What
if authors and publishers had to pay a usage tax based on how many words they
used for a book? How would that change
the book industry?
The
tax could be used to stimulate the book industry to produce shorter books (a
tax that caps total word usage per book).
Or it can inspire a varied vocabulary (tax on repeating a word too many
times).
You
may wonder: Who would ever charge such a
tax and could any government get away with such a stunt?
First
Amendment defenders would say such a tax infringes on our right to free
speech. Others would claim that no one
is stopping you from saying what you want to say in other formats -- blog posts,
letters, speeches, etc. – just that the total amount of words in a book is capped. One can write as many books as they want.
Some
would question the purpose of such a tax.
What would the money fund?
Literacy programs? Tree
plantings? Book sales for the
underprivileged? Libraries?
Publishers
may like the idea of a cap – it saves them paper and forces authors to self-edit
and to write more efficiently. Maybe the
potential for unlimited space is not what is so great but rather our ability to
publish a concise book is.
Many
books tend to come in at a certain length, based on genre. A 320-page memoir is not unusual, nor is a
208-page business book or a 400-page novel.
Books tend to represent a genre based on length and size. Kids books tend to be 32 pages. Chapter books might range around 140
pages. But with the tax imposed, perhaps
that would change as well.
How
much could be raised by such a tax? It’s
like the luxury tax in professional sports, where teams that spend beyond the
league-designated salary cap pay a premium or a tax for the luxury of buying up
so many players. Will wealthy publishers
and attention-seeking authors have the resources or the goals to publish books
under the penalty of a tax?
How
many lawsuits will be waged over such a tax?
Will consumers demand longer books – and be willing to pay for
them? How will this impact long books
that get published here and sold overseas – will they get imported here with an
abbreviated translation? What impact
will this tax have on books published here where the foreign rights are shopped
to publishers in other countries?
Of
course, no one is really going to tax words, but it is interesting to think of
how something like that, if it were to happen, could alter the publishing
landscape immensely.
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