What’s your research and writing worth?

Nothing, apparently … if you agree with Andersonomics as it’s interpreted by some folks. Your content has no value if you make it digitally available—unless maybe you’re a rockstar or already sponsored.

Andersonomics? This is my term for economics as revealed by Chris Anderson, first in an article in Wired, then in his book The Long Tail and now in the Wired article from his forthcoming book Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Andersononomics—the devaluation of content online—is how many are interpreting the "Free!" article—and, frankly, the only way I can interpret it.

Anderson hammers on the notion that the incremental cost of one more digital copy of anything is nearly zero. Which means, he asserts, that digital content needs to be free to the consumer—with the enormous costs of hosting and distribution taken care of by cross-subsidy, advertising, or "freemium" services. All of which may work out for the "thick head" of digital resources—the biggies, the ones with hundreds of thousands or millions of monthly hits. Just as it’s probably realistic for true rockstar musicians and authors to give away digital downloads of their music or books, because it will boost the audiences for live concerts, speaking tours, and other paid events.

In other words, free works fine for the thick head—but not so well for those further down the curve, people on the long tail. If it’s wrong or hopeless to ask for direct payment for content distributed digitally, and if you’re in a niche where your site receives tens or hundreds of hits a day, advertising isn’t going to do the job. Free and the long tail don’t work together very well.

I won’t attempt to fisk "Free!" as a whole. (I’m not wild about neologisms in general, but "fisk," meaning to criticize an essay or argument in extreme detail, according to Wikipedia, has a certain rightness about it.) I do note, with sadness but no surprise, that Anderson is another one who defines media in a way that excludes books, sound recordings, movies, DVDs, games, scholarly journals, and a fair number of magazines—when he says that the "three-party system" of payment, where advertisers pay publishers most of the cost of creating and distributing products to readers and viewers, is "the basis of virtually all media." He’s not the first to make that grotesque oversimplification, and he won’t be the last.

That’s not my main problem here. As a niche writer, my main problem is that "Free!" doesn’t work for niche creators unless they’re underwritten up front. The model devalues the work that goes into creating digital media. The writer and researcher, in this model, are essentially worthless unless they’re famous.

This isn’t entirely hypothetical. I’ve self-published three books through Lulu as an ongoing experiment, after publishing a dozen books through major library publishers. The books are in the library field, and I’m not promoting them every day. The highest sales numbers I could expect for any of them would be in the hundreds or very low four digits (and two digits is still possible for two of the three). These are niche products, in a field where charging handsomely for each copy isn’t plausible.

Because a couple of people asked about the possibility (and Lulu makes it so easy), I added downloadable PDF versions of the books early in 2008—set at a price that would yield essentially the same net revenue to me as the trade paperbacks.

Last spring, I encountered a blog posting—by a generally reasonable younger librarian—taking me to task for charging any price for a downloadable book. As picked up by another blogger, I was essentially called clueless and money-grubbing because I thought that several hundred hours of research and writing deserved a few bucks reward when presented in book form.

It was an isolated incident, but the thinking is squarely in line with Anderson’s model. Nowhere does he mention the value of the creation itself. It’s all about distribution. What’s particularly bothersome is that some people can (and do) take that to mean that it’s wrong to charge for digital material—and right to copy it for free, regardless of the creator’s intent.

Such a mind-set won’t eliminate some novels or some other forms of creation, and it won’t hurt the most popular writers and other artists. What it will do, I suspect, is discourage those of us who work in niches and don’t have institutional sponsorship. If we know going in that it’s assumed our work should be free if it’s digital, a lot of that work just won’t get done. That, I submit, is unfortunate for econtent and for creativity in general.