Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do": Books, Magazines, and Newspapers

[I thought it would be fun to serialize my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]

[1.] Introduction

Text is even easier to send electronically than music, because it requires much less space, and therefore less transmission time; it can even be transmitted feasibly through today's relatively slow communications mechanisms. Some newspapers already put much of their news online. There are already special electronic-only news services, such as Clarinet Communications' ClariNews, which contains everything from business news to sports to a few columnists (such as Miss Manners) and cartoons (such as Dilbert and Bizarro).

There are also libraries of electronic books. Project Gutenberg at Illinois Benedictine College has created a database of 160 books, including the Bible, Alice in Wonderland, and the collected works of Shakespeare, all available free on the Internet. The Internet Bookstore service sells new books—though at the moment, rather few of them—from various publishers, including Paramount MacMillan, Oxford University Press, and the National Review. The books sell for somewhat less than the print price.

The problem, of course, is that computer screens are harder to read than books. Modern large-screen workstations, with black-on-white display and proportionally spaced fonts, are better than the old 24-by-80 displays that most of us still use. Still, they're not as easy to read as a book, and they certainly aren't as portable.

There are two ways to deal with this: Some text might be not only electronically delivered, but also printed out on home printers; and laptop computers might be made so readable and portable that reading text on them will be as easy as reading a book. I'll deal with these two possibilities in turn.

[2.] Short Opinion Articles and Home Printers

I suggested above that, in the coming years, more and more homes will have a computer, an infobahn connection, and probably a music recorder connected to the computer. But even more common than the recorder will be the laser printer. Laser printers can generate text that's as readable as what you see in a newspaper; today they cost as little as $400. While people probably wouldn't like hundreds of unbound, single-sided, 8½″ x 11″ sheets of paper coming off their printers—which is what a complete book or newspaper requires—one to five sheets should be no problem.

Many people make a living writing short, periodic articles. There are columnists, either daily or weekly, such as William Safire and Mike Royko. There are comic strip artists. There are also organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Rifle Association (NRA), and many smaller ones, which periodically send out their ideas-or at least would like to send out their ideas-to their members or fellow travelers.

Electronic delivery, assuming it's cheap enough, is a perfect medium for these writers and their readers. The setup would be simple.

(1) A consumer will run a program on a home computer that will display a list of available columns. This list would be indexed by author, topic, and so on.

(2) The consumer can then choose a column; the cost of the subscription will be automatically transferred from his account to the writer's.

(3) Every night, or once every week, a column will be sent to the consumer's computer, which will automatically print it.

The writers win under this system, because they can reach readers whom they otherwise couldn't reach: people in areas where no newspaper carries the writer's column, and people who don't subscribe to a newspaper. Moreover, by cutting out the middleman, columnists may be able to get more per subscriber than they do today. And readers win too, because they can get columns that they otherwise couldn't.

Electronic delivery is also perfect for public interest organizations. Today, they have to communicate with people by mail, a costly operation. If the infobahn dramatically cuts the cost, they can increase their impact by writing to their members more often, and by reaching nonmembers, too. If delivering three or four pages costs five cents, the ACLU could offer people a weekly "ACLU Action Letter" for $2.50 a year. Millions of sympathizers might well want to subscribe at that rate, especially if they could do so in minutes from their home computers.

Technology: There's every reason to think the cost of transmitting the text will be very low. Two information infrastructures of today are useful analogies: According to a recent estimate, the cost of transmitting 2000 bytes (about a page of uncompressed text), even using today's relatively primitive Internet technology, is about 1/6 of a cent; and local phone calls are already free. As newer, faster delivery methods come online, the cost of transmission should fall even below that of the Internet.

The big expense will probably be paper. Paper now costs about one cent per page. A daily one-page column might thus cost the consumer as little as two cents a day-one cent for the paper and one for the transmission cost and profit for the sender. This comes to less than $10 a year. The per-item paper costs will go down if the consumer subscribes to more than one item, since the computer can fit several columns or comics onto one page. Even if the transmission costs are somewhat higher, the result should still be quite affordable.

