their writing again. This is a good thing for authors and readers who love imaginative fiction.

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Publishers’ Marketplace brings up two key issues for this Apple pricing model five of the top six major publishers are trying to cram down our throats.   First is the tax issue (tax link).   Wherever the publisher or retailer has a significant business presence, they have to collect tax.   The publishers and retailers are confused about who has the responsibility to collect and report taxes.   Sounds like it will be a huge headache and one that no one has figured out how to handle. I confess to not understanding the entirety of the issue. Maybe reader DS will help us out?

Second (paid link), iBookstore is allowing all kinds of content into the store via aggregators like Ingram, Smashwords, LibreDigital.   Each one charges a different commission.   Smashwords takes about half of the 30% commission and LibreDigital about 20%.   Ingram won’t say.   The publishers who aren’t doing Agency pricing are having a difficult time enforcing the hybrid scheme.   For example, Sourcebooks has priced some books at the iBooks store at $6.99 and because it doesn’t have an agency agreement with other retailers like BN or Amazon, those two are discounting.   For authors who want to skip the aggregators, you can go directly with Tunecore who will submit your epub to iBooks for a flat fee, no subsequent royalty share.

Right now, though, the iBook store sucks so hard that unless a reader knows exactly what to look for, its fairly useless.   One person (Liza Daly of Threepress and Ibis Reader) called it an airport bookstore and it is such an apt description.

Yesterday I looked and there were no April releases in the romance section which only displays two subcategories: Contemporary and Historical and only about 27 titles in each category.

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Penguin has signed a co branding deal with a major Indian publisher, Shobhaa De. Unfortunately, the books will “comprise of celebrity memoirs, guides and biographies -’ with a focus on lifestyle, business, cinema and commercial fiction.”

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Karen Scott highlighted an interview with two Mills & Boon Authors. Penny Jordan has sold 85 million copies her books worldwide and has never spotted a reader with one of them.

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Related posts:

1. Thursday Midday Links: Apple’s iBookstore Pricing Is $9.99 too
2. Thursday Midday Links: Defamation Accusations Strike Again
3. Thursday Midday Links: More on Amazon and Macmillan

I suggested a warning and opportunity to cure and Cleland liked that idea. He said that they have used it in the past in the health product field except they are called advisory letters.

I asked about the issue of the fines. Cleland stated that this is something the AP took out of context. The FTC has no ability to levy fines. A charge must be made and taken to an administrative law judge and a cease and desist is requested and provided if the FTC fulfills its burden. If the C&D is ignored, then a civil penalty can be requested for up to $11,000.00. The full explanation of enforcement and penalties for all FTC violations can be read here.

No case would be brought in federal court unless it involved a very serious fraud else the FTC would likely be frowned upon by the court for wasting judicial time.

We discussed the issue of Twitter and whether each and every positive statement about a book that had been received for review would need to carry a disclaimer. Cleland was of the opinion that it would however we did discuss the issue of the product itself. In many other industries, the review product is nearly always returned and not kept by the reviewer. In the book industry, it is common for all reviewers, regardless of whether they review for mainstream publications or whether they review for a personal blog, to keep the books that are reviewed. I also brought up the issue of e-arcs and how any blogger could prove that the product had been deleted or kept.

I’m fairly certain that Cleland is not familiar with the book industry or the book blogging industry. He certainly was open to hearing more from us. I plan to continue to discuss this issue with him.

Related posts:

1. In re: the Moderation of Posts and the Endorsement of Comments
2. The FTC and the Unreasonable Case of Disclosure
3. TV Guide to feature Nora Roberts

With all the discussion lately about the rights and wrongs of online speech and conduct, I recently discovered a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, appropriately titled “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” (someone posted it in reference to the ginormous Brockmann brouhaha).   Shirky’s insightful analysis of online communities tracks what he (borrowing partly from psychologist W.R. Bion) sees as a consistent pattern of group development and dissolution:   a group forms and solidifies around a common purpose and the establishment of external enemies around which the group rallies.   However, over time, the very thing that initially formed and grew the group starts to work against it, especially if the group does not have a constitution that establishes a shared set of rules:

So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it’s being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert’s Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we’re going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

Constitutions are especially important in free speech environments, Shirky argues, because groups inevitably tend to revolt against themselves (isn’t this an ingrained political truth by now, too?), and the more freedom people have, the more potential chaos and rebellion.

