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.

Comments

[John F. Carr]

In 1995 a good monochrome display was better quality than a color display. In the early 1990s I encountered two systems that had 2 bit per pixel monochrome. One was the NeXT cube, which computer historians have heard of. The other was the VXT 2000, which was always obscure.

"Some text might be not only electronically delivered, but also printed out on home printers"

The paperless office arrived long after the prediction of the paperless office. Around 2015 one commenter observed that we had to wait for the older generation of office workers to die off.

[Supremacy Claus]

This article makes the point that things are 10% better after 30 years. Instead of wasting money on the military, on health, on pensions, we should turn into a tech economy. Devote 20% of the gross budget to research and development. The military budget should be 10% by targeting hierarchies, oligarchies, and their families, down to the last kitten, as the first casualties of war. Let the aggressive promoters and profiteers from war die first.
Health may be slashed by ending pointless, painful end of life care, by crushing the med mal lawyer racket and the resulting defensive medicine cost, putting all relatively safe treatments over the counter, have patients treat themselves. Get social security money when physically unable to work. Put all social security payments into index funds to triple the monthly payment.

On the front end, after age 10, all students study all day. Asian students are 3 years ahead of lazy American students. Those disrupting learning get caned every day. If they have ADHD, get them treated. At 15 go into your occupation, including the professions. End high school, a garbage babystting service wasting the most proficient years of life on garbage activity.

This is so slow and stupid, because our elites are so stupid and slow. Fire them. They stink. They are only looking out for themselves. Gee, after 30 years, I can open my car without turning a key.

[John F. Carr]

"local phone calls are already free"

Outside of the computer context, the improvment in phone service has been revolutionary.

I remember somebody leaving to drive four hours home, around the late 1970s. She was asked to "give us a ring" when she arrived so we would know she made it home. Four hours later the phone rang once. We didn't pick it up. That was a trick used to get around expensive long distance rates. A connected call could have cost close to a dollar for the first three minutes. Thanks to regulators, a direct dial call that didn't connect was free.

Now almost everybody has flat rate calling. There's no such thing as a "long distance" call.

The change to flat rate billing also ended what was called the "Spanish-American war" telephone tax. There was a tax on calls billed based on distance. Not on long distance calls in general, on calls that were billed based on the distance between endpoints. By 20 years ago ordinary phone service was not based on distance. So the tax died quietly as a result of statutory interpretation. I don't know if it's still on the books.

The tax was not really a relic of the Spanish-American war. A tax imposed during that war set a precedent that phone service was a thing to be taxed. The tax lapsed and was reinstated a few times.

[TwelveInchPianist]

No more waiting until after 9 for the long distance rates to go down.

I don't think you can dial 7 digits anymore, although I haven't tried it in years.

[David Nieporent]

No more waiting until after 9 for the long distance rates to go down.

As I recall, there were two break points: after 5 pm and then an even lower rate after 9 pm. (Plus, of course, lower rates on weekends.) My mother z"l would always call her family in NY at 5:01 p.m. if there was something time sensitive but not emergency to discuss.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

We used that ring-once trick as kids to ask our mother to pick us up from school if we had to much to walk home (it was only a mile, but it doesn't take much to wear out a 3rd grader's arms).

I remember when i dropped my home phone line, late 1990s. I had just moved to a new job but the phone company (Pac Bell or whoever owned them at the time, maybe SW Bell which became the new AT&T) botched my ISDN computer phone line and I had to call my old ISP for a week. Got a snail mail letter the Thursday before the three day Labor Day weekend demanding I pay $400 RIGHT NOW if I didn't want to be disconnected. I called them Friday from work to find out the haps. I'd been their customer for 20 years; too bad. Did they think I was really going to not pay my bill when I had just moved? Too bad. Over and over: too bad, pay up.

So I sent the check off when I got home. Naturally the weekend delayed it. They disconnected my phone the day the check cleared. Really pissed me off. So I found that if I switched my Airtouch (PacBell) cell phone for Sprint, it worked at my apartment and at work, it had no long distance fees for my family 1000 miles away or my aunt 2000 miles away, and while I still needed the ISDN line, I could drop their cell phone and landline and long distance service and save $100 a month. (Right now, typing that, it horrifies me to realize I was spending so much on the phone, 30 years ago.)

I called PacBell up and congratulated them on saving me $100 a month. The clerk perked right up, that was good news. I said yes, and these are the people to thank, and named everyone who had been such a jerk, and said, "They saved me all that money by being such jerks that I found I could switch to Sprint and save $100 a month. So be sure to thank them all." Click.

Doubt it got anyone in trouble, but it sure felt good.

[David Nieporent]

We used that ring-once trick as kids to ask our mother to pick us up from school if we had to much to walk home (it was only a mile, but it doesn't take much to wear out a 3rd grader's arms).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

[Stephen Lathrop]

John F. Carr — All accomplished with an increase of service costs not much greater than 400% . . . per household member, more than 1000% in all, in my case.

