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Not long ago, I interviewed Richard Nash, the man who once headed up Soft Skull Press and to whom many are looking to figure out where the publishing industry will land.  The interview was quite long and therefore only a portion of it went on Jewcy, but the post was so well received that a few people requested that I post the full interview.

I think this interview touches on some very important issues, not just concerning the book business but the media business and culture at large.  Pardon any remaining copyediting errors, but my rods and cones can only handle so much. Thanks for visiting this blog, and please enjoy.

Tell me about your background, where you grew up and what it was like.

Well, I’m from Ireland.  My father’s Irish and my mother’s American. I was born in rural southwest Ireland.  My father’s family business goes back to my great, great, great grandmother.  She invented something that actually connects back to the present funny enough, called Red Lemonade, Nash’s Red Lemonade.  It’s not the American kind of lemonade.  It’s sort of a tangier, sort like 7 Up, a tangy, sugary lemon lime drink.  There were a couple of imitators in Ireland, and in Scotland they had Brown Lemonade.  The business was named after her husband and for a couple of generations, the Richard Nash’s were alcoholics and their wives ran the business.  But eventually the Richard Nash’s got it together for at least a couple generations, my dad and his dad.

As a teenager I assumed that I would be taking over the family business, but then a couple things happened, one of which is that I ended up going to college in the states, at Harvard.  My parents had gone to college in the states, and they liked the American liberal arts system and so they said if I got into somewhere good, I could go.  So I came here and started to see a little bit more of what was possible out there in the world.

I took a couple of different trajectories with fairly significant pivots.  First it became clear that I wasn’t going to go back to Ireland to take over the family business, I thought I was going to become a political scientist.   Then I fell in love with doing theater and did theater in college, extra-circularly, you couldn’t really do a theatre degree at all, there were very few classes at Harvard.

I feel like I’ve never heard of a Harvard theatre major.

Yes, it’s not like Yale in that regard.  So I came to New York, like any self-respecting theater director would, and I was very interested in the avant-garde stuff and I did that for an extended period of time, starting in the 90’s.  I started collaborating occasionally with a playwright named Sander Hicks, who addition to being a playwright was the founder of Soft Skull.  So, I sort of fell in with him and around 2000, 2001, things got rather hairy at Soft Skull, and for a variety of those circumstances, Sander took a leave that was a somewhat sudden.  There were basically three people working there with an average age of 22.  I was 31, I was a grown up!  So, I offered to help out, thinking I would do so for about six months, and I just got addicted.

I like to say that I came into publishing without any illusions.  Publishing in the popular imagination involves lots of reading, maybe some gin and tonics and lots of highbrow discussion in mid town office buildings.  What it was for me, was persuading printers to whom we owed 40,000 dollars that, not only were they not going to get their 40,000 dollars right away, they were going to have to print more books for us on credit so that they stood any chance of getting there 40,000 dollars back.  And I’m kind of non-confrontational, so this was very difficult.  But, also, if one of my pathologies is being non-confrontational, then another of my pathologies is taking on the hardest possible project, in order to prove my self-worth.  So, Soft Skull was like crack in those regards! But the other thing is that it was real.  It made a difference.  It made an impact out there in the world!  I was doing plays and I looked out in the audience, and I saw my lighting designers boyfriend, my set designers ex girlfriend and three actors who wanted to be in the play, but didn’t get picked … You know there was no sense that you were reaching an audience that you couldn’t reach by picking up the phone and calling them.  Where as with Soft Skull, the people who were reading these books, I had no idea who they were.  That was kind of thrilling.  Of course, the reality was that to get people to read books, you had to somehow or another connect with them for it be meaningful for them, and I was lucky in some respects to have this poisoned chalice, because there was nothing I could take for granted.  So many people who come into publishing, walk into a pre-existing machine, a machine that basically our society has spent 600 years building.  I had to sort of figure it out knowing nothing.  I didn’t know what a galley was!  And I was running the damn company!  It took me a couple of months to figure out that we were supposed to acquire books to publish, that they weren’t going like magically appear.  I was tremendously naïve but that was such a blessing because it meant I had to learn everything from first principle and that really helped me prioritize.  It helped me insure that I learn every aspect of the business and why things were the way they were.  So as a result I was able to start saying to my colleagues as early as 2005, “We’re in the writer reader connection business,” which I still get to say.  It’s probably lost a lot of its radical-ness but that was not what people were saying in 2005.  Publicists did what publicists did and marketers did what marketers did and editors did what editors did.  Often what the marketers did was sort of…everyone held their noses. 

There were ups and downs.  I maybe went three months the most, worrying where the money was going to come from to make payroll at the end of the month.  There were very good years where that happened maybe only three times and very bad years when it happened 10 out of 12 times.  We were sort of on an upward trajectory, but there were real peaks and troughs on that trajectory.  Then in 2006 our distributor, Publishers West, went bankrupt. And that was that, we weren’t going to be able to dance our way out of that.  So we had to find a white knight.  We were acquired by a guy named Charlie Winton who bought a couple of publishing businesses.  He was actually the guy that founded Publisher’s Group West and he had sold that to a company that subsequently went bankrupt and he had another publishing business, which he’d just sold. He was starting a new one, and so we became a component of that new business and I’ve kind of given you a whole bunch of story now, so ill let you get back to your questions.

Regarding Soft Skull, I like to write about things that I understand as being linked to DIY or punk ethics in one way or another, apart from the obvious.    I found my way to Soft Skull because I understood Soft Skull (along with Akashic) to be the DIY/Punk publishing house.  I understood Sander Hicks and Johnny Temple to be the icons of punk publishing, and essentially that, if this was your culture, these were the books you needed to find.

To me, that also meant a certain freedom of communication, that if I wanted to write Soft Skull a letter, I would probably hear back, or If I wanted to write one of the authors, there was a good chance they’d respond.  There wasn’t that unspoken barrier that exists in the mainstream reader/writer world.

Exactly!  Exactly!  I mean, it was punk in the American sense, not the more kind of nihilistic British sense, but that intimate, personal, naked, exposed, DIY sense.  The sense that the way you stuck it to the man was not by flinging a bottle at him, but by making your own damn house, making your own damn world.  I think that was critical thing about Soft Skull.  I think that you just really identified what it meant in practice.  What it meant in its DNA… Soft Skull was amongst the first publishers that benefited from what I like to call “publishing 2.0” From the desktop publishing revolution…

Pagemaker?

Yes!  Exactly.  Pagemaker + Kinkos.  Pagemaker on it’s own required a two and half thousand dollar computer and either the capacity to hack a copy or five hundred dollars, so that was three grand.  But at Kinko’s it was six bucks an hour.  So, Sander worked the graveyard shift at Kinko’s and he had a novel that no one wanted to publish, so he and his girlfriend laid it out on the Kinkos computer at night. 

It’s interesting, because Kinko’s in a sense, became a symbol of the DIY punk scene in the early 90’s.  Anyone that was involved with a scene spent a fair amount of time at Kinko’s, either making zines, or flyers, or inserts.

Exactly!  I think that, because the web began in 93, it obscured to some degree how significant those years were.  It drew attention away from the fact that the moment when creating your stuff became possible wasn’t about the web, it was about the moment when you didn’t need capital to create, and when something begins in that spirit, I think there’s going to be fewer airs and graces.  Now, I’m not saying the web wasn’t important, because one of the examples I like to give about Soft Skull and about publishers like Soft Skull is that our photo’s and bios were on the website. 

You just said, you could write us and we would write you back.  You often knew what our names were and what we looked like.  If I was at a reading, which I often was, you could recognize me, and you could say, “thanks for publishing that book, I really loved it,” or “I hated that cover” or “I sent you a manuscript three months ago, why haven’t you read it?”  And even if you didn’t bother to do any of those things, the fact that you knew you could was powerful.

Let me pose this question to you then.  I’m a writer in the process of trying to a get a novel published.  A big part of what I’ve done, first just in the process of writing the book, is I’ve tried to write other novelists I look up to, for advice, for inspiration, etc. 

Now, in trying to get the book published, I’m doing the same thing, just asking for different advice and sometimes help. I often think that having been so ingrained in that world of DIY and punk, I’ve got broken barometer for when it is or isn’t appropriate to open the lines of communication.  Other times, I think it’s been helpful.  Either way, navigating the etiquette of the book business has been especially difficult.  I’d imagine your perspective on this is quite unique.

What I learned at Soft Skull was that we were stewards of the community.  That there was a Soft Skull community as it were.  That there was a bunch of people out there that could tag themselves, amongst other tags, with the phrase “Soft Skull” and we existed to serve them.  They were writers and readers which very often one and the same thing.

A friend of mine, Peggy Nelson, recently pointed out, writers and readers are behaviors, not different people.  When we would get a submission, it would have a cover letter and the cover letter would describe the books we’d published that the person had read.  I’m proud of a lot what we did, and I’m grateful that you perceived the important things of what we did because you just described them, but they weren’t nearly enough.  I mean, they were enough maybe at the time but they’re not nearly enough now. 

What we did was this: we had one or two interns look at them [manuscripts] and if they both liked it, me or someone else would somehow try to find the time to read them, which as the years went by, it got harder and harder to even do that.  So typically they were just rejected and this person who’d bought five of our books and had spent three years of their life writing this manuscript basically had it sent back to them with a dagger through its heart, and we were forgiven.  To some degree I think we deserved forgiveness but to some degree, I don’t think we did.  Or certainly we are no longer as entitled to that forgiveness as we once might have been.

When digital publishing first happened, by that I mean digital distribution and consumption, it permitted sort of production, that was the digital production revolution and to some degree you could call the web the digital promotion revolution.  So it allowed you to create a book and then the next bit, printing the book was analogue, distributing the book was analogue, buying the book was mostly analogue, getting people interested in the book was starting to become digital.  So, the middle bit, the printing distribution and retail, when that was first started to look like it was becoming digital that was 1999, 2000, 2001, I was first starting to get involved with Soft Skull.  At that point, I was like, “Holy shit, this could change everything. Because the corporate publishers are able to get book printed much more cheaply than us, but a PDF costs them the same as it costs us. This could be amazing.”  Now that was sort of true.  Now, it’s certainly true because of e-pub files and Kindles and that sort of thing, there is actually demand for this stuff.  But, I was so used to thinking of myself at the bottom of the ladder, that I didn’t’ really realize that the ladder extended way beyond me in the other direction, to all the writers in the world that me and the rest of us were saying no to, these tools could work just as well for them as they could work for us.  Those tools, I think, only have so much utility.  You can now build it, but will they come?  So, a lot more people are building stuff. 

It’s not just because of technology, our whole society has become relatively less, sexist racist, classist, and has so dramatically opened access to third level education and given far more people the social intellectual and cultural capital, required to construct a long form narrative, that it’s increased the possibility for the number of books to be created.  Then there’s technology unrelated directly to books, but the technology that allows people to record songs and video, that allows them to blog. That, I think, has increased people’s sense of possibility, that “I too may express myself, I need not be a passive consumer.”  All those have resulted in people feeling like they can and should be able to write and reach some kind of an audience.

Then you start bumping up against, “What does the audience want, and how big is the audience in these individual cases?”  My feeling when I look at poetry, is a lot of the assumptions about quality and how quality is going to be arbitrated, about how many copies you need to sell in order for something to be good, I think poetry challenges those. 

In my mind, it’s a hell of a lot worse to see 500,000 copies of something being printed and 200,000 copies of it being returned unsold.  The notion right now that there’s 50,000 books for which the audience might only be somewhere between 400 and 1,000 is not waste, it’s people getting to express themselves and being able to connect with other people.

