danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

For my last post of 2008, a video of a great song I first heard a long, long time ago.  YouTube is amazing.

Filed under: Popular Music, Special Occasions on December 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

As a student of literature, I buy a goodly number of books.  For the sake of convenience, I acquire many at Goerings Bookstore on 1st Avenue, just a block north of campus.  All the English professors put their orders in there, and the store is generally well-stocked.  Plus, they have titles that the big stores in town (Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Books-a-Million) might not generally carry.  Actually, you’d be surprised at the important novels that I haven’t been able to find at some of the chain stores – Oliver Twist, for instance.  Next time you’re in one of these stores, see what Dickens novels they have.  If they don’t have a copy of Bleak House that’s a bad sign.  That said, authors like Aphra Behn or Mary Elizabeth Braddon are considerably less well-known, and I can understand how difficult it would be to stock every work of classic literary fiction and still have room for the mandatory coffee shop in the front corner.

For this reason, it’s convenient that Amazon.com exists.  If I have the time to wait, and I can put together an order substantial enough to qualify for free shipping, it’s hard to beat Amazon.  I value having a brick-and-mortar store like Goerings, and I want them to succeed.  For all I know, they’re doing very well, since they get so much student business.  But in several respects no brick-and-mortar store, including Goerings, can compete with Amazon.

First, Amazon charges below cover price for most of their paperback books.  Sometimes this is a substantial discount.  For example, the Penguin edition of Clarissa bears a cover price of $24.95, and that is what you’d pay anywhere else, including Borders (I saw a copy at a Borders in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last August).  At Amazon, however, you can get a brand new copy of Richardson’s absurdly long novel for $16.47.  That’s a substantial discount.

Second, of course, is selection, which I mentioned above.  At a good independent brick-and-mortar shop, you will certainly find a copy of Wuthering Heights.  (If you don’t, turn around a walk out; they don’t deserve your business.)  Often, however, they may only have a mass-market edition, like Signet, which is inexpensive, but bare-bones.  The Penguin and Oxford editions are better, and just a few dollars more.  Best of all, though, especially for something like Wuthering Heights, is the Norton Critical Edition, which has translations of Joseph’s incomprehensible mumblings.  You can find all of these at Amazon.

Finally, Amazon has built an astonishing used marketplace.  For paperback classics it is often no cheaper after shipping to buy used than new, but for almost everything else it is.  But the easy availability of used books (and CDs and DVDs, too) is apparently a mixed blessing.  David Streitfeld wrote an especially interesting article last weekend about his conflicted feelings regarding buying and selling used books online.  On one hand, it’s such a convenient and cost-effective way for readers to shop.  On the other hand, it hurts publishers, bookstores and authors.  This doesn’t apply to Samuel Richardson or Charles Dickens, of course, but it does affect living writers (and songwriters and filmmakers), and the shops that sell their wares.  Streitfeld’s article cites a California shop owner who criticized him for “depriving” the author of income, and driving bookshops out of business.

I have a problem with that sort of logic.  We buy books for what’s written on their pages, but they are still physical objects, as are CDs and DVDs.  As a physical objects, they take space on our shelves and coffee tables.  They can be loaned to friends or sold to strangers.  Those in the business of publishing would have us think this is wrong.  Of course, if they had their way there would be no libraries either.  They can whine until the end of time, but they cannot convince me that when I am finished reading a book I should throw it away in the garbage or leave it to collect dust on my shelf.  If I want to pass it along to a friend I will.  If I want to sell it to someone else I will.

The music industry fought a losing battle against MP3 for years.  They feared that MP3 made it too easy to steal music.  That is, one person made an MP3 of a song, then posted it online for others to take without paying anything.  They also didn’t like the idea of consumers not having to buy an entire $18 CD when they only wanted one song.  I acknowledge that it isn’t easy to make an argument in favor of loaning MP3s given the lack of physical medium.  The labels now know that they can save a ton on production and distribution in an MP3 world.  Likewise, publishers can save a fortune selling e-books.  Do you think that record labels and book publishers care about record stores and bookshops?  I don’t think they do.

It’s clear to me that everyone is simply trying to get as much money as they can however they can, and will use whatever flawed reasoning it takes to justify their greed.  If publishers could figure out a way to charge a fee for literacy I think they would.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Rantings on December 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

Christmas 2008 has come and gone, and I am back home in Gainesville after three days and more than 500 miles on the highway.  On the Turnpike this afternoon, an accident on the southbound lanes caused a tremendous backup in the northbound lanes, and more than five miles (I counted) of bumper-to-bumper traffic for the southbound travelers.

Christmas Eve was spent in St. Petersburg at Grandma’s house.  She was at church when I arrived, but had made dinner and left it on the counter.  Plus, there were brownies.  When she got home we watched It’s a Wonderful Life.  On Christmas Day we went over to Julie’s.  It was a great time.  I gave Miriam some aluminum plates for her skates.  I gave my dad a book of selected essays of Samuel Johnson, a book which has changed my life.  Grandma gave me a book of photos of me as a child.  Julie gave me a neat personalized stone for the garden.  Miriam gave me the DVD of La fanciulla del West I’ve wanted for a long time with Sherrill Milnes as Jack Rance, and the Penguin Classics edition of Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo I’ve been itching to read.

