- My old friend and fellow early GTer Rod Smith has posted a great many excellent pictures he took at Chicon 7, including a book signing that I attended.
- My mother’s cat Fuzzbucket died yesterday, at 16 years and change. He outlived my poor mother by twelve years, and while skittish as a kitten eventually warmed to me. I’ve never had a cat (for obvious reasons, of which I have four right now) but of all the cats I’ve never had, Fuzzbucket was my favorite. He kept his own LiveJournal page, and the final entry brought a tear to my eye.
- For those who couldn’t attend Chicon and were cut off from viewing the Hugo Awards by an idiotic copyright protection bot, you’ve got another chance: The award ceremony will be re-streamed tomorrow night, September 9, at 7 PM central time.
- This morning’s Gazette had an ad for hearing aids, which bragged of their product having 16 million transistors. This is easier than it used to be, since all those transistors are in one container. Now, does anybody remember the days when ads bragged of radios containing six transistors?
- And while we grayhairs and nohairs are recalling transistor counts in the high single digits, does anybody remember the early Sixties scandal (reported in Popular Electronics, I think) in which Japanese manufacturers would solder additional transistors into simple superhet boards and short the leads together, just so they could advertise the box as a “ten-transistor” radio?
- Nice piece from Ars Technica on the deep history of the spaceplane.
- Bill Cherepy sent a link to a marvelous steampunk tennis ball launcher, used for getting pull-strings for antennas (and as often as not, the antennas themselves) into high or otherwise inaccessible places. Gadgets like this (albeit not in steampunk dress) have been around for a long time, and I posted a link to this one (courtesy Jim Strickland) back in March.
- Also from Bill (and several others in the past few days) comes word of a promising if slightly Quixotic attempt to preserve orphaned SF and fantasy. Here’s the main site. At least they’re offering money to authors and estates; most other preservation efforts (of pulp mags and old vinyl, particularly) are pirate projects most visible on Usenet.
- That said, there are projects that limit themselves to out-of-copyright pulps, like this one. One problem, of course, is knowing when a pulp (or anything else from the 1923-1963 era) is out of copyright. Copyright ambiguity only hurts the idea of copyright. We need to codify copyright and require registration, at least for printed works. I’m not as concerned about copyright’s time period, as long as the owners of a copyright are known. As I’ve said here before, I’m apprehensive about competing with hundreds of thousands of now-orphaned books and stories.
- I don’t eat much sugar anymore, but egad, there are now candy-corn flavored Oreos.
piracy
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- MS has apparently got some kind of robo-scanner looking for porn on its SkyDrive service (even folders that are completely private) and if it sees an image it thinks shows too much skin, you could lose your account. If I wasn’t suspicious of cloud storage before (and I was) well, do the math.
- Speaking of clouds, here’s the latest manifestation of Climate Weirding: No hurricanes and almost no tornadoes.
- A study on music buying (and non-buying) habits suggests that P2P file piracy accounts for only about 15% of music acquisition. Sneakernet, by which I mean the trading of files in person and not over a routed network, accounts for 46%. No mention of Usenet, which is something of a wildcard in the piracy scene.
- More on the pirate wars: I am not a big fan of the Olympics, but man, their Wi-Fi cops have cool warwalking gear. (As the article says, it should be fairly easy to see them coming…)
- And to round out this entry’s pirate news, we have Sweden’s scurvy Waffle Pirates.
- I’m trying something new these days: Shut the quadcore down early, then sit quietly and read a (paper) book until my abominably early bedtime. Quite apart from the well-known issues with late nights full of artificial light (hamsters exhibit more distress when placed in water!) I’m wondering if staring at flickering rasters of TV/PC gadgetry could be a particularly short path into clinical depression.
- Guldurn. I did not learn about this kind of bond when I had a chemistry set.
- I was always fond of the Venetian Blinds school of aviation. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Damn, I’m dense sometimes. I startled myself today by looking up from other work and realizing that OWS is gone. It didn’t fade out. It vanished. The most interesting piece of mass psychology in decades walked around a corner and never came out. I have no theory, and nobody online seems to know why either. Wow.
- While checking to see if I was the only one who’d noticed Cooking with Pooh , I came across this compendium of the 25 worst book covers of all time, nearly all of them SF. I’d quibble with a few (of all time?) but the comments are worth the price of admission.
How Not to Fight Ebook Piracy
The estimable Janet Perlman recently posted a link to an article suggesting a “new” concept in ebook piracy protection that doesn’t involve any sort of encryption or tying of files to a particular device. The gist of it is to embed a purchaser’s personal information in the file purchased. If the purchaser knows his/her name or address are somewhere in the file, well, they’re less likely to post it on Pirate Bay, no?
This concept is not new; I remember talking it as long as ten years ago, when ebooks were still exotica. It’s as wrongheaded as it is obvious, for the following reason: The fastest-growing source of files shared on Bit Torrent is material taken from stolen readers, tablets, and smartphones. If somebody swipes my tablet and the files stored on it are somehow traceable to me, then once the files appear on the file sharing networks, publishers might assume that I was the one who uploaded the files–which in most cases is a felony.
This is true whether or not my name is actually embedded in the files. A serial number or database key pointing to my sales record in the publisher’s store would be enough.
I’ve written before about massive ebook collections available on pirate sites. The file I mentioned in that entry was an old one, and crude. Newer and even bigger ones are available now. (No, I won’t tell you where they are.) Specialized collections are turning up as well, as specific as books on programming for Android.
Driving the trend is the appearance of specialized private Bit Torrent trackers catering to ebooks. If you’ve never studied up on the torrent scene it’s a little hard to explain, but Big Media pressure is driving a lot of torrent traffic into a darknet of members-only trackers that keep their members on very short leashes. To avoid getting kicked out you have to upload as much as or more than you download. Of course, if nobody wants to download what you upload (because it’s of poor quality or they already have it) your ratio goes down and the admins show you the door. This creates pressure to find new material to upload, especially in private trackers with few members who very quickly grab everything of even minor interest to them.
The torrent scene is a numbers game, and ebooks are small files compared to movies or TV shows. So collection editors are grabbing files anywhere they can to spin out new collections. If your device is stolen, your files will find their way to the pirate sites. If your name (or some other identifiable traceable to you) is in those files, you’re the one in trouble, and not the pirates themselves.
File piracy may be an unsolvable problem. The last thing we want to do is propose solutions that might turn completely honest purchasers into criminals–thus providing a perverse incentive to stop buying, and pirate other people’s files instead.
Odd Lots
- I’m still alive, and still remodeling. Designing two more Elfa buildouts, in fact, before the Container Store’s annual Elfa sale times out on January 31. Getting migraines from craning my neck during ladder work, too, which has made me disinclined to be perky in this space. It won’t be forever; the painting was finished today, finally. But it will be February before the carpeting’s in.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: plectrum, an implement used to pluck the strings of a stringed instrument such as a guitar or harpsichord. Among the many forms of plectra are guitar picks and harpsichord jacks.
- Here’s an intriguing list of major solar flare events, beginning with the Carrington Event in 1859. Is it just me, or has the Sun done a lot of quieting down in the last 100-odd years?
- Why Megaupload? Those guys had four percent of all Internet traffic worldwide, all of it Linux distros and Project Gutenberg mirrors. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah.
- On the other hand, there are a lot of people who were using Megaupload as a cloud server for their own files. And you wonder why I like local storage.
- As I take a break from remodeling to try and get my head around various current IP topics, it occurs to me that the well-covered Megaupload bust is Streisanding the hell out of the bitlocker concept itself. People who had never heard of bitlockers (alias “one-click hosting”) or indexes like FilesTube are doubtless adding lots of new bookmarks today.
- That swoopy one-piece telephone with the dial on the bottom that you used to see in a lot of spy movies and TV shows? The Ericophon.
- Nancy Frier has found a niche printing firm that can actually print from then original plates used in Alox kites, and so new kites using the original Alox designs may well live again. More as it happens.
- This dream is such a common phenomenon that the dream itself must have a name. What is it? (I’ve had it now and then for probably thirty years.)
- Is there a utility that will search a Web page or pages for a list of search terms every X minutes / days / weeks ?
A Rootlocked Industry
I just heard this morning that the ASUS Transformer Prime will be shipped with a locked bootloader. I wanted to spit; that machine was (until a few hours ago) at the top of my tablet prospects list. Then, about twenty minutes ago, I found the update: ASUS, having felt the Gates of Hell open upon its head for the last four days, decided that it will ship a bootloader unlocker for the product–though at the cost of your warranty.
This topic will be the tech issue of 2012: Whether or not our industry has a rootlocked future.
We’ve had hints about this for some time. I originally wrote off the fact that Android could not access the Xoom’s card slot as some weird failure at Motorola. Then I found that this was only true in the US. Europeans, once they got the Xoom, found full access to the slot. Only where the Xoom was a “Google Experience Device” was the card slot out of reach. So it wasn’t Motorola at all. It was Google declaring war on sideloading, lest sideloading thin out their revenue stream from various Google cloud services.
Looking around at promising tablets, it’s a rare one now that isn’t rootlocked. I evaluated and turned down the Nook Tablet for that reason. (The original Nook Color is still what I consider an open system–though for how long no one knows.) The Xoom 2/XYBoard no longer has a card slot. (Rounded corners are not enough to make me pull the plastic out.)
Put as simply as possible, all of the major vendors want to make the handheld market basically what the TV market is today: A completely locked end-to-end pipeline that guards content from server to screen. ASUS was very clear about that: They had to lock the TP’s bootloader to get Google to allow Google video rentals to operate on the machine. Motorola hasn’t confirmed it, but I’m sure it was the same for the original Xoom. Calling it “video rental” is a misnomer. It’s really pay-per-view, which Big Content has wanted to do for many years. The PC market evolved in too open a fashion to make that possible. The tablet market, by contrast, seems to be jumping right into their pockets.
Part of this is the idiotic “give away the razor, sell the blades” business model. Tablets are often cheaper than they would otherwise be, because their vendors expect to make money on content, with content subsidizing the device cost to the end user. People now expect a tablet to cost no more than a certain amount, and so getting a truly open tablet (without a locked content stream) on the market at a competitive price is far more difficult.
Side comment: Yes, I am an anomaly. I see two or three movies a year (at the theater) and do not watch TV at all. I do read a lot of books, and I’m certainly willing to pay for them, but I do not buy as many as I might if I were more sure that they would not simply evaporate on me someday, due to a corporate bankruptcy or some kind of patent or IP rights battle that doesn’t involve me. If an ebook costs more or less the same as a hardcover, I buy the hardcover. It’s unclear how prevalent my attitude is, but I’m sure it’s prevalent enough to depress digital revenues significantly.
I’ve already mentioned that Android isn’t an OS in the same sense that Windows is. Vendors and carriers can make mods to Android that basically fork the open-source base and turn it into separate OS species that are more “Android compatible” than anything like a single OS. Android isn’t a GPL product. It uses the Apache 2.0 license, which does not compel vendors to release changes back into the community. So Android is a hybrid of open and closed technology that makes the sealed content pipeline possible. (Otherwise, the community would just edit out what it didn’t like and recompile the OS.)
2012 will be an interesting year. The top vendors like Apple, Motorola, and Samsung have enough market share to get away with this. Smaller vendors like ASUS (and down from there) do not. My hope is that we will see smaller vendors offer truly open high-quality Android tablets that do everything but offer pay-per-view content, and are capable of booting into other versions of the OS, or another OS entirely. I’d pay more for such a tablet. A year from now we may know. Stay tuned.
Odd Lots
- Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it–and to those who don’t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I’ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: seedbox, a remote and generally headless system on a high-bandwidth Internet connection, used exclusively to seed torrents in defiance of ISP speed-throttling of BitTorrent users.
- Also pertinent to yesterday’s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender’s remorse, and basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. Apparently the DRM wasn’t DRM-y enough, and Penguin (through the Overdrive technology) locked its titles out. Precisely what the technical issues are is still unclear, but I’m researching it.
- We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85. She died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on November 21. She was the first woman to earn a Hugo or a Nebula award, and did a great deal to drag SF out of the locker room to which the pulps had led it.
- Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun’s Electric Sheep.
- Debsnews now has a wine channel. It’s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: WalMart’s new $3 wine line) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.
- Anybody who’s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate this gadget. Everybody else, move along.
- Many people are sending me links to stories about canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA. This is not new news. However, I didn’t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.
- Maybe the new Spam Singles packaging is the answer. No can!
- Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. You can now see him from space. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. It’s been there since 2006, and consists of 87,000 colored tile “pixels.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Make describes a steam-powered bristlebot. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.
- There may be another reason (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone’s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)
- If you’ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at the staff credits page, you’re missing out on people you haven’t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Pirates and Dummies
I used to go up to the Pirate Bay on an almost weekly basis, to see which Paraglyph Press books were listed there. It ceased to be a priority after Paraglyph folded, and I don’t think I’ve been up there for over a year. Then last week I learned that large NY publisher John Wiley & Sons is preparing a multiple “John Doe” style lawsuit focused on torrent piracy of its staggeringly popular “For Dummies” series. So I sailed back up to the Bay to see how bad it is on the ebook side.
For dummies in search of “For Dummies,” my initial impression is that it’s pretty good, which means that for Wiley, it’s pretty bad. The word “Dummies” can be found in TPB’s torrent catalog 691 times, and although some of those may not be “For Dummies” titles, I’m guessing that nearly all of them are. Individual books are listed, of course, but what probably worries publishers more is that a 6.3 GB file containing 572 “For Dummies” books is listed as well. 6.3 GB sounds like a lot. It’s not. It’s about the size of a single 720p feature-length Blu-Ray rip. 572 PDF ebooks in one lump, egad–in truth, I didn’t know that there were that many “For Dummies” books in existence. (GURPS for Dummies is not something I would have gone looking for.)
Alas, the pirates have forgotten about me personally, and for that matter, about Paraglyph Press itself. Only one Coriolis book is listed, Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book. (There may be others that weren’t cited with the word “Coriolis;” I didn’t search deeply.) As I said, my own last name isn’t present even once. Much more startlingly, David Brin is listed only three times. Connie Willis, twice. Vernor Vinge, once. Nancy Kress, not at all. Being hot must help; Neil Gaiman is listed 49 times.
One gets the impression that reading isn’t a priority among pirates. To find out just what is, you need a better metric, and The Pirate Bay offers one: the number of complete torrents. “Seeders” are people who make available complete copies of a given file. “Leechers” are those who are currently downloading the file. The more seeders, the more popular a file, and the faster it will download to the leechers. (The protocol is interesting and described well here.)
Although there are hundreds of torrent trackers, the Pirate Bay is by far the most popular, ranking 91 on Alexa. I think it’s pretty characteristic of the pirate world in general. So let’s go count Pirate Bay seeders:
- The top audio book is Double Your Reading Speed in Ten Minutes. 548 seeders. (Irony alert! Near-toxic levels!)
- The top ebook is Do Not Open: An Encyclopedia of The World’s Best-Kept Secrets. 1,442 seeders.
- The top pirated app is Photoshop CS5. 6,412 seeders.
- The top music track is “We Found Love” by Rihanna. 7,010 seeders.
- The top game is The Elder Scrolls. 12,438 seeders.
- The top movie is Conan the Barbarian. 17,422 seeders.
