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Ebooks are not subject to sale-or-return accounting; every sale is final. Ebooks never go out of print, so contract reversion terms are different. The retail price is typically lower but the sales channel has fewer middle-men so the royalty rate is higher. Production costs are, surprisingly to most people, nearly as high as for dead-tree books (ebooks still need editing and proofreading and marketing).

Mass market paperback sales are down around 50-70% in the USA. (In the UK the mass market channel disappeared in the early 1990s; all paperbacks are sold as trade books.) Ebooks are now up to 60% of gross sales, from 6% in 2008-09 and 0.6% in 2005.

Hardcover or trade paperback sales are, mostly, unaffected by ebook sales. These are premium products sold to people who like buying lumps of dead tree. They may dwindle over the coming decades but the hardcover market is still okay.

So ebooks are the new mass market paperbacks; easily distributed, cheap, disposable reading matter.

This is an excellent antidote to the ebooks-are-changing-everything-books-are-dead panic that's abroad in the land. Yes, there a changes afoot, but this stuff is always a lot more contingent and complicated than it looks at first glance.

In convenient graph form:

Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950 (via The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish)

This kind of thing is what infuriates me the most about capitalism. They aren't even following their own rules! You should want to sell more books and create more value, right? Right? But somehow hoarding IP and rent-seeking is seen as the better path to take. I just don't get it.

See also: ebook lending and libraries.

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what's more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It's a bad business model," said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change.

"Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball.

"But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

(The Telegraph | Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society)

What absolute piffle. He starts out heading in a fruitful direction when he talks about the economics of ebooks. They're definitely a threat to the commons and especially to libraries, because they're a remote-controllable and license-able medium. When you buy a paper book, you own it free and clear and the law is clear on your rights for lending, reselling and reuse. Not so with e-books, and if we don't get it in hand, public libraries will be renting their whole collection on onerous and restrictive terms, the same way academic libraries have to now with journals.

So, that's a big advantage to paper, but that's not really what he's on about, because he's not really worried about democracy or civil society or the commons. Just like with Stanley Fish awhile back, what he's really concerned about is authorial identity and authority. Funny how the "radical contingency" of electronic media tends to freak out privileged white dudes sitting at the top of their fields more than anyone else.

This ain't about democracy. Democracy will be just fine, except for the whole rapacious global capitalism issue, but more authority and stability for the current crop of elites sure won't help us on that front either.

Radical contingency, mutability, fluid and collaborative notions of authorship, and an interactive and fiercely contested intellectual and public sphere were all hallmarks of the print culture that spawned and nurtured early democratic polities. Electronic media are bringing back those conditions, albeit with the complicating issues of surveillance, control at a distance, and I.P. What he's really lamenting is the loss of broadcast culture, which privileges a few fortunate voices and denies the rest a chance to talk back or participate in culture creation.

Which, if this is the best those voices can come up with, good riddance.

Amanda of Pandagon's Vonnegut tribute post reminded me of another reason why he, and the literature of WWII in general, was very important.

what I find interesting about Slaughterhouse Five is that it's an angry protest against the historical revisionism that casts WWII as the "good" war.

This is vital, especially in light of what happened in the 90's with the ridiculously over the top mythologization of the Greatest Generation. It confused me a lot at the time, because all of the literature and history of WWII I had read up to then was nothing like that. And most of it wasn't written by professional intellectuals or mythmakers, but by people like Vonnegut and Heller who were working or middle class, and actually fought and saw what it was really like.

None of them seemed to have any illusions that WWII was anything but a senseless bloodbath and a tragedy for humanity in general. Nobody "won" that war. The very fact that it happened to begin with, and that humanity got to a point where things like London, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, and the Holocaust could occur was such an immeasurable tragedy and loss that no amount of heroism and courage could begin to overcome it. Pynchon, who was too young to actually fight in WWII, but who definitely understood it in the same way as Heller and Vonnegut, put it this way:

Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer - it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness- not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.