Filed under: Family, Literature and Books, Special Occasions, Travel on December 27th, 2008 | No Comments »

What has become of Christmas?  Today is Christmas Eve, a day of fondest childhood memories. But for a grown man, much of the enchantment of the occasion is lost.  Dickens wrote:

There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be–that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope or happy prospect of the year before, dimmed or passed away–and that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes–of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune.

When I consider the suffering of others–the Hard Times in which Dickens lived (rim shot!)–and contrast it with my own many blessings, I shame myself with the slightest intimations of self pity by conjuring recollections of Christmas past.

Never heed such dismal reminiscences.  There are few men who have lived long enough in the world who cannot call up such thoughts any day of the year.  Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire–fill the glass, and send round the song–and, if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago…put a good face on the matter…and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it’s no worse.

So, with that in mind, Merry Christmas.  God bless Us, Every One!

Filed under: Musings, Nostalgia, Special Occasions on December 24th, 2008 | No Comments »

On Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed Lawrence Lessing, a law professor who argues that the changes wrought by the internet require changes in copyright law.  One of the examples he cited of copyright restrictions being overly strict involved a YouTube video of a small child dancing in her own, filmed by her mother for her grandmother to see.  In the background you could hear a song by Prince, which is, presumably, what the girl was dancing to.  YouTube was instructed by the record label to remove the video.  (I know some labels and artists are much stricter about these things, and I know Prince is one of the most strict.)  Lessing made the point that this mother committed a crime by posting this video under current law, but asked if this really should be criminal. That is a particularly good example for him to use, because if you consider how much copyrighted music surrounds us each day, it is very easy to run afoul of the law when videotaping in public.  Imagine that you’re having a fine time hanging out on a game day here in beautiful Gainesville, Florida, and you shoot some video of you and your pals throwing a football around while the food is on the grill and the girlfriends are chatting amongst themselves.  I can almost guarantee that somebody in the camper next to you is going to be playing their radio, and that audio bleeding into your video means that you’re guilty of copyright infringement by posting it online.

We live in the age of file sharing.  Anyone who had a computer in the spring and summer of 2000 (which I dubbed the Summer of Napster), will recall what a big deal file sharing became.  I distinctly remember the sense of urgency many felt when the lawsuits against Napster threatened to shut the service down.  Everyone stayed home by their computers that night in a frantic orgy of downloading before it was too late.  I also remember saying at the time that the world would never go back.  The genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and once people saw the benefit of having unlimited access to every song they ever loved for free, there would always be a service or program to satisfy that demand.  Napster did eventually end, but the long Summer of Napster continues.

I say all this to make a point about copyright which relates to yesterday’s Fresh Air.  Some argue that, since file sharing is so common, and copyright holders are “losing” so much money (I use quotes because I think that these artists are “losing” sales they never would have made in the first place: i.e., “people” will download Avril Lavigne for nothing, but they wouldn’t pay for it {I use quotes around “people” because I don’t think real humans could like Avril Lavigne}), that we should change the way royalties are collected.  Lawrence Lessing referred to a system in which file sharing is legal, downloads are tracked, and royalties are paid to copyright holders based on the number of downloads.  These fees might be collected from ISPs according to one proposal.  My problem with that system is that it requires people who do not download songs, or download only a few, to pay for the hobby of those who download hundreds or thousands of songs.

Perhaps the best point that Lawrence Lessing made related to the meaning and intent of copyright itself.  If you are like me, you probably assumed that copyright exists to guarantee that the intellectual property of creative individuals remains valuable through protection from theft.  Apparently this is not what the founding fathers intended.  For them, copyright was designed to ensure continued creativity by offering temporary protection from theft of intellectual property.  As Lessing pointed out in the interview, George Gershwin or Robert Frost write music and poetry with the understanding that their creations belong to them.  But since neither man is alive, the copyright that still exists on their works is no longer encouraging creativity at all.  Lessing points out that the constitution expressly forbids perpetual copyright, but Congress’ continued passage of legislation designed to extend copyrights amounts to an endless copyright.

Most of the music I listen to is in the public domain.  Some of it never was copyrighted to begin with.  Anybody could have passed off Bach’s music as his own, even in Bach’s time, and there wasn’t much that could be done.  That’s obviously a bad system given today’s technology.  Still, lack of copyright protection certainly didn’t slow Bach down.  There are well over a thousand pieces in the Schmieder catalog.  But almost everything created in the last hundred years is still in copyright, and considering the value that corporations place on their intellectual property (Mickey Mouse was created in 1928), it’s doubtful that copyright will ever be anything but permanent again.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Music, Rantings, Technology on December 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »