Slashdot Mirror
"Big Publishing's Worst Nightmare"
"The average writer is really more interested in writing than the transaction part of the process."
-- Jack Romanos, President/COO of Simon & Schuster, quoted in NYT"We're confident that publishers add enough value to the process that authors are still going to want to use them."
-- Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, quoted by AP"My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare."
-- Stephen King"Looks like the future of publishing to me."
-- Bruce Schneier
We've had a few people submit this news item, describing it as "shareware." It's not. This is shareware with a bite attached, something else entirely. What King is doing is a real-world test of the Street Performer's Protocol.
The SPP is a proposal for artists to make money without retaining any control over their work (since, on the net, copyright is rapidly being rendered irrelevant). Here's the paper by Kelsey and Schneier if you'd like to get all the technical details.
But the bottom line is that Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel.
Readers aren't going to send in a flood of cash and money orders (!) -- that's a given -- envelopes and addresses are a hassle. Luckily for him, he's brokered a deal with Amazon to accept credit cards, which is pretty sweet considering that most places won't even look at $1 credit card charges -- too much overhead. (My guess would be that Amazon is doing this as a loss leader to get the attention and signups. That won't work forever. Amazon PR didn't return my phone call by press time.)
But the real problem is that King demands that 75% of his readers be honest. That'll never happen.
Kelsey and Schneier's original SPP proposed thoughtfully that authors ask for a flat fee: say, $100,000 for a novel. If the majority of an author's readers never pay, that's fine: as long as the remaining minority is large enough (or rich enough) to collectively make the payment. (If not enough pay, the money stays in escrow and then reverts to its owners.)
King's terms make the question one of relative loyalty, not absolute popularity. He's not offering a transaction with his readers -- he's testing them. And the test is guaranteed to fail.
What he's proposing is a Prisoner's Dilemma played between thousands of people. Because of the large nature of the game, the actual statistical "profit" returned by sending in your dollar is a tiny fraction of the enjoyment you'd get from reading the third installment that King would post. Your payoff matrix looks like:
Novel Released Novel Not Released Cooperate
(pay $1) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $1, profit: $9 $-1 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0
No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.)
Of course there are other considerations (can you sleep at night knowing you cheated Stephen King out of a dollar?) but for the most part, people will weigh these options and decide they're not going to pay.
And once you start thinking that you're not going to pay, you realize that many others won't either, and it starts to look even more like throwing money down a drain. Vicious cycle.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect. Unfortunately, if everyone behaves rationally, we all merely break even (and the novel never comes out); if only we were a little more irrational we'd all make a profit of nine dollars - or however much King's story was worth to us.
Douglas Hofstadter ran an experiment for Scientific American in June 1983, asking twenty friends to play a similar one-shot Dilemma. Even though Hofstadter's was profit-only, no chance of losing money, and even though participants knew their choices would be reported in a national magazine, his cooperation rate was only 30%.
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right.
First of all, the percentage thing needs to go. King doesn't write for the satisfaction of knowing that he has honest readers. He writes to make money.
I suspect King is too used to thinking in terms of royalties, hoping for a good-sized slice of those unpredictably large pies he bakes. He might not know which novel will be the runaway best-seller that will make ten times the money he'd hoped for.
My advice to him would be to relax; don't try to look for the gravy train. You're on the internet now, that won't work. Set a price for your time -- an obscenely high price, to be sure, you're one of the world's most popular writers -- and be content with what you get. When contributions hit that number, release the book.
Second, invite readers to contribute as much as they like toward the novel. For some, a dollar; for real fans, ten dollars or more. Let us decide how much it's worth to us.
Third, hold contributions in escrow until the novel is released, and if the limit is not reached by a certain time, give us our money back. As a contributor, this makes my cost negligible, and changes my payoff matrix to, let's say...
Price Reached Price Not Reached Cooperate
(pay $3) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $3, profit: $7 Get my $3 back: $0 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0
This way, there's no risk; the worst-case scenario is that I lose some time and energy at the mailbox. It's a win-win situation, and I'm much more likely to play.
If Stephen King wants to craft a real nightmare for Big Publishing, that's the plot he needs to use.
(P.S. If you're interested in reading more about the Prisoner's Dilemma, I've assembled a few references -- and thoughts -- at thedilemma.org. See in particular Hofstadter, pp. 740ff., re the one-shot PD.)
(P.P.S. Updated 90 minutes later. I had this link to "the download" up in the top paragraph, but took it out because some people didn't realize it led straight to the pay-me-a-dollar PDF file. Sorry; that's why the link is down here now. If you read it and want to pay your dollar, you can probably figure out to visit stephenking.com, eh?)
OK. You placed a link to the downloadable file RIGHT ON THE FREAKIN' news story. I do not want to pay for the book, or even read it. But I hope this kind of thing takes off.
/.
But I accidentally clicked on the download link, thinking it was ABOUT the download, and not THE download.
Now, the logs will show 1,000,000 slashdotters downloaded without paying, when many in fact were mislead by the story posting.
Way to fuck things up,
I totally agree with this. WTF, slashdot? Why completely screw with people like this? This is the most irresponsible thing I have EVER seen ANY online news source do. Worse than being pro-microsoft because microsoft pays you. To add, EVERYONE WHO CLICKS ON THAT LINK NEEDS TO PAY THEIR $1. To further add, WTF, SLASHDOT? If you want to make a mockery of this entire site, you've done a SMASHING job. You ask people to respect the GNU copyright and then TRAMPLE over steven king's. I simply do not understand a single thing in the world after this moment.
For the same reason that I buy music rather than pirating it. I don't want the people who make it to get fucked. If you steal that file, you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life by the image in your mind, of Stephen King starving in the gutter, offering sexual favors in exchange for crack money.
He also ignores the multiple schelling points which is not present in the traditional prisoner's dilemma.
* Each player does at least as well and sometimes better by cooperating.
There are also multiple moves and the payoff is many more installments than 3 (until the book finishes).
What he doesn't realize (and this is short sighted stupidity) is that n cooperators will always beat n freeloaders in this example.
King's model even allows for 25% freeloaders.
Now, I think King writes trash, so I'm wondering just how many people out there are actually willing to buy his stuff. The potential buyers may be skewed by thousands of non fans just hearing about it, downloading the pdf and then deleting it.
As for third parties, it's really another dynamic--the fact that voting your third-party favorite ends up helping the guy you hate the most. This can be fixed with instant runoff voting: You pick your first choice, second, third, etc. Count up all the first-choice votes. If no one gets over 50%, eliminate the candidate with the least, take all the people who voted for him as first-choice, and count their second-choice votes. Continue until one candidate has over 50%.
This way if, say, you like Keyes and hate Gore, you can vote for Keyes first, Bush second, and Gore last. You don't abandon your first choice just because the media says he can't win, but if he doesn't win it's just like you voted for Bush.
King has stated that you can only download ONCE -- I.E., he's tracking that 70% or better number based on the number of downloads of the .pdf. Thanks to that link on the front page of slashdot that goes DIRECTLY TO THE .PDF, hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are not interested in purchasing the book will now throw the download number off completely, pretty much guaranteeing that the experient WILL FAIL. FIX THE LINK! FIX THE LINK! FIX THE LINK!
Well, following the model of a street performer, they can pack up and leave any time, even if it's right in the middle of your favorite [song|act|juggling|magic trick]. They have no obligation to go on and it's up to the people who are the fans to throw $ in their hat (or into the amazon website).
I personally don't think he's really trying to make money here but is conducting an experiment to see if you can cut out the middleman and communicate directly with the fans. I plan to download it and I plan to pay my $1, if for nothing more than to prove to myself that when I say that I want to get rid of the evil middlemen and that I'll directly support the artists that I'm a fan of, I will.
my $0.02CND.
King doesn't write great fiction. It does follow a formula, like most traditional stories and most of the rest of fiction. People like it. They don't become Better People through it. Sorry.
I mean, I can appreciate difficult literature. But I enjoy traditional literature with traditional formulas more -- and so do most people. Not everyone likes King's formula, but a lot of sci-fi and almost all fantasy is from a formula.
King writes to a formula and he does it pretty well. He doesn't jerk people around. He gives them their hamburger.
--
Steven King bought your account?
So he could post his book at +2?
Now I'm confused...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
- No chance of getting back your donation if the author decides not to publish - as has already been pointed out in this thread, presumably your money belongs to King whether or not he actually publishes the last third of his book. The protocol calls for this money to revert back to the donor.
- Not public domain - King is restricting resale of his novel. This is a bit silly in the context of the protocol. The point of the public-domain phase is to get the work distributed as much as possible, so that many people are exposed to it, maximizing the number who donate.
- No hash - The protocol calls for a cryptographic hash of the work to be published, so that its integrity may be verified when it reaches the public eye. This one's perhaps excusable; King is an established author and we trust him enough to let him write the last third of the book after he gets all the donations in. It wouldn't work at all for a no-name author trying to make a mark, though.
- Not a flat rate - This is the killer. King is implicitly assuming by providing a percentage that he'll be able to track how many people are reading the book. Ain't going to happen. Inevitably, mirrors will spring up, and every download from a mirror is essentially $0.75 right out of King's pocket. If he really wants to get into the spirit of this experiment, he should give up all hopes of controlling or tracking the myriad copies of his novel, and a flat rate on donations is the only way to truly dissociate himself from the old-media ideas of control.
This really is the future of publishing, and King has been known for bold experiments in the past (he wrote the Bachman books, including the novella The Running Man , under a pseudonym as an attempt to determine whether his stardom was an accident.) Hopefully with a little fine-tuning, he can lead the way for more authors using the Protocol to distribute their works.If the law becomes unenforceable, it should cease being the law. Prohibiting people of doing what they regard as they basical right to do (en masse) is plain wrong - state should serve the people, not other way.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Give the man some credit.
He's onto "us". As individuals, we may have honor, but you know as well as I do (and he does), that as a group, the logic here is pure Prisoner's Dilemma, and since most people read Stephen King (well, he's kind of passe now, isn't he?) and not Scientific American, he's just reproducing the experiment for the masses, taking "us" to task on this IP system.
He's basically saying, okay all you info-pirates out there. Put your money where your mouth is. I'm betting y'all just want your free beer.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I can't believe you people just don't "get" it! Have you ever read one of his books? He doesn't expect to get 75% either. He's teasing us on purpose.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Every other story on /. has been about how x technology spells the end for the dominant publishing/music/OS business, because that has been THE whole idea of the computer revolution. It's been sitting in the back of everyone's mind ever since we figured out: hey, you can digitize information, and if everyone had a computer, information ultimately cannot be protected, and will be literally free to make unlimited copies.
That's what went through my mind the day I read the article in Popular Science back in 197x, about Compact Disks. I thought to myself, well, if that information is digital, if these personal computers ever "take off", these guys are going to be in big trouble. I didn't see the MP3 coming until it was here, but I knew that the genie had finally arrived. And he's PISSED!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You know, that's probably what it is. He's probably already got a deal with a publisher to let him do this, the publisher's laughing because people are going to pay him for the first two parts, and then pay THEM for the dead-tree edition because they bought the first two parts, and couldn't get the third one, (because I am 100% certain that the conditions wont be met).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What he doesn't account for, is peer-peer sharing, like if someone put his novel up on Gnutella (hint!) then lots of people could get at it, not be counted as the % who don't pay.
Then there could be some nasty hacker out there who will just set up a perl-script to download the thing a million times, to throw off the stats. All it would take is one jerk-wad to blow it for all the honest folks out there.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Of all people, it may work for him. He's got enough rabid fans to cover that.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Anyways, Slashdot should link to the download page only. By direct linking, people are missing out on the importance of the honor system that King has set up.
Joseph Elwell.
Yes, Jamie, it probably won't work. But can you imagine if it did? Finally, you could create a virtual library that wouldn't be castrated by copyright laws.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
No, there are not (only) three installments. The Faq:
--quote--
How many installments will there be?
That depends on your honesty. If more than 75% of you pay, it rolls. Any less, it folds.
When does the next installment come online?
The second installment will go up August 21st. If people show that they can be trusted to pay, then the third installment will go up in September. We will keep you posted about later installments.
-- end faq quoting--
There will be enough installments to finish the novel. That means enough to finish the story. They will post when they have more info about more installments.
Darn those FAQs, always telling people correct information.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Then, Lard Ulrich will release a drum-only MP3 soundtrack and see how many people pays a dollar to download it.
Then, they'll add a bass guitar track and see how many people pays a dollar and download it.
If this is successfull, they'll add a guitar track and see how many people pays a dollar to download it.
And if THAT is successfull, they'll add the lyrics track and see how much people they'll have coned into paying four bucks a song.
Damn. I should have copyrighted this earlier.
I had the much smaller vision of requesting a small (10c-$1) donation for reading my short stories, payable by PayPal or some other convenient method. Silly of me not to realize Stephen King was already on his way to doing this.
I see it as more of "Shareware Fiction" rather than some sort of donation paradigm, however.
TMH
Personally, I bought the first installment, because I like the concept of moving the middleman to the side (make the middleman more of an advertiser than a publisher...) and dealing pretty much directly to the author.
People, this is where the rubber meets the road! Whatever your position is on King is irrelevant. If you want micropayments, if you don't want the record companies and the publishing houses saying "see they are cheap, want-something-for-nothing theives" then grab the pdf and pay, otherwise we're just giving them ammunition. We have a real chance here to prove those neysayers wrong!
Dont Screw This Up! Long journeys start with a first step.
I hope the experiment is a dreadful failure. One dollar for 20 pages is not a fair bargain by any stretch of the imagination. If the man wants to play for tips, fine, but let each person decide how much (if anything at all) the story is worth to them.
True street performers have no guarantee whatsoever that they will cash in regardless of whether or not they succeed in entertaining passers-by. Why should SKing have such a guarantee?
He can refuse to put out the final chapters if he so desires, so he has created an 'experiment' in which HE can't lose. Regardless of what happens he get's lot's of press and his happy little footnote in Internet history. I'm supposed to be impressed? I'm supposed to cheer the man on? F*CK THAT!
Repeat, F*CK THAT!
The only one being served here is Stephen King. Forgive me if I don't weep for joy as he 'sticks it to the Man' by sticking it to his readers, most of whom are undoubtedly loyal enough to fuel his fantasy with their cash.
Put the WHOLE thing out there with "Please Feel Free To Send Tips To:" info and LIVE or DIE by your little experiment.
**>>BELCH
I'm sorry, jamie, but your commentary is a prime example of trying to fit human behavior into an algorithm. Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people do not perform a cost/benefit analysis when they perform an action. In this case many people will buy the book because they like Stephen King. They don't mind giving King a dollar because they think he's a cool guy. That little factor called "emotion" will play a part in their decision. Hard to believe! And apparently hard for you to conceive...