He saw the war as some sort of inhuman, irresistable force; machines and systems that we had unconsciously or inadvertently created had broken out of our control. From the literature that came out of it, to the countless grandparents who were not at all eager to even talk about what they had seen and done, let alone cast themselves as heroes, it's clear that many of the people who participated in it and saw the real price on all sides seem to have seen it similarly, and taken the same sorts of lessons from it that Vonnegut and the others who wrote the literature of the war did.

Failing to grasp those lessons is a lot of what got us into the mess that we're currently in. I think the 90's revisionism about WWII was really pernicious, in that it put forth this ideal of a great crusading struggle against evil, with America at its head. That was attractive to lots of people looking for meaning in post-post-everything life. They wanted to be part of a Great Unambiguous Struggle like their parents and grandparents were, to be swaggering heroes like their mythical forebears.

That's a significant piece of how we got from a limited fight against a bunch of dudes in caves in Afghanistan to a full blown Holy War. The only reason people can think it's plausible that Islamic Fundamentalism is an existential threat to our way of life is that they're looking at it through the lens of WWII. They wanted a Nazi Germany of their own to overcome, and, since no such thing existed, it had to be invented. Vonnegut and most of the voices of his generation knew that you should never wish for something like that. After all, they saw what that really meant, and what the true cost was.

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - KV

And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's the book.'

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet?

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Kurt Vonnegut died today at 84. I've found his work very uneven, but at his best he was the closest we had to a modern heir to Mark Twain. I fear he might have been one of America's last great humanists. America has badly needed, and largely lacked voices like his in the past 10-15 years. It's too bad we didn't have him at the height of his powers to (cheerfully, and without much hope) struggle against the rampant bad faith and profound lack of imagination we've suffered from as a culture and a polity. He will be missed.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it. - Bertrand Russell

I've been thinking a lot lately about uncertainty. The past century, and more pointedly, our current world climate, is absolutely shot-through with it. It is the ideological elephant in the room... everyone is taking drastic measures to cope with it, all the while doing everything they can to avoid facing up to the thing itself. To me, Heisenberg's discovery may well be the most important, as well as the least assimilated idea of the last one hundred years. Philosophy has barely addressed it, and, more practically, we still haven't learned to deal with the realities that it opens up. I fear that until we do, we'll never be able to truly move on and live stably and peacably in the chaotic world we have created. In an uncertain time, we must embrace uncertainty on some level or consign ourselves to chaos and failure. So, what does Heisenberg mean, and why is it important? The gist, in scientific terms, is this:

The more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known.

Sounds simple, right? The implications are rather earth-shattering though. A little context: at the end of the 19th century, a strongly materialist, mechanistic worldview was beginning to come to the fore. Darwin had shown that, with little doubt, the laws of nature applied to us just as inexorably as they do to everything else. It was thought that the end of physics, and by extension the end of uncertainty, was within sight, and that the laws of the universe, soon to be fully known, would eventually allow us to predict the future, given enough information about the present.

This is a lot of what the 19th century Russians, especially Dostoevsky, were on about. Russia was in a bit of a unique situation, as it had traditionally been a feudal, spiritual, mystical sort of society, which had had the enlightenment and all of its implications suddenly thrust upon it by Czar Peter the Great. Even 150 years later, thoughtful people were still struggling to assimilate the contrasting worldviews, and to a Russian outlook shaped by this context, determinism was much more disturbing than it was to the average European intellectual at that time. Dostoevsky was horrified by rational self interest and the "Crystal Palace" of positivist thought because he (rightly) saw that if this worldview were totally true, it meant cutting out a large part of what makes us human; the loss of imagination, of spirituality, and ultimately, of freedom.

Tolstoy was more well-versed in western science, and in his younger years was a materialistic atheist. Later, he found it lacking, went through a nervous breakdown of sorts, and founded his own prophetic variant of Christianity. The great Russians were seekers, humanists in a grander sense of the word, in that they thought human imagination, belief, spirituality, and freedom in some way transcend cold reason and scientific certainty.

Of course, this wasn't merely a Russian phenomenon, though the Russians made the terms most clear in their work. European Romanticism in general, and the American variant, Transcendentalism, were also rebellions of the spirit and imagination against the rigor and limitations that science seemed to personify. Whitman's "When I heard a Learn'd Astronomer" is a representative example of what I'm getting at, and Thoreau's whole ouvre is the more practical, philosophical side of the same coin.