I’m circling around the answer to your question.  What I’m trying to do is get at a sense that we’re talking about just a network of people.  We’ve become so accustomed to thinking about publishing as this straight line that begins the writer passed through the agent, then the publisher, then the bookseller, then the reader with a little bit of media pixie dust sprinkled on the various parts of that equation, but the process of writers and reader connecting is not a straight line.  It’s a whole sort of miasma of opinion and influence.  I think its just a great big process of participation of helping your community thrive by participating in it, giving in, getting back, over and over again and the community sort of recognizing when there’s freeriders, people trying to get something out of it without putting something back in.  Whether that person is a beginner who’s just trying to get the community to buy his book or whether that person is someone who’s now very established in the community but is not doing those mentorship things that is needed in order to keep the community alive and thriving and I think that’s how we have to think of the world now.  So, when I think of advice to writers, it’s to say, “This is the world that you’re facing, so give it a lot of your effort and at the same time, don’t be afraid to ask it for stuff, because if you give it a lot of your effort, you’re entitled to it responding.”  Now, not everyone is always going to hear what they want to hear in that situation but that’s life, right?  Not unlike one’s love life, right?

I’m not sure if this is a common question, but it’s one I’ve never actually heard anyone ask.  In any given reader/writer, community, or even in the world at large, do you ever wonder of how many readers would be out there, if you took out all those who aspired to one day be writers? 

I used to, but I don’t anymore.  Or, to the extent that I do, I have the opposite approach to it.  I’ll begin though, to try and answer your question by referring to a conversation I had two weeks ago with Lynne Tillman, who’s going to be the first Red Lemonade Author, and a friend of hers, the artist Jim Hodges.  Lynne was observing that it can often be hard to get students to read.  They just want to write.  Now, my reaction to that was to say, “Young people are impatient.” I said, “Here’s the thing, the writers that are great will be the writers who’ve read.”  From a commercial standpoint, what I’d like to do is get to a situation where we don’t make the equation about, the only way for writers to make money is for lots of people to read there books, because reading a book is but one way for writers and readers to connect with one another. Because many readers are reading in order to become better writers.  Reading, properly done, is an awfully creative act.

It always bothers me when people say “We need to make books more interactive.”  They are fucking interactive!  They’re just as interactive as video games in many respects. Video games give you choices as far as plots, what door to go through.  Novels let you choose what color the door is.  So, text-only long-form narrative is perfectly, adequately interactive.  All art forms have rules.  In haiku you have rules that exist to provoke creativity.  If everything is possible it’s almost impossible to be creative, so video games have their rules, they have a syntax behind them, and there’s rules that make a novel a novel.  A writer reads in order to explore that, read and write, study and practice.  The writers who get attention will be the writers who’ve read and continue to read. When the national endowment for the arts put out a study in 2002 called “Reading At Risk” one of the things that was noted was that fourteen million Americans engaged in creative writing in the last year, in a context that indicated that reading is declining.  Now we have no evidence that those people were writing in lieu of reading, but lets assume they were.  I don’t think you can build a culture around telling people to stop creating.  I certainly don’t think you can build a business model around telling people that they have to change their behaviors.  So, what I want to do is build a business model that accepts that writers want to create and looks to find many different ways than just to say, “how are we going to pay for this ecosystem of reading and writing?”  We are not going to pay for it simply by selecting the output of 25,000 writers a year and getting the other 50 million people to read them.  That’s not how it’s going to work, now how exactly it will work?   I think various people are laying various bets.  My bet is that we need to find a way to manage the reading/writing metropolis rather than manage some kind of writing/reading supply chain.

