Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

The problem with Le Guin's position is that it's so Manichean, a world composed of good guys and bad guys with no ambiguities. To her, it's either sell books like deodorant or some ideal system where it's quality, not marketability, that makes books sell. This sounds good, but it's tripe. As you say, the Internet in general and Amazon in particular have opened up publishing -- Amazon getting huge credit because it not only allows freer publishing, but has set up a system that allows many thousands of new authors to actually connect with readers. Yet, Amazon is also a business focused on selling products at high volume with tight margins. These two goals aren't opposed, they're different aspects of a complex business. Amazon can be both a great contributor and profit-motivated, it's not that hard to see how.

Who defines quality, anyway? The tastemakers, like newspaper reviewers, who nobody much pays attention to anymore? Or Le Guin -- she seems to think she knows what's good. I imagine, what if John Kennedy O'Toole had the opportunity to self-publish A Confederacy of Dunces, instead of facing despair when all the traditional publishers turned him down. What if he'd been able to sell his work like toothpaste on Amazon, even if the tastemakers thought it wasn't worth publishing. To Le Guin, this would somehow violate the ideals the publishing world ought to aspire to. To me, I wish the opportunities offered by Amazon had been around back then.

Despite Amazon's open platform, I'm fairly sure that her phrase:

  "We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience..."

refers to Amazon's conflict with Hachette.

not if you want actual wide readership, as opposed to theoretical wide readership. Ask a blogger!

This should be further up.

I personally found myself skimming through the written version while her delivery left me glued to the screen and quite moved.

That's a list of "Best-sellers initially rejected", though. Not quite the same as quality initially unrecognized. Some of them could still be books of low quality, that happen to be popular.

What a bizarre connection! Disputing the divine right of kings had to be a private act or you faced the consequences; you and I, the consumers, ultimately decide the fate of the millions of businesses that constitute the system we call capitalism within a free market.

"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.

The gift of the artist is to express ideas that are in the air of a particular time, but have not yet been articulated. So it is inevitable that a cultural upheaval would have its origins in the art of a culture, even if it is not easy to draw a direct corollary. The art does not effect the change, except maybe in exceptional circumstances, it only expresses what is already in the air.

You don't have to look very hard to find examples. Take The Wire in the United States, which is all about the futility of the War on Drugs and the harm it causes to its citizens. Only now are we are seeing the first steps of decriminalization in states like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Did The Wire effect that change? No, probably not. But it did articulate the attitude long before it manifested in policy.

The "art of words" has certainly effected huge social change. This is self-evident if you include political commentary and philosophy (Common Sense, Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Communist Manifesto, etc.). If you restrict it to fiction, a common example is 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.

It's easy to point to examples when we construe art (as she does here) as including all forms of creative writing or storytelling. Just one example is work by many literary scholars on the 18th century novel as helping create a new sense of interiority and private life (i.e., reading a novel alone replaced gathering around a fire to hear a story). Or, going back much further, Alexander the Great's obsession with the Iliad would surely count as significant for world history.

Perhaps the real root cause of upheaval such as pervasive discontent correlates with occurrences of revolutionary art. Perhaps the art then acts as an amplifier or accelerator of the discontent, creating a feedback loop. Clearly it helps when the "art" is easily distributed and widely understood (printing press, literacy).

I just finished http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide

Great book, I got the Peter Constantine translation. It was published 30 years before the French revolution.

To answer your question, the fact that the powers that be at the time took the trouble to ban the book is some indication as to the potential they felt it had for disruption.

If you want a behavioral explanation, you should consider the morale of any kind of resistance. Such morale depends on some kind of foundation and support. Inspiration for these may be found in art.

IMO, no, it's false, it just sounds _so_ good.

There is obviously a feedback loop, but that doesn't mean that change begins in art. Art is, like everything else, as much a factor as a product of the growing mindset changes.

You can certainly find examples, but if you think about it, 99% of the art didn't cause any shift.

Is the US socialist after "The Grapes of Wrath", or has race become less of an issue after "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

Was the history of Spain very influenced by Picasso being a communist, or portugal by Pessoa being anti-catholic?

While she may speak with the authority of having written "The Dispossessed" (which is wonderfully good), her words seem to mostly be about Amazon.

In that regard I think her comments miss the mark ("corporate fatwa" being the biggest silliness).

This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better.

I.e. re a typical speech by rms:

"Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."

This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?

Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".

I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her speech was the conflation of concerns that produced an incoherent thesis.

On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find.

The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.

Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, no better or worse than the dozens of alternatives?