Looking back, late Victorian-era determinism was a very hubristic outlook, but at the time it all seemed fairly reasonable. Nothing much new was on the horizon, and existing theory worked for almost every practical situation that the physicists had encountered. This general belief in the inevitability of determinism and the approaching end of physics continued for quite awhile, but chinks started to gradually show up in its armor.

New, strange discoveries started to pop up, such as the Curies' work with radioactivity, and Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in the 1890's. Albert Einstein struck the first truly major blow, with general relativity. However, this was still compatible with an ordered, deterministic universe, it was simply a more subtle and complicated way of looking at it, which was easy enough to eventually assimilate with the old Newtonian views of motion (though not so easy to assimilate philosophically, a predicament which arguably helped in the rise of relativist postmodernism in the stead of the one-way, natural-law-centric path of logical positivism.) However, it was Heisenberg and his fellow discoverers of quantumn mechanics who would truly throw physics (and who should have also thrown philosophy) into disarray.

Basically, Heisenberg's discovery removed the spectre of determinism from the scene once and for all. Free will was vouchsafed forever, by a strange quirk in the measurability of subatomic particles. Since we could never know both the momentum and the position of a particle at the same time, the best we could do was a probability-based guess at where the particle might be at the next measurement. Thus, we would never be able to get all the information required to absolutely predict the future of complex systems (such as consciousness or history) and remove the human conception of free will from the equation of choice.

Paradoxically, uncertainty had saved human freedom, and perhaps human spirituality, once and for all. We could never know absolutely, and thus there would always be a chance for novelty, variation, imagination. This should have been occasion for rejoicing. Nature had provided a way out, a way to reconcile Romanticism with Positivism, art with science, reason with emotion, human-centric conceptions of the universe with observable reality, and without giving up either one entirely.

However, it didn't quite work out that way, and I'm not exactly sure why. There was definitely something deeply disturbing to both camps about there being a fundamental randomness or ineffability at the heart of reality. This is an old idea, and, instructively, things shook out in a similar fashion the last time it came up.

Way back in Hellenistic Greece, Epicurus (picking up where Democritus left off) postulated a universe made up of atoms falling through a void, with life, action, and choice made possible by a randomness inherent in some of the atoms, which he called "The Swerve." This conception eventually lost out to the Platonic and Aristotelian visions, which roughly approximate the later idealist Romantics and realist Positivists.

On the scientific side, the reason for tumult and denial was fairly obvious, best exemplified in Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" quip. An ordered and predictable universe was the bedrock principle upon which all research rested. For the Romantic or spiritual side, it was probably more diffuse... perhaps for some just a failure to understand the significance and implications of the discovery, for others an aesthetic distaste for a "flawed," imperfect reality (hearkening back to the desire for perfect Platonic ideals), for the more spiritually minded, some thorny clashes with accepted dogma (though to me, quantum uncertainty is one of those things in science that is so weird that it almost makes the idea of God, or at least some sort of distributed universal guiding intelligence, sound plausible, because this somehow happening on its own, and also just coincidentally turning out to be a backdoor for the preservation of our ideas of free will and inquiring intelligence, is just plain wacky.)

After the old generation of Newtonians had died off, science managed to assimilate uncertainty into its worldview rather readily, if not very completely (the main problem in physics to this day is the attempt to find a reconciliation between quantumn mechanics and Newtonian/relativistic mechanics.) Taking off from Popper and Kuhn, science studies even managed to produce a new worldview in which science wasn't an infallible religion, but rather just another way of looking at the world, subject to the same sort of limitations of the rest of our constructs, albeit one which is quite useful for many of our purposes. However, philosophy and literature seemingly failed here. At any rate, nobody I've read has ever really managed to philosophically address both relativity and uncertainty, in terms of knowledge, ideas, choice, and existence, in a satisfying way.