I think that first question you asked me, “What’s the etiquette?” I think that’s a powerful question and I think I will be quoting you in the future.  Because I think that’s going to be one of the most interesting core five or ten questions that we’re going to have to ask ourselves.  It goes back in a sense to before the Industrial Revolution, it goes back to perhaps even pre-Guttenberg, it was a much smaller world, and the literary world was smaller still.  They had tribes, some big some small, that told one another stories, and some were better than others so they spent more time telling stories but everyone participated in some way shape or form and effectively probably the king paid for it or the lord paid for it.  I think we just need to find a democratic version of that.  When I say that, people are like, “Oh Richard, this is probably going to be like the American Idol of writing.”  I say that we don’t run our society the way we run American idol.   American Idol is referendum style democracy.  Most of our democracy is representative democracy.  You pick a person every four years and that person is supposed to be paying attention to you and you throw them out if they suck.  Obviously, it’s not as simple as that, but it does suggest that there’s a role for specialization, that you can have editors in this world, they are people deputized by the community to stay on top of everything, to have their ears to the ground.  Because the reality is that those people who would, in the tag cloud of their life, put Soft Skull, have other tags, they have other things in their life, they don’t have time to read everybody’s stuff and vote on what’s the best, they don’t time to be publicizing what they pick, they’ll want to deputize that.  So, there will be a role for intermediaries. But the intermediaries shouldn’t be perched in ivory towers acting.  They are expert servants, but nevertheless servants. When I was acting as a service-oriented custodian of the Soft Skull community, I did my best work when I was listening attentively and critically, and I did my worst work when I was operating at my most solo.  I mean gut and instinct are part of it, training is also a part of it and the community recognizes that over an extended period of time.  People fuck up and that’s the way of the world.  It’s not straightforward.  We need to figure out new bits of etiquette.  The rules used to be really simple, you found agent, the agent found a publisher, bingo.  Now, that’s still kind of part of the system, but the reality is that there’s so many social things going on at the same time and reaching out to writers you admire is one part of that and figuring out the etiquette of how much you’re supposed to pay into the community versus how much their supposed to continue to give back to the community that’s been good to them, that’s a real process, but again, that’s a little microcosm of society.  Effectively I see my role as trying to break problems down into soluble bits and learning how to solve them by looking to the community and to other media for the solutions that they’ve come up with.

I read that Facebook intends to become recommendation-centric.  If one of your friend gave a good rating to a dentist, Facebook would would recommend that dentist for you if you were to search the word, “dentist.”  This sounds along the lines of what I’ve heard you talk about, community-centered recommendation.

The word “intermediaries” keeps popping up when I read about Cursor and I’m curious about the specifics of this.  Are you the intermediary?  How will it work?

I think it’s the whole community in a certain sense, some people will be more intermediary than others.  Within the Red Lemonade context, to start with, I’ll be the chief intermediary.  Over the long run though, Cursor is going to roll out a bunch more communities so someone else will be the chief intermediary at Red Lemonade although I won’t ever be able to let it go entirely since I was involved with it from the start.  But in a certain sense, even a casual participant who goes and re-tweets a link, is an intermediary, even if he only does it one time.

Are we talking about aggregation?

In a certain sense we’re aggregating intermediaries who’ve expressed interest of varying intensity in that community.  One of the hassles with words like “culture” or “community” is that things can be kind of circular.  “What’s the definition of the Red Lemonade community?”  The definition of the Red Lemonade community is that stuff which the Red Lemonade community likes.  That was the problem at Soft skull as well, there was certainly the punk/post punk thing, but what did that mean exactly?  It could mean doing those kinds of books, but we didn’t always do those kinds of books. We did fucking Echo and the Bunnymen, Jesus.  Good communities always have fuzzy edges, because it means they’re open and permeable and people should be able to come in and go out, otherwise they’re in prison.  I like the way you put it though, we’re basically creating a few magnetic poles around which intermediaries of varying levels of intensity are going to congregate and the ones who feel more intensely drawn to it will come in closer and they will probably comment more or write longer stuff, or you could have very passionate intermediary who never writes anything, but reads a lot and tells their friend about it in a bar that night. 

The internet is a tool that co-exists with all the other tools that we have, like our mouths or our fingers on the keyboard.  I do think that there is a degree to which the Red Lemonade community is publishing, but it’s also a recommendation engine, much smaller than Facebook, but much deeper.  I think Facebook’s weaknesses are one, that it’s quite shallow, or maybe horizontal.  It’s defines everybody as “friend,” “corporation,” or “celebrity.”  The reality is the world is a much more nuanced place than that.  But its social graph is dependent on the connections between people only. Twitter’s social graph is dependent on people’s interests, it’s a more broadcast-y kind of thing.  Each is good at one thing.  As a recommendation engine, each has something to recommend it.  Your friends may know you better on Facebook personally, but there may not be any experts on a given topic who you’re friends with.  So you rely on Twitter to get advice from some internet guru who’s never going to friend you on Facebook or from Susan Orlean, who’ll never friend you on Facebook, although she might, the writers tend to be kind of friendlier.

