If you remember my lengthy report on the odd miscellany of movements by publisher Simon & Schuster in recent months, you'll know what I'm talking about. Otherwise, you can read the series or take my word that S&S appears to be seeking to wrest control over the distribution of books into their own hands (as opposed to those of bookstores).
One of S&S's most interesting moves was the change in their author-publisher contract that granted them publication rights for the full length of a book's copyright.
Recently, I've received an anonymous tip suggesting that at least two other major publishers may be following suit--in this case by sticking clauses in their boilerplate contracts allowing them to register copyrights to books in the name of the publisher instead of the author. This would essentially grant them the same power--placing publication rights under their control for enough time not to have to worry about anyone else grabbing the rights back.
I don't know who the publishers are (though I have my suspicions), but it seems the clauses were picked up very recently in contracts received by literary agents.
Given this new information, I'm definitely increasing in my conviction that the return system is not long for this world. Here's why:
Let's say it happened tomorrow. At least three publishers--being Simon & Schuster plus our Publishers X and Y--one day tell bookstores, "Hey, guess what: you can't return books anymore." The first thing that happens is that bookstores stop buying books from them and change their business plan to compensate (possibly by opening their doors to used books, which would be a way to keep bestselling authors on their shelves). This is short-term, and hopefully that's all there is to it; after a little while, the bookstores cave and the publishers get their way.
But what happens if that's not all there is to it? What if the bookstores continue to fight it and refuse to carry non-returnable books? It's certainly a possibility that other publishers might exploit the situation by continuing to accept returns. If that happened, then authors frustrated by falling sales in the care of non-returnable publishers might jump ship as soon as they could. If the non-returnables lost enough revenue sources this way, they might end up being driven out of business; not exactly the desired outcome.
The best way avoid this would be to ensure that the authors published under non-returnable imprints stay that way. Scribner and Pocket Books are both S&S imprints; what happens when Stephen King books are no longer available from bookstore that refuse to buy non-returnable?
Granted, that itself is an unlikely scenario; authors that generate sales as high as King can frankly have whatever kind of contract they want, but the industry isn't sustained by bestsellers--contrary to popular belief, the real way for publishers to keep things moving is to generate enough books that earn out on their investment; not spectacular sellers, but reliable ones, are the bread and butter. It's much more likely that publishers would be able to hang onto mid-list and newer authors who can generate that kind of product.
I've talked to a lot of publishing professionals, and I feel confident guessing that if you ranked their top ten biggest wishes, the end of the return system would be one of them. One thing you don't often hear them consider is what kind of sacrifices--temporary or permanent--that kind of change would incur. These contract changes by publishers initially struck me as completely author-unfriendly and malicious, but right now I'm honestly on the fence about them. Considering what they could mean for the industry, is it worth it to have nasty contract clauses thrown in?
Book Publishers Seeking Tighter Control: New Development
Kids These Days... Bah!
Despite the respectful fading into the distance of my #1 news source, bizarre stories keep popping up. My new favorite is the Jane Austen Bozo, a struggling unpublished author in the UK who seems to be looking for a way to blame someone else for his own failure to sell the manuscript to his first novel.
The story is this: frustrated novelist sends manuscripts of Jane Austen novels out to publishers and is surprised when those novels are not accepted for publication. This is supposed to prove that kids today can't recognize quality writing when they see it.
Okay, look, this one's too easy. Look at the picture of David Lassman in the Daily Mail article. The rejection letter he's so proudly displaying is from Harlequin Mills & Boon (yes, that Harlequin), which is not only a completely inappropriate market for a Jane Austen novel, but clearly states in their submission guidelines, "Unless otherwise noted, we do not accept unsolicited complete manuscripts." Notice how short the rejection letter is.
The Daily Mail article itself is a piece of crap, as evidenced by the fact that the author thinks that Penguin and Penguin Classics are the same thing. For more reliable sources, I'll send you to Jim MacDonald and John Scalzi. They've said all that needs to be said in depth about why Lassman's stunt signifies absolutely nothing.