... or, sabotaging his competitors. Katz has put a link up to the downloadable file without the pay-interface -- why? Not out of any altruistic intent, I can guarantee -- he's personally attempting to sabotage King's attempts.
Why?
If Big Publishing(tm) died, what would Katz have to bitch about? He'd be out of a job.
Way to go, Jon... sacrificing an interesting experiment for your own greedy ends.
You're quite right -- I made the mistake of thinking that it was Katz based purely on the concepts tucked into the fold.
My apologies to Katz and his minions -- my mistake.
/Andrew
However, Stephen King is only working with Amazon to rake in funds for his novel, and that conflicts with the boycott called upon amazon.
What to do... :-(
donfede
--- http://foo.ca
2. Not to print extra copies and sell them to your friends. If you want to print copies and give them away, I can't stop you (in fact I can't stop you from doing anything, which is the beauty of this thing-think of it as web-moshing). But don't sell them. Two reasons: first, it's against the law, and second, it's nasty behavior. Respect my copyright. As a writer, it's all I've got.
It's not the standard legalese agreement, and it gets right to the SPIRIT of the other licenses out there from the GPL and others. This is a Good Thing (tm), and I'm for the theory that is consumer driven, and not prisoner driven - ie, I want to see more books released like this - cheaply, efficiently, etc.--- http://foo.ca
I would certainly buy a copy online if I had a way to make the online transaction.
The only drawback that I see is that Stephen King books are meant to be read with both hands clutching a fifty pound tomb, snug in bed or a chair or streched out on the grass in a public park. I don't really want to read king on a monitor. Plus, there is truly something nice about a hardcover book and pages that is very pleasing for some of us. Also, I like to collect books. I don't want to have two gigabytes of books on my hard drive. I want to have tons of shelves filled with tangible reading material -- each with a different cover and style and appeal. However, the brilliant part of something like this is that you can make a somewhat acceptable compromise and just have a nice printer and a cheap $50 binding tool like a lot of high schools still have and let the consumer become the publisher of their own reading material. Heh.
Anyway, I hope this doesn't push out books you can touch, hold and see on shelves, but I do hope this forces the publishing world to realize they need to be less the nazi's they are and embrace a new world of information and demand.
Glad King is feeling better and that he is still writing, though! I remember shortly after his accident, he had stated that he wasn't sure if he was going to ever write again. And here he's been pumping out some rather interesting material and in interesting mediums recently! I really have to respect and admire this guy. I hope he keeps it up, even if this first main trial doesn't do so well.
King is the fucking man.
---
seumas.com
I would personally want to wait for the book. There is nothing better the sitting at home readng a good book. It is very hard to get into a long document that is on the screen and I really don't want to print out either. Well that is just me.
Its a gimmick. The idea of a "publisher's worst nightmare" is a nice geeky dream fit for a nice geeky media such as the net. It works great for generating interest. I'm sure everyone reading this article and the various links will agree.
I don't think there is any way he could make more money selling novels on the net (currently). That means you will continue to see Stephen King novel's on display at your local mega-bookstore.
Also, what the hell does this have to do with my rights online?
I'm not sure what you're whining about. I've got an extremely high karma, and I earned it fair and square. I haven't even been called a karma whore even once (though I expect I will be now...)
I don't think Signal 11 needs to resort to activating other accounts to boost his karma. He's frequently insightful. You might disagree with me, but I just don't see the conspiracy here.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
... is that you have to have some idea what to ask for. This is by far the greatest stumbling block in my opinion, especially for new authors.
Virtually no one can estimate the "value" of an initial piece of work (or even the first few pieces) from an unknown author. Using the SPP, the first couple of works from an author usually end up horribly under-compensated. While this is useful for gauging the future asking price for prolific authors (such as Mr. King, or long-term performers such as The Rolling Stones), what about the people doing one-offs? Or who only want to write 2-3 works? Inevitably, they get screwed, since the amount they receive via the SPP is considerably less than that which their popularity should dictate.
In order to use the SPP a bit more fairly, I suggest a modification which helps bring the compensation model more in line with a particular work's popularity:
I think this would more fairly compensate the unknown or low-output author. We still need to come up with a better micropayments method than we currently have. PayPal is OK, but by no means problem-free.
-Erik
PS - and the publishers do have a point: they do provide large value-add to the author (PR, printing, tours, editing, equipment, et al). The current question is if the cost they charge is greater than the value-add.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I speak from experience when I say that it's not easy to step out of the standard publishing industry. It's also not easy to step into.
King can be successful with this method, but I don't think it's viable for your average author. I also don't think the SPP is viable.
But for most writers and readers, the biggest problem for non-standard publishing is the lack of an editor. Take Katz for example. Not to pick on him, but if anyone remembers his early articles, they were ripe with typos and inaccuracies. My novel is published at www.xlibris.com, and if you look through the excerpts from other writers, you'll notice the same trend. Writers are notoriously bad at editing their own work. Most wouldn't even know where to begin.
King can afford his own editor. Jim Munroe self-published his second novel. Check it out at www.nomediakings.com He is good enough to edit his own work, and the result is an excellent novel.
Most readers will be profoundly disappointed by the quality of a raw novel.
Editing any book is a huge task. As I mentioned in another post, take a look at self-published, unedited works on the internet, and you'll realize how hard this can be.
King has an editor for this book. Side note: he needs much more aggressive editors for anything he produces.
Too bad because I'd really like to read the story but don't really want to mess up this experiment.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
that King will never make the money he wants from this book, who REALLY wants to download a book and read it on a monitor. I get eyestrain after reading an Ars Technica article, how the hell am I supposed to read a novel? Even if I had a Rocket e-Book or something like that (why would I pay 300$ merely for an eletric display with a memory card?) I wouldn't want to stare at the text on the bloody thing. I'm also not real apt to print out 50 or more pages on my inkjet printer (ink costs money you know) because it would literally take hours to print it all. Either reading it on an eletric toy or my screen or printing it I'm paying for the price of the book in some way. My monitor is using extra electricity in the summer which costs beaucoup cash, my e-Book cost me 300$ which I may or may not make back in the number of books I read on it, or I spend hours printing and have to spend money on both ink and paper to read the book. This is why industrialism exists you fucking technodweebs. Mass production allows the cost of something to be distributed over a large number of products and customers. When I buy a paperback book I'm paying a very small portion of the production of that book. Everyone else who buys it is also paying a small portion of the production, shipment, advertising, and royalties. Distributing things electronically only cuts off a marginal percent of the cost. It's no different than shopping for a "deal" on Amazon and then realizing you have to pay 4$ for shipping and handling of a single book. This leads you to the logic that you need to buy several books to distribute the shipping cost over many products, oh wait thats why mass production is effective. All these generation-y neo-maxi zoom dweebies need to drop their CS classes and take some economics classes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If I may say so, you have excellent taste. I'd chip in at least $50. I'm on my 10th or 12th time through the existing 4 novels, and every new novel which isn't the sequel to Wizard and Glass just makes it worse. Especially since it's starting to sound like this series will bring in elements from many of his other books. Pretty amazing, considering the spartan beginning of The Gunslinger.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The escrow idea sounds pretty hard. Not only do you have this extra, painful obligation to keep clients' payments in escrow in a safe place (banks do fail), but you also have to keep ridiculous records on who paid and where they can be found.
What happens if I pay for my book, then I move, then the payments don't hit the watermark, and ol' King is obligated to send my money back? Kind of a pain, aint it?
What?
What?
So what you're saying, jamie, is Stephen should take all the risk of not making a profit and release the whole novel rather than risk part of the novel and withhold the rest if he doesn't make a reasonable profit?
Basically, Stephen's put his book in escrow; hoping that there's enough honest people who are willing to pay a buck per installment. Why should he swap the book for the money in escrow? So he can lose what little leverage he has to encourage someone to pay? So the M0r@1 31337 can throw his novel around the ethernet like some sort of football?
I like Stephen's plan. The big, bad publishing industry gets the Shaft*, Stephen can pay the mortage on his fourth house, and the reader pays less for the book. And if Stephen doesn't get his profits, he can take his book and go home. And you know what? If we don't like what we've read, we can take our money and go home, too.
* Right on!
George Lee
Whoever wrote the article probably never tips. (How does tipping hold up in the prisoner's dilemma?)
Here is why I tip as well as I do. I go to the same few places around here all of the time. Even when serveice is less than good, I still tip well. Why? Because I don't want the wait-people to remember me as "that cheap guy" and mess with my next order. Tipping is how you reward your wait-person for a job well done, and how you can subtly let them know you are dissatisfied with their service. But not tipping at all (unless things are REALLY bad) is just going to piss them off.
In the context of the prisoner's dilemma, think of it like this. The cost of defecting is that in the next round you are going to get shat upon by the other guy. IIRC, it has been shown that in multiple rounds of PD it is best to cooperate (tip) anyway.
And there you go...
Stephen King is counting # of downloads as compared to # of payments. If you download the PDF file for your use 10 times, he expects to get $7.50 out of the deal.
This whole plan is flawed.
King should have created a website that creates accounts for people wanting to download the book. If you want to pay, fine. If you don't fine. But if someone out there downloads the book a million times just to spite the author, there is nothing that the paying public can do about it.
Creating a user account system would allow King to log in people, and then find out which individuals paid for the document. Each individual could download the file as often as needed.
Personally I open the PDF in my browser, read what I want to at the time, then close it. I haven't ever saved the file to a specific spot on my disk. No need. Just pop it open in the browser and read a little bit where ever I am.
It's too bad that this was not thought out enough at the get-go. If there is a 3rd part to this book released, I will be very surprised if the reason is that King reached the %75 mark.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
We should start a /. poll on who paid what for the book.
$0.00
$1.00
More than $1.00
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
So... anyone who doesn't particularly like Stephen King (or who dislikes Stephen King fans) can just download a copy (or several) with no intention of reading or paying.
Particularly when you allow for download-bots, a model based on ( # payments / # downloads ) seems extraordinarily ripe for abuse.
Of course, as long as the conventional book market exists, this is a risk-free strategy for an established author. If King makes the desired amount of money from downloads, he keeps it free and clear. If he doesn't, he should have no problem finding a publisher to make a dead-tree version at his usual rate. Because there's no chance that he'll end up uncompensated for his time and effort, his threat to discontinue e-distribution in the event of non-payment is credible. This would not be the case for a new or unfamiliar author using the same distribution system.
He was an accident waiting to happen. Most accidents happen at home. Maybe he should have gone out more often.
Thought this was interesting... I wanted to see if the other bits were there just not linked.. So.. rip off the end of the URL to the pdf file, and get:
http://radiant.www.conxion.com/
Pretty funny, I thought.
Here's the text:
You are not permitted to view the contents of this directory.
If you have gotten here by mistake, then please use your back button and follow the correct link for The Plant download.
If you have gotten here on purpose, remember -- don't steal from the blind newsboy.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's going to work for King, and other famous writer, but not any Joe Who.
This morning I heard around 50% people paid immediately. You know why? King has a large enough fan base, and those are the people who download it as soon as possible. So, we have a relative high percentage at first. This is not the same as the experiment in Scientific America, coz' that's simultanenous game. We now have a dynamic game, which is not the same.
The following is my analysis, borrowed from some observation of voting. I read somewhere that the voting rate of an election is higher when there is no clear leader in poll. This is because, a person may think that she/he is the marginal voter who make the difference by voting.
So, when the percentage is large initially, especially for a famous writer like King, the coming reader may put herself/himself as the marginal reader. $1 is not a big deal, at least it's less costful than going to poll station to vote. If I really like it, I will definitely pay, when I find that if I didn't pay will make a difference of all-or-nothing.
So it's going to work. If it fail, it's not because people are selfish, it's because less than 75% of people who downloaded his novel do not like this story.
A sig is redundant.
King's last effort netted him almost $500,000 in spite of being heavily pirated. It's not an "Us vs. Them" situation and his publishing costs are limited to whatever his bandwidth costs. Therefore, if 50,000 people pay for his story, he's made $50,000 minus overhead costs, regardless of how many people DON'T pay. Still not a bad salary, IMHO. Ok, people will cheat, but he's STILL going to make money. Personally, I see this as a good way to distribute copywritable material.
FP
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
It appears this story has vanished off the front page..
BilldaCat
-Scott scott@surrealistic.org
Everyone getting all irate about it.
It's simple. If you like the story, pay up. If you don't like it, or can't pay up, don't.
IF enough people pay, and King sees the $$$, then he'll have the incentive to write the next part of the story.
If the story sucks, and nobody wants to see it, they won't pay!
heh, the Slashdot effect alone could murder this thing.
I think King means well, but he's got the percentage thing all wrong. Not that peole who read it and like it won't pay, but there is probably going to be a large group of people who are going to see what the buzz is about, download the thing, scan through it a bit maybe, but don't intend to actually read the whole thing. Many more will take the "try before you buy" approach, and might decide that they don't like it enough to want to finish it. How many people who watch PBS actually make donations? A fixed level or a more conservative ratio would be more effective of measuring its success. Instead of focusing on each person paying their share, the attention sould be given to making it free for all, and the more generous patrons contributing to its advancement.
LOL!
I hope that you're there at every step of the way, sabotaging every tiny step an author takes towards adapting to the internet. Just blow them into fscking oblivion if they don't take a transcendent leap from what's happening now to the perfect system some nameless hacker has visualized.
That'll get the authors running from the publishing/distribution houses to the internet in no time!
This is terrific content for a discussion Website, and rather out-of-character for Slashdot (unfortunately). Congratulations are in order for jamie.
MJP
"Government has arrogated so extensive a role to itself that it's understandable that many people might imagine that nothing the government has a hand in could possibly have happened without it." -- Brian Doherty
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
You are right, I've read your rant and I'm going to go be a freeloader and a bum.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
You think not? He gets to keep the money from this even if he doesn't put out any more installments. And it's blame-free, because he just points a finger at the evil internet who tried to cheat him.
Great way to get a few quick $s.
Not saying he *is*, but he very well might be...
Yup, it's trivially obvious so we can pretty well count on some jerk doing it. It'd only take one guy with a fast connect to do it. And it probably counts when it starts the download, just start the download and drop the link.
This will fail the way it's written, it has to be set to a flat fee, and a counter so people can see how close they are to it.
The escrow idea would help, but I'm sure he's famous enough that he can get people willing to lose a buck, at least in the beginning.
Tipping is easy to justify if you ever eat in the same place twice, waiters can spit in your food before they bring it out, or worse.
