The Socialist Future of Digital Book Publishing

5 min readNov 10, 2015

The book industry is gearing towards a future in which most texts will primarily be published and read digitally, though the technology that will make this change viable is not yet adequately refined, and reading culture has not yet fully-adapted. This digital revolution is, nonetheless, already changing business practices in a dramatic way, and numerous financial concerns are already arising. What sorts of revenue models can be feasible when novels and textbooks exist merely as files that can be handily uploaded and duplicated? How are writers to be incentivized to create compelling, high-quality texts in this coming age? What might the new publishing businesses look like? In this essay, I would like to put forth a route to publication that is already well-established in a niche of print publishing, and which could prove to be delightfully progressive in the digital realm: the issuing of government grants.

A number of options currently exist for writers looking to have their print works subsidized. In Canada, grants can be applied for at the national and provincial levels from several different councils and foundations, including Canada Council for the Arts, Livres Canada Books, and CanadianArtsNet. These organizations all provide numerous grants to various types of projects every year — for example, Canada Council for the Arts’s grants include rather comprehensive funds that can cover the costs of producing high-quality illustrated art books, of translating texts into Aboriginal languages, and even of going on national book promotion tours, in addition to offering more conventional grants, such as those for writing novels. Certain criteria must be met in order to qualify for funding: all of these grants require the applying writers to be residents of the specified country or province at least, but often also require the works produced to have some sort of cultural relevance, or for the authors to have received formal training in their crafts, etc. Sums awarded can be as high as $40 000 per work.

These grants function as a way for the government to ensure that Canada keeps producing meaningful, substantial works — something that might become a growing concern as digital texts, like digital music and digital photography, might soon find its consumers expecting to gain more free access to products. Authors could be better-motivated to work in this emerging landscape if they received money not for selling their works to consumers directly, but for having produced the work in the first place.

For this idea to be successfully implemented, I imagine a model similar to digital libraries being created. Texts could be provided online for free download as EPUB files, via a government server; perhaps users would need to create a verified account in order to gain access to files, or perhaps these texts could be accessed internationally. The grants that work to make the texts available would be funded by federal taxes. Writers looking to have their works published would apply for their relevant grants, and, if their works were accepted, would receive reasonable remuneration in-turn. Editors and designers would be government-hired to refine the texts for publication. A study by Barry Bozeman and Monica Gaughan on the effect of government grants on quality/quantity of works produced because of them suggests that the existence of grants has a significant effect on workers’ propensity to work within a given industry, and that they increase overall productivity.

This is a model that is admittedly more socialist than present-day Canada allows, and would therefore need to garner strong public support. It would be beneficiary for all parties involved: writers would get paid, editors and designers would find work, readers would get easy access to all texts, and Canada’s cultural capital would grow. Research shows that the percentage of people who are looking to benefit from government programs is steadily growing in the United States, and reached 50% in 2011; it is hard to imagine the landscape looks remarkably different in Canada. Canadian Parliament has recently shown strong support for Creative Commons licensing, even despite a precedence that sought to limit it, proving that they are on the side of supporting wide public interest and the ready availability of texts. The proliferation of the digital age is making society view art and information products in increasingly more socialist ways — the internet almost inherently promotes the act of sharing. Many of the most popular art and information sites on the internet are community-based, such as YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Imgur, Bandcamp, and Vimeo; beyond this, a great deal of pirating of music, movies, and the like occurs. Statistics show that 70% of internet users see nothing wrong with online piracy; the problematic aspect of this report is that 98.8% of data currently transferred using peer-to-peer networks is copyrighted. Extensive sharing of documents online, whether legally or through a different means, is probably not going to stop; what needs to change instead is how the documents which will be prolifically passed around are created and shared. Government-funded digital books that are offered to the public for free, under Creative Commons licensing, will actively support the future of authors, and will help keep regular consumers from turning to illegal acquisition methods.

It might seem like increased government support for writers would be detrimental to the existence of publishing houses, but research actually suggests that the opposite would be true. An article on government grants, private R&D funding, and innovation efficiency in transitioning economies found that the prevalence of government grants do not typically crowd out private funding enterprises (such as Canadian publishing houses), but rather stimulate them to be more astute and progressive in searching for works to support and, therefore, to sell. This effect was found to occur much more regularly for smaller enterprises, while mega corporations typically suffered due to a lack of willingness to try innovative methods. This, again, points towards a future in which books will be paid-for and shared in a much less capitalistic manner.

Cultural value is highly-emphasized in the criteria for receiving a government grant — presently this seems to mostly mean literary value, though there is no reason the definition couldn’t be adapted to include scientific, educational, and entertainment-related value. Considering “valuable” books to only mean “literary” ones is quite limiting and even seems, contemporarily, a bit retrogressive. I imagine a government-provided treasury of free-to-take digital books should provide a medley of interesting texts: memoirs of interesting people, studies of scientific phenomena, romance novels about face-eating vampires, etc. Once technology has developed a more sophisticated method for reading long digital texts, and once society’s reading habits begin to substantially trend toward preferring digital over printed books, it would make a whole lot of sense to create such a system.