Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A Love Affair With the Cell Phone Novel

I was browsing through an old New Yorker and I found a story on the advent and rise of the cell phone novel in Japan, by Dana Goodyear.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear?currentPage=4

The Japanese publishing industry is shrinking (20% in the last 11 years), and the rising success of cellphone novels, the largest readership of which are teenage girls, is changing the business model for publishing houses. I think there are many parallels that can be drawn between this kind of technology and the response of traditional copyright stakeholders to embrace change and profit from it (rather than attempt to quash the mutation). It does raise a lot of questions as to how, though.

For a brief snippet of the article: "Even established publishers have started hiring professionals to write for the market, distributing stories serially (often for a fee) on their own Web sites before bringing them out in print. In 2007, ninety-eight cell-phone novels were published. Miraculously, books have become cool accessories. “The cell-phone novel is an extreme success story of how social networks are used to build a product and launch it,” Yoshida, the technology executive, says. “It’s a group effort. Your fans support you and encourage you in the process of creating work—they help build the work. Then they buy the book to reaffirm their relationship to it in the first place.” "

Something I can't help but think about as we all seem to move, faster and more feverishly, towards free digitial information, is how business models must change to still profit. In essence, technological innovation seems to, at times, out pace the business models and structures that often enabled the innovation in the first place. Increasingly, the owners of websites and blogs count on advertising dollars to sustain the overhead costs of producing information. Without subscription costs, or book purchases, is advertising enough to sustain the publishers? And if it is not, are we moving towards an age where the middle-managers, the clearninghouses, the website hosts, either monopolize the market (like Google or Yahoo) or fail miserably?
I suppose I don't have much of any answer to my question....but I do wonder, and feel fairly certain, that it is unwise to rest the future of profitability in the digitial age on advertising.

It seems that you are either successful as a big fish (Google), or an individual author, with an individual blog, with costs that are low enough to sustain modest advertising revenues. With anything that is given (be it civil rights or free information), expectations shift and the initial freedom that is given may, in most cases, only expand, not be restricted. If we all expect free information, there is little doubt that anyone would support facebook charging a subscription rate, or google charging a "search" rate. Everything seems to be moving in the direction of "free." Why is U.S. copyright law (as it seems to me) protecting a model that is no longer economically viable in the digital age?

And for that matter, how are westlaw and lexis nexis still in business, doing business as usual?

(with furrowed brow),
Lauren Sancken

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