In his op-ed for the New York Times, “The Slow Death of the American Author,” Scott Turow launches an indiscriminate polemic against e-books. Turow starts with a recent Supreme Court ruling—one permitting foreign holders of American copyrights to resell their editions in the United States—and ends with a Cold War flag wave against “Soviet-style repression.” Not surprisingly then, Turow’s position is consistently conservative. He advocates for the maintenance of book markets circa 1956, and his vision of an alternative to “Soviet Russia” is a variety of American democracy that is profoundly undemocratic.
Turow’s favored argument is that literary careerism is protected in the Constitution, which includes a line about how Congress ought “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Turow comments, “the idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.” Turow’s first fallacy is to take the Constitution as a kind of divinely-inspired, a-historical document. In fact, copyright law was a relatively new and controversial doctrine in 1780s America, tied to questions about slavery: is owning a text like owning a person’s body? In the early American republic, copyright law was implicated in the complex emergence of federalism—who had authority over fugitive slaves and pirated texts, state or federal governments? The idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to a form of democracy genealogically related to slavery and empire.
The first “modern copyright law,” the Statute of Anne (1710), was amended by a later act in 1739 to prevent Irish booksellers from reprinting British titles and importing them to Britain. Sound familiar? At the time, Ireland was a British colony, and copyright law was an extension of imperial power motivated by racist and colonialist ideologies. Today, arguments for protectionist copyright laws recruit the same allies.
Turow fetishizes a democracy that is by nature exclusive. By railing against Google’s project to digitize in-copyright books, academics who want to use copyrighted materials to teach! to teach in the classroom!, and libraries that want to lend e-books, Turow imagines a world where a print-to-digital transition keeps books in the hands of wealth. The most elite universities tighten their enclosures and the decline of public education accelerates. Libraries disappear. Or even without reduction to absurdity, Turow believes that a fundamental expansion of literary and print materials is inimical to democracy. That letting more people read is somehow hostile to political participation. And indeed, according to one account of the Constitution and its history, “democracy” as it is defined therein is exclusive. It excludes women. It excludes slaves.
One obvious rejoinder to my argument is that in the absence of certain copyright laws, literary production cannot exist. “There would be no books to make free if books were free.” Yet the most fertile periods of literary creation have surrounded controversies over copyright. For example, one need only look to Victorian England to see how literary piracy stimulated and informed our received canon. “There would be no Dickens without pirates.” And maybe we’re moving, in the digital moment, beyond the novel as a popular or artistic forum. Clinging to a myth about what literature is and how it works is counterproductive when media is in such rapid flux.
A cure for struggling authors won’t be found in protectionist and jingoist trade policies, but rather in the e-book industry itself. Turow acknowledges that the “six major publishing houses…all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties…” That kind of collusion, along with structural changes in cultural markets, is contributing to the so-called “slow death of the American author” at least as significantly as foreign imports. Moreover, Turow recognizes that the real problem is piracy, not cheaper foreign products. Off-shore companies rolling out cheap e-books own copyrights to the works published. Perhaps foreign rights to American titles need to be sold at higher prices, and more of that revenue needs to devolve to American authors. But more urgently, the Department of Justice needs to crack down on e-book pirates who do not own the copyrights to the works they are distributing.
Turow winds his essay to a close with a rhetorical question: “Many people would say such changes are simply in the nature of markets, and see no problem if authors are left to write purely for the love of the game. But what sort of society would that be?” Well, it might be a “better” society than the one we currently inhabit. It might be a more tolerant society, a society with greater equality, with less fear and more compassion, a society less beholden to nationalism and more open to global communities, a society committed to compromising about development, climate change, immigration, and civil liberties. Of course, a class of professional authors would cease to exist. But then we would be without a class of people who, to preserve their livelihoods, are motivated to tell us certain stories about reality, to condition our responses to the world, to shape our experiences into limited scripts and to discipline our emotional and cultural lives. Whatever would we do.
Turow’s title alludes to a famous essay by Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” I’m not sure whether the allusion is ironic, because Barthes refutes Turow’s entire thesis. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes attacks the idea that there is some author “out there” who owns “a work.” Barthes spent his career criticizing the politics of the novel, the very anti-democratic democracy Turow champions. But I have heard that Barthes loved nothing more than to read a Balzac novel before going to bed. The novel and all similarly nostalgic things are addictive. We know that they are bad for us, as citizens and as feeling, empathic people living in a world with others, yet we cannot resist their allure. If Barthes killed the author in 1967, we are now facing the slow death of the American novel, perhaps indicative of a coming freedom from the genre’s limitations.