Paying for Creation ex Nihilo Part 2

To continue the exploration of why pricey ebooks offend me when they deliver the exact same intellectual and artistic work as the print version:

Again, though it’s somewhat misguided, the intuition of the inherent value in a material thing is not entirely wrong. Print books do perdure in a way that ebooks and audiobooks almost certainly won’t. Who knows what of our digital age will be available in half a millennium or ten centuries from now?

But that is, as I suggested, only the surface explanation. There’s a deeper explanation.

We all—even the intellectuals, even the artists—maintain a suspicion of people who just make stuff up. And that’s essentially what intellectuals and artists do. We create out of nothing: ex nihilo, to use the Latin terminology applied to God’s creation of everything that is not God.

It’s not an accurate usage, theologically speaking. God creates really out of *nothing.* Human creators create out of *something.* Not just the minimal viable materials for getting the idea out of one person’s mind and into another’s, like paint, pencils, or needle and thread.

All stories are built out of other stories, not to mention lived details—even when fabricating fantasy or sci fi worlds. All ideas are built out of other ideas, even if innovating into an idea never before conceived. Artists receive color without any work of their own; writers inherit a language they did not generate. (Even Tolkien had to know enough of grammar, syntax, and Old Norse to invent Elvish.) No human creator starts with a truly blank slate.

Still. You can see plainly that a handcrafted chair is made out of wood that used to be a tree. The human work applied is what renders the chairness out of the tree.

Whereas a story or an idea or an image just came out of your head. You pulled it out of nothing. You didn’t have to buy the wood to make the chair. We get that you had to buy the paper the book was printed on. But the book itself, the content, the story—you just made it up. Why should you get paid for that? Where’s its value?

Moreover, to extend the God analogy, God creates purely out of generosity and self-giving love. That clearly ought to be the model of the human creator, right? Creation is its own reward.

(A pious assertion that ignores, to give but two of many examples, the cost to God of creation in the form of the flood and the cross.)

Weird—but something in us is offended at being asked to cough up cold hard cash for something that came out of nowhere and nothing. It should all be pure gift. Money should only change hands for solid things that have obviously transformed one thing into something else.

So goes the fake moral high ground of all too many people, including in my profession.

I could argue that it should be just the opposite: given widespread anxiety about environmental degradation and resource exhaustion, shouldn’t wealth flow precisely toward those who manage to generate new value that doesn’t deplete anything at all?

Creating Harry Potter contributed enormous value to the world, not only financial value but infinitely more emotional and spiritual value, without depleting the fund of stories in the world. In fact, Rowling probably spurred on the creation of countless more stories. Thus, she her creative act actually added to the capital of Story, and with a generous rate of interest, to boot!

But of course this is way too capitalistic to be morally appealing.