I myself won't pay for the book, because I don't like King. I'll probably grab a copy from a friend later (so as not to screw up the stats for those who do) and give it a read... if I like it, I will pay, but a system designed to extort money should fail.
Keeping track of downloads is the wrong way, it's like saying, give it a try, but if you don't like it, pay anyways, so you don't screw everyone.
I have no idea that King's fans will avoid screwing it up, they want it to succeed. But it'd pretty easy to set up something to download the book from a bunch of different IPs. And I'm sure someone will, eventually, just to fuck stuff up.
The fact that 78% of serious fans obeyed King isn't suprising. I'm not a fan and I didn't download, because I wanted to give it the best chance, but there are people out there who don't just not care, but actively care, about ruining everyone else's fun.
It'll die anyways, some script kiddy will download ten thousand and kill it.
It was fairly obvious even without the article that it won't work if it's based on percentages.
Two things *need* to be changed... First, there needs to be a set ammount of money per installment, not a percentage. Second, there needs to be a limit of the number of installments.
I'm not a SK fan, but I might download a free book to give it a read, *if* it's free and won't hurt anything. Then, if I like it, I'll pay for it. Not before. But I won't do that now because it hurts the whole process if I don't like it and choose not to pay.
I'd also feel cheated if I payed for the first few parts, then found out that instead of ending it in a reasonable ammount of words, SK decided to stretch it out to 500,000 words, in $1/8000 word installments.
At some point, if he decides to keep going, the installments should be free. Otherwise he's suckering people in with the idea of paying less for a book then milking them...
I'd say that the installments should stop at four, or be free from then on. I'd only pay $4, *tops*, for an e-book.
It does seem that he's set it up to fail. He's getting a large whack of cash from fans, and a large percentage of that will go straight to him, and it's gonna go down the tubes, 'forcing' him to stop, and because there's no escrow involved, he has to keep the money... poor boy, cheated by the evil internet.
"What he doesn't realize (and this is short sighted stupidity) is that n cooperators will always beat n freeloaders in this example. "
I'm not sure who "he" refers to in this sentence, so I'll just respond to the last portion. Yes, N coops will beat N defectors. But the pool of defectors is not liable to "predation" by a lone cooperator while a pool of coops IS liable to predation by a single defector. Only if the coops can identify the defector (and, if the pool is large, communicate that identity to each other) can defectors be kept out. Neither of these conditions holds for the King example.
--
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"The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect."
You mention Hofstadter's column, but you neglect to mention his conclusion that the REAL rational strategy is to cooperate, even in a one-shot. Of course, his experiment with rational people didn't pan out as he wanted...
In any case, there are two flaws in your argument:
1) This isn't a one-shot. There are other writers in the world and probably other novels from this writer. Thus we could play the game many more times. For this to work, we'd need some way of identifying the "players" however. In this case, that would also include "did they give copies to other defectors?"
2) (most importantly) You've got the payoff matrix wrong. In addition to the $1 vs $0 in the "Novel not Released" column, you need to add "Didn't get to read the end of the book". Assign tags like so:
A: I defect AND novel released
B: I cooperate AND novel released
C: I defect AND novel not released
D: I cooperate AND novel not released
A game only counts as the Prisoner's Dilemna if A > B > C > D. As it stands, B (coop and get novel) is greater than C (defect and lose novel). But to some people the risk of a dollar is negligble compared with the cost of missing the end of a King novel. To determine the real chances you'd have to do a poll to find people who cared enough about King that they would download a partial novel. Then ask them for numbers that would satisfy
$1 x (risk of losing dollar) - (value of reading FULL novel) x (risk of NOT reading FULL novel) = 0
That said, I think King's choice of a percentage rather than a straight dollar amount will doom this to failure AND I think your idea of escrow is a good one.
--
Give us our karma back! Punish Karma Whores through meta-mod!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Maybe it's enough for some to theorize. I payed my dollar and read the darn thing. It was mildly suspensefull as promised.
Think about it this way: Do you buy cds online? Books online? Stuff online in general? This is just another way to do payments for entertainment, and we should support him if the novel is good.
-Ben
Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary".
What I was trying to say was that I don't think that the length of a book (and we'll limit ourselves to fiction) has any kind of correlation to the quality of the book. I've read some great short stories and novellas and novels, and I've read some really crappy 1000 page monsters.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Perhaps Mr. King needs to make his micropayments a little more "micro" so that customers are being offered a better value.
This is assuming you are measuring the 'value' of a book by the number of pages it has. This seems pretty silly and arbitrary to me.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Now, what i think would be cool would be to have an on-line type of library where you can check the book out onto your computer for a certain amount of time and then it maybe self deletes or something when the time limit is over if you haven't renewed it. I think when people think Internet, they should be thinking, really big library
Hmmmmm.....a library......
Can book publishers legally prevent libraries from loaning out books they publish? How about music? Can music publishers prevent libraries from loaning out CDs? What if they're CDs of MP3s? What if the libraries loan them out by putting them on the web? Aren't public libraries exactly as ethical/unethical as Napster?
Perhaps he has already thought of the escrow idea. Once the initial portion of the novel is out you can bet people will want to pre-order, and Amazon will be happy to take their money. He may have his required cash for the third novel before it's even "published".
Honestly, any predictions of what is going to happen is just a wild guess about uncharted territory. People don't think in terms of the Prisoners Dillema, and if they did everybody would just stop paying once that magic $100,000 point was reached.
I say, just wait and see. The worst thing that happens is it doesn't work and the experiment fails. That's all, no collapse of civilization.
Seeing as there are already at least 188 comments, I'll take the chance that this is repetitive:
I'll pay $1 now. And another in a month. And save both files. If the final installment doesn't come out, so I wasted $2. Big deal. I waste more than that every day on cigarettes.
I'm quite aware of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It was one of the favorite lessons of my micro prof. And your analysis seems good. And no, I shouldn't pay. But then again, I shouldn't support NPR (and won't, until Dianne Rehm is buried) and I shouldn't support PBS (which I do). Sometimes, you have to do the right thing, even if it doesn't make financial sense.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
> How about mailing him a dollar?
Now that's a good idea. Along with a note saying why you're doing it (Amazon boycott).
I've often thought it might be satisfying to mail money directly to a musician after Gnutella'ing one of their albums-- and let them decide whether or not to share it with their publisher.
SK doesn't define "episode" anywhere on that page compared to "installment". If he's talking about $1 per installment, and each installment is only 20 pages, and his books are typically 500 pages plus, he's talking about $25 to pay for one book (assuming, of course, you're being honest.). If you assume he meets his goal and everyone then pays 75%, it's still > $18/book! This is *not* a savings. In fact, he's charging us *more* for each book, all the while circumventing the publisher, so that his profits are increased as well.
If someone knows anywhere where this is explained or clarified please let me know, because I searched his whole damn page and didn't see anything to contradict this.
I wrote an essay called, "Mass-Market Busking: The Inevitable Economics of Software", about this whole class of economic activity.
I think it is relevant to this discussion.
A respected author who stands to loose more money than I can jump over has risked it all to step into the new age publishing. This is a comendable act regardless of the lack of technical savvy employed.
Way to go Stephen. Now if only I liked your books. Regardless, however, I'll buy one for Mom, and hope that others do the same.
The difference between those who genuinely value freedom, and people that are simply cheap, is that the former will pay for goods received when no entity can force them to do so.
An excellent analysis of the probability of success of this experiment.
These questions are of interest to us all, and I guess they must be because at least 1/3 of the stories on here are related to these issues.
Authors seem to have it both the best and the worst on the interenet currently. The best because it's easy to distribute their content economically and the baseline machine / internet connection can handle their medium easily. The worst because they're the poor cousin on the bandwidth requirements scale so their stuff is also easiest to rip off. I hope something's worked out so we can all benefit.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
1) I don't have a credit card and I'm not going to ship 1-USD-notes from Germany per mail to pay for the book. So, as there is no way for me to make micropayments without a huge overhead, I'm not able to participate, just like many other folks around the world (although I /would/ pay that dollar).
2) This whole 'project' can be blown up by a few l33t script kiddies who repeatedly download the file, as I guess the 75 percent value is related to the number of downloads (which is a flawed concept, IMHO).
Nonetheless, I don't think King is in this for the money. He's got a lot already, and he can keep publishing whatever he wants and make more, so this is an interesting project for him. It's the implementation that is flawed... Well, and the whole thing only works with King and maybe half a dozen other bestseller writers, so it's not exactly the model for the future.
FWIW, Credit cards have two items associated with each transaction (you buying something) - the authorization, and the settlement.
The authorization is done at card-swipe time (or one-clicking at Amazon). They check that you have a valid CC, and that the amount of the sale is under the credit limit for the account. The amount of the sale is "reserved" on the card - deducted from the total credit available for later purchases.
At settlement, the merchant validates that they did indeed get the merchandise (whatever form that takes - a UPS box, a download, etc) to you. At that time they actually transfer money. That shows up on your bill.
There has been a lot of talk here about the Escrow type payment system. It really is not needed. There is a built-in time limit, kept by the credit card companies, between authorization and settlement. Originally it was up to 30 days (though now is usually only a week or less).
If the CC companies can guarrantee that a certain kind of authorization is good for X days (say 10, 14, or 30 days), then an author can use that instead of an escrow system.
For example, if King announces his new novel will be published if X dollars are paid for it within a certain time frame, he can collect payments (in variable amounts, no less) for Y days (however long the time period is). If the total at the end is enough, he settles all the payments, everyone's CC get charged, and he puts his book out for free download. If not, he does nothing and all the CC authorizations expire, freeing up the credit on everyones account (whatever they had put in).
Simple. And the nice part is no one can know what the total paid so far has gotten to, so no one can look at the total so far and decide based on it whether to contribute.
Who needs escrows?
It doesn't stop there. I have proof that Signal 11/Enoch Root was the second gunman on the grassy knoll.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Blah blah blah Big Publishing(tm) blah blah. Blah blah post-copyright blah blah. Blah blah whine blah. Blah blah freedom. Blah moan blah greed blah blah. Blah blah blah Artistic Expression(tm) blah blah blah. Blah complain blah blah internet. Blah impossible to control blah blah cat out of bag blah blah. Blah blah new paradigm blah blah. Profit blah blah greed blah blah. Napster good. Blah blah blah. Metallica blah blah blah share blah blah. Consumers blah.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Considering the average length of a King novel (600 .. 700 pages?), he'll be doing quite well if his fan base isn't familiar with grade school math -- That's $30 or $35 per book. :)
you can, just buy it several times... i bought 3 copies but only downloaded once.
Excerpt from a story on Yahoo.
"So far, his bet seemed to be paying off. Marsha DeFilippo, an aide who is working with King on the project, said that as of Monday afternoon there had been about 34,000 downloads and that about 75 percent of the users were paying their dollar right away by credit card. Readers also have the option of mailing payments to a post office box."
Why tell people not to pay for it? Or, that they're not going to pay for it? I know what I want to read and what I don't. I'll give the guy a buck for twenty pages. It was pretty good for twenty pages. You think of the rationel (sp?):
1) You got your 300 page novel at $28.95.
2) That's $.09 a page
3) For twenty pages your paying $1.93, almost two dollars. For one dollar for twenty pages, your getting a bargain.
How much of a novel do you expect for a buck? Don't you realize that if this is a true novel, then the next installment will be HUGE. People aren't all money-grubbing heartless bastards who want to rip people off. Stephen King is showing us this. What is so wrong to think that (GASP) people might actually PAY for this stuff? You might as well 'instruct' us to your EXACT way of thinking, that we shouldn't pay for such 'rubbish' and never think about giving this guy a cent for his work!
"Say your thoughts are not the property of others."
Fair enough. They're not. On the other hand, Stephen King's novel is the property of Stephen King. He wrote it. I read it, I enjoyed it. It's fair to pay him for that.
It's fine with me if you want to download mp3's and warez. But don't try to say that it's revolutionary and world-changing, because it isn't.
That *might* be possible, when something like Robert Hettinga's IBUC is out (supposed to be 01/01/01, but I know how these things usually go, so I'd add "at the earliest" to that date). I don't think the PayPal interface (which is pretty good, don't get me wrong) or even my favorite, e-gold, can do that kind of thing at present without driving readers insane with constant passphrase/account# requests. (I could be wrong, as I have yet to see the latest PayPal shopping cart, and they're smart guys.) I look forward to IBUC and possibly others making this kind of thing possible soon, though.
/. readers can create a free e-gold account and nick me for a bit of gold, if you like. Thanks.
e-metal is cheaper to use than plastic, even if you don't make a market in it, and I wonder what kind of fee he's paying, or if he's getting many "charge backs." As always,
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
There is an extremely positive aspect to King's bypassing his publisher to distribute his work, and a great point to be made here: publishers and other "middle men" don't actually accomplish anything outside of distribution. Think about it: marketing for a book or album or whatnot is unnecessary, since anything worthy of review gets reviews in national publications. While it is true that several of these publications only review what the record/publishing companies tell them to, many other publications review things because the writers themselves thought that it was good. What do these corporations do besides marketing and distribution? They have money. That's it. They will not make your art better. They will not make society better. Think about it: corporate management makes more money than the people who actually produce art, and their benefit to society is not immediately evident, while the artist's benefit is obvious: they provide you with entertainment. What King is doing is eliminating a useless function from the process of his creation. He does not need them, so he gets rid of them. This is how it should be.
You probably should read the post again. It was not posted by Jon Katz, and I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate you dragging his name through the mud without anything at all to support your claims...
And just because something is illegal, doesn't make it wrong.
It's completely true that King is selling the written equivilent of a hamburger. So? He ADMITS IT HIMSELF! He has said before in at least one interview that the majority of his work is a Big Mac for the mind.
Sure he wants more money (only a fool writes for anything but, &etc)... but I bet he also wants less bullshit from a publisher. I'm not a big fan of his work other than the Dark Tower books, but I can respect his rationale.
--
These are *MY* opinions.
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
Why don't you read the article. King Rogered up to publishing the first three chapters, more only if enough people pay. You could wind up wasting $3 reading three chapters of a book that may never be complete. And my argument that it could tally to more than $15 for an average length book. At least if I buy the real thing in hardcover for the same price I have somthing tangible to resell.
Good point, I have to admit that I'd rather donate to a free project than pay for somthing essentially free.
I really have to wonder how any people are like me and won't even look at a incomplete book. I'm sure as hell not gonna pay $15 (assuming 15 chapters) for a damn downloaded book. King's just a money grubbing scammer leeching off the talent he used to have for writing interresting horror. People buy his books at this point because 1)He is in a niche genre - and there are very few new authors getting published.--Don't even think about bringing up the Bachman crap. I the writer wan't you he wouldn't have gotten published in the first place. 2)People are in the habit of buying his books.
