Paying for Creation ex Nihilo Part 1

Allow me to divert a bit here into my proper domain of theology, in order to explain what I’m trying to get at regarding art, the internet, and commerce.

Why is it so outrageous to pay for art, when I’m the buyer—and why is it so outrageous *not* to *be paid* for art, when I’m the maker?

Besides the obvious, I mean. Let’s bracket greed out of the discussion for now, because it’s a cheap trope for moralists of all kinds to invoke.

I propose, instead, a surface answer and a deep answer.

The shallow answer is the trick that the internet, which we experience as virtual and ephemeral, plays on our bodies, which are anything but.

Of course, the internet is seriously material in its substrate. None of it works without silicon, wires, cooling fans, routers, screens and so on. But generally we don’t experience that or don’t realize we’re experiencing it.

What we believe ourselves to experience is the immersive illusion—a massive multiplayer video game in a richly imagined world, an interaction of avatars on a dating site, a Zoom conversation with someone we know so well that we can fill in the missing torso and legs and three-dimensionality.

Immersive, but insubstantial. Close the browser and it’s gone. It isn’t a thing you can hold, store, smash, cradle, or polish.

This is why, I submit, I have so often felt outraged at the price of e-books. I’m a crazed reader and bookaholic, whose print collection has followed me on multiple moves to multiple countries across three continents. I feel so strongly about my books that I’ve catalogued them (1301 volumes at last count) and I get rid of books I don’t like because they seem to ooze poison into the house.

Obviously, I am willing to spend money on books. *If* they are on paper.

But something in me surges in outrage when I see a high-priced ebook. The sense of being cheated balloons. This long pre-dated my discovery that on Kindle (for example) you don’t actually own the ebooks you buy, you only license them. In a very primal way, I felt that getting a book entailed getting the paper it was printed on. Or maybe that the book really *was* the paper, while the content was ephemeral and secondary.

Not actually a bizarre conclusion for an embodied creature to feel intuitively. But on a moment’s reflection, it does in fact become bizarre.

Here’s what showed me my own illogic.

I paid a visit to the website of creativity guru Derek Sivers. (Gemini fans should like his site—it’s about as stripped down and spare as the Web ever gets.)

https://sive.rs/bp

On this page he talks about “Considerate Pricing,” where he makes the exact opposite argument of my unthinking intuition: the value in the book is its contents, while the paper is only one of several possible vehicles of delivery.

Therefore, the upfront charge is $15 for the intellectual property, which he’ll deliver in digital format for no additional cost—which makes sense, as digital delivery costs next to nothing extra once you’re already set up online. Note, this includes audiobooks, which are quite a lot more time and work to produce than ebooks. But again, the base price is calculated strictly on the cost of intellectual property + zero-cost delivery.

Then, if you want print editions, there is an additional fee to pay for the physical substrate of paper and the service charge of mailing. But it’s only that much extra.

The pricing insists that the value of the book is *primarily* the intellectual and artistic content, not the vehicle by which that content is delivered.

Sivers is right, of course, because otherwise I’d keep the poison books on my shelves sheerly because I like having extra bound paper in the house. The embodied intuition that the real value is in the paper is thereby disproven.

In other words, the intellectual property and artistic discovery of the book is not confined to its print format. It’s the same content on a tablet reader, and the same content speaking through my earbuds. Differences in delivery might be meaningful in other ways—for example, if I really love an audiobook, I’ll get the print version so I can study it more carefully—but it represents the same labor of the author. It has the same value.

So to suppose that I ought to get the ebook cheaper because it doesn’t cost any paper, and there is no in-built scarcity, amounts to an unthinking judgment that intellectual property and artistic discovery are just not worth very much.

A bad judgment: my whole life’s work is premised on exactly the opposite conviction.