- The top TV show (in fact, the top torrent of any kind) is an episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” 23,259 seeders.
I hope I don’t have to beat you over the head with it: Video is twenty times more popular on torrent sites than ebooks. Down in Dummies land, it’s worse: The 572-book “For Dummies” collection has all of 99 seeders. Neil Gaiman’s best (46) is less than half of that.
So why is a major book publisher suing a relative handful of torrenters? I’m guessing that it’s because it can. BitTorrent is extremely “open” in terms of who’s doing it, and if you’re downloading you’re automatically uploading too. Recording the IPs of people in a torrent swarm is easy. Suing them is dirt simple. Some money can be harvested offering settlements, but at those minuscule usage levels, not much. I’m sure that Wiley wants to exert a “chilling effect” on sharing of Dummies books, and they are–but only in the torrent world. Even though my books vanished from the Pirate Bay, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find them out on the bitlockers and Usenet, which for various reasons are much tougher nuts to crack on the legal side.
Video rules the torrent world because video is big, and the BitTorrent protocol is the most effective way to get video downloaded quickly. Small files like ebooks are elsewhere, unless they’re gathered into massive collections the size of Blu-Ray rips. Ebook piracy seems to be a minor issue today because ebook piracy is mostly invisible. It’s out there, and for all that I’ve pondered the problem, I return to the conclusion that the problem has no solution other than to sell the goods easily and cheaply, and to stop teaching people to be pirates by making the media experience complicated with DRM.
In the meantime, announcing mass lawsuits of torrenters of a specific product line pulls the Streisand chain hard. You might as well yell “Come and get it!” to people who hadn’t known that all 572 Dummies books (or ebooks generally) could be found on torrent sites. This has to be balanced against whatever chilling effect the lawsuits may have, and I can’t help but think that it’s a wash, at best. The real result of such suits over the years has been to push piracy into places where it’s difficult to see and almost impossible to police. The First Principle of whatever we try has to be this: Don’t make the problem worse. If this means that no solution presents itself, we may have to content ourselves with that.
Amazon’s Print Replica
A few days ago, Mike Ward tipped me off to a new ebook format coming from Amazon: Print Replica. The new format is a lot like PDF, in that it presents a fixed page layout that cannot be reflowed, only panned and zoomed. A lot of people have been scratching their heads over it, but some things were almost immediately obvious to me:
- Amazon will some time (reasonably) soon release their long-rumored high-res color tablet, capable of displaying fixed-format color page layouts at high quality.
- Amazon wants a piece of the digital textbook market.
- The whole point of the format is time-limited DRM.
- And the whole point of time-limited DRM is to prevent any least possibility of a used ebook textbook market.
I’ve spent a couple of days sniffing around for details, though not much is out there yet. The format in question is .azw4, and you can buy some titles in the new format right now. However, .azw4 ebooks will only render on Kindle for Windows 1.7 and Kindle for Mac 1.7–and only in the US. It’s not only a great deal like PDF; it is PDF, inside a proprietary wrapper. For the moment, it seems that publishers submit a conventional print-image PDF to Amazon, and Amazon places it inside the wrapper.
I’m pretty sure that Print Replica is Amazon’s version of Nook Study, which I mentioned in my April 18, 2011 entry. Nook Study is also a DRM wrapper around a PDF. The DRM is draconian and mostly hated by everyone who’s ever tried it. I’ve never seen evidence that Nook Study is being adopted broadly, but if Amazon’s imitating it, that market must have begun to move.
If it is, it’s probably the only segment of the publishing market that is moving right now, where “moving” means “better than marginally profitable.” Textbooks are the cash cows of the publishing business, and because college education is a monopoly market for books, students shrug and pay well over $100 a copy, often more. There’s very little competition and almost no choice. The prof assigns the book and that’s that. The only shopping possible is for cheaper used copies.