Hey Steve, howsa bout you dump a little of that payola back to the community by starting a book publishing house and publishing books by new writers. Didn't you ever write a book about some guys greed coming back to haunt him?
My point on distribution.
I've written two computer books. When I need to buy a computer book, I don't buy off the web, I go to Borders or Barnes & Noble, pull out 3-6 books on the subject, get a coffee and skim through each one. I look at the level of technical skill required, I check things that I know about the subject, and see that the author's got it correct, and I look at the subjects.
If I was in a hurry for a book, I'd still go to Borders or Barne's & Noble, if I need to the book today or tomorrow morning, I'd rather trust myself than Amazon or some self published author.
My point on editors
You don't appreciate an editor until you see what they do to your work. It's humbling, every page has your words changed, your ideas challenged and your uses of utilities questioned. I think it makes for a better book.
Editor's can make for a more consistent book, too. My next book is in the Dummies line. I like the Dummies book, and have bought several (even despite the tax advantages). If you buy a Dummies book, you have a pretty good idea what kind of book you are getting. (No, I don't approve of their aggressive defense of their title, but I understand it).
If you read my books without editing, many phrases wouldn't make sense, and there's less chance what I tell you is right. That's kind of important for a computer book.
PS. If you want to write a book, let me know, ghaberbe@frontiernet.net. My agent specializes in computer books, and would be glad to hear you out.
George
every time you click to the next page, you deduct 5 cents from your PayPal account.
George
Thanks,
George
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Screw the prisoners' dilemma, this is bound to fail for that reason alone. You may say that they can check for multiple downloads from the same IP, but,
- Stephen King does not say that he will do this (in the FAQ), in fact, for the people who want to pay extra, he specifically states not to download it again, so he must not be taking multiple downloads into account.
- Most users are on dialup access and will have a different IP each time they connect.
What Stephen King needs to do is set a target of an amount of money he would like to earn for each installment and if that is reached, then release further installments only when the target is reached.Stephen King should also look at the download numbers for the second installment when determining the success of the first because many people will download the first installment and discover;
- They don't like it,
- They don't have Acrobat and don't want to get it,
- Reading books on a computer is a pain in the ass.
Also, by only releasing it in PDF format, he limits his users to Acrobat and therefore locks them to the screen of a computer. Most people prefer to read elsewhere. Printing out the book would be very expensive and time consuming on most home printers. A format that could at least be viewed on handhelds, like palms, would help to get the book off the computer and out to the places where people prefer to read. More options equals better acceptance.By the way, has anyone here pointed out our concerns to Stephen King?
BeNews also has FAR less traffic than Slashdot, and (I might add) a whole lot less "derivative posting"/"meta-posting" - people writing about posting, the site, moderation, etc., everything besides the articles. Not to mention no piles of useless crap like hot grits et al.
:)
I'm not sure it would work for Slashdot. Of course we won't find out until they try it
Sponge
How about mailing him a dollar?
:-)
I haven't downloaded the story yet, but I'm sure it will turn up on gnutella in a few minutes. Hey! There it is.
It could be kind of fun sending in your dollar with a little note for Steven telling him how much you enjoyed the chapter. A nightmare for his staff to open all those letters and pull out the cash, since they can't just toss all the fanmail into the trash from now on
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right.
Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but he could still publish an actual "book." I for one could care less about the net as a distribution method for books. I like reading from actual pages and not spending even more time staring at a computer screen.
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
I'd buy that for a dollar
:-)
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
with e-commerce being a big hype, isn't it odd that there is no easy way to pay very small amounts? I bet a significant percentage of non payers are because it is too much hassle to pay. If there were a way to transfer small amounts of money, lots of cool ways to earn money could pop up arount the net.
Separating "small amounts" from "large amounts" is important because it is a fundamentally different thing. Small amount could do with less security, simpler transactions etc. Transactions towards large amounts could only happen in bulk.
This reminds me of newgrounds.com's the portal. Kids upload teasers of movies they are making in Flash, and leave it at the end saying "Vote for 3 or higher if you want to see the rest of this". Great, now well-respected authors are doing this. oh well.
If this works, it won't affect his ability to make money. I mean he'll still get royalties from every video of Children of the Corn (ok, he'll probably make more from The Shawshank Redemption or Carrie) sold. I don't think he's in any danger of going broke. He's not trying to destroy copyright on traditional distribution methods... just trying to find a new way to make money publishing in a digital format. In fact, why is he publishing digitally at all? It can only be that he likes to experiment... because it's like saying, "here, pirate my book."
What do rich people do when they're bored? I assume one thing is look at various causes they are interested in. He might be interested in this, if it works, he'll probably get credit in the history books, somehow. I think he has an idealistic streak, because of The Dead Zone.
Of course, it might just be a revenge thing because he's a Mac fan and his last book was legally illegible on a Mac. I think revenge might be a good motivator for him too, see Creepshow.
legally illegible: The latest fun creation of the DMCA.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If anyone else tried this, without the name recognition, the total sum earned with be three dollars. That's always been the case with shareware. People like to think that the little guy can stick it to the man, but in fact people tend to buy what they see in stores and hear about through media outlets. They don't poke around trying to find unknowns to support.
You don't buy a lot of stuff online do you? In order for companies to process your card without actualy seeing the card they need your billing address, and it must be exact. When i say exact i mean exact, i once was declined because i used the wrong zip code, it was valid for my city, and mail sent to it would have easily got to me, but its not the one on the card. if you don't provide the correct info they can't process the order. the email address probly isn't needed here, but most places use it for a unique user ID. and your phone number is usualy part of your address, but its also a place to call if your card fails. I have never bought anything online that didn't require all of this information. So basicly there is no conspiracy here. besides, you could also just shell out $1.33 for the book and a stamp and mail it to him.
Hrm,
The error lies rather with the person who decided to offer the content as a static link, rather than hidden behind a form forcing you to read and accept the licence. I had rather assumed that amazon would have taken care of this; pay the dollar, get taken to a dynamic url to grab the pdf.
Of course, that would have completely ruined the hair(hare?) brained scheme of measuring honesty to begin with...
As it is, of course people are going to send the link to their friends, spiders that don't understand/listen to robots.txt will crawl it... complete and utter stupidity. Set up to fail, as Jamie said.
I quite liked the write up, btw.
four words:
Distraction by Bruce Sterling.
As common for BS, he does a bit of a Theodore Sturgeon; great ideas, not-so-great prose (well, I guess I vote with my wallet, own every one he's written, so the prose aint that bad).
Anyway, apart from litterary sniping, I wanted to point out that he introduces the concept of reputation servers. In the book, there are huge gangs of bartering hippies/gypsies/motorcycle gangs. Your status is measured by your repuation. Of course, people move from group to group, so there are these root reputation servers (and two warring protocols, yadda yadda) that allow people to vote on past experiences with others.
So helpful people get instant credibility in new groups, and slackers and layabouts get recognised for that as well. Karma, basically.
Now the karma system sucks because it is the karma system. If slashdot added to necessay hooks for 3rd party karma, then I could have the posts sorted according to my CompSci karma list (so that if Knuth ever were to post, he'd come in at +50 odd) while others might have a server that rated good use of hot grits and frightened aspiring actresses in posts. It is easy to envision how to extend the system to make it hard for people to hi-jack your karma server.
Taken to an extreme, we are almost getting to Fire-fly. The danger is that extensive user profiling (cue ominous strings) is just want marketers want. But you can design against that if you recognise it as a concern.
....is because of "Crouch End", from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
God DAMN I love Stephen King.
grep -ri 'should work'
The fact that this post was marked as flamebait is a sad testimony to Slashdot's current state. Thank you for proving my point.
Dude, lay off the acid. It's a bad batch.
So I'm wondering what King's incentive might be to backstab publishers. Has he suddenly decided he wants MORE money than the millions he already made by writing?
To use a geek-friendly metaphor, this is like saying Bill Gates wants to screw capitalism. The truth is, King is the one who was best-served by the publishing world.
So something is fishy, trust me.
Someone posted earlier that he/she doesn't understand why people always have to pay for what they read. For sure, libraries will let you rent the books for free. For me, the idea of paying 20$ for a book, instead of waiting a month or two before it gets to my local lbrary, is about giving a writer an appreciation of their work. Call me old fashioned, but it feels right when I give someone money for a great book or an anwesome movie. Hey, that person deserves it. And if I didn't like the book afterall, well, I'll be more carefull with that writer's books next time.
However, as with any circumstance, there are exceptions.
Think WinZip, or mIRC, or BulletProof FTP.
These are highly successful programs. Indeed, in 1996, I wrote a quickie VB 'cookie killer' that sold for $10 a pop. I made over $7000 for it in that year. I get letters to this day asking about it. (Obviously, it is long out of production...everyone and their mothers write cookie killers today).
Point is, if a concept is worthy, and the time is right, things tend to surprise even the harshest critics.
I've been a King fan for more years than I care to think about, and I just bought my copy of the Plant. GO STEPHEN!
"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)
Heh -- actually I think that was going to end up being the plot of his next book...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Oh, that's an easy one - ladies and gentlemen, may I present Battlefield Earth. I got about 500 pages into it before I couldn't bring myself to read another paragraph.
I'll happily download and pay $1 for this. It may not be perfect, but it's a worthy experiment. And, if it sucks, I've only spent a dollar on one chapter.
Just a note to tell you I'm going to pass on The Plant. Although I am a big fan (my faves are your "weird" works - Firestarter, Tommyknockers, etc!) I must tell you that Amazon.Com has been an absolutely terrible netizen, brazenly beating competitors over the head with fraudulent patents on basic web technologies which have years of demonstrable prior use.
Sorry Steve, but Amazon == Evil. I simply do not do business with them (nor do many thousands of netizens) even if they are collecting the bux for you. In this regard, you blew it badly. Ah, well.
Keep cranking out the magic, my man! And watch out for them vans!
Stephen King Contact Page
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
So, I went to pay for it. I downloaded the PDF and glanced at it (I'm at work) and I decided I was in support of what King is doing. So I clicked on the link to pay. And that's when I decided
It's a shame, really. I wonder how many other people don't pay because they are as paranoid as I am?
Alas, I wonder at the prospects of a publisher 1)taking a gamble at making money on online electronic distributin 2)publishers being willing to convert exisitng hard copy into e-text, and 3)publishers being willing to send out books in a universally intelligble format that doesn't require a special reader or software, so that they can be read anywhere one sees fit. King succeeding on this one could make some distributors and publishers think a little harder about the possibilities (and profitability) of online distribution.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Reading Jamie's comments, it gives me the impression that he thinks serialized novels are a new mode of distribution.
Sure, it's on the internet, but it's not new. Dickens famously wrote his novels in serial form, publishing them in story magazines, and crowds formed on publishing day for a chance to plunk down their tuppence or whatever for the next issue.
One famous anecdote relates that when Dickens was completing the last installment of "The Olde Curiousity Shoppe" a mob formed on the pier waiting for the next shipment of magazines to call into port, yelling "Does Little Nell die?" to the approaching sailors.
This will work, although it might take some tweaking.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
King is just the prominent, safe, establishment figure that was needed to validate the Street Performer's Protocol in the public eye. I'm sure he's not the only pulp-fiction author who chafes under the heavy percentage levied by his publishers from the sale of each book. Sure, practically speaking he doesn't need the money, but then neither do Ellison or Gates, and they don't show signs of slowing up in their rapacity soon either.
But if this fails, damn... we're in trouble. And the repercussions could extend well beyond media like books, even perhaps to the extent that OSS software advocates will have to argue against the "King Incident" when proselytizing and open source solution.
Consider Netscape Mozilla. Inside the community, people mostly understand that the project is doing well (with some misgivings perhaps) but int he corporate world, Mozilla is tarred as a top-flight example of "the failure of open source" as a business model. It's unfair, but it's also the popular impression.
Similarly, King can afford to screw himself once or twice while playing with new means of distribution. So could, perhaps, Daniel Steel or Dean Koontz, or the other pot-boilers. But the less well-heeled authors out there, who are scraping by on their publishing income and probably a shit job on the side, can't afford to take risks. They'll view this move by King as a litmus test of the viability of online publishing, and they'll act accordingly.
I want very much for this experiment to succeed. It's the first step towards a more open, better-connected world. But if it doesn't, expect massive damage control on the side of IP freedoms.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I freely admit that Stephen King is not a Pulitzer Prize-worthy of writer, and I haven't even read any of his new stuff in the last five years or so, but what I have read has certainly not been trite or formulaic in any capacity. His short stories are particularly well varied, as are his works published as Richard Bachman. Although I've not read all his novels, those I have - Insomnia, Gerald's Game, Through the Eyes of the Dragon, The Long Walk, Rage, etc. - have been no more a result of a formula than any other author of a particular genre.
I'd be interested in hearing your idea of what "formula" Stephen King writes by.
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
From the agreement:
1. To pay for each installment of The Plant, and to pay each time you download it. Look at it this way: you couldn't go into a bookstore and say, "I bought a copy of The Street Lawyer in here yesterday, so give me four more for free today." Get it?
It sucks, but make sense at the same time. I'm sure it won't be too much trouble for me to save it on a disk or something if I want to keep it.
King has some realy good books (the stand) and also some realy bad ones (insomnia). I think that he should set up a pay what you think its worth program. Where you have a subjected domaintion to the author. I would definitly give some extra money to see another dark tower book.
All in all, I think this is a great way for king to get his revenge with book publishers.
Jon
Yes, link directly to the PDF file with the novel, it really helps to prove you right, jamie! There are tons of Slashdot visitors that haven't had a clue that they had to pay up a $1 (or at least haven't read Stephen King's reasoning), yet mechanically downloaded the novel.
I can't applaud louder! Slashdot always attains its objective to get paid things for free! Congratulations, another success, Slashdot!
But really, article's author is hyperskeptical of Stephen King's success. The author is citing all these "profit and loss" matrices. That's bull, you know.
A loss of $1 isn't loss to me. I doubt it's a big loss to anybody. Get out on the street, get four quarters from strangers and I got my $1 back.
Indeed, wonderful reasoning: because people will be losing a WHOLE ONE DOLLAR if they give this a try, 85% of people won't be gullible enough to incur such losses.
Oh my, one US dollar. As a high schooler, I have to wait a whole week to get allowance that is probably from five to fifty times more than that. As a college student, I have to work a whole one hour at my work study job to get over five times of my lossage.