I am not certain I agree with Shirky’s insistence on formal community constitutions, but I do think he’s right that groups can easily dissolve on the very foundations that built them, especially if they do not have something important or compelling enough to redirect the more destructive patterns of group behavior.     I hadn’t thought a lot past this point until last week’s excellent discussion on internet anonymity, and more particularly after Jessica’s thoughtful question about the difference between Will Shetterly’s “outing” of a fellow blogger and the Maryland court’s ruling to protect online anonymity:

But isn’t this exactly what the justices did in the decision Jane discussed? Extend anonymity to online individuals on the same basis it is protected for physically embodied individuals?

I knew instinctively that the answer was “no,” that the Maryland court and Will Shetterly’s positions were not identical.   But it took a while for me to discern that while both were focused on rules and on rule-making (and breaking), Shetterly’s argument was essentially ethical and the court’s was, obviously, legal.

And the difference is as important, even though it’s hard to distinguish law and ethics sometimes, because we tend to compress them so often in our discussions of online speech and conduct.   Take the Shetterly incident, for example.   When Will Shetterly got angry at a fellow blogger, he posted her full legal name online as part of his response to her, even though she blogged and participated online under a pseudonym.   He later defended himself by pointing out that her legal name was already attached to her online LiveJournal account, and therefore he wasn’t “outing” her as people charged, ultimately writing a post on Internet anonymity in which he argued that

In the world Behind The Keyboard, nicknames are connected to faces or voices or mailing addresses-they’re ultimately legally verifiable, though you may need detectives if someone you only know by a nickname shafts you.

But in Life Online? A pseudonym is just a pseudonym, not a nickname. Log out of gmail, make a new account, and you’re a new person, walking free from all the shit you’ve made.

The post seems to turn on this whole notion of having a name that is “legally verifiable” as a way to be accountable online and in real life for what you say and do.   Which, besides providing a convenient rationale for Shetterly’s own actions, also tries to tie the notion of anonymous speech online to legal responsibility.

In some cases – defamation, for example – that tie is explicit.   Although even then, an accusation of defamation does not prove defamation, which was the whole point of the Maryland decision Jane discussed; in that case, the court held that someone could not force an online outlet to release someone’s “legally verifiable” identity based on an accusation of defamation.   Legally speaking, people are entitled to a certain protection of anonymity, ironically, for the same reason Shetterly ultimately changed his mind and tried to wipe clean all references he made to the opposing blogger’s legal identity:   he was publicly shamed into doing it by the online community.   In and of itself, public shaming is not unlawful; however, there are things that flow from the loss of anonymity that can be, like harassment, stalking, defamation, etc.

And at some point speech can be chilled in an environment that does not appear to welcome diverse opinions.   DA gets charged with this sometimes, and I can certainly see how some of these conversations would seem intimidating and not particularly diverse to people whose views do not mesh with whatever majority emerges at any particular point.   There are times I wish there was more dissent in our threads, that we could have more extended debate, with people on different sides of an issue arguing strongly and passionately – and fairly — for their different positions.   The problem is that no one can be guaranteed that her view won’t be challenged, and not everyone likes to argue as much as I, uh, as some of us do.

In any case, most of the issues we have with online speech and conduct are not legal in nature but rather ethical – that is, they are not covered by legal principles but rather by codes of conduct that emerge from and are tacitly or explicitly agreed upon by the members of any identifiable community. Here’s the thing about the law:   it’s a narrow, artificial, and sometimes bizarre paradigm.   There are many wrongs and hurts people endure every day that have absolutely no legal remedy.   Just because someone is an a-hole toward you does not make them legally liable for your offense, even though every one of your friends, family, and casual acquaintance and commenters think they’re out of line.

And based on Shirky’s argument, I would argue that we should not underestimate the importance or urgency of paying more conscious attention to shared ethical codes.   Because as things stand now, when people get pissed, they sometimes invoke some type of legally-inflected threat or language, which can easily have the effect of inflaming or chilling conversation.   And the vast majority of the time, there is no legal issue at stake, and the ethical issues get quickly reduced to mutual charges of what basically boils down to ‘you’re a poopy head and you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Ideally, we rely on people, especially grown-ups, to regulate and moderate their own behavior, a basic notion of some ubiquitous social contract informing expectations for online behavior.   So even if Will Shetterly did not do a legal wrong in publicly posting information that is publicly available, as one of his commenters explained,

. . . you were angry enough so that you would have deliberately revealed her private information if it had actually been private in the first place. Which is, from their viewpoint, basically the same thing. It’s the principle that matters. Not the petty details. Heh.