The argument made for digital textbooks is that they are less bulky and can be cheaper than printed textbooks, but cheaper here means $80 as opposed to $120. The argument against is that the legal waters are still very murky on used ebook sales. The doctrine of first sale makes it legal to sell used print textbooks, though there are wrinkles involving importation. Current case law for software suggests that license agreements (even ones that can’t be examined before the sale) may prohibit resale of a physical boxed software product, like AutoCAD. It’s pretty clear that if ebooks are eventually considered software, first sale may no longer apply. To be certain, publishers want textbooks to vanish once each term is over, so that they cannot be resold irrespective of future legal decisions. Once most textbooks are ebooks, every sale is a new, cover-price sale, and if time-limited DRM is taken at face value, once the term is over, the book goes poof. (And whaddaya bet that that $80 e-text will be $85 next year, and $95 the year after that?)
I still have about a quarter of my college textbooks and still refer to them occasionally, most recently Listen, by Nadeau and Tesson (1972.) It’s hard to imagine not having any of the books I studied back then (granting that I only kept the better ones) but it’s sure starting to look like that’s the future. It’s also hard to think of a redder flag to wave in front of the nascent ebook piracy scene than an $80 price tag. As I’ve said many times, I’m glad I got my degree in the 70s, when a term cost $600 and you could keep your books forever.
The Terror of Customer Expectations
As I’ve said any number of times, I loathe DRM and have since I first understood what it was. My reasons are these:
- It makes content delivery systems fragile. DRM adds complexity to a system, and by its nature is constantly looking for a reason to cut people off. Jerry Pournelle made this point at least 30 years ago, when DRM was “copy protection” and floppies ruled the world.
- DRM inconveniences paying users and does very little (if anything) to stop piracy. Because…
- A DRM system only needs to be broken once. A single very bright individual (or a small cadre of them) figures out the crack, then wraps it up in a script or a simple utility that any fool can use. Bruce Schneier made this point at least twenty years ago.
- DRM often ties content to one single company, generally through some kind of Internet permissions system. If that company goes under, DRMed content can become unavailable.
- Related to the above: DRM often (admittedly, not always) ties content to a single device or family of devices. Users who want to move to a different content rendering system can lose everything they’ve paid for.
- Very Large Companies Run By Comittees Of Clueless Egotists (VLCRBCOCEs) forget that the ultimate goal is to curry favor with customers so as to sell them stuff, and allow the pursuit of DRM to make them do really stupid things. Google “sony rootkit” to see how that works. Oh, and Amazon’s private dustup with the 1984 rightholders that led them to “repossess” books right off customer Kindles.
- Consequences of much or all of the above: DRM turns paying customers into pirates. Piss off honest customers a few times, and they’ll start looking on the pirate sites before heading over to your online bookstore.
In short, DRM creates an adversarial relationship between content providers and content purchasers that benefits neither side. As a publisher, I have promised never to force it on my readers.
Which brings us to today’s issue: What happens when online stores force DRM on me? Jim Strickland and I are preparing ebook editions of all our SF, and as time allows I’m going to do the same for my Carl & Jerry books, and even the Old Catholic Studies Series. It’s not news, and certainly not news to me, but we’ve had to confront the fact that Apple forces DRM on book publishers who want access to its store. Jim and I will probably go along, and think of a clever way to get unencumbered epubs to paying iBooks customers.
I don’t know what that clever way will be yet, but you’ll hear more about it as we figure it out. In the meantime, it’s a headscratcher: Why the hell would Apple do this? I’ve been sniffing around and there’s no clear answer. Some think it’s because Apple owns the DRM technology (FairPlay) and it’s in their interest to sell books with FairPlay gunked to them. I doubt that it’s true (it’s like paying yourself for something you already own) and given that you can download bookstore apps from other vendors to iOS, encumbered ebooks are at a competitive disadvantage, right there on Apple’s home turf. (Amazon allows unencumbered ebooks on Kindle.)