The News Keeps Rollin' In...
A couple notes that have popped up since yesterday:
- A fellow named Will Collier, one of the people who received his copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 4 days early from DeepDiscount.com, attempted to sell his copy on eBay. The book sold for $250, apparently to a reviewer at Publishers Weekly. Hours after the sale, eBay received a notice requesting they take the listing down (a little too late...), from The Christopher Little Literary Agency, which represents J.K. Rowling. The agency alleged that the listing constituted the illegal sale of a copyrighted work, even saying that "Mr. Collier included a copy of our client's work on his eBay advertisement and this amounts to an unlawful copying." I'd love to see whether they could back that up in court (seeing as they have no contractual agreement with eBay or Will Collier regarding the release date of the book), but eBay has given them a pat on the head and taken the expired listing down anyway.
- I found this Boston Globe article by a columnist who seems to be feeling guilty for not getting her kids hooked on Harry Potter because now her son is watching disturbing stories on the news (because, you know, there's absolutely nothing dark or unsettling in Harry Potter books, especially the later ones). Paradoxically, this causes her to wish there was no Harry Potter at all. If anyone can make head or tail of this, please let me know.
Pondering Recategorization
I just found this article, which presents the simple idea that the way stores categorize things is stupid. It's extremely short and I'd encourage you to read the examples. I also like John Klima's comments on the article, highlighting its possible strong and weak points and applying it more to entertainment fields.
It's something to think about the next time you browse your favorite multimedia store: why are Britney Spears and Megadeth in the same musical category? Why are Science Fiction and Horror the same category in the movies section? Why is Cormac McCarthy's The Road placed in the same section as Hemingway and Jane Austen, rather than Pat Frank, Ray Bradbury, and other books that are actually similar?
I don't know about the rest of their stores, but my local Hollywood Video is a paradise in this regard. A few months ago, my girlfriend and I were looking for A Clockwork Orange until we talked to a clerk and were told that it was classified as "Drama." A Series of Unfortunate Events is placed under "Horror." Alien and Aliens are both under "Action/Adventure," whereas Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection are "Science Fiction."
I've been thinking about this: do we need to recategorize our industry? And if so, how?
I agree with Klima: when I'm looking for something specific in my reading/viewing/listening experience (which I almost always am), I don't want to have to slog through mounds of unrelated stuff. For that reason, I'd like to propose that all bookstores, video stores, etc. implement whichever of these new categories apply to them, and move all the appropriate materials to those sections immediately:
1. Anthropomorphizing
Think pet-related humor (e.g. How to Live with a Neurotic Dog), the majority of nature documentaries, Redwall books, and any other products whose appeal relies on erasing distinctions between homo sapiens sapiens and every other animal on Earth. Same basic thing.
2. Branded Authors
John Grisham; Stephen King; Anne Rice; Danielle Steele; Janet Evanovich; Sue Grafton; any author whose name on the covers of their books is way bigger than the title or the artwork. Many of their fans don't read anything else anyway, so let's just give them their own section and eliminate those massive blocks of Stephen King et al books from the middle of the Fiction section.
3. Don't Go There
There's sitcoms, and then there's Don't Go There sitcoms; so many, in fact, that they deserve their own category, especially onwards from the 1990's, at which point they began to comprise at least half of the shows on television.
4. The DaVinci Code
I'm actually serious about this one. The DaVinci Code has enough related nonfiction and rip-off novels to qualify as its own genre; I'm just not sure what to call it other than Modern-Classical Cataclysmic Ancient Mystery Thriller. Seriously, there's a friggin' ton of them now.
5. Tie-Ins
Again, really could be its own category (and sometimes already is, depending where you go).