In other words, it’s not the fact that the information was already public that matters; it’s the fact that Shetterly was mad enough not to care, because his intention was to call this person out and take away something he thought she did not deserve: her relative anonymity, as fragile as it may have been.   That Shetterly wants to invoke pseudo-legal language to “explain” his reasons behind what he did does not make that language applicable.   In fact, if you think about his argument that it’s easier to find out people’s legal identity in real life, it’s completely belied by the ease with which he got a hold of and published the identity of the blogger whom he opposed.

More generally, though, what I find most objectionable about Shetterly’s actions is that because he has decided not to claim a certain right (the right to speak anonymously), he decided it was okay to deny that right to someone else.   In the same way he had a right to make the choice for himself, so should the other blogger.   If Shetterly did not like the other blogger’s choice, he does not have to interact with and/or read her.   But to take away a right he also had strikes me as Shetterly exercising his own rights twice simply because he could, or because he didn’t think through the implications of his actions, or because he was pissed.

I think what Shetterly did was ill-considered, and I think it’s an important ethical issue because it does not just impact the individuals involved; it sets a community standard and identifies a boundary across which certain speech and behavior are not okay for the ongoing welfare of the community.   Some communities will thrive on wider boundaries, some on more narrow ones.   Some communities will prefer a broad tolerance for speech but a narrower approval of behavior.   It will depend on the purpose, make-up, and structure of the community, and on the contexts in which various speech and behavior occur.

Two fundamental questions are what ethical rules should apply, and how should they be applied?   This is the problem with ethics:   compared to how people perceive the law, ethics can seem soft and slippery.   I would argue that in this sense they’re not much different from the law, but that’s an unnecessary tangent.   More importantly, I would argue that it’s the softness, the difficulty in discerning and applying ethical rules, that makes them so valuable.   Because they require thoughtful generation and application.   They require reflection, comparison, context, conversation.   They require community participation.   In fact, I would argue that it’s not the rules, per se, that are of utmost importance; rather, I would argue that it’s the process of working toward the rules that counts, because it’s that process that engages the community as a community.   And that, consequently, the rules will always likely be a work in progress, as long as the process of the work is taking place.

Another key, in my opinion, is to recognize that many of our recognized communities will have members that also belong simultaneously to other communities.   And further, that people who are members of the same community may have different roles in that community.     I believe that much confusion and conflict emerges from the elision of differences inherent to distinct roles.   For example, authors and readers occupy different roles.   Authors profit economically from their writing, and the name under which they write is identified with and connected to that economic profit.   Consequently, they may have a narrower margin for speaking out under that name.   Readers, by contrast, may have more freedom in speaking out, but they also do not gain an economic benefit from doing so.   The roles are different.   Which means that the standards of conduct are going to be somewhat different.

That does not necessarily mean, as some believe, that readers are/should be held to a lower standard of conduct; it simply means that they are/should be held to a different standard, but one, hopefully, that is at the same level of ethical conduct, taking account of the different roles.   The trick, of course, is identifying these different roles and expectations and applying appropriate standards of conduct.

The issue gets a little more complicated, I believe, when it comes to strongly connected or overlapping communities like readers and bloggers, where many readers are themselves bloggers.   The more overlap you have, the more confusing it can get, because it becomes more difficult to distinguish the elements that go into determining different standards of conduct.   Should the blogger be held to a higher standard than the reader, and if so, what and why?   And what about when authors are speaking out as readers?   If they do so under their author name, does that automatically connect their words to the economic consequences of their work?

If you’ve been following the larger RaceFail ’09 controversy, you know that it’s been going on since January.   I do not believe that the conversation will ever resolve, in part because there are too many individuals with valid, competing interests who have a stake in the debate.   But is that such a bad thing?   We are, perhaps, too hungry for resolution and unreasonably intolerant of the natural flux of dynamic organic systems.   In an ideal world, there might be a perfect balance of priorities and expectations, but in the “real life” of the Internet, a fixed community is a comments closed, defunct community.