Doesn't Stephen King understand that people will feel SO RIPPED OFF if the 75% thing doesn't go through?
C'mon, jamie, real world, reality check! Earth to jamie, earth to jamie!
The $3 escrow idea is much more unrealistic than Stephen King's undertaking. Who will EVER bother to allocate the resources and time to keep track of every single buyer and return a whole lotta $3 to that every single buyer if the novel doesn't sell enough? Really, the overhead of reimbursing $3 to thousands of people is simply too much to make any business sense.
I have just bought the first installment. I wrote out a check for a dollar (since I don't have a credit card, thank you for permitting check payments or I wouldn't have bought the novel) and put it in an envelope.
It's a dollar. Gimme a break. Even people with no checking accounts can just take a dollar in cash, wrap it in colored or thick paper and send thru mail. Every Slashdotter that dislikes big, monopolitic corporations can SPARE A DOLLAR to this great cause.
And I hope every Slashdotter does.
with a chapter coming out only once a month, nobody's going to be continuously interested in the book.
I don't know about that. The Green Mile was quite a success, wasn't it?
Yes, everyone who writes books needs an editor. Or another pair of eyes. Or time. Or experience. But: even if you DO have great editors, you can still have crap PR and distribution or a designer can irritate someone "in-house" and screw yr project, etc, etc, etc. I mean from BIG publishing houses...the bigger the house, the more they focus on their biggest names.
Let's face it, Stephen King is hardly yr average technical writer. Nor is the scheme he endorses the only Web alternative. The Web is already a FANTASTIC plus for authors. Especially anyone who writes _because_ they know a good idea is good without "market research".
The more aggressive e-publishers, such as iuniverse.com and Bertelsmann Arvato, are setting up now to absolutely cream offset publishing. Plus, at only $200 for a starting fee (as long as you know enough about digital design and PR), most authors can already benefit. You just have to have the energy. If you still leave it to agents, publishers, editors, etc - well, they deserve your money!
Someone like iuniverse (like all the big-name publishers who just don't say so), uses Lightning Print, Ingram Books' pioneer plant in Tennessee. Lightning has very interesting IBM-provided technology which can print and bind a book in 30 to 60 seconds...changing titles one by one, if that's what's needed.
The books look just as good as anyone else's but they don't incur the costs of shipping and sitting unsold in warehouses. Instead, you can order a book every time someone wants it.
This beats the download-by-parts or pay-as-you-go schemes, plus actual booksellers like it. (Barnes & Noble own 49% of iuniverse and they stock various iuniverse titles on the shelf.) It also means the independent, non-chain, booksellers can now afford to launch imprints of their own.
Currently, the only drawback is: you can only print novels or academic books. Because, with half-tones or anything like that, the technology isn't cost-effective. No-one is doing color plates at all...not YET.
So it's still great for Steven Kings or technical writers. But anyone doing a book on Web graphics or art must wait.
Meanwhile, that agent who takes 10%-15% of the work you did (and the same off yr royalties, as well as delaying your check) is losing his or her valued prestige and power. Your publisher has to re-evaualate how he or she treats authors. And the in-house imprint staff are scrambling to become REALLY literate. For anyone who writes, this is hardly bad news.
I like Stephen King's work, but I think that he must be smoking something pretty nice to think that 75% of the people who download his online book will send him a dollar.
I think that he will be lucky to get a 30% return rate...and if he does, he will still make a pretty nice profit.
It will be interesting to see if he truly will NOT release the final chapter when he still makes millions on the novel.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Some of us may live in smaller communities where going through interlibrary loan for half pr more of our reading would be a bit obnoxious, given the delays and other constraints.
Alternately, libraries often don't have that many copies, if you prefer bestsellers to the more obscure texts. I worked in a library once, and have known reserve lists to be VERY long indeed.
Or if you wish to study literature and compare texts -- say, you want to see for yourself whether the "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" series by Donaldson was massively influenced by Tolkein's LOTR series, you'll probably be spending a LOT of time. Enough that it might be called inconsiderate to keep borrowing them and denying others the chance to read from the library. And so forth.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
A prisoner's dilema is one where the participants cannot communicate with each other. The fact that this is all bandied about on slashdot demomstrates that the whole PD premise is full of holes.
DB
Time to come clean.. I control both Signal 11 and Enoch Root.
'Signal 11', complete with mail-forwarding from the given mail account, cost me a pair of Alteon 571 SS7 motherboards and 300 MII chips back in January. Everybody wondered why he suddenly went whacko; It was just me having fun!
'Enoch Root' was one of my old Karma Whoring accounts, and I used it from time to time after people caught on to my whoring keep the name fresh in their minds.
I've been using 'Sig 11' for trolling mostly, in an effort to dwindle the 600 Karma down to +1 land (figured it might be good for a laugh) and 'Enoch Root' just when I feel like looking
respectable. This account, 'technos' was one of my later failed attempts at abusing the moderation system. I only ever managed 300 karma on it, so it was a failure..
Sincerely,
osm
.sig: Now legally binding!
One, if this account really were an exploitation attempt, I'd consider 300 karma in a year and a half a failed attempt at exploitation. Others have ramped to the 150 mark in less than two months.
;)
Two, I'm only a part-time troll, but thanks for noticing!
Three, that was, and was supposed to be, more ridiculous than the conspiracy theory itself, eg, a joke. One would have to be an actor of top caliber, completely insane, and jobless to pull off a simultaneous performance of 'osm', 'Signal 11', 'Enoch Root', and 'technos', complete with supporting mail addresses and web pages.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Incidentally, why's this published under YRO? Is it my inalienable right to read and pay for Steven King books, online or off? I wonder if every story about a new business model with a chance to "stick it to the man" is going to turn up here.
Then again, steven king is not exactly a small unknown author. So why's he actually doing this? I don't think it's some big Athenian crusade either, but it can't have that much to do with money, if he's making it so deliberately easy to circumvent the payment system. So, we're faced with the possibility that he is indeed testing his audience for loyalty... it's all a big ego-stroke for King.
Which I can kind of understand, actually. There's a comment below (marked "flamebait," currently) that accuses King of really pandering to the publishers. I'm sure he's heard this accusation before; maybe he wants people to prove they really like him. "Hey guys, this one's just for you! I'm not being self aggrandizing and making a million bucks, see?"
Of course, if all goes well for him, he will ;)
Sometimes people just amaze me. You know, there are libraries where you can read FOR FREE! It's an abberation that lately people have chosen to own everything that they read. So what if it is a little inconvenient to go to the library or take books back?
Why the hell does everyone want their own home library? What advantage does it give you? If the book isn't from O'Reiley, there's almost no chance that you can't wait until morning to go get it. Why don't you check the book out and then, if you like it, buy it. Why buy a book whose quality is unknown to you? All the dust jacket reviews are going to be glowing. That's why they put them there.
Sorry for the rant. This whole situation strikes me as ridiculous.
So old, I didn't get my password right first time.
There is a grain of truth in your argument that profitable artists subsidise non-profitable ones, but the insisputable fact is that record companies are in it for themselves.
Yes, they screw the artists because it's more profitable to do it than not to, and they are effectively a cartel.
Everyone should read what Courtney Love has to say about it from her personal experience:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ index.html
it's not about whether someone is going to pay the $1 because they feel inclined to or feel guilty, but if you start to think that you're paying $1 for reading an entertaining part of the story, and to hopefully be able to read the next installment.
I think King is correct in putting money in the belief that the majority of his readers will chalk up $1 to guarantee themselves the next installment. Who the hell wants to read 2/3 of the story and not get to read the conclusion??!?
If this novel can build the climax the way Stephen King is known to, then EVERYONE that reads the novel with pay the $1 to read the conclusion.
Again, who would read 300-500 pgs, only to not finish the book?
----------
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I've never read a Stephen King book but I paid the dollar for part 1 and downloaded it primarily because I believed in the idea. Please take that link down quickly.
----------
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According to MSNBC, of the 41,000 downloads for the first installment so far, 32,000 (~78%) have already paid via credit card. Kinda shoots to hell the theory that people won't pay.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Bzzzzt! According to MSNBC, ~78% of the 41,000 downloads so far have paid.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
So far, 78% of the people who've downloaded have paid for it. It looks as thought the naysayers in this case are wrong.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
You forget to deal with the fact that people often do not act rationally. If the first two installments are good enough that people *really* want to read the conclusion, the money will pour in. I think this strategy is brilliant. It's sort of a "cliff-hanger" marketing scheme. You can bet that the second installment will end with an extremely tantalizing cliff-hanger.
To look at it from another perspective, how many people do you think would send in $1 if King announced that the next novel in the Dark Tower series would be published next week if only people would send in $1 to indicate reader interest? If enough people didn't respond the book wouldn't be published. A whole lot of people would be sending in a buck.
The unfortunate part of this is that it only works for wildly popular authors like King. Joe Q. Author could probably not rely on such a strategy to make a livable income.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Stephen King says he got the idea when a reader mailed him a check for $2.50 because the poor guy felt guilty about reading the last book King put up for pay-to-download without paying.
If he were in this for the money, as the author seems to think, then he wouldn't be limiting the number of downloads to 50,000 and charging $1. $50,000 minus the costs of running the website don't amount to a drop in a bucket when you're got the net worth of a man like Stephen King.
Mr King has said that he's doing this as a test of honesty on the internet to see if this type of distribution works. If it does, you can expect to see others start to use it. Unfortunately, it will still require authors to have some following beforehand for the most part (how many bands have gotten popular off mp3.com?)
Addlepated - punk & metal
Well, from just credit card payments up front, "The Plant" seems to be on track through 34,000 copies. That's still not even counting those who will pay by mail.
So much for all you nay-sayers. People can be honest.
Addlepated - punk & metal
2000-07-24 16:13:10 Stephen King Releases New E-Novel (articles,news) (rejected)
*and* I linked to the king site instead of the *.pdf
'nuff said
First posting isn't trolling. It's...first posting.
If you cooperate: $10 enjoyment from 10 chapters.
-$10 + $10 enjoyment + 10 all you can eat chapters
= 10 all you can eat chapters of a complete book.
King gets 75% x $1 x downloads/chapter x 10chapters/10 months
= $.75xdownloads/month but has 10 months worth of work which makes writing a chore sometimes.
It's cheaper than paying first.
People usually are less vigilant about a dollar.
If 75% cooperate: $1 enjoyment from 1 chapter. -$0 + $1 enjoyment + 1 all you can eat chapter.
= $1 enjoyment + $1 chapter of an unfinished book.
King gets 74.99% of $1 x downloads/chapter x $1chapter/month but only has one month of work to do.
He makes a bit of money then he decides fuck novels, short stories rule. Less of a strain.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
$ cat < /dev/mouse
I'd probably pay a lot just to see all of those variations.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I agree! I'm on a fast connection, and I often open links in article son /. before reading the post... I ended up having the PDF downloaded (and thus wasting the dollar) before I realized that I was supposed to pay for it! I think this si a good scheme, I didn't want to help it fail!
Well, if I want to increase the number of downloads, i.e. make it less likely that SK will publish, I only need to repeatedly download from conxion.com.
If I want to go the other way, I could repeatedly pay. But if I could also kill that conxion.com server, or make it really slow, and offer another faster mirror. Then I've reduced the number of downloads, but people can still pay at amazon.
So I can to either by just affecting conxion.com, and leaving amazon alone. I download a lot from conxion, I stop all downloads from conxion.
So the idea that those numbers will be valid is completely wrong, no way they mean anything, except maybe a measure of the 3l33t sk1llz of the two sides. You can be sure that someone out there is already trying to skew them one way or another.
. . . can "adjust" that downloads to money ratio.
Why will big publishers probably not do this ? Because a huge number of downloads might feed the old scribbler's ego, and promote the idea of reaching a huge audience, which would help sell the idea to the new and independent authors, who are the ones they really have to worry about signing and capturing.
However, there is a chance that even if SK made more money on this than any other book, he'd still feel offended at the "billions and billions" of people who "read" it and didn't pay. Most authors (think of Metallica) can't really mentally comprehend the idea of selling something and then not owning it after the transaction -- look at the emotional offense they feel after you do what you want with the tape/CD that they *sold* to you. They really believe that they sell something and then still own it, that they can eat their cake and have it too.
There is a reason why publishers will survive, and it is simple: most artists are too dumb to manage a lemonade stand, let alone their own businesses. A few can, but the best hope for the rest is to go with someone who can count their money for them.
If you support this experiment and want it to succeed, DDOS his server right now, and post mirrors of the pdf somewhere else, like geocities.
If SK is really going to pay attention to that ratio number, just be aware that it is highly vulnerable to manipulation. If I gave a shit (I think SK sucks as an author, screw him, and online publishing will happen no matter what this experiment results in, it is the one and only future path) I'd consider it my duty to fix those the results in the right direction before someone else did it in the other way.
And that he'll be coming for you!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hmm, putting a link to the download on /. will not help the $$ to downloads ratio King is looking for. I am a big King fan and I would like to see this novel finished. Please /., be kind to the King readers and remove the direct link and put up a link to the King Website.
What would the RIAA be able to say about that, nothing. ditto for the MPAA
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Intersting...
The voices in my head don't like you
DDoS is a problem because 1) it goes over systems that have to respond quickly and 2) it actually overloads the capacity of the network. If we assume that the goal of the DDoL group isn't to actually take down King's computer, we can ignore 2). In this case, 1) also isn't a problem. A 1-second delay in every packet going over a network would be a complete disaster, but taking an extra 10 seconds to get a copy of a novel won't be a problem for anyone who's already willing to pay the dollar.
Given that, there are all sorts of solutions that are open. The system could require that you enter an e-mailed password, or it could display one graphically and ask you to retype it (I stole this from a recent posting about stopping slashdot trollbots). It could just block a domain for a brief time after each download; even in a DDoS each box sends a relatively large number of requests, and this would slow them all down (this would inconvenience some humans, but perhaps it could put them on queue and display the first few pages to whet their appetites).
Or, to be realistic, the administrator could look at the logs, note that one domain increased its downloads a thousandfold for a couple of hours at 0200, and throw those out of the average. It's not like King is looking for an excuse not to write the book...
- Michael Cohn
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Of course, the real nightmare comes when most of the readers are honest, but some Moral Majority-type group sets up a bot to download the novel over and over and over and over...
And of course it eventually develops a malevolent, superhuman intelligence and kills them all one by one, but we still don't have the novel. An unlikely group of slashdot misfits convince the bot to look at the RIAA website, and it decides it would be deliciously evil to deprive King of his unwritten intellectual property by finishing the novel in his style...