6. Roman a Clef
They're not exactly memoirs, but they're not exactly fiction. They're just these kind of nebulous, deliberately ambiguous based-on-real-life-except-not kind of stories, usually dealing with coming of age or some other period of extreme angst. They're extremely widespread, and for some reason I can't figure out, some people love them.
Harry Potter Leaks Are Definitely Real (No Spoilers)
Deep Throat Discount breaks story on Nixon Potter!
I wanted to track everything down and verify it myself before blogging about this one, so you can be sure I'm not working from rumors, biased sources, single sources, or doctored photos.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows can currently be downloaded using BitTorrent through at least one torrent tracker, and has been there since at least July 17th in the form of digital photos taken of each of the book's pages. Claims that the manuscript only goes up to page 495 and claims that it's really a piece of fanfiction faked onto the pages through photoshop or a similar program are false. I've tracked down and examined the file, and it is undoubtedly the real Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Needless to say, Scholastic has not taken this lightly. Millions have been spent on preventing any kind of early release of the book (another factor leading to doubts that the manuscript is real).
At first, it wasn't clear how this could have happened. My best guess was that the culprit had to be someone who worked in close proximity with copies of the book (which could be a lot of people, from employees of Scholastic to any of the thousands of bookstores carrying it, to somebody in the warehouse at a distributor like Ingram or Baker & Taylor). However, yesterday it surfaced that an online bookshop called Deepdiscount.com had sent copies out ahead of schedule, with as many as 1,200 arriving in preorderers' maliboxes on--yep--July 17th. Scholastic has filed a lawsuit against the company that owns Deepdiscount.com.
One of the more interesting takes I've seen on this came from PublishersLunch: "It's also fascinating that emphasis in press coverage is not that the entire manuscript has been pirated and is available for free online--which it is--but that spoilers are available."
At a time like this, every world publishing house that holds its region's rights to Harry Potter needs to kick things into overdrive; they need to start doing round-the-clock damage control to eliminate the problems caused by this leak, which will kill all their carefully laid plans for the book's release in their tracks if left unattended.
Not.
Contrary to PublishersLunch, the thing I find most fascinating about this incident is the number of people who don't care. Potter fans who I talk to are horrified at the idea of "cheating" online with a pirated e-copy that's difficult to read. As discouraging as it is for a publisher to spend millions containing possible leak points, their concerns over this strike me as a Grinch scenario. As in:
And the grinch, with greedy grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes, or bags!"
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.
Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!"
I'd be surprised if this incident cuts, even insignificantly, into any of the vogue surrounding the book's release, or the sales of the books itself. When it comes to this point, people just want their midnight release parties, their 789-page hardcovers with fancy artwork, the awe, the experience, and most of all, the community. I've seen people who have read the pirated copy, but never anyone who has decided not to buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because it's already been spoiled in a pirated edition. Even the people who post the torrents urge their downloaders to "Go out and buy the book!"
I'm not sure whether the publishers should find that encouraging or discouraging: millions down the toilet--and in the end, for something they don't even seem to need to worry about.
Blah Blah Harry Potter Blah Blah; or, How Movies and Books Are Different
To get caught up, see my previous post about the Harry Potter books.
I figure now is a good time to talk about the movies, why they're not the same, and in in what ways they're not. The perception among the general public is, well, there's the books which are real popular and make lots of money, and there's the movies which are real popular and make lots of money. It comes as no surprise to you all, I'm sure, that it doesn't quite work that way, that the movies and the books are in fact quite different, because, well, movies and books are different.
The biggest difference is that the movies are super-lucrative, mainly because they don't have to contend with the discount wars that the books do. But why is that? Look at the other post and you'll remember that the books' discount wars and loss leaders come mainly from Harry Potter's unusual cycle of demand, enormous for about a day and then virtually nothing. However, this alone isn't enough to explain the difference; indeed, it's something the movies and the books have in common. There's huge demand for movie tickets the day of release. The last movie made eight figures on its midnight screening alone (on a Wednesday for cryin' out loud).