Still, if you could construct your ideal community online, what would it look like?   Would there be explicit rules and what would its foundation be?   Free speech or not?   What’s the most important rule you would want to see implemented and why?

No related posts.

Do you remember the movie "Election," with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick? In the first scene Mr. McAllister asks his high school class about the difference between ethics and morals. Ironically, of course, the one student who eagerly attempts to answer the question is also the one who proceeds to make mincemeat of both ethics and morals during the course of the movie, her ambition a veritable engine for her imagination and willingness to do almost anything to secure her class presidency. Tracy Flick sees the future open before her, dependent on winning that race, completely indignant when someone dares run against her, amazingly unself-conscious about the levels to which she’ll "stoop to conquer.’

In fact, Tracy continues to see herself as a good person, earnestly praying before bedtime for her "Dear Lord Jesus" to "go that one last mile and make sure to put me in office where I belong so that I may carry out your will on earth as it is in heaven. Amen." In this Tracy exemplifies the difference between morals and ethics: morals relate to one’s personal value system, while ethics relate to one’s conduct within a community. Ethics concern the responsibilities people within a community have toward one another and toward a larger sense of "good living" or "correct conduct," while morals are more commonly associated with beliefs about what is right or wrong in a particular society. Ethics are particularly important in professional communities where there are certain standards that each member is expected to meet, especially when someone’s life or livelihood is one the line (doctors and lawyers, for example, even teachers).

It’s easy, of course, to mix these up, and people often do. In fact, I think we see the confusion over ethics and morals every time one of these author-conduct incidents rolls out. As soon as an author is called out over some particular conduct – plagiarism, gaming reviews, re-shelving books, whatever – a lot of backlash erupts around whether or not the author is being attacked. Which leads to a lot of mashing up about whether or not the bloggers who cover these stories are, for lack of a better description, mean girls who just like to stir shit up.

Since we’ve talked a lot about the difference between the author as a person and the author’s work and online conduct, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about blogger conduct, and more specifically about whether bloggers need a code of ethics similar to the one we seem to assume of authors. Do we need some community standards of reporting and reviewing, even though we’re largely amateurs in this online arena and not professionals earning a living?

I don’t have an absolute answer to this question, but before I offer my view and open it up for discussion, I want to put a few things on the table to chew over:

First, do bloggers constitute a community separate and apart from the online community more generally? Since many different types of people blog, is there a special category for blogs like Dear Author, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Teach Me Tonight, All About Romance After Hours, and the like, that sets them apart? Is it the particular activity that defines the blog community or the role of the bloggers?

If bloggers are a community unto themselves, to what standards should we be held? Should we meet more general journalistic standards or editorial standards? Does it make a difference if we attempt impartiality in our reportage and commenting, or should we be required to provide honest opinions? Should we be required to believe everything we assert? Cyberjournalist.net created a proposed Bloggers’ Code of Ethics that emphasizes three main categories: Be Honest and Fair; Minimize Harm; and Be Accountable. Some of what they focus on – "never plagiarize," for example – is relevant to anyone writing publicly, but other things – "show good taste" and avoid "pandering to lurid curiosity" is obviously a HUGE matter of judgment, not to mention valuation of a blog’s worth. Do editorialists abide by these ethics? Do journalists, for that matter?

In the specific arena of Romance-related blogging, are reviewers a special sub-community within online blogging, and should there be a special code of conduct for reviewing, regardless of the general character of the blog? Author David Louis Edelman recently posted a list of things he wants from reviews, namely that they be honest, insightful, opinionated, detailed, original accurate, independent, not anonymous, and free of spoilers. Would the institution of something like this as a reviewer standard benefit reviews, which are, by nature, individual opinions? Why, for example, should reviewers always steer clear of spoilers if a spoiler is necessary in elucidating one of the detailed points Edelman wants in reviews? And how much detail is enough in a review? Under his standards, neither Romantic Times nor Publishers Weekly would qualify, I’m afraid, and yet they continue to serve as standard benchmarks for authors.