If I had to guess, it would be this: One or more VLCRBCOCEs in the print publishing industry, as part of their deals with Apple, demanded that everybody selling on iBooks must be required to use DRM–or no deal. What’s really at stake are customer expectations. Big Print is in a panic over ebook pricing to begin with, as we learned a year or so ago when Amazon and Macmillan jumped down one another’s throats. Macmillan didn’t want Amazon to “train” customers to think that ebooks should cost $9.99. (I was on Macmillan’s side that time, though for a different reason: If they jack their ebook prices up to the sky, I can undercut them much more easily. Amazon, please let publishers control their own pricing–especially huge, clueless, suicidal publishers.) In this case, Big Print doesn’t want customers to think of unencumbered ebooks as normal and expected, and DRM-encumbered ebooks as undesirable anomalies.
That particular war has already been lost, pretty much. Conventional wisdom among the tech savvy is that DRM is bad, and few of the indies use it. Nontechnical ebook buyers will figure it out when they decide to move to another reader system and can’t take their purchases with them. (The ebook business is so new that most people are still on their first reader and their first forty or fifty ebooks.) The day will come in the next few years when Big Print will be a lot less big, and competing against a lot more ebook publishers who have long understood that DRM does no one any good.
And price expectations, egad. $9.99 is so 2010. Many independent publishers now think that $3.99 or even $2.99 is the new normal. Furthermore, Amazon is now worried about yet another price point–99c!–at which their own ebook business model becomes unsustainable. Ebook pricing is still a huge imponderable, and I don’t (yet) have much useful to say about it. I hope to have some real data for you by this time next year.
Do I have proof that Apple was railroaded by Big Print into requiring DRM from all comers? No. But it makes sense to me: Apple didn’t have the negotiating leverage that Amazon or B&N had. If they get bigger, things may change. And if they don’t get bigger, it may be because everybody else, and especially the indies, is eating their lunch. Either way, for weal or woe, Big Print is in trouble, and therein lie many more entries that I hope to write in the near future.
The Inexplicable Pirate Box
I’m still on the long climb back to functionality and can’t do much computing because the current bug has hugely irritated my eyes. However, I did want to call quick attention to one more thing in the pirate universe before going back to bed: David Dart’s Pirate Box. I got the tip from the Jolly Pirate a couple of days ago, and most of the gadget blogs have now picked up the story. It’s a make-it-yourself wireless filesharing node in a pirate lunchbox.
Lesse here: You carry this into a crowded coffee shop so that people can connect from their laptops and smartphones and download whatever pirate goodies are in the box, at least until somebody calls the Bomb Squad.
Ok, I’m just funny that way. But read through the DIY, and ask what I’m asking: Isn’t this a lot of fooling around just to create a wireless file-sharing node? Even a five-year-old beater of a laptop can run Debian and a file server, and software router apps are routine. Furthermore, a laptop looks like a laptop, and when there’s a dozen people at Panera running laptops, it’s a little less easy to tell who’s the pirate.
Unless that’s the idea. This certainly seems to be more about cachet than practical piracy. I’m reminded of warchalking, a silly near-hoax that was getting people’s twickers in a nist back in 2002 or so: marking the locations of wi-fi networks on the sidewalk in chalk, god help us, as though there were no other way to know something was there.
I have the late Harry Helms’ books about pirate radio and I think I understand the psychology. It’s about being a Merry Prankster more than actually getting anything accomplished. And I’m good with that, especially since the 17 people on Earth who will actually build this thing and hang out with it are unlikely to do much damage. (I do grant them points for creativity.)
The Pirate Box reminds me a little of AirStash, which has the advantage of being able to hide in your pocket. The notion of hidden local physical filesharing is an interesting one, and I’m sure that there are better concepts for it hiding out there somewhere. (A USB thumb drive mortared into a brick wall is just one of the gonzo notions I’ve seen recently; something like geocaching with data.) If you know of any more, send me links.
And now it’s back to bed for me.