No, there are other differences involved. The cycle of money on the Harry Potter franchise comes from more than just demand; venue, medium, and other factors play large roles as well. Some examples:
1. You can't see the Harry Potter movies at Wal-Mart, Safeway, or those gift shops they have in airports, all places that sell the books. Put it this way: between where I live and the 2 closest movie theaters, there are about 15 places to buy the books (3 grocery stores, 2 CVS pharmacies, 2 Barnes & Nobles, 4 university bookstores, 1 Target, and 3 used bookstores). Not only are there far fewer movie theaters competing (most people just go to the closest one to them), there are fewer companies that need to compete. Of the 7 theaters within close driving distance from where I live, 4 are Drexel theaters, 2 are AMC, and 1 is a Marcus. And I live in the 15th largest city in America; many smaller communities have only a single theater or company running the show. Recruiting customer loyalty, a major motivating factor behind discount wars, is just less of an issue.
2. Harry Potter DVD sales are more sustainable. Even though most of the places I've mentioned to buy the books are also places to buy the DVD's, the same rules of demand don't apply. Because just about everyone who wants to see the movie already has, there's no rush for Harry Potter DVD's and no need to make the first, cheapest sale.
3. There are just more interests involved with a movie. The film industry doesn't have the kind of internal logic that makes losing money on a bestseller ultimately beneficial. In the book world, the idea is that deep discounters increase their business by having the lowest price, allowing the publisher to keep its venues open (though deep discounting has driven a fair number of bookstores into the ground as well). But the process of bringing a film to theaters involves the work of too many salaried and commissioned professionals--far more than are involved in the production of a book--to make that logic compute.
4. There's much more franchising involved with a movie. No matter what, the release of a major motion picture will almost always be a more high-profile event than the release of a book, meaning more opportunities to make money from subsidiary rights like posters, clothing, actor publicity spots, action figures, happy meal toys, and so on. Most books never receive any subsidiary deals, and the ones that do usually only get one or two (and audiobook and a movie, for example).
This isn't to say that movies are necessarily more profitable than books. The film industry is also much more based on blockbuster successes and monumental failures; major films tend to either bang or bust (some people will tell you that the book industry is becoming more like this, and those people are LIARS). And there's a lot of other differences, too: instances like Harry Potter are really prime material for observing them.
I'm Cookin'
Well, Pizza Hut panned out (oops--no pun intended). I start work there tomorrow as a cook, with the professed intention of moving up into management. It's strictly a part-time gig, at least for now.
The only reason this particularly merits its own post is because of a couple relevant questions I was asked during my job interview regarding my BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. The first question was why I'm not off making millions, which you probably know the answer to (and I'm sure did he, except insofar as he wanted to watch for warning signs that I might take the job too lightly).
The second, though, was why I'm not working in publishing professionally, and what it is that I do want to be doing.
Of course, the first answer was that I am working in publishing professionally; I'm a real, live copyeditor under contract by a real, live book publisher. The problem is that I can't expect more than one project a month.
To "what do you want to be doing," my reply went something like, "Well, more or less what I'm doing now... I'd just like to get paid more for it." This was referring to something I'd said earlier: basically, that I was working part-time on freelance writing, editing, and publishing jobs while looking for something stable to pay the bills.
Then he asked if I wouldn't rather be doing that creative, freelance stuff full-time, like going off and writing the Great American Novel.
My answer was, "Well... no. I don't think I'm at the point where I could write a novel or anything like that. I went to college because I wanted this kind of creative work, and I've got it. I don't need anything grand, at least for now."
There's a little bit of idealism in that, but for the most part, it's honesty. Part of going through college in this field is learning not to expect the grandiose visions of the entertainment business that our culture has presupposed.
Now, keep in mind, this is a question of degrees. I have an undergraduate degree in freakin' Writing; entry-level jobs aren't the same deal in every field. Part of it is also that I don't live in New York; if you want to work in publishing and you're willing to do that, great.