Should bloggers who make money blogging be held to a different standard? We often talk about how authors are professionals, how they are writing for money, and as such should accept a certain amount of straightjacketing in their online conduct. Should so-called professional bloggers have similar "professional expectations?" And what about amateur bloggers whose only capital is their reputation as bloggers, who are not making money, but who may gain a certain readership based on a positive reputation, whatever that may be based on (humor, reviews, honest dialogue, whatever).

As a blog reader – whether you are author, reader, fellow blogger, whatever – do you feel that there should be minimum ethical standards of conduct to which blogs should be held? What do you expect from the blogs you frequent, and do you give more validity to blogs that proclaim some ethical standard of their own, or are you simply looking for entertainment, ethical standards be damned?

My own view – not fully considered and open to reconsideration — is that the role of blogs is to provoke discussion, and that even more than authors, bloggers are individual voices that are not part of a professional group. So while anyone who writes has to be conscious of plagiarism and copyright concerns, in terms of some collective code of behavior bloggers are merely public citizens (and I use this in the most general way, not to imply national identity), and should be held to the same basic standards of any member of society. One important caveat, though: if someone is blogging in their capacity as a professional, then they may be held to different standards, depending on their professional context and their content

Most bloggers seem to be hobbyists, though, and not inclined toward professionalization in regard to blogging. One blogger or a thousand can all talk simultaneously without any of us being in contact or affiliation, in the same way that a thousand different conversations can proceed at once without any concept of them being linked. At a basic level, blog = voice(s), regardless of the actual people behind the blog. Authors, on the other hand, do not distill down to that same level. Book = voice, but an author functions on multiple levels, as individual, as professional, as contractor with a publisher, etc. I believe, therefore, that authors have responsibilities to one another that bloggers don’t. For example, if an author engages in reshelving books, s/he is violating the policies of bookstores and publishers, as well as engaging in an unfair practice relative to other authors. Whereas bloggers, especially not-for-profit bloggers, don’t have that same kind of mutual professional reliance because our role as a blogger is synonymous with the blog itself. Blogs are more like books, in my opinion, and do we hold books to a professional code of ethics? Do we accuse them of being mean and of lying?

Essentially, I believe that blogs function as sites of public discourse, and that their popularity, value, and reliability will be determined on the basis of individual blog (and the persona of the blogger) relative to the blog’s audience. And despite the belief that bloggers can and do basically say anything they want without thought, I actually think there is a dearth of really good, really challenging, really fearless public conversation online, and that it sometimes takes a very provocative, even polarizing and sensationalistic voice to get some of these discussions going.

Related posts:

1. FEC Says Bloggers Have Same Rights As Media
2. NBCC Posts Its Ethics in Reviewing Survey
3. Ethics in Blogging: Taking the Wild Out of the Wild West?

Apparently Affaire de Coeur has a policy of providing positive reviews and articles to publishers based upon the amount of page space that is purchased. Additionally, and possibly more damning (I know! what could be more damning) is that according to Goldberg:

I’ve just discovered that their advertising director, Bonny Kirby, co-owns the disgraced Light Sword Publishing company with Linda Daly (a court recently fined Kirby and Daly thousands of dollars for defrauding authors). This explains why Light Sword titles consistently got positive reviews from Affaire De Coeur and why Daly was the subject of a cover story. No reputable magazine would review books published by their advertising director-or feature her partners on the cover. It’s a sleazy, unethical conflict-of-interest.

I’ve not ever read/purchased/seen an Affaire de Coeur magazine but I have seen them quoted multiple times in books and have been in business for over 26 years. It seems that the paid review is becoming more and more commonplace. I know that even Kirkus offers a pay review service.

Kirkus Discoveries, rolling out later this year, will allow self-published authors, long ignored by the trade journals, to buy a Kirkus review for $350.

The second new product is Kirkus Reports, set to appear early next month. It highlights titles that the editors feel are the best lifestyle books (health, parenting, personal finance). But to be included in this free e-mail newsletter for magazine and newspaper journalists, publishers must pay $95 per title.

It’s one thing, of course, to have advertising and still another to accept payment for the review itself or inclusion in a magazine or newsletter. What’s ethical?

Updated on September 2008.   I’m closing the comments.

Related posts:

1. ALERT: Major Plagiarism of Reviews Occurring on eBay Seller Site
2. Why Romantic Times Reviews Are Not Credible
3. Ishmael Beah’s Memoir Facing Frey-like Scrutiny