That’s true, I just friended Dennis Cooper yesterday, he’s a favorite writer of mine. 

Really?  His blog is a great example of how true community beats user interface. (Laughs)  His is sort of like the Craigslist of reader/writer communities.

You were on this list of “15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing.”  Personally, Twitter is something I’ve never been able to fully grasp.  I recognized it as being important early on, and signed up early on.  I recognized the power of it, but I’ve never been able to put it into practice.  For those of us looking to be better Twitter users, is there anything specific to which you attribute to your success on Twitter?

I find social media interfaces in odd ways with a person’s habits of assimilating and transmitting bits of personal belief and expression.  I’m good friends with the writer Colson Whitehead, and Colson couldn’t’ run an effective blog if it was the only communications tool left on earth, but the dude can Twitter!  I’m not quite sure how to describe what combination of positive and negative personality traits are required.  I’ve had a hard time keeping my own blog up.  I would say that probably the thing that works for me most is that I was or am an idiosyncratic framer of publishing news.  People follow me largely for the present and future of publishing, book publishing especially.  But I do it in a way that has more voice to it than Publisher’s Weekly or the people who are publicists for corporate publishers.  There’s enough stuff sprinkled in there that was linked from my own blog where I would be the original source, so I would be re-tweeted a lot as a result.  I think those two things are the reasons I’ve developed somewhat of an audience.  Also I started early so I’ve developed somewhat of an early network effect.  Thankfully, I couldn’t figure out how to make Second Life worked to save my life, but it didn’t matter.  Whereas I kind of figured out how to make Twitter work for me and conveniently, Twitter took off.

I’ve been reading Douglas Rushkoff’s new book.   He often writes and speaks about the affect of modern technology will have on the human psyche.

Also, “digital fasts” have become a hot topic lately as people start to realize how much time we’ve begun to spend staring into tiny boxes.  I have two questions.

Do you ever think that people will seriously revolt against the internet and modern technology?  Do you ever find it necessary in your life to limit your internet use, or distance yourself from technology?

I’ll start with the personal answer first.  The personal answer is that I don’t.  But I feel as though, because I didn’t grow up into it that I have a certain level of built in resistance that suffices to ensure that I perceive the patterns it imposes. 

One of the things I used to realize about myself being born in Ireland is, even though my accent barely exists anymore, there’s still something about me that’s fundamentally different, because I grew up in Ireland and lived there until I was 18 and don’t anymore.  It gives me a certain distance that I find helpful in helping me understand and not take for granted things about how America works.  I think to some extent I have the benefit of that when it comes to technology, that I’m insufficiently native and the plus of that is that I don’t take its assumptions for granted.  Now, of course, Douglass is older than I am… I’ll go on and answer you first question instead of speculating about poor old Douglass who I know a little bit.

Do I think people will revolt against technology?  A certain percentage of people will revolt against anything.  I know that sounds snarky though I don’t mean it snarkily.  I just mean that when it comes to the problems of the world, varying people place varying weights on things.  So, is the biggest problem the world faces global warming? Is it technology? Is it Islam?  Is it Women?  Is it men?  Some would say it’s technology.  But we’ve been dealing with technology since we were human.

I feel that Douglass’s admonition that we need to understand how technology works is critical, I think that’s a very important thing.  I feel optimistic that we will do so no worse than we have understood technology in the past. But I think there will also be people who will resist that, there will be mini backlashes, it will be a messy process.  Humans are so fucking messy, that I don’t really worry about a clean dystopia, the dystopia that emerges out of utopian thinking. Like, technology is going to solve everything and then we become robots.  We’re just too messy for that to happen.  That’s our blessing and our curse.  I’m more worried about us failing to use technology to fix the planet.

Where do you stand on Pirating?