But it still goes around killing and eating people and stuff. The evil is finally quieted - but never destroyed - when it's convinced to settle down and become a node on Freenet.
- Michael Cohn
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
ooh Stephen you big rebel you...
/. seems to be how x technology spells the end for the dominent publishing/music/OS business.
playing devil's advocate here - I'm interested in the aspect of why this/linux/napster etc etc is all to do with taking on Big X.
Every other story on
So here's a question for y'all:
What things are these big companies actually good for? Under what circumstances - Right Now - do you agree with Big X? i don't mean if they did this or that, but actually right now...what good things do you see Microsoft, record labels, publishers etc doing that others are not?
just wondered
Just a thought, not sure it would work, but something in the statement about "not knowing how to price something" suggests auctions to me.
This is precisely what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did with his Sherlock Homes series, though it was a news print that he used to publish the stories, not the Internet. This could work maybe...
The wording of this reminds me of the show "Blackmail." For those of you who don't know, it was a skit on Monty Python. They would show a film of someone in a potentially bad position, with a counter running. When the person sweats enough and calls in, they stop the tape. Great fun!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I like the idea of what Mr King is trying to do (unfortunaly I am not a fan of his actual work, and even if I was, am participating in the amazon.com boycott) and I share the opinion that it has a high probablity of failure. However, I don't think the analasis was fair.
> King's terms make the question one of relative
> loyalty, not absolute popularity. He's not
> offering a transaction with his readers --
> he's testing them.
However you don't know how loyal his readers are. Perhaps his readers ARE loyal enough to pass his test?
> No matter what happens, you do better by not
> sending in your dollar.
Yes, however this assumes a purely profit-oriented world-veiw. This is NOT the worldview of most humans. You could make similar assertions about the lotto, or casino gambling.
> Of course there are other considerations
> (can you sleep at night knowing you cheated
> Stephen King out of a dollar?) but for the most
> part, people will weigh these options and
> decide they're not going to pay.
I am cynical enough to agree that this is, by far, the most probable outcome. However, to say that this WILL be the case, on the other hand, is premature.
Other considerations include how much they enjoy reading the novel, and how well it hooks them. Can they stand the thought that they will never know how the story ends?
> First of all, the percentage thing needs to go.
> King doesn't write for the satisfaction of
> knowing that he has honest readers. He writes
>to make money.
Really? has he said this? Perhaps he writes because he enjoys it? Perhaps he write for money, simply because he needs money to live off from and to support his writting because he CAN make money from it, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, in the end I agree, he is doing it wrong. He is making a much bigger chance of failure. However, the chances of success are, I think, nonzero still.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Don't gripe about the $1 while sitting at your $500+ PC. . . and don't bitch about your $1 not making a difference. If you'd like to see more of this, then do the right thing and support it.
I believe you misunderstand. I'd download and pay the $1, but I don't want to read it. Giving a false impression of support is probably worse than downloading and not paying.
There are many books and short stories I'd pay $1 for. King just isn't one of them. I downloaded the free PDF he gave away a few months ago and didn't like it. However, I did download, enjoy, and pay for a They Might Be Giants CD from emusic.com at more than $1. I'll continue to support artists I like in the way I see fit and pass over artists that I don't prefer to benefit. Isn't that really what the street performer protocol is all about? I purchased previous performances (the older books), decided I didn't like them, and am now passing by on the latest performance without "watching" the entertainment or paying.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.)
This is the same logic that has kept the democratic and republican parties "in power" for the past 200+ years: the idea that your dollar (vote) doesn't matter.
On the smallest level (you) that's right. Your dollar (vote) won't change anything. From a macro view, 1000 people saying that they'll pay (vote) does make a difference. You (the individual) are now part of the 1000 people that made a difference.
$1/book isn't bad. It's better than buying used books. Then again, I prefer King's short stories over the long-drawn-out novels so I won't download or pay for it.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
You won't flip your creditcard for $1? That doesn't really make sense.. maybe you mean you won't flip your credit card to buy the book because you're not that interested in it? I mean if you saw a bar of gold on sale for $1, you'd flip it then, right? I don't get it.
That cleared it up, I thought I might be missing the point to your post.
Oh yeah, next time I see a gold bar on ebay for $1, I'll email ya right away!
10 million downloads * 10% = 1 million * $1 'donation' = $1 million!
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Consider for a second that the book is redistributable, and may make it to many people based solely on one download. It would even be possible to have a total payment of greater than 100%.
t
So... where are the mirrors?
tee hee.
This beggars the question who would pay a thin dime for the drivel dripping from King's pen.
...he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart.
This cuts right to the "heart" of the matter, doesn't it? What sort of idiot would write a novel out of the "kindness of their heart," for the sake of their art, to achieve a great start, release sacred farts?
What kind of fools would create a free operating system?
Quashing the marketplace of ideas is the first step to eliminating poetasters and punters like King and the pin-striped remoras that swim with him. The mercifully brief era of the professional writer is dead, long live the amateur!
illegitimii non ingravare
For a free copy of Stephen King's new book, name something Boswell wrote, other than the Life.
Boswell was a punter, here's a taste from the London Journals:
Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person.
Turgid, pompous dreck, notwithstanding the absurd chauvinism, exagerated even for his enlightened era.
Only a self-important fop writes for money.
illegitimii non ingravare
... remove the direct link to the PDF from /. . People should read the agreement before downloading the novel. I've downloaded it and paid for it, because I like his work and think it's worth every penny. Also, he's counting EVERY DOWNLOAD. That means if you download it twice, he wants $2 for it!
If you really want to help, pay the $1 without downloading the installment.
~ I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere.
I downloaded it, read it, and paid for it since I did agree to his terms. The only objection I have to the business model is, what if the product sucks? Saying that "The Plant" (name of the story) sucks is a bit strong, but it's not very good IMHO, if I picked it up at a bookstore and read chapter one, I probably wouldn't bother finishing it, much less buying it.
If he's relying on the user honesty, then wouldn't a "shareware" business model work better? i.e., don't make someone agree to pay for it at the download page but rather suggest a payment amount if the reader enjoyed it? If the Yahoo story that someone posted here is any indication of what sort of honesty consumers are showing (75% so far), it shouldn't be an issue.
NO CARRIER
This idea is worth $1. I payed it. I might read the book later too. Publishers in every field get a huge chunk of cash while the artist gets the smallest cut. I'd like to see this applied to movies, videogames and music also. So I'm gambling my $1 on it. I think my odds are a bit better than the lottery.
"I am worried that people won't pay, can I pay a little extra? Although we aren't asking you to do this, we have seen that many of you in your comments have asked if you can pay extra to help cover the costs of the dishonest people who will download The Plant and not pay. You should be applauded for this desire to pay -- and should be held out as an example to those of you reading this who are not planning to pay. You know who you are. No stealing from the blind newsboy. If you wish to pay more than $1, you can either send a check to the address specified at Amazon.com Payments or pay multiple times with your credit card and then do not download the file."
So there it is, and does allow for people with more inclination to help curb the percentage toward getting the novel published. Not that anywhere near 75% paid for would be hit in any case.
By the way, forget resale, this is not public domain period. If Pepsi wants to come up with a gigantic "The Plant likes Pepsi better than water!" campaign, Stephen King will not be out of the equation as far as rights are concerned.
Not that it matters. The SPP is not viable. It's a modification of old ideas that have not worked. It really isn't much different than what we're under now minus a few legal battles and quickly-eradicated new-encryption tactics. If you'd like to see copyright eliminated entirely and aren't concerned with the bazillion folks living off the idea currently, you have no problem. If you are concerned about that, things like the SPP and "advertising in everything" will not fill the void either. What you begin talking about is things like a "Software Tax" or "DAT Tax" (as you can read about on www.gnu.org). This will never happen in the capitialistic world we live in today.
As others have said, Copyright is not going away. Without radical changes like adding taxes, there is no broad economic solution other than no solution. This constant ring of dissonance and disagreement is going to continue for a long time -- just get used to it.
making him more money?
I see this as more of an investment on his part, even if/when it fails. It CAN'T be bad for him, because he will pick up more readers (consumers). So I don't see this as a gift, more like a trojan horse/virus for your brain ... hehe :)
Hey, it's late, and I don't know what I'm talking about...
Now we're seeing the same forces that drove magazine sales in Victorian times being applied to a new medium, that being the hope that the reader's interest in the story will drive them to pay for the next installment. And I think that's a good thing, as it will hopefully be a step towards a time when people will choose to pay for an entire online book, or any other form of art for that matter.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I applaud King for being in a position to try this out, and being willing to do so. He can afford to lose a few grand (hundred grand?) by doing this, and does so.
How else would you have any industry try out new approaches? Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.
How many chapters? 10? 15?
SK will make vastly more money (he only makes 3 or 4 dollars per hardcover, which is more than almost any Author) with this scheme than with a publisher.
Assuming people pay.
I think he should put the entire book up for $5 or $6, and let me pay that to download it. Then I am assured that the ending will be published, and SK makes out better than with any publisher, and I get a SK novel for way cheaper than a hardcover. Of course maybe paperback pricing is more appropriate.
http://www10.nyt imes.com/books/00/07/23/reviews/000723.23kinglt.ht ml
It's a pretty in-depth review of the Harry Potter books by Stephen King. He's generally impressed by them, although he has two main complaints:
1. The latest book is too long (700+ pages)
2. The first book is being adapted for the big screen
Pause, digest, pause. An obvious case of the blood-stained crucible calling the witch's cauldron black. Now I realize that King is writing from the lofty peaks of successful writer Olympus, but c'mon now...
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I quite like the idea that it might work, but I think he's wrong to assume that he's testing internet honesty. Given the language used to hype the event, the motivational factors influencing p[eople are not really honesty, but a chance to
(a) be part of the first potentially successful business model of it's kind
(b) screw "big publishing"
Which of these factors is the clincher? Probably (b), given that a great many people out there love the thought of being part of the masses out to defend the poor helpless individual whose pocket and liberties are being infringed by any company with a capitalisation of more than two cents.
Oops.. I forgot to /sarcasm after my last post, that came out a bit heavy.
Salocin.com
I like to see this happen, I am not much a SK fan but I like to see this take of so I downloaded it and have put the money in the envolope and as soon as I get a stamp it will be in the mail, I hope this dose work out. I hope it a good "book" I will probably print it up and take it to kinkos to get it bound.
Of course I will have to be paid more to read it.
Cheers,
Wes
Its a shame that your .sig link is incorrect, or I would actually buy one or more.
It claims that you should "Restart, format c: and install Linux"
Why would I want a "C:" on my hard disk if I was going to install Linux? umsdos installs are pretty lame if you ask me. I sure hope you didn't print off alot of those shirts, so you can fix it to say "Restart, fdisk and delete windows partition, install Linux" or something to that effect.
Lars -
It seems he'd be much better off using paypal instead of Amazon to accept "micropayments" - The whole point of internet publishing is to eliminate the middleman, right? Plus, he'd get the $5 bonus for signing up new paypal accounts for about 95% of the buyers, and he gets to keep 100% of the purchase price, instead of giving Amazon a cut. It's gonna take someone big like King to get real micropayment systems (like millicent, if it ever materializes) on the map - I'd hate to see those systems passed up by an Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
For works such as these where there is a loyal fan base getting an expected product, and there is an ability for some users to get away without paying but want to reward the good users, this is the model matrix I would like to see:
Fixed price for work to be completed is $800,000.
Don't Pay: $0.
Pay: $3.
If payment breaks threshold: credit a distributed refund of by how much broke the $800,000 mark. With serial formula base novels like King this credit is easily enough kept within Amazon.com to be used towards a future online King book preventing a frivolous credit card refund charge. Amazon is a macro bookseller so the credit could just also as well be used towards another book.
---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
What a great idea! You write two chapters which you publish in monthly installments, meaning that it is likely to be at least three months before the third chapter is published. You get say half a million people to "donate" $1, which you keep in the bank account for a cpl of months. At the end of the holding period you return the copius amounts of $1's via some electronic means (eg. a gift token for his publishers) because returning a $1 any other way would not be worth it, and he wouldn't want to be called a scam artist. What your left with is a couple of months interest of $1/2M plus your publishers are laughing because they've just swept up the $1/2M in the first place in terms of gift certificate payments most of which nobody is ever going to redeem. Very ingenius, or am I just paranoid? V:)
oh, wait, I never paid in the first place. I didn't like it. I could care less about its conclusion. And its so short... Heres to a glorious failure Steve.
The current publishing system saves me alot of time when it comes to sorting the huge amount of available material. F'rinstance, how many of us /.ers gravitate to the O'reilly tomes before considering anything else? Why? Because ORA built up a reputation for publishing *quality* books. Sure, I would still be able to pick the autors brain via this new distribution method, but it would take me a lot longer (perhaps never) to locate the book. This systems relies on word of mouth as the primary means by which an author can promote his book.
Glazik
I will agree that 3/4 of the readers paying is far to high of a percentage. Better to base it on how much he takes in. What's better pay - 75% of 5000 downloads or 1% of a million downloads.
But it is an iteresting experiment.
Yes, he said lyrics.
<O
( \
X Adopt a bird today!
Will I retire or break 10K?
he'll never get the 75%, but with sales of the book through brick 'n' mortar mixed in, that would be cool.
i've worked at two places where those nice people come in and put those "honor snacks" machines in. both times, the vender pulled them in a week or so.
some of the employees were quite honest about it -- especially if they were from the east coast -- something like "what, is this guy a frickin' idiot? i'm doing him a favor by eating all his snacks for free. i'm letting him know how stupid he is so he can get counselin' or sumthin'"
true, i swear it. the average person will steal if they think they can get away with it. myself? i always enjoy the look on people's faces when i return something to them that could of been easily stolen -- they give me that quizical look "why?" -- really makes my day
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. Stephen King may not turn the publishing world upside-down, but the potential here is bigger than you might think. For about 2 years I've been dreaming of an effort to publish electronic versions of textbooks (specifically math books) for free distribution to students. All I needed was an appropriate article on /. to start a discussion:) My vision is a collaberative effort to develop textbooks by authors who submit new chapters/books/fixes/updates to the administrators, who review those changes and consider them for acceptance into the published versions. Students could then either use the books online or print a postscript or pdf (or whatever) version of them. A printer could even print, bind and sell the books, in case anyone really needs a bound version. A teacher could download and change it to his/her liking and use it as the required text for a class. I got this idea when I tried to return a Trig book to the school's bookstore - they refused to accept it because they had changed versions. I had paid something like $50 for the book and could get $0 for in 6 weeks later (it was a summer class). I'm wondering what had changed in trigonometry over those 6 weeks - in fact, what significant changes have been made in algebra, geometry, trig or calculus over the last 100 years? Do students need to have $75, newly minted math books to learn math in a community college? So, my question is, what are your thoughts on a gnu textbook license? I've reserved freetextbooks.org, but haven't done anything with it, yet. joelgrimes@mad.scientist.com
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
I think this is brilliant. You can download the 1st episode and read the whole thing. If you like it, you contribute $1 to tell the author you liked it and want to see the next one.