Camus and Kierkegaard came close to what I'm getting at, but ultimately backed off. They both posited the absurd as man's reaction to uncertainty. Kierkegaard looked at the leap of faith, the embracing of God despite the lack of proof, as the absurd man's reaction to an uncertain world. Camus went a step farther, abandoning God and embracing the absurd in of itself, in the form of the struggle to know and create, regardless of its ultimate futility in terms of ever being able to attain absolute certainty or permanence. Neither went so far as to question the very desire for certainty that they were trying to deal with.

Pragmatism and other forms of postmodern thought, with greater or lesser degrees of success, embraced relativism and attacked the problem by using it in attempt to eliminate the idea of certainty altogether, an approach I embrace, though with reservations.

I don't think any of them really attack it from the angle I prefer though, in which uncertainty serves to empower human beings to write their own narratives. This is sort of a synthesis of Existential and Pragmatic/Postmodernist thought, and does show up somewhat, though obliquely, in the postmodern fiction of Eco, Nabokov, and Borges. I don't think we should abandon the idea of certainty altogether, but we should treat it as exactly that, as one way at looking at things, as an ideal, human-imposed benchmark from which we can measure the deviation of reality, much as scientists already use ideal systems as a tool in order to better understand more chaotic real ones.

The key is to acknowledge uncertainty, to even praise it as a necessary prerequisite for a good human life. Without uncertainty, there would be very little in the way of possibility, wonder, or discovery, and of course, no freedom, no choice, no autonomy. The search for knowledge and understanding consumes us, and we tell ourselves that we want it to end with complete certainty, but have we really thought that desire through? What would we do if there was nothing more to strive for, nothing more to learn... if there were no more suprises?

I think despair and gradual mass suicide would be the more likely outcome in that case, as opposed to the usual claptrap about perpetual contented bliss. Human beings don't deal very well with stasis and contentment in large doses. We need to struggle, to grope blindly in the dark, to be thrilled and awed once in awhile. We may be rational animals, but I don't think we're by any means wholly rational, or that we should ever want to be. Uncertainty, both in terms of physics and philosophy, guarantees that we will never have to face such a difficult ultimate choice, to have to choose between the human heart and the human mind. And because of that, the associated slings and arrows are ultimately worth it.

Russell was right. If philosophy and literature have taught me anything, it's the ability to be comfortable with, and at times to even revel in uncertainty. This is of course much easier when it comes to abstract matters, but enough of the temperament carries over to everyday life that I am willing to accept more risks and unknowns than most in trade for the possibilities these realities open up. As a global society, I feel strongly that we need to take a similar approach, both in terms of our ideas and beliefs, and in terms of our more concrete social and political realities.

We may not have certainty about many of the big questions, but life would be infinitely less rich if we did. The joy is in the search, even if the ultimate and complete solution is actually foreordained by the subatomic structure of the universe to be elusive. This is the first, and perhaps the only, lesson of philosophy.

Time for more from the department of interesting crossovers and coincidences in reading. I find that this is one of the best parts of reading widely and voraciously... you start to see all kinds of serendipitous and productive new connections between different genres, groups of ideas, historical eras, and so on and so forth. The more you read and learn, the more your further reading and learning is enriched, and the more sense it all starts to make, at least internally, and at times externally as well. This is why reference and allusion, when done well, is so great. It's more than just being able to feel really smart whenever you "get" a reference. It goes two ways... modern writers invest their works with meaning through allusion and reference, and this in turn can make musty-seeming older works take on a new, modernized significance and applicability of their own.

This is much of why I tend to defend at least some sort of loose form of the literary canon. There are certain things that you just have to read, or at least certain concepts and ideas that you have to be familiar with, to be able to fully understand and get the most out of just about anything else you read, and vice-versa. Most "important" books are that way for a reason... because many people who came afterward saw fit to write about them. Even if you don't greatly enjoy, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey on their own merits, slogging through them will truly enrich your experience with an innumerable number of later books and authors.

Anyhow, this week, it's been the confluence of TH White's The Once and Future King, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an article lamenting the possible demise of internationalism, in the latest Mother Jones. These at first don't seem like a terribly likely combination; an Arthurian fantasy novel, a terse historical document, and a despairing commentary on current events, but, they dovetail quite nicely, at least in my addled brain.

