The Buchmafia Story

Monday morning in Frankfurt-Bockenheim. Ruth is reading in the bath, the only warm spot in the flat.

The job centre sent her the book “for mental fitness”. It cost 35 marks.

Ruth: The thing won’t sink.

Books don’t float. Ruth calls in her flatmates, Selma and Ansgar.

Selma: The paper has been foamed up. There’s more air in here than book.

Meanwhile, Nuri is at the Trust’s mainframe.

Nuri: “Field V: 2.8”? What’s that supposed to mean?

Later that morning, the four meet at Egon’s petrol station. His car lift can squash a book flat, too.

Ansgar keeps Egon talking while the others slide the book under the lift.

Four centimetres shrink to barely one and a half. The book was 2.8 times as thick as it needed to be, and that’s what Field V means.

Nuri: They pump every book full of air so it looks worth 35 marks.

At noon, the crew sneaks into the Trust. The porter holds every ID upside down, because he can’t read.

Ruth: Lift maintenance. Your paternoster is stuck.

Ansgar applies for an editor’s job as a cover. The interview turns into a duel with red pencils.

An intercepted pneumatic-post capsule holds Holzschliff’s secret cost sheet.

Ansgar: Only sheet four is missing, the one with the production costs. It’s in his safe.

And Ansgar saves a sentence the Trust wanted to strike from its own rules:

§ 14 (3): Books with defects are exempt from fixed pricing.

Remember this sentence. It will matter.

In the evening, the four print thin paperbacks with no air in them, down in Egon’s cellar. The Trust has banned books like these.

Nuri: One costs us 1.20 marks. The Trust charges 35.

At 10:40 p.m. they’re outside Holzschliff’s paper mill by the canal. This is where the air paper is made.

Ruth worked in this mill for sixteen years and knows where the valves are. Tonight the machine is going to make honest paper.

The machine is already running honest paper when Holzschliff suddenly walks into the hall.

Holzschliff: I don’t read, my boy. I weigh.

Ansgar: There are four of us. It’s “ladies and gentlemen”.

Holzschliff: Wendt, you’re fired. Effective immediately.

Nuri: Fine. Then you still owe me eleven hours of overtime.

The gate is already closing. The four jump onto a barge.

Tuesday, half past five. The barge drifts back into the city.

Selma: We’ll call ourselves the Remainders: books nobody wanted, sent back to where they came from.

Ruth: As soon as it’s dark, we go and get sheet four.

The plan is in § 14: books with defects have no fixed price. Any bookseller can sell them as cheaply as they like.

A “defective copy” stamp on the edge of the pages is all it takes. Then the price is “at the seller’s discretion”, and the book costs 3.80 instead of 35 marks.

The Trust would simply round up a few stamped books. So the crew stamps a whole print run.

At 11:41 p.m. the crew creeps into a back yard. A crate stands there, watched by a guard and three spotlights.

Ruth: We do this together. None of us gets over that fence alone.

Inside the crate are proof prints of Holzschliff’s secret cost sheet.

But they’re printed on self-destructing paper that crumbles on its own. In an hour it will all be dust.

Ansgar: Then we’ll just get the original from Holzschliff’s safe.

At 1:12 a.m. the crew is inside the Trust’s print works. Tonight the press prints for them.

Selma: Officially a defective copy.

Every book gets the stamp.

Nuri: Thousands! Nobody can round these up.

At 3:05 a.m. they’re in the archive, in front of Holzschliff’s safe. Ruth cracks it by ear.

But the safe only holds carbon copies. The real sheet four was among the proofs in the crate all along, printed on good paper that doesn’t crumble.

Under the lamp, the watermark shows. The sheet says what a book costs: 1.40 marks to make, 35 marks in the shop.

Ansgar: That’s our proof. In black and white.

5:40 a.m.: Nuri switches the traffic lights to green, Selma listens in on the police radio, and Ruth drives the crew out of town.

Six a.m.: stamped books for 3.80 marks.

Selma: Nobody asks why they’re so cheap. Everyone wants more.

In Frankfurt, Holzschliff measures the reports with his caliper. As if that will help.

The Bockenheim Gazette · Special Edition

Books for 3.80 Marks

Books with a defect stamp are turning up all over the country, for just 3.80 marks. The Trust is holding one crisis meeting after another.

A spokesman would only say the incident is being investigated.

According to a leaked sheet, a hardcover costs 1.40 marks to make. In the shop it costs 35.

Holzschliff: No more paper! Anyone can stamp paper.

That same morning, he writes to all his print works.

Internal memo · Not for publication

We will no longer print books you can touch. Readers will only get a permit to read, and permits expire.

signed, Holzschliff

And what about the old contracts? — H.

Fifteen years later

Holzschliff meant it: there are hardly any paper books left.

And nobody buys books any more. People rent them, as e-books.

Every e-book runs through the World Register, the Trust’s mainframe. Every night at 2:59 a.m. it wipes whatever has expired from every device.

The cheap books from back then are gone too. The screen just says “not available”.

Whatever the Register sends to every device at night goes out through a radio mast at the West Telecom Office.

At 11:38 p.m. the crew rolls through the gate in a repair crew’s truck.

The Remainders have got older, but not one bit better behaved.

Selma: How am I supposed to forge an e-book? You can’t even touch it.

This time, Nuri has the plan.

Nuri: I spent three years helping build the Register under a false name. I know its weak spots.

At 12:31 a.m. they find the terms and conditions in the cable cellar. They say: an e-book cannot have defects.

Ansgar: And I proofread that sentence myself, back then.

Selma: Then the stamp trick won’t work any more.

But Nuri knows a back door: an e-book with “transmission damage” gets cheaper.

So that Frankfurt notices nothing, Nuri feeds the teleprinter harmless lines.

On a tape of the board meeting, they hear what the old contracts say: for every e-book, the Trust pays the authors five marks.

Nuri: If a book costs just 99 pfennigs, the Trust loses 4.01 marks every single time.

So the crew doesn’t have to steal anything. Using an old punch card from the archive, they report transmission damage for every e-book and set the price to 99 pfennigs. The readers do the rest.

At 2:17 a.m., in the transmitter hall, the crew slips the new prices into the broadcast. Then they wait for 2:59.

At 2:59 a.m. the Register sends out the new prices itself, as it does every night. Eleven minutes later, every book on 400,000 devices costs 99 pfennigs.

Nuri: The Trust is sending out our prices for us.

At 3:12 a.m., squeezed into a phone box, the four watch the sales figures climb.

Nuri: Nobody’s stealing anything. Everyone pays the price on the tag.

Ruth: And we didn’t break a thing. Nobody will believe that.

At quarter past six, the night’s payouts lie in front of Holzschliff: a receipt 24 metres long. Instead of a total, it just says “Change roll” at the end.

Ansgar: All his life he weighed books. Now books that weigh nothing at all have ruined him.

The Bockenheim Gazette · Special Edition

Trust Goes Bust

Every e-book now costs just 99 pfennigs, and the Trust loses 4.01 marks on each one. The board calls it transmission damage.

One question remains: why was that old punch card still in the archive at all?

And what happens next? For three weeks now, Radio Bockenheim has been secretly broadcasting at night.

Officially, the station signs off at 12:30 a.m. with the national anthem. But after that, a husky voice on 1548 kilohertz reads out lists of banned books.

The Trust sends tracking vans all over town, but every night the signal jumps three frequencies along.

Every night at 11:58 p.m. someone loads the tape. The note beside it has just one letter on it:

— H.

To be continued