Still, it goes as a general principle that jobs in which success comes rapidly are very, very, very few. Especially in entertainment, where the path to success isn't clear (cf. "no front door"), it's easy to mistake rational living for giving up on a dream. In fact, there's always mobility as long as you don't get stuck of your own accord (or do something extraordinarily dumb, like plagiarize a novel or run a production company into the ground).
In any case, I need some sleep. Work starts in 12 hours.
I Honestly Didn't See This Coming
I recently got turned onto this case study, which I find both interesting and disturbing. I wonder if this is the kind of thing my parents worried about when they tried to talk me out of buying Street Fighter II for Genesis when I was nine, though I'm sure the reality is that this is a far cry from what they had in mind.
To distill the post, a man developed a form of paranoid schizophrenia that made him think he was inside what appears to be a Grand Theft Auto game. This led him to steal a series of vehicles and assault several people, though he thankfully never killed anyone.
On one side of the issue, paranoid schizophrenia is a mental illness that arises from a number of combining factors, so blaming it directly on the presence of games like Grand Theft Auto in our culture is out of place. On the other side, the study mentions that the delusions experienced by paranoid schizophrenics--I'm God, Secret agents are trying to get me, I'm inside a video game--always reflect some modern cultural element, and the omnipresence of games like this in our culture means that there will inevitably be such cases.
Speculation and scapegoating tend to run wild when things like this come up, and as much as I love to comment on controversial issues, I have to say that this time it's really a "keep calm and carry on" scenario. Nobody should or ever will have to think about the possibility of influence on the severely mentally ill when designing the content of entertainment; there's just no accounting for it.
Things I'm Doing: Writing Invoices and Dealing with My Own Appalling Habits
For those of you who have been managing to read this blog in spite of our technical difficulties lately, I want to apologize, first for the disarrayed state of things, but also for putting my rants so close together. If you're tired of hearing about grand, abstract issues, just bear with me: I swear I'm not planning it this way. I'm writing as news items pop up. Guess it's just been an odd couple of weeks.
I completed my first book-length editing project recently, which was a lot of fun. There was some kind of situation that made it difficult to reach the author when things needed added or modified, so I had to use my best judgment on edits, rewrite a few scenes, and even write a few new scenes myself. Not the easiest job, but definitely rewarding; if nothing else, it gave me a feel for what it's like to maintain continuity over 300 pages.
Now that I'm finished, I need to write an invoice. Somehow, when I was thinking about how to conduct myself as a freelancer, this is something that never came up, probably just because I've never had to bill somebody for my services before (unless you count my last summer job, where I needed to invoke terms like "Bureau of Labor" and "Laws regarding prompt payment of wages" if I wanted my paycheck). Writing an invoice isn't exactly a skill, except insofar as you need to know what goes on it. At the bare minimum, it should be your name and address, your contractee's name and address, a list of items and services delivered and the amount to be paid, and of course a header that says something like "invoice for items delivered."
Depending on the job, there may be more to it than that. Sample forms are easy to find on the web (and so are sample contracts and other paperwork, by the way); it's a good idea to study some of these. I've heard that MS Excel has a spreadsheet template, but I haven't tried it. At my income, I don't see why I should shell out the dough for MS Office when its advantages over Open Office are so scant (if any).
But my biggest job right now is dealing with my own work habits. Writing and editing is a profession where it's easy to goof off for several reasons. First, because there's really no set way to accomplish what you're doing, or even a concrete goal to work towards. Editing a book basically consists of getting a manuscript in the mail with a note that says "make this better." Writing jobs tend to be even more vague. Second is the fact that I work from a home office, where every source of diversion imaginable is within arms reach. The combination of these things doesn't exactly compel me to get things done expediently. As Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist anything but temptation."