One the next episode comes out, you read it, then decide if you like it or not. If you do not you don't pay the $1, if you do you pay the $1 to say you'd like it to have it continue.
There are MANY people that do that with video games these days. (ie playstation, dreamcast, nintendo, etc.) Basicly they try the game, if they like it and say it's something they are going to want to play alot, they buy it.
Piracy of video games has been around ever since video games have been sold and they are still in business and it's a growing business. So why shouldn't this take off? You'll have the people that are loyal and pay, and those who don't. But I believe that MOST people will feel like "Hell it's only a buck" and pay it.
I see calls to arms daily about calling your Rep/Senator to oppose/support Bill #1234. . . god forbid we use the Slashdot effect in the market and not politics! Tell your friends, or pay for multiple downloads yourself!
There's WAY more at stake than the third installment. . . paying $1 might prevent the MPAA/RIAA from saying "See, most people prefer to steal even when the price is modest."
Don't gripe about the $1 while sitting at your $500+ PC. . . and don't bitch about your $1 not making a difference. If you'd like to see more of this, then do the right thing and support it.
I don't know about anyone else, but I still like hard copies. I like to highlight my training manuals and user manuals. I like the fact that I can earmark a page in my favorite novel and immediatly flip to that page. Reading for long periods of time on a computer monitor usually starts giving me a headache and i get sick of it really fast. I think this distribution method won't take off because of those facts. And for $1 a chapter thats prett steep, your average paperback is like $5.95 or so. If a book has 30 or 40 chapters thats more than you would pay for a hardcover.
In the Plant FAQ, he says that the third will come out in September if everyone pays and "we will keep you posted about later installments. I hope that doesn't mean he needs to keep the 75% for EACH installment--we'll never see the end of this thing.
I've got a site that publishes MP3 choose-your-own-adventure audiobooks. (Sounds weird, but it's quite cool when you think about - listen to the first episode, make a choice, listen to the next one you chose, etc.) Everybody always talks about how it would be great to put a tip jar up on an mp3.com page, how people would probably use it if it were there, so I set one up. I signed up for PayPal, enabled "Web Accept", and now I can accept credit card "donations" of any size from anyone. PayPal takes like 2% of the payment.
It's the easiest method out there that I know of, but even that still feels kind of annoying. A person has to give their name and shipping address even if they aren't being shipped a product. People tip on the street because it's easy and no big deal. 50c here, a buck there, into the street musician's hat. Easy. But on the net it's still a major pain. Are there any easier methods out there? What about the near future?
tune
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
I saw King on the Today show this morning, and his idea seemed OK until he started spouting off about how "hackers" stole his last online work. Didn't anybody tell him that hackers built the internet that he wants to use to make money? His language was really insulting, and turned me off on reading the story, much less sending him money.
This is just the first person that is gennerally known doing this. My reaction is half "So what?" and half "Yippee!". So what because it's nothing new, and Yippee because this could be the death knell of Big Publishing, a dinosaur that won't die.
Anyone doing a bit of writing knows that Big Publishing, by and large, does not care about anything other than dollars. Most authors I've spoken to feel cheated by Big Publishing with respect to the amout paid for the work. Only the big names get the big bucks, and they still get big bucks even when the work is a flop.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
This has both good and bad.
The good -- more information can get out.
The bad -- more information can get out.
Since there is a very low barrier to entry, almost anyone can be a publisher. So, any writer the good, bad, or ugly can "publish" what they want. There are no copy editors, fact checkers, etc.
This has opened up a myriad of legal issues, libel or just plain bitching.
It also scares the likes of RIAA and MPAA where they are losing their control over publishing. Now the small guy for little money, can get their music or short movies out on the net.
Fight Spammers!
you don't win a dollar if you cheat, since you wasted your time -- and your time is wasted if you don't know the conclusion.
besides: the dilema here is a bit more complex: if king says that he won't releice the rest of the novel, a lot more people may pay. and if he says that he will never reliece it, people may download it without paying.
Something like Download Accelerator, it opens four streams and fetches different parts of the file: lets say a file of 40000 bytes Stream 1, takes from 1 to 10000 Stream 2, takes from 10001 to 20000 Stream 3, takes from 20001 to 30000 Stream 4, takes from 30001 to 40000 At the same time... this is much faster, but would his site consider that 1 download, or 4?
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Tell me when we get there because I don't ever see it happening. The world we live in is one where breaching copyright is becoming easier, and no doubt will continue to get easier, but it is still illegal.
For now... i suspect one day it will get the way of dodo
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I see two things happening here and can't decide which it is...
1- King's really on the publisher's side (who BTW made him make the tons of money he has through marketing (his novels are not THAT good, IMHO Koontz is way better, but they're all the same)), and the only thing he's trying to prove is that the whole thing doesn't work (bypassing the publisher), while at the same time he gets some credit for trying. think about it, makes sense to me.
2- the other option is the fact that there are several small planets worth of people online today and if a very small portion of those readers pays the buck, he'll make his money. I think you can't compare studies like the scientific american one or similar others to this, mainly because the amount of people that know king and will be hit by the free marketing campaign (read headline news, talkshows and websites) are prone to just log on, pay a dollar and check it out (what's a dollar worth to you?).
will this work for all artists?? hell no, unless you have a huge fan base, or you make it to the news.
what will be proven in the end? absolutely nothing, because the technology that will make the whole damn thing work isn't widely available yet: some software that protects novels and songs against copying. this is the only way that you will see intellectual property distributed over the internet at a gain for the artist and in a popular common manner. many people disagree, but all other methods have failed so far (napster) if you look at it from the artists perspective.
just my $0.02
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Moreover, it isn't actually a book in the literal definition. Its a serial. Comic books are more expensive, and follow pretty much the same business model. That is, if its profitable, they continue publishing. If not, it goes bye-bye.
I plan to buy the book. Assuming the first part is okay, I'll exercise my choice to buy more. And considering how much /.ers bitch about "megacorps" controlling our lives and reducing our choices, I think its a little hypocritical to bitch about this too.
I disagree.  You really can't tell much of a story in 20 pages (at least Stephen King can't. :-) 
Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary".
Perhaps Mr. King needs to make his micropayments a little more "micro" so that customers are being offered a better value.
This brings up a question.  How much of the cost of a new book is material and distribution and how much goes to the author?  In this scheme, he has to pay for bandwidth, a web presence and credit card processing fees which are fairly low (I'd estimate to be less than 20% of the $1 cost of the book.)  That means by my calculations that 80% of the dollar goes to Mr. King which is likely a much sweeter deal for him than any of his deals with a publisher.  Does anybody have real numbers instead of these that I just pulled out of the air?
I personally have read exactly two Stephen King books. Night Shift, which was excellent, and the Stand, which was also excellent (if long. Then again, I read all the Dune books.) I've tried to read a couple others and quailed away in horror at the bad writing.
Now, my opinion is not necessarily your opinion, but the real issue here is to find out what kind of people read Stephen King books. More to the point, will those same people pay for something they can get for free? Will they take the long view? King strikes me as the Romance Novel of horror, and down there somewhere with Piers Anthony writing anything else; It's bubblegum for the brain. (Much like TV, ha ha.) It has very little content, is mostly composed of filler, and is written according to formula. I don't know or care whether King has other people write his books and then just edits them these days, though to be certain that sort of thing could be going on... It just doesn't really matter. If it's in King's style, and it's according to King's story, then it might as well be entirely written by him.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that this is going to flop. Not because there aren't enough King fans, which there are, but because people tend to be of the belief that if they can get something for free, they should, and damn the long view. For all I know, King fans tend to be more honest in the long run, and that's going to be the deciding force in this issue. There's always the possibility that he's just doing this to get attention and the book will turn into some encrypted thing that you can only read in some whacked out windows app, as well. Who can say?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just clicked on the download, not sure what I'd see. Having seen it, I'll probably go home, download it again, read it thoroughly, and send in my $1. Do the two downloads and one payment - even if all by one person - count as 50% compliance and work against the 75% requirement? What if I paid, and want to re-read it a few more times? ...I'm not likely to save it locally (easier to just click the link) but certainly have upheld my obligation, yet will paid only $1 for multiple downloads.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Wasn't he a heroin addict once?
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
are you?
Let's ask Philip if he's reaped any benefits from online publishing. He has written "Travel's with Samantha" and countless articles about photography online, on what could possibly be considered the foremost photo community online photo.net. He is very intelligent, and has been interviewed here before...
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
Check out Fairtunes.
Fairtunes enables the listener (only been done for music so far) to download their favorite songs via Napster/Gnutella/Scour.. And then once they've determined that they like the song and feel it is worth remunerating/compensating the artist they will visit Fairtunes and charge a completely voluntary amount to their credit card. Fairtunes will then send that money to the artist selected in either the form of a check or a direct money transfer. It is now up to the artist to distribute the funds as they see fit. This is opposed to the record label doing it because we all know the record industry is not the fairest. A similar idea has been implemented at PayLars but they only send money to Metallica. Whereas you can use Fairtunes for any artist.
Do people think this idea is completely off the wall? Will it work for music? Or will the participation rate just be too low for the artist to make any real money off of it? Do we live in the kind of society where people can be "trusted" to remunerate as they see fit? Or do we live in a society that has to have rigidly enforced pricing policies and intellectual property laws?
Matt.
Don't worry. If King never finishes the novel, we can get a team of wannabes to do it instead.
There'll be about three different incompatible versions, and it'll be 'beta' for about 5 years, but hey, that's open source for you.
Absolutely right. I worked for several years at King's publisher, and we let him go because we were losing money on his books. They'd sell 1.3 to 1.5 million copies, but, after we'd paid him and all the contractually-obligated promotional costs, there'd be nothing left. Remember The Green Mile? We took a bath on it, bigtime.
His next publisher came up with a different method of getting him to sign, moving more of the payments onto the royalty end of things. From the buzz I hear, they're not making any money, either.
King is definitely interested in money, not only for its own sake, but also to see to it that he's among the most highly paid. It's an ego thing. Now that publishers are balking at blindly signing him up in hopes of making a few measly dollars from backlist sales 10 years down the road, he's pursuing alternate means of distributing his product. As seems obvious to everyone here, it won't work.
--- Submission is feudal.
Some have mentioned that the book download is not similar to shareware, however, the distribution method is very similar to shareware distribution and this does not bode well for a 75% registration rate. Registration rates on shareware are very low. I just recently attended the Shareware Industry Conference in Tampa last week, and the industry average for registrations to actual purchases is 2%! As a shareware author, this is in line with what I see with my own software. I think Stephen King will do very well to get 10%, but I'd place good money on him not even reaching that.
Remember that King is only counting those who download from his web site. Assuming that his text files are transferred over Gnutella and not counted as the number of downloads, many more people will have the opportunity to send him $1 than those who download from his site. Consequently, 75% of the downloads from his site may be equal to about 15-25% of the total readership. Also, there is a novelty to this distribution scheme. I have never read King's work and really do not have an interest in horror, but I may just send him $1 because of his application of this interesting distribution mechanism. Plus, think of all the free press that he is getting, easily worth a few thousand dollars.
Besides, King is also capitalizing on the Internet community's need to feel honest and moral now that their value system is coming into question. Many people may send him money to alleviate their own guilt instead of rewarding him for his work. There was a study on "tipping" published a few months ago that claimed our desire to top is not motivated by rewarding the person providing a service but rather making ourselves feel better and reinforcing our own sense of power and control over the transaction. Regardless of how it pans out, King should be rewarded for the effort. Besides, how many authors get paid lots of money before they even finish their books (not an advance that must be paid back, but actual compensation)?
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
As an amateur typographer, I also can see that having professional design and typesetting would help a lot, even for a book to be downloaded as PDF, but this is secondary by a long shot to the services of the editor.
I have other friends who have gone the DIY route with vanity presses and it's clear that their work would have benefitted greatly from a good editor (as well as more polished design and typography).
Where my friends tell me publishers definitely overpromised and underdelivered was in promoting their books. (But don't all authors feel this way?)
In other areas, particularly nonfiction, authors such as Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and Jonathan Haar (A Civil Action) were able to write their excellent books only because publishers took risks and fronted them significant advances which they used to spend several years researching and writing their books. It's hard to see how such books could have been written if the authors tried to go the Stephen King route. Possibly a venture capital financing scheme could be worked out, but does anyone think this would be less predatory on authors than existing publishers?
There may be room for improvement in the publishing business, but it's not clear to me how professional editing will fit into the King-style world. I have read the comments on stephenking.com and don't see how his model addresses the services a good publishing house offers to less polished writers than King.
The 'fishy' something may be very obvious. It could very simply be an "I told you so" game:
I (Stephen King, publisher bitch) am a happening twenty-first century writer, I am hip, and I am open to new ideas. I want to cater to those who believe the centralized publishing machine is fascist and outdated, therefor I will try out one of your new fangled 'internet' schemes for reimbursing an artist/writer for his/her time. Let's see how it works.
3 months later
Okay, this failed, (as I knew it would) and I didn't get reimbursed for my time. You geeks and your high faluten talk of a new artistic econony, look here, it didn't work! Now we can all go home, back to our centralized fascist distribution system, and hopefully now you wont keep bothering me (and the whipcracking publishers above me) about free(speach/beer, doesn't matter)dom of information.
Now, I like Stephen King, I've always had a soft spot for the little wierdo ever since The Shining and The Gunslinger, so I hope this isn't the case. But its very plausible, and a little thing called Ahkam's Razor (sp?) keeps poking me in the back. Maybe he is doing this, but without realizing the publisher's motives. I don't know, we'll see how it pans out.
Ok, so if you don't like King, don't send in the small 1$ that he's asking for, but if you do, 1$ seems like a small price to pay, even if you don't really have to pay it.
I like how you can download the first installment before paying. I think this makes a great system (kind of like how you can read the first 3 chapters of Orson Scott Card's next book at his web site). This lets the reader get a preview of the book, and if they like it, they can pay the dollar like a down payment for the rest of the book.
Another nice feature is instant gratification. I'd much rather be able to read the book immediately rather than wait for it to ship (or pay for shipping costs in the first place). Granted, reading on my computer monitor isn't as nice as reading in bed, but for the money I save, it's probably worth it.