I remember fondly my former single-digit monthly telephone bill.

And don't forget the demise of public telephone booths. That too is a cost.

I believe progress can happen. I reserve a right to decide if it has happened for me.

A much larger cost is demise of public awareness of local geography. GPS turn-by-turn addicts can't tell you whether the river they see drains into the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, or the Arctic Ocean, let alone what local drainage they are in. Has the GPS taken them to the wrong side of the tracks? They have no clue. They did not notice there were tracks—yet another problem.

[David Nieporent]

And don't forget the demise of public telephone booths. That too is a cost.

…for drug dealers and Superman, sure.

A much larger cost is demise of public awareness of local geography. GPS turn-by-turn addicts can't tell you whether the river they see drains into the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, or the Arctic Ocean, let alone what local drainage they are in.

Ok, and?

[tuphat]

"laptop computers might be made so readable and portable that reading text on them will be as easy as reading a book" -- ahead of your time! respect!

[Stephen Lathrop]

People will still buy newspapers for news and will expect to get their familiar columnists, too.

Not so much.

That half-buried bit of misprediction points toward what experience has taught should have been the near-entire focus of Volokh's piece. Like nearly everyone else, EV put his attention, nearly exclusively, on what to expect for consumers. He did that on a mistaken presumption that evolving consumer demand would drive the changes.

What actually happened? Evolving publishing business models dictated almost everything about today's consumer experience. Yet the term, "business model," appears nowhere in the OP.. The few mentions of publishers focus on speculations why evolving consumer practices will make publishers happy too.

Given that, EV's piece must be judged the same kind of failure that almost every long-term cultural prediction turns out to be. Not blameworthy, because the future is destined to remain forever obscure. The task is thus too demanding to warrant blame for even egregious misprediction.

Problem is, EV's merry-but-mistaken romp through an illusory notion of demand-driven internet publishing typifies still-current commentary. It persists to ignore almost everything which determines what actually happens, to focus instead on hoped-for but impossible utopian outcomes, cherished in the imaginations consumers.

Thus, the bad news now evident is not getting much attention. Here it is in a nutshell. Internet publishing will not deliver anything by any process which does not accord with publishers' needs to operate viable business models. If you want to predict what will happen henceforth, you had better learn to focus first on the publishing side of the process. Learn the possibilities and limits which characterize the publishing problem, and practical policies can be created to deliver more-predictable results.

Until then, expect more wheel spinning, consumer dissatisfaction, and ever-burgeoning demands to have government step in to regulate publishing. I hope I am writing for an audience capable to concede that would not be a good result.

[Schroeder4213]

"which I call a cbook."

You were two letters away from appearing in the OED!

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Wikipedia says the first Kindle was in 2007. He was only 12 years ahead of his time.

Man, Professor, you shoulda patented it!

[Currentsitguy]

"The problem, of course, is that computer screens are harder to read than books"

I cannot stress enough the benefit and ease of reading on a dedicated Ebook device, such as a Kindle, Kobo, Pocketbook, etc. The Eink display does one thing, and it does it extremely well, that is display text. Since it is not LED based, there is no imperceptible eye-strain inducing 60Hz flicker. Better models eliminate the blue light and gradually transition to a warmer light as the day goes by into evening. Since they don't do anything but display text there is no distraction from ads, social media, email, or anything else that interrupts your reading experience. The display only requires a fraction of a volt to function so battery life extends into weeks and beyond. They have a storage capacity large enough you can store hundreds if not thousands of books. You can quite literally carry around your entire library with you. My Kobo is one of the most useful and used devices I carry with me.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

I have three Kindles. They are great for reading, with one caveat -- the displays cannot scroll continuously. They have to flip pages, just like a physical book, and I like scrolling. But the displays are fantastic for reading.

Then I got a TCL NXTPAPER tablet. No glare. Runs Android, so there are numerous reading apps, and at least some have scrolling. I haven't used the kindles since I got it. The display is hard to explain. There is almost no reflection. You cannot use it as a mirror. If you look straight at it, no reflection at all, no glare. If you tilt it just right, you can get some light reflection instead of flat black, but still read it. Reading in bright sunlight is impossible, but the Kindle is still readable. That's the only advantage of the Kindle.

[jb]

It's interesting. As others have noted, Professor Volokh got the idea of an ebook/cbook almost exactly right--dedicated readers came within about a decade and have become quite popular. (Although, surprisingly to me, printed books are still much more popular!) They're also generally quite a bit cheaper than printed books, especially when first published. This is one of the few places I can think of where prices really came down for electronic vs. physical media.

On the other hand, his assessment of how people would consume short-form written media was pretty far off. People adapted to reading stuff on computers quite quickly, so unless you were reading something long-form, computers (and now mobile devices) are fine. I don't know anyone who reads the news on their ebook reader, and obviously the "send an article to get printed every night" never really happened.