At the same time, I won't claim that my work habits are truly horrendous. I've heard stories. One professor I met mentioned that one of his students could only write anything if she had just finished cleaning her room and was listening to a certain song on repeat. Everyone has habits like these when it comes to writing and editing, and unfortunately the only way to break them is to just get the fark over it. Not easy, but not impossible. In any case, this is why we have deadlines.
The Boy Who Cried "Censorship!"
Last week I talked about why it's important for allegedly humorous material to actually be funny, and a couple days ago a grand example landed right on my desk. The source is, of all things, my high school (Columbus Alternative High School, a.k.a. CAHS), by way of The Other Paper, a local indie not-exactly-newspaper.
The situation is that a student was suspended for a day for distributing an "underground" student newspaper called Verbal Abuse in the hallway, tucked inside copies of the official student newspaper, The CAHSmic Herald (yeah, I know...). He had been caught doing so before and asked to stop, but that didn't seem to bother him. The student's parents are issuing a first ammendment lawsuit against the district.
The Other Paper, in what I think demonstrates terrible journalistic form, spends about 95% of the article interviewing the staff of Verbal Abuse and the lawyer representing Ben Burkholder, the student who was suspended (not, himself, being a member of Verbal Abuse's staff), with a few generic comments from one or two school officials tokenly thrown in. The lawyer predicts that Burkholder's family will win (which... you know... duh; he's their freakin' lawyer), which The Other Paper uses to imply that they really will win.
I've talked to a few people who have read the article, most of whom, like The Other Paper, were jumping onto Burkholder's side. The dominant mode of thinking seems to be that Verbal Abuse is being censored, and censorship is a violation of free speech. The key phrase I've heard is "discrimination on the basis of content."
It always amazes me how many people who really should know about things like free press have ideas that just don't compute. Because it's pretty clear to me that Burkholder's position is not a free press issue at all.
Here's how it works: the staff of Verbal Abuse is free to print up and distribute all the newspapers they want, and they'll never have to worry about being incriminated, prosecuted, or fined. That's free press. And the school also has the right to forbid it from being distributed on school grounds if they see it as disruptive of the school environment.
Is that censorship? You betcha. It's probably also dumb, if for no other reason then because I still talk to CAHS students and nobody gives a flying frak about Verbal Abuse anyway (I've read a few of their stories myself, and I can see why. I'll give you a hint: it's because it's not funny).
What it's not is illegal or unconstitutional. I'm as anti-censorship as anybody, but you won't catch me thinking that institutional censorship and free speech aren't mutually exculsive. As I've made clear, I'm no fan of the MPAA, but they're free to stick their ratings on movies all they want; that's their right, the same way banning Verbal Abuse is the school's right.
As for "discrimination on the basis of content--" that's exactly what it is. And there's nothing wrong with that either. Discrimination on the basis of content is one of the industry's most widespread policies--except we tend to call it "selectiveness." If discrimination on the basis of content was unconstitutional then my magazine, Spinning Whorl would have to print every single story, article, and artwork that was submitted to us. Every issue would be 400 pages long and 99% of it would be crap. Every store in the country would have to carry it if we wanted them to, and they'd have to display it just as prominently as their bestselling titles. Barnes & Noble stores would be the size of a small town.
In any case, I'll be eagerly awaiting the outcome of Burkholder v. Columbus Public Schools.
To get back to issue of comedic value, though--and I may roast for saying this, but so be it--the main problem I see with viewing Verbal Abuse's situation as some kind of lofty question about free expression is the fact that the newspaper itself is... well... not good. To give you an idea, I'll quote The Other Paper:
In issue 7, the front-page story dealt with the district's credit recovery system, which allows students who have failed a course to recover the credit and graduate.
...
It then evolves--or devolves, depending on who's reading it--into a spoof of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, suggesting Upper Arlington* HIgh School students have the opportunity to purchase CAHS credit recovery students as slaves for a "going rate of about $10,000 per unit" resulting in $1 million in annual revenue for Columbus Public Schools.