King, besides being a delightful and poignant modern update on the Arthurian legend, is also sort of a tradegian look at the ongoing experiments of liberalism, human rights, and civil society. It casts the forming of the Round Table by Arthur as an attempt at replacing the Medieval idea of Might as Right with one of the use of controlled Might to defend Right, with the eventual goal of establishing equality before civil law, and abolishment for the need of violent, warlike power at all. He brings the knights, the most powerful and invulnerable weapons of his time, under his central control, and uses them to prevent the various feudal lords and barons from using them to promote tyranny and anarchy for personal gain.

The United Nations was formed with similar goals in mind. Horrified by the carnage and chaos that typified the first half of the 20th century, the internationalist founders of the UN tried to restrain the use of Might by nations for selfish means, by attempting to set up a global version of concentrated power enforcing civil law. They neglected to attempt in earnest to concentrate true Might behind it(perhaps a mistake in retrospect, perhaps not), relying more on consensus and mutual benefit, but the main idea was the same, to replace the idea of kill or be killed with that of cooperation and the concentration of power for mutual safety and benefit.

There is a dual tragedy operating in White's book, that of Arthur's own personal life, fatal error, and eventual unfulfilled death, paralleled by that of the demise of his grand project. He harnesses Might productively at first, subjugating the warring barons and bringing peace and prosperity to the kingdom. However, with nothing else to occupy and direct it, the controlled violence of the Table soon begins to turn on itself and others. He then tries to direct Might on a cleansing spiritual quest, in the form of the Holy Grail, in the hopes of both occupying and taming it. This also succeeds for a time, and the knights who succeed are indeed cleansed of violence or killed, but this sadly leaves only the more mercenary among them in place with no countervailing force to restrain them. The end of the book documents the slow unravelling of Arthur's dream in internecine warfare and chaos, both in the case of his kingdom and of the fate of himself and the people he loves.

Reading the utopian vision of universal rights that is the Universal Declaration, the defining document and hope of the UN, I couldn't help but think of what I had just read about the failure of Arthur's beautiful dream. Both were incredibly worthy ideas, which society and human nature in the real world are sadly just not ready to practically allow. The UN and internationalism are currently threatened with irrelevance by the same uncontainable forces and human failings that destroyed Arthur's vision, the same streak of irrational violence, fear, hatred, and selfishness that runs through the heart of us all, and by extension all of our aggregations together as nations or societies in greater or lesser degrees. The same failings that have destroyed every attempt at ending war and providing liberty, equality, and justice for all. The eternal bane of all Utopias.

So, does this mean that we should come to our senses already and just stop trying? I'm not so sure. White ends his book on a more hopeful note, having Arthur call in a youthful page named TomFootnote
Sir Thomas Malory, of course. See what I was saying about allusion and references above?, and ask him to stay out of the coming (and fatal) battle, and instead to make sure that the ideas for which it was being fought would live on.

"Thomas, my idea for those knights was a sort of candle, like these ones here. I have carried it with me for many years with a hand to shield it from the wind. It has flickered often. I am giving you the candle... you won't let it out?"

I think that Arthur finally realized, right there at the edge of death's door, that there would be no winning of a decisive ultimate battle, no magic bullet that would fix everything and lead us to a Utopian world. What matters is slow progress over time, and what allows that is ideas that survive and pervade, that change individual minds, the sentiments and choices of which filter upward to form what we call societies, nations, and the global community. Arthur would die in a futile and foregone battle the next day, but he would not be a failure, because his dream would live on, and others would work towards bringing the world closer to approximating his vision.

Even if the UN meets a similar fate and eventually fails politically, and this incarnation of internationalism goes by the wayside, there's no reason to despair or quit. The world is a better place now than it was looking backward from 1948 by almost every measure. The ideas that the UN and the UDHR made legitimate and important on a global scale are here to stay, enduring in the hearts and minds and actions of millions of people and many governments around the world. The candle may gutter at times, and the ideas may come to manifest themselves in a different form in the future, but I don't think there is any way that particular flame is going to go out anytime soon. Like Arthur, the Once and Future King, they too will return to lead us one day, if we are willing to fight on their side.