Effectively I think we are at the beginning of the end of copyright.  Piracy is an emotion latent term concocted largely by the beneficiaries of copyright monopolies.  Copyright began life as a commercial monopoly originally run as a cartel by printers subsequently given legal force by the government who then said, “We’re in charge of managing it.”  It was given, especially by German philosophers in the late 18^th century, some intellectual weight as the idealist and Romantic Movement began to attribute genius to individuals who were very good at something instead of just being touched by god.  So if you’re a genius you deserve special protection.  This did not exist in humanity up until then and I think that it’s on its way out again.  Here’s the irony.  Germany produced more books when it didn’t have copyright and Britain did when it did.  So, there’s rarely been any evidence to demonstrate that copyright is necessary to advance, as the constitution puts it, “The useful and lively arts.”  In fact, the American Publishing Industry is founded on the piracy of British editions, noticeably, Harper and Roe knocking off Dickens.  So, China right now is doing what America did in the late 19th Century, except they’re actually being much better behaved.  The right conferred on a writer by the constitution and the Copyright Act to hold a monopoly on their expression of an idea is going to mean less and less as the expression is already being so easily reproduced that it becomes effectively impossible to police.

 The shift in terms of monetizing culture will be a shift away from reproduction to other forms.  That’s effectively what we’ve seen in the music business: the shift from selling the hackable to the unhackable.  By unhackable I mean, experiences, concert tickets, t-shirts which can be knocked off, but it’s not about the t-shirt, if you really just wanted a t-shirt you could go to Wall Mart, you want the t-shirt you got at the concert, you’re not paying for clothing, you’re paying for a badge of identity, you’re paying for an experience, you’re paying to connect, it could be to connect to the band it could be to connect with people who were there with you.  Our society was able to generate enough culture before we had copyright and given the tools we have now, we don’t seem to be in any danger to generate culture because of a lack of motivation.  The biggest victim of copyright will probably be the writers who wrote a seven and a half thousand word magazine article and spun it into a fifty thousand word book when it didn’t need to be a fifty thousand word book and I’m not going to cry any tears there.  The reality is that most of those writers will probably make more money on speaking engagements anyway.  Already we have a situation where a big part of the book business is about creating prestige points to enhance speakers fee and that’s true both in business and in the academy.  A lot of books are designed to get the author tenure, it’s true in the humanities, it’s true in poetry, it’s true in certain areas of literary fiction.  To my mind, piracy in a certain sense disappears because we abandon the notion that the right to make copies of a work is the exclusive province of the creator.  There are certain things that will remain a problem but I think they’ll be handled through a combination of trademark law which is basically to ensure that the person who is representing him or herself as the creator of something is properly credited.  A pirate isn’t pretending to have written Harry Potter (laughs) So if a pirate says that they’re the author of Harry Potter, there’s state unfair competition law and trademark law that can be used on that.  Then there’s the cultural opprobrium visited upon plagiarists who are fired or culturally shamed.   It’ll be a period of time, I’m not saying this is going to happen in the next six months and people will still buy digital downloads and people will pay for access to streaming music because it’s convenient, because it’s reliable.  I mean, I do not have the time to figure out how to download music for free.  I am paying iTunes for my time.  But I think us intermediaries are going to have to distinguish and understand what people are paying us for.  The process doesn’t happen over night.  Fifty percent of the music bought in America is still being bought on CD.  We had six hundred years to refine the book, whereas we had fifteen years to refine the CD.  CD’s weren’t going to last very long, there’s a good reason why the book is going to last a hell of a lot longer.

Are the details of Cursor still under raps at all or can you put it all out there? 

I think I can mostly put it all out there, yeah.

When is it set to launch?

Our first print book is publishing April 22^nd, that’s Lynne Tillman, then there’s two more, debuting, one is may by a woman Vanessa Veselka and one in June by a woman named Kio Stark.

How we deal with opening the website up is difficult to predict right now.  We’re a couple of weeks away from starting to work with Alpha testers.  Then we are just going to keep adding to that group of Alpha testers out of people who’ve asked to be able to look under the hood and kick the tires and at a certain point we’ll give them invitations to pass on to other folks.  We’ll do it incrementally because we want to be able to make something that works.  Exactly at what point will you be able to become a full member without an invite, I don’t know, it will be at some point in the Spring.  Exactly at what point will we have some pages up for everybody without having to register, I’m not sure either but that too will be at some point earlier in the Spring.  I’d like to have some stuff up for everyone by the end of this year.  I’d like to have definitely a couple of thousand people trying to break it and fix it and yell at us and tell us what features they want and what features they want us to get rid of by January.

