There?s a growing movement among some folks to make all information in the world available to everyone on the planet at no charge.

But if information is free to consumers, that means the salaries of the subject matter experts, writers, and editors whose job it is to produce content must all be paid by advertising, rather than subscription and product sales. One can argue that all content producers would be then influenced by advertisers, who would hold their financial fate in their hands.

Content producers who produce objective, unbiased reporting because they accept no advertising, like traditional subscription newsletter publishers, cannot survive if they must give away everything they produce for free.

Consumers, by the way, don?t buy into this ?all information is free? crap: according to an article in BtoB (1/16/05, p. 10), the information industry will generate revenues of $306 billion in 2006.

That?s an increase of 8% over 2005 sales — an indicator that the growing presence of the Internet is stimulating rather than retarding the sale of paid content.

In an earlier post on this blog, I criticized Google for its plan to scan copyrighted books without permission, calling them ?copyright pirates.?

Now an article in the Record (8/13/05) reports: ?Stung by a publishing industry backlash, Google has halted its effort to scan copyrighted books so the material can be indexed in its search engine.?

However, they are STILL copyright pirates.

The suspension remains effect only until November, giving publishers time to notify Google which copyrighted books they DON?T want scanned.

The Record notes that this scheme ?effectively requires the industry to opt out of the program instead of opting in.?

But wait a minute. That?s CONTRARY to the accepted Internet practice of ?permission marketing,? where the Internet marketer can?t act until I opt in.

So why can Google now copy, scan, and distribute the books I?ve written unless my publisher or I deliberately tell them they can’t?

Also, Google plans to contact the publishers of the copyrighted books only ? not the authors.

But for out of print books, the rights typically revert to the AUTHOR ? so it should be up to ME whether I give Google permission to scan my out of print books.

Right?

No, says Richard Notorianni, Executive Creative Director of Media, Euro RSCG, MVBMS Partners in an interview with Circulation Management (8/05, 0. 10).

?Worldwide, information is ubiquitous,? says Notorianni. ?You can access it any time, any where. Magazines create perspective and knowledge and are enhanced by the chaos around them. The well-edited magazine is a force [in the market].?

What about you? Do you think the Internet makes magazines redundant? Do you turn to the Internet for all or most of your information needs?

Or do you still read magazines ? and find that they indeed add a perspective and knowledge that?s lacking in Web content?

According to a short item in The Week (6/17/05), more than one out of three hardcover books are returned by bookstores to the publishers unsold each year.

And an article in BtoB (6/13/05) reports that after 2006, Thomas Publishing will cease publishing the print edition of its industrial buying directory, Thomas Register, making it available online only.

?Quicker than we probably think, print will be replaced by the online delivery system as the primary source of content,? says consultant Malcolm Netburn in an interview with Circulation Management (6/05).

If you are an author, a bibliophile, and a lover of the printed word — like me — this can?t be happy news to you.

Or can it? Do you see any bright side ? or is it the continuation of the slow death of the book publishing industry as we know it?

My theory is that the Internet has and will continue to diminish the importance of writing skills and the quality of writing over time.

The reason: Pre-Internet, documents were printed, with considerable expense invested in the design and reproduction.

Therefore, publishers and other content producers would take pains to ?get it right.?

After all, once the piece was printed, correcting a typo, grammatical error, or awkward sentence meant going back to press ? again at considerable expense.

In the Internet era, documents are increasingly electronic files posted on a Web site.

Making corrections is easy, and in fact a whole new category of software ? content management systems (CMS) ? has evolved to manage these changes.

Now that content producers realize mistakes are quick, easy, and inexpensive to correct, they are not as concerned with getting it right the first time.

As a result, they are not as particular about the quality of the writing, editing, and even thinking their organizations publish.

So it seems to me that, if anything, writing skills are less important in an age of technology, rather than more important.

Also, the Internet has sped up the pace of business and society.

Therefore, the primary attribute valued today in writing — or any other product or service — is speed, an attribute to which quality often takes a back seat.

Do you agree?

Am I wrong, or has technology ? specifically, the Internet, desktop pubishing, and printing on demand ? reduced two of my favorite things in the world, books and writing, to mere commodities?

When I started out as a writer at Westinghouse in the late 1970s, managers who wanted to demean the craft of writing called it ?word-smithing.?

But I think that the true demise of the craft was signaled when people began referring to writing as ?content? ? which, like pork or butter, sounds like something that should be sold by the pound.

Certainly, with 150,000 books published every year, we?re suffering from a new kind of pollution ? ?content pollution.? There?s simply too much to read, and not enough time to read it.

I worry that, every time I write in my blog, or write an article or a book, I am contributing to this content pollution.

After all, aren?t there already a million others already writing on the same topics and saying the same things? And isn?t that true for virtually every author ? and every topic ? on the planet?

Next time you want to download copyrighted material from the Internet illegally, think of my friend Bob.

?I was a singer-songwriter who had an ?artistic development? deal in Nashville during 2001 to 2002,? Bob wrote me in a recent letter.

?However, the music downloading issues of the past few years killed my Nashville deal. Much of the music industry was hit hard from this illegal activity. From 1999 to 2002, CD sales were down a staggering 30%.?

According to an article in BusinessWeek (12/27/04), online thieves download 2.6 billion illegal music files and 12 million movies a month, costing the music and movie industries millions of dollars a year: “The problem is finding a way to protect copyright holders without blocking important innovations such as the iPod.”

As Harlan Ellison explained to me when I interviewed him for the May 2004 issue of Writer?s Digest magazine:

?There is a culture of belief today that everything should be free. The Internet is the glaring promoter of such slacker-gen ?philosophy.?

?People have been gulled into believing that everything should be free, and that if a professional gets published, well, any thief can steal it, and post it, and the thug feels abused if you whack him for it.

?I?ll go to speak at a college, and I?ll have some kid stand up and say, ?Well, writers shouldn?t be paid; they should put their stuff up; and if people like it they get paid for it.? And I think: what the hell looneytune universe are you living in, kid? The question indicates a total lack of understanding of how Reality Works. This kid?s been living off mommy and daddy too long.

?These mooks don?t think of writing as a craft or even as an occupation. They think it?s some kind of dilettante behavior. Much like their own lives.?

So let me ask: Why are people who advocate Citizens Publishing so dead set against business models where creators charge money — and get paid — for fiction, journalism, music, art, and other content?

Why should ?content be free,? as so many Internet enthusiasts insist ? while people in all other professions, from plumbers to psychotherapists, get paid for their expertise, talents, and efforts?

What say you?

David Lawrence loves blogging and the Internet. He calls it ?Citizens Publishing,? which I think means (a) anybody can say anything and (b) immediately publish it on the Internet where (c) everybody can read it for free.

I interviewed writer Harlan Ellison in the May issue of Writer?s Digest, and he had this to say about writing and the Internet (not specifically blogging):

?Vast hordes of semi- or untalented amateurs festoon the Internet with their ungrammatical, puerile trash, and they think because this ?vanity? publication gets seen by a few people, that they are ?writers.? Horse puckey!

?That isn?t being published; that?s the fanzine press. And there are fewer and fewer real venues for a professional writer nowadays to make a decent living at the craft. Half the world is illiterate, and the other half treads water in the gravy of hubris secretly knowing they can write, if only they had the spare time.

?The Internet has destroyed the use of the library, it has destroyed the use of the dictionary, and as a result people don?t speak as well, because when you go looking up a word in a dictionary, you pass fifty other words that stick in your head and you find other serendipitous stuff, and you just become a better, more literate, smarter and more well-rounded person.?

Writers, publishers, bloggers — is Harlan right? Or out of touch?