Consumer Satisfaction: This format should also satisfy consumers. Print quality will be good, subscribing will be easy, and the columns will arrive automatically on the printer, with no extra keys to punch every morning. Some people might actually prefer a few pages of their favorite stuff to a thick newspaper they must unfold and search through.

Of course, some people will be unwilling to pay even pennies for the columns. They may already be subscribing to a local paper, which is full of columns and cartoons and other things. After paying $100 to $200 a year for the subscription, they may not want to pay more.

Nonetheless, the great majority of people do not subscribe to newspapers. Many of them might not much like print, but others don't want all the data newspapers provide-they may find it irrelevant, or they might get it from radio when they drive to work, or they might not have time to read the newspaper every day. They might well prefer paying, say, $25 a year for the few columns and comics they really like.

Even people who already subscribe to newspapers may be willing to pay that much for the columns the newspaper doesn't carry. Twenty-five dollars a year is cheap as entertainment goes, especially when it's entertainment that the reader knows he'll enjoy, and that he can easily subscribe to on a whim. Some people may be deterred by the cost, but lots won't be.

Speaker Willingness: Finally, there should be no shortage of willing high-quality speakers. Public interest organizations should be happy to use this medium, and they can certainly provide quality (if partisan) commentary to their subscribers.

The situation is different for existing columnists. William Safire and Judith Martin (Miss Manners), for instance, already appear in hundreds of newspapers. Their syndication agreements may contain exclusivity clauses ensuring that the columns won't appear in more than one newspaper in each market. These newspapers might be reluctant to let the columns appear electronically in the same markets that the newspapers serve.

Nonetheless, competitive pressures will eventually make more and more of the good columnists electronically available. Electronic suppliers could distribute columns with geographic restrictions: A consumer can subscribe in Las Vegas but not in Los Angeles. Columnists can thus give their newspapers exclusivity, while still taking advantage of markets in which their columns otherwise wouldn't run.

Newspapers might be hesitant to go along even with this scheme because the electronic distribution system competes with newspapers as a medium, and newspapers may be reluctant to give any edge to their competitor. But every subscriber for a one-cent daily column could be $3 a year in a columnist's pocket. If the columnist can reach 100,000 extra subscribers—and millions of people read (not just have access to) the highest-profile columnists—that's a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Persuading columnists to forgo this market could be expensive for newspapers. Some newspapers might get some columnists to agree not to publish electronically; more might get them to limit distribution to places where the columns are unavailable in print. But not all newspapers would be able or willing to do this in the face of the substantial economic pressure on the columnist to go electronic.

Moreover, good opinion pieces don't cost a lot to produce. Not everyone can consistently write informative, readable prose, but neither is the talent remarkably rare. Tens of thousands of people can do the job. With the electronic medium, each of them will be able to throw a hat into the ring.

If the Safires and the Martins don't do it, others will. Of course, they'll have to find their audience, in competition with thousands of others. But finding this audience electronically will be easier than finding a comparable audience with newspapers; and even if most columnists fail, that'll just be because others will succeed.

The Survival of Newspaper Columns: Note that, unlike record stores—which I think will be largely displaced by the electronic music databases—opinion columns in newspapers will survive. People will still buy newspapers for news and will expect to get their familiar columnists, too. Moreover, an up-and-coming columnist may still prefer to be published by a newspaper, with potential access to millions of readers, instead of trying to find his own following on the electronic services. My claim is only that electronic opinion columns will thrive alongside newspapers.

[3.] Cbooks and Books, Magazines, and Newspapers

In the previous Subsection, I focused on short opinion pieces printed out on home printers; books, I suggested, couldn't be conveniently delivered this way. But home printers will become less necessary once computer screens are developed that are roughly as readable, portable, and lightweight as books. One possibility, which I call a cbook, would be a display that is the size of a small book, folds open like a book, and has the resolution of a book. The technology doesn't exist yet, but it seems within reach.

