Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do”: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers
[I thought it would be fun to serialize my 1995 Yale Law Journal article “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” written for a symposium called “Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I’d serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
[1.] Introduction
Text is even easier to send electronically than music, because it requires much less space, and therefore less transmission time; it can even be transmitted feasibly through today’s relatively slow communications mechanisms. Some newspapers already put much of their news online. There are already special electronic-only news services, such as Clarinet Communications’ ClariNews, which contains everything from business news to sports to a few columnists (such as Miss Manners) and cartoons (such as Dilbert and Bizarro).
There are also libraries of electronic books. Project Gutenberg at Illinois Benedictine College has created a database of 160 books, including the Bible, Alice in Wonderland, and the collected works of Shakespeare, all available free on the Internet. The Internet Bookstore service sells new books—though at the moment, rather few of them—from various publishers, including Paramount MacMillan, Oxford University Press, and the National Review. The books sell for somewhat less than the print price.
The problem, of course, is that computer screens are harder to read than books. Modern large-screen workstations, with black-on-white display and proportionally spaced fonts, are better than the old 24-by-80 displays that most of us still use. Still, they’re not as easy to read as a book, and they certainly aren’t as portable.
There are two ways to deal with this: Some text might be not only electronically delivered, but also printed out on home printers; and laptop computers might be made so readable and portable that reading text on them will be as easy as reading a book. I’ll deal with these two possibilities in turn.
[2.] Short Opinion Articles and Home Printers
I suggested above that, in the coming years, more and more homes will have a computer, an infobahn connection, and probably a music recorder connected to the computer. But even more common than the recorder will be the laser printer. Laser printers can generate text that’s as readable as what you see in a newspaper; today they cost as little as $400. While people probably wouldn’t like hundreds of unbound, single-sided, 8½″ x 11″ sheets of paper coming off their printers—which is what a complete book or newspaper requires—one to five sheets should be no problem.
Many people make a living writing short, periodic articles. There are columnists, either daily or weekly, such as William Safire and Mike Royko. There are comic strip artists. There are also organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Rifle Association (NRA), and many smaller ones, which periodically send out their ideas-or at least would like to send out their ideas-to their members or fellow travelers.
Electronic delivery, assuming it’s cheap enough, is a perfect medium for these writers and their readers. The setup would be simple.
(1) A consumer will run a program on a home computer that will display a list of available columns. This list would be indexed by author, topic, and so on.
(2) The consumer can then choose a column; the cost of the subscription will be automatically transferred from his account to the writer’s.
(3) Every night, or once every week, a column will be sent to the consumer’s computer, which will automatically print it.
The writers win under this system, because they can reach readers whom they otherwise couldn’t reach: people in areas where no newspaper carries the writer’s column, and people who don’t subscribe to a newspaper. Moreover, by cutting out the middleman, columnists may be able to get more per subscriber than they do today. And readers win too, because they can get columns that they otherwise couldn’t.
Electronic delivery is also perfect for public interest organizations. Today, they have to communicate with people by mail, a costly operation. If the infobahn dramatically cuts the cost, they can increase their impact by writing to their members more often, and by reaching nonmembers, too. If delivering three or four pages cost
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