Print is Dead

Somehow I missed the UK publication of Robert Levine’s book Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business in August. It’s possible I mentally dismissed it because of the unhelpfully negative title and an overwhelming sense of fatigue with this subject. But then again, August can be a shitty time to get your book published so it’s just as possible that I didn’t hear about it.

In any case, the book has now been published in the U.S. (with the equally sensationalist title Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back) and the author was on WNYC today to discuss it:

Levine, a business journalist and  former executive editor at Billboard Magazine, is as pugnacious as you might expect, but his argument is apparently more nuanced and interesting than one might have supposed from the title of the book alone. The interview is definitely worth a listen. Whether you agree with Levine or not is a different matter.

The interview also led me to two reviews of the UK edition that make for interesting reading. The first by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion (and the new go-to guy for reviewing books on the internet), ran in The Guardian. The second by Tom Chatfield, associate editor at Prospect magazine and author of Fun Inc. a book on the culture of video games, was for The New Statesman. Both reviews place the book in a wider context, and while neither is uncritical of Levine, they do not entirely dismiss his arguments. Here is a sample passage from Chatfield’s review:

Words like “open” and “free” are hard to argue with in principal. What they can mean in practice, however, is the privileging of infrastructure at the expense of allowing creators any control over what they make – let alone the possibility of profit. Google, Levine notes, “has as much interest in free online media as General Motors does in cheap gasoline.” And it has lobbied extremely effectively to help maintain the status quo.

Behind this lies a simple commercial truth: the flat, open structure of the internet has helped a small number of companies make vast amounts of money by controlling navigation and distribution, while hollowing out the capacity of those creating original media content to make any profits at all. “Traditional media companies aren’t in trouble because they’re not giving consumers what they want,” Levine observes. “They’re in trouble because they can’t collect money for it.”

Indeed.

 

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