Let's take a minute to recover from the side-splitting laughter we're all experiencing. Granted, these people are (at least, legally speaking) just kids--kids who I've only got about five years on, but whatever. Still, the fact is that the school's literary magazine puts out stuff that's about 10 times as "questionable" in terms of content as Verbal Abuse. Students pull goofy pranks all the time that don't land them suspensions.
Removing myself from the situation as much as possible, I think the pure and simple case is that things like Verbal Abuse that actually contain humor or some grain of creative quality go on in schools all the time and are allowed to continue within reason. But when they stop registering as funny or creative--as in Verbal Abuse's case, then a kid shoving copies into people's hands in the hallway registers as a disruption instead, and that's where the trouble starts.
I do think that suspending Burkholder was a stupid thing to do, and I sympathize with his family. I was a lonesome, artsy middle-schooler with an offbeat sense of humor during the Columbine era of zero-tolerance--enough said. But I also think that the dumbest thing of all is launching a free speech crusade out of an embarrassing clash with school policy.
Quick bit of advice: if your school offers any classes along the lines of "Entertainment and The Law," then I highly suggest taking them. One of the best things you can be in this field is knowledgeable about how what we do is governed; especially since there seems to be a shortage of people who are.
For the Love of All that Is Holy, Universal Music Group Is About to Commit Suicide
Quick run-down of the situation: Universal Music Group is threatening not to renew their contract with Apple to carry their music in the iTunes store. Their reasons for doing so appear to be that they don't care for the amount of control Apple has over how their music is distributed and want to gain back some leverage. This seems to relate directly to Apple's previous announcement that they want to distribute mp3's through iTunes without any DRM attached (essentially, allowing the mp3's to work on music devices other than iPods).
Quick run-down of my analysis: bad move, Universal. Very, very, very bad move.
It is my sincere hope (and my sincere belief that this is a strong possibility) that Apple will tell Universal to go fu-- *ahem* --will tell Universal that they respectfully decline to offer any further contractual leeway, and will regretfully discontinue their partnership if Universal finds their current terms no longer acceptable.
In my fantasy, Steve Jobs's letter to the heads of Universal goes something like this:
Dear Universal,
I'm very sorry that our negotiations had to end the way they did. I've considered your position and decided that you people must either be consciously trying to run your company into the ground, or are experiencing declining judgment as you advance in years and should probably bow out fairly soon.
I suppose, at a time like this, I could point out that we have the most widely-used, user-friendly music store on the web, and that removing your products from our store would render millions of customers unable to purchase digital music of yours compatible with their iPods. I could note that doing so would be sure to generate more negative publicity for you overnight than you've experienced in the last decade or so combined. I could remark that, with your profits dropping as they are, you've got about as much leverage on this issue as a little kid attacking the Statue of Liberty with a plastic shovel.
And I really, really could come down to your corporate office right now and laugh in your faces while using all those reasons to demonstrate why I don't have to do a damned thing about your contract terms. But that's not the real reason I'm refusing to negotiate further.
The real reason is that, frankly, you people are a bunch of as-- *ahem* --hateful nitwits and, like every other music retailer in the world, I'm tired of putting up with your sh-- *ahem* --of dealing with you. As the world's largest record label, you have been the single largest obstacle to the advancement of music in the digital age, and--let's be honest--it's time for you to die.
I sincerely hope you will enjoy not having your music offered in the iTunes music store. Your customers are probably downloading Morpheus as I write. Good luck, and good riddance.
Love,
Your Daddy
Anyway, if I were Steve Jobs, that's what I write.
On all that I hold dear, I swear that I will renounce every criticism of Apple that I have ever made if they show Universal the door on this one. At The Verge a few weeks ago, I remember Kevin Lyman predicting that a major retailer would do something like this in the near future. All I can say is that Lyman has been right about a lot of things before, and I'm crossing my fingers on this one.