You would connect the cbook to your home computer and use the computer to access an electronic database. This database would contain tens of thousands of books stored in electronic form. You'd select the one you want—searching by title, by author, or by subject-and download it to your cbook. Then you'd read it as you would a normal book, but pushing a button instead of flipping pages. There would be ways, of course, to do all the normal "features" of a book-go to a particular page, set a bookmark, highlight some text, write a note to yourself on the margin, and so on. And there would be other features normal books don't have:

• You could search a book for a given word or concept much more easily than with traditional indexes.
• Foreign-language books would have built-in dictionaries.
• You could easily carry around hundreds of books; the only limit will be the size of your internal disk drive.
• Books could easily be updated to reflect new developments or to correct errors. {Suppliers can easily update the central database, so all future buyers will get the updated version. Suppliers can even update the book for people who have already bought it and downloaded it onto their cbooks. The publishers can set up a service to which any cbook owner can connect, perhaps every week or month, and automatically receive updates—for a charge—for all the books he owns. This service will be just like a pocket part for a legal treatise, but with no need to print, mail, and stuff, and no need for the reader to check both the main part and the pocket part.}
• The book could be exhaustively footnoted without having the footnotes appear obtrusively on each page. And you could easily follow cross-references in the footnotes without keeping a finger on every page.
• Children's books could be more interactive.

Cbooks will also be especially useful for distributing magazines and newspapers. First, they'll save publishers a lot in printing and delivery. A typical issue of a monthly magazine, for instance, costs seventy-five to eighty cents to print and mail, but can be electronically delivered for pennies. Many scientific journals are already shifting into electronic distribution, in part because of the huge cost (several hundred thousand dollars a year) of acquiring all relevant journals for a university science department library. Competition will force publishers to pass some of these savings along to consumers, but even if they do, they'll still win, because as magazines get cheaper more people will buy them.

Second, cbooks will allow timelier distribution of the material. A Newsweek could deliver news to people that's genuinely current, rather than two or three days out of date. Newspapers could update their stories as news comes in, and would no longer have to be up to a day behind broadcasters. This will help the consumer as well as the publisher; and once some publishers do this, competitive pressures will push others to follow.

Finally, cbooks will give newspaper publishers access to geographical markets that are now closed to them. Today, only The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Christian Science Monitor are nationally distributed. Cbooks will open the whole country, and eventually the whole developed world, to all newspaper publishers. While many regional newspapers won't get much from this, would-be national publications—say, The Washington Post, or a liberal equivalent of The Wall Street Journal, or the entertainment section of The Los Angeles Times—definitely could. Foreign newspapers, which have a ready market of expatriates and others who are professionally or personally interested in the foreign country, could benefit as well.

Technology: The cbook would cost much more than a typical book. The cheapest laptop displays wholesale today for about $1100, with the price supposed to fall shortly to as little as $500 to $700. The price will probably fall further, but it seems likely it will always remain fairly high.

One could easily save that much, though, in lower costs for the actual literary works themselves. Working from a customary 10-15% royalty, and including a mark-up for editorial services and electronic database costs, books that sell today for $5 to $20 could sell for as little as $1 to $4 each. And, of course, the reader will save the costs of driving to the bookstore, trying to track down a book that isn't on the shelves, and finding that the book he wants is out-of-print.

Scanning old books into computers is hard, but publishers must put virtually all new books into electronic form to print them. Publishers can easily send all new books to the electronic databases.

The cbook won't have the feel of a conventional book, even if it has the look. People who like feeling paper rather than plastic under their fingertips may always loathe cbooks, or so I've heard from friends with whom I've discussed this concept. On the other hand, some people will prefer cbooks to bulky, hard-to-unfold, ink-smearing newspapers. And while some will always appreciate paper books (though probably not all paper books) as objects of art, the main purpose of books is to communicate information. The cbook will be useful enough that many people raised on paper books will switch to it. But even those who wouldn't read it for themselves will buy it for their children, especially given the possible educational benefits of interactive cbooks. And the children, when they grow up, might not be as nostalgic for paper books as today's adults may be.