 Red lemonade is going to be a fairly distinctive community to begin with, so the question of what kind writing will be going on the site is distinctive from the process.  It’s not going to be for everyone to start with, so part of what I’m trying to do is find out what kind of other communities should we be building.  Should there be  a community of political writing?  A community of writing in the Doug Rushkoff vein? a community of political writing, science fiction?  Should it be science fiction and futurism ala Io9?  That’s something we should try to figure out so we can improve our platform.

You were just at the Frankfurt book festival.  It was the last big thing that happened in the book world.  Can you tell me what it was like, what the overall vibe was?

Lordy, it can be a bit Rashomon like.  The party line was things were better than last year and worse than three years ago.  This being defined as, were people whining to each other all throughout their half hour meetings or for just ten minutes of their half hour meetings.  It was a sort of environment where the Americans said “Ok, ebooks are here and it’s going to be okay because we’re selling them.  We’ve got agencies, we’re not going to be like the music industry, we’ll fight it off.” Europeans sort of agreed they had to do something about this but were particularly suspicious of the American companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, Apple probably engendering the least suspicion, Google perhaps the most, Amazon somewhere in between.  They’re kind of the devil you know at this point.  Basically to my mind, there’s a certain heir of unreality at this point, because they just have no idea what’s coming down the turnpike.  The change is far more radical than any of them are willing to recognize.

So, I still think it’s a tremendously useful event because at times it’s useful to get together a bunch of disparate people and make then deal with one another.  I think it’s good to make them learn from one another.  Obviously people in the publishing industry are people with staff jobs and whatever I might be yapping about the future of copyright is not going to change this year, next year or the year after so they will deal with it when they’ll have to deal with it. 

I’ve heard you talk a lot about the future of brick and mortar bookstores, and I’ve been thrilled to hear you express the opinion that specialty indie bookstores will last, perhaps more so than the chains.  So, I’d like to hear you elaborate on that.

I think basically that the chains offer selection and location.  Their selection value proposition is effectively gone because Amazon is always going to be able to beat them on selection.  The location issue, between people’s increased comfort with ecommerce and the fact that the chains over built starting in the late 90’s, as did all retailers,  Sharper Image went out of business.  Circuit City went out of business, and of course music stores.  I just don’t see a long-term future for them.  I mean, there will be some kind of a future but it will be a radically smaller version, the chains will be a couple of hundred stores, not a couple of thousand. 

The independent book retailer however, selection ought not be his or her value proposition, community is.  One of the most successful bookstores in the United States right now is Word in Greenpoint.  In my mind that’s because Greenpoint was a neighborhood that was in the process of gentrifying and a lot of people were moving there who had a fair amount in common with one another but didn’t have a means to meet one another except in a bar.  Word basically is where the Greenpoint newbies get to meet.  Their singles events and their dating bulletin board is a perfect examples of how they understand that role, because books are powerful talismans of personal identity, so if you want something that you can use as a proxy for another person, do you want to meet this person or not, a book is a perfect way to find out about another person.

One thing I’ve wondered, partially in jest, is if bookshelves disappear, how will people on dates decide whether or not they want to sleep together?

That’s right!  They wont!  Or they will very slowly, and will find other ways to do that. You start to see it, the new Nano shows the song you’re listening to.  We’re starting to see it in digital stuff, ways to telegraph who you are.  Books are absolutely central to that process I believe.

One complaint about the Kindle that you can’t see what the person across from you is reading.

Exactly that is a problem.  That is a correct assessment of a weakness of the Kindle.  Honestly I don’t think of it as a joke I think that’s deadly serious.  I think the reason for that is that long for narrative is a very demanding thing, it is quite interactive, it takes a lot to engage with it.  So it says a lot about you that you choose to do that.  It telegraphs to other human beings who you are as a person.  Can it sometimes be shallow?  Sure, but so it basing it on a band t-shirt or on someone’s facial hair. It’s less shallow than those, is it not?