Even though I'm not a King fan, I may just pay out the 1$ to support the cause, it's not like 1$ is gonna hurt me. If you have a buck to spare, I would encourage you to do the same, it may mean cheaper books in the future.
Like it or not, this is what the people have been asking for. I have yet to here the Slashdot crowd comment on the fact that this is being published in an UN-Encrypted manner....
Using "Slashdot" math --
I wonder if the 500 people that commented last time around that they would only buy "internet" books if they did not require "special" software to decode would buy this book on the honor system?
This also inderectlly relates to the thousands of people who have complained that they only use Napster because the $17 bucks for a CD is to expensive....Well -- what if the music industry said -- OK -- 50 cents a track, you download them and then send us a check...And then you find out that many of the "$17 is to much" idiots are now saying "$4.50" is to much....
I for one am a HUGE Stephen King fan -- and am glad that he is offering me a medium to download his work for a great price -- and also maintain the freedom to have it in a format that I can convert to read on my palm, not have to wait in line in bookstores, not having to pay "hardcover" prices, etc...etc...
I would hope the "Free Riders" that are always complaining about having to pay for anything -- do not ruin this.
To top it off: As I told a friend today as to why my hatred of Microsoft was much deeper than his -- "From 1987-1997 I paid (lots) of real green money for bad products -- which gives me a legitimate beef VS. someone who "pirated" for those 10 years -- and still bitches...."
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
It is clear that people do not use the Prisoner's Dilemma as a model for making decisions. Just look at the lotto. here is the matrix: play : $-1 dont play $0 (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the number.)
It wasn't until the advent of the pocket book that people started to expect great novels to be published all at once. Have you ever seen the unabridged version of Les Misérables? It's around 1,500 pages (no relation to Battlefield Earth). You can sometimes find it in 3 volumes (usually in French), but the original was 9 books.
Many of the classic novels in history were published in this cliff-hanger marketing scheme (as you put it). Today, though, we think of it as more of a soap opera scheme, where writers create a story to keep people buying rather than write a cohesive plot in one book.
Kinda' like Micro$oft shipping software with bugs and then fixing them in the next release.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
First they require my email address. Which would be my username for my amazon account.
On the next screen they require a password and my credit card infomarion.
On the final screen they require my billing address and phone number
So the cost also includes my e-mail address, billing address, and phone number
I lied about this information of course. But this could cause a lot of people not to pay.
I just came from Kings website, and I saw no mention of "three installments". Furthermore, he expects 1$/installment from the readers, with no indication of how many installments will be available.
Theoretically he could just end each installment with an even more hefty cliffhanger, and see the 75% paying customers fork over more cash just to know how the story ends.
Ultimatly you could wind up paying the 10$ the novel would cost if published by normal means.
As a paying customer, I should be able to assertain the cost for the entire product before making a buying descission.
How many of you bought a non-virtual print copy also? {raises hand}
How many of you bought more than 1 print copy? {raises hand}
Amazon.com sales rank 1,587 (not too shabby for a book that can be downloaded for free).
Plus, the downloaded file is text, not PDF (yack!)
BTW, if you didn't get to raise your hand even once, then I encourage you to download and/or buy. .. Just not at Amazon.com
The thing is, with a chapter coming out only once a month, nobody's going to be continuously interested in the book. Well, Steven King is quite the author, so he *might* be able to pull it off, but not most authors. Go read a chapter of some book, and see how urgent it is to read the next chapter a month from now.
This is the biggest flaw with this payment method, the time between installments. I suppose it depends on the medium. Novels, I don't think, fit too well. Music might. I'm a Beck fan, and if Beck were to release one song a month, I'd pay to get the next song to come out, for sure.
And if the artist/author is smart, they'll release it in stores afterwards as well.
---
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
What if he is only gathering the email addresses of his interested readers? Not only is he getting the ability to contact them directly, he's getting them to pay for the privilege of giving it to him! Also, suppose he's just testing the price point at which people will pay. Given the man's prolific and consistant output, would you pay $12 /year and he *guarantees* you a chapter of his latest and greatest novel in the email every month? That seems like a reasonable deal to me. $24 for chapters of two different novels a month? He could guarantee a consistent revenue stream for himself (as opposed to "bursts" using the current method), have a DIRECT relationship with his customers (he writes the words, readers get the bits, no physical product, internet replaces the distrubution mechanism & he keeps all the cash)and makes a LOT more money . Wow-- if it works.
Besides why pay for a book if you can read tons of books that are already in public domain now. Just go an look at Project Gutenberg. I actually paid for the complete works of Shakespear and now I know I could have gotting it for free.
But then nothing compares to reading the dead-tree version :-))))
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
But then my sister loves Stephen Kings and well 1$ wound't be a bad investemnt to make her read more. *grin* Still considering
Oh, and for the goldbar? Was that on ebay? ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
It's also too bad I can't contribute more; I'd love to pay $5.00 towards the cost, if it'll make it that much more likely that everyone can have a piece of it for free.
BTW, while I respect the prisoner's dilemma, I don't think charities would hold too well inside of it. It also doesn't account for the "It's just 1 friggin' dollar, cheapskate" factor.
Whoever wrote the article probably never tips. (How does tipping hold up in the prisoner's dilemma?)
I just paid $10 for the heck of it, to show that there are still honest people out there who will pay for what they like. Not everyone is about ripping off.
Time does not wait.
You might know someone named Bill, who happens to do that, but there's another guy named George that does the same thing...
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
To whomever keeps modding me as Overrated:
I'll keep posting
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
Wow, this is a lot of fun!
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
Or NOOOT.
Well, first concern is not valid. I don't believe King would just drop the novel after writing two thirds of it.
Maybe not... But he will almost certainly not release it in the "public domain". The first two chapters wont be. More likely he will broker a deal with his publisher. So everyone who payed a buck (or two) will then have to shell out another 10-30 bucks to read the end.
I for one think the SPP is in essence good. It also allows me to read the book and THEN take a position on weather or not I should pay for it... Kinda like shareware.. I might not like when it comes right down to it.
If it's all a matter of money, then do like King does, and publish in parts. But write two parts, and give away part one. Then when people pay for part two, they get it, and when enough people have payed for part two, make it free.
I know this stands out a little bit from the basic idea of the SPP, but it certainly would have made me bother to download. As it is I didn't, and I wont.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Nowhere on King's site does it mention that there are ONLY three installments. Merely that the third will arrive online (if ... blah blah) in September. From reading the first installment, I cannot see how the story could be wrapped up by then. Twenty installments at a buck apiece? Who knows, the Reader should have some idea of what they are getting themselves into. Also, why take down the first episode when (if) the third arrives? Sounds like that would alienate potential new readers...
I think that King would be very upset if you would copy his work at will. He's trying to make a buck in the digital world, and wouldn't hesitate to call the DMCA upon anybody who copies it.
Be careful who you say your allies are.
It is easy to say that SK will fail at this if you put up a direct link to the download. play fair and we'll see if your theory holds water.
Yankees suck. yep you know it.
I heard this on Friday via NPR...they were saying that this idea, if works, will make the already established authors richer, and provide more opportunity for new-comers since it lowers the barrier of entry. But personally, I hate to read an entire book on the computer monitor...If I print it out, I might as well get a published version of it. 'course I also think HP's morning newspaper delivery to printer is a waste of paper/ink resources when you can subscribe to the papers for probably cheaper due to mass-production of the printing press...
What you say doesn't make any sense. If signal 11 had 600 karma (not 700, as he was claiming), then 300 karma is half as good as signal 11, the most notorious karma whore. That's not a failure on my book.
Secondly, you are a troll. Enoch Root is an admitted troll (a while back, on k22320inchfan). Signal 11 never admitted he was a troll.
Cross-post this to k22320inchfan with confirming posts from Enoch Root and Signal 11 and I'll believe you. (Keep in mind that you can log in multiple users on slashdot.org, www.slashdot.org, web.slashdot.org, and beta.slashdot.org).
-- 11223
-o Who care's how corrupt our leaders are when they're political karma whores? o-
O.K. Heres several thoughts on this whole thing.
First: When I buy a book then less than 75% of the readership pay for it, almost all of my books end up getting loaned to one or more people so it seems like hes looking for a sweet deal there for one. As far as I know this is legal (do not lend, sell or otherwise distribute in any binding other than the original or sth like that) IANAL BTW so correct me if im wring.
Second: Why cant he do something like counting banner add clicks from the page, I'm not sure how much a banner click nets these days but where It is hassle to go to the trouble of rooting out your credit card and entering details etc, I'm sure some people would be willing to follow a few banner adds or sth for a Stephen King book.
Third: Assuming the book does well, makes its 75% and gets completed, then it will more than likely end up getting published anyway, its a lovely advertising campaign, read the book that tamed the internet. Also if it is published well then those who payed for it online ended up paying for a few downloads whereas those who wait will get a proper hardcopy version. Or will any people who pay the money be sent a copy of it?
Fourth (and Last): It has been linked to slashdot. Now we have a 900,000 hit a day site populated by people who for the most part believe stuff on the internet should be free. A lot of them will download it just to see anyway which means a hell of a lot of people need to pay for it to get part 3
Finally I will say that i'm not gonna download it. If I go into a bookstore i can read the first chapter of any book before I buy it, hence I can make an informed decision. I don't think making me pay $1 for that privilage (or penalizing those who like the book because i downloaded it and felt it wasn't worth a dollar) is a step forward.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
I think it's Occams Razor.. and I have to say that the simpilest explanation is that he just doesn't understand the monumental feat of humanity he's asked for (requiring 75% of us to have honor is quite a request, from anyone, including Stephen King).. So Occam's Razor points towards he just didn't think about the math..
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Remember, when an author publishes a regular (paper) book, he may not get very much money from it. The publisher takes a good chunk off for it's profit and the cost of production. The author may only see a very small percentage of the cost of the book. With Stephen selling the online book for $1, he makes out pretty good. No publishers to pay, most all of it goes straight to his pockets. This way, he can probably make more money than selling 'conventional' books. If there are 10 million downloads, and 10% choose to pay, that is a cool million dollars. If it was a paper book, which retailed for $10, he may have to sell a few million copies just to make a million dollars. It is really quite simple if you think about it.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I think the biggest achievement is the fact that it's only costing $1. Come on, what PRINTED book are you going to get, new, for a buck? Come now, it's one hell of a bargain. Sure, you could get it free, but a buck for a chance at the end of the story? It's as charitable a donation as putting money in the big plastic guide dogs at the mall.
Here's my thinking. Suppose for the sake of argument that 1) I am honest and pay up. 2) Enough other people are that the novel gets written.
OK, now, the novel comes out in what, ten installments? So I pay $10, which is MORE than I would pay for a paperback (at $8 or so these days. Unless King's sell for more? I don't read his stuff anyway.) So now lets look at things: If this succeeds, I pay $10 for the next Stephen King novel. If it fails, I pay $8 for the next (different) novel (it is two months late cuz he wasted time, but still.) So, what benefit do I get aside from being able to read this particular novel? As best I can tell, I pay extra for no gain... Thats my quasi-game theoretic analysis. I would, as a reader, prefer that King continue in current form. Of course, that assumes I don't think King should be given lots of money just because, or the fact that I prefer my books in bound form anyway. My answer: write a script to download it 100K times and make it fail!
Sorry, I guess I don't have a lot of respect for Stephen King, but I do have respect for this move, in a way. The sad part of this whole thing is that you really do have to be one of the biggest names in the publishing world, commanding million dollar advances, etc. This is one of those cases where I would like to give the dollar, but I don't want to sully my hard drive with any King algorithms. The most interesting aspect of all this, I guess, is that we will no longer be force-fed our literature. There was a point in time when I dreamed of being a super-well read kind of guy, looking for books that I would like AND that were hard to find. I have just now begun that stage in my life and I can honestly say publishers, nowadays, almost always pass up a good book the first time around. "Force-fed literature" is a fairly obvious phrase, and I imagine most people know what I'm talking about. Stephen King has been force-fed to us. I think he stopped being a good writer (if he ever was) a long time ago. Most good science-fiction readers can tell you that his ideas are piquing only to those whose brains are piqued by NBC news. Most good readers will tell you that his writing was very rarely good, or well wrought. So at least I get a chance to snub King. I hate the way publishers do things, of course. But I still like BOOKS (I will NEVER NEVER NEVER get one of those palm-book thingies) and I still like good writing. I dislike King's high-handed mission here. It's almost as bad as the publishers. After all, writiers (bad ones, mostly) have been selling their stuff on the web for a long time, but it never makes a dent. They would still need the hype to get anyone to buy. The kind of hype a WELL PUBLISHED author like King can bring to bear. Fuck him. Let him fall on his face (though he won't, because you've all been brainwashed by the publishing industry that you pretend to whip).
Although I would like to imagine that King would be nowhere if this is the only way he ever sold his stuff, I know I'm wrong. People like bad things just as publishers give them bad things. There is a discrepency, of course, with the balance of power belonging to publishers. I just wish it was someone else. Remember the Public Enemy album giveaway? I just wish I could respect King--that's why I'm so harsh. I just want it to make people like what I call (selfish) good writing, but fuck it. Pay the dollar and get your jimmies wriggling.
Here's a quote from http://www.stephenking.com/download.html " No tiresome encryption! Want to print it and show it to a friend? Go ahead!" Some kind soul(s) could put this story on their webpage and share it with a few thousand friends for free, and provide a link back to pay for it. That way you would get lots of people downloading it for free, and a few nice people going to the official page to download it and pay. This would blow the whole experiment that Mr. King is proposing, but sometimes that's what happens in the real world... Myself, I'm a huge S.K. fan and I certainly would not hesitate to pay a measly $1 to read this. What is $1 anyways...the time it takes to pay filling out the credit card info would deter more people really. I don't see S.K. as a hack the way lots of people on Slashdot apparently do. I think he is a talented author, who writes a lot more than horror. He has experimented with a lot of unusual ideas for distributing his work in the past as well - an Audio only book, a ebook only story, etc. The is also not the first time that S.K. has messed around with serial novels of course...
post-copyright world
Tell me when we get there because I don't ever see it happening. The world we live in is one where breaching copyright is becoming easier, and no doubt will continue to get easier, but it is still illegal.
Just because you can do something, doesn't make it right.
And why do people always looked so suprised on the Jerry Springer Show?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
"Third, hold contributions in escrow until the novel is released, and if the limit is not reached by a certain time, give us our money back. As a contributor, this makes my cost negligible"
Two Points.
1) Say it takes King two years to write his novel. Im assuming this money will be put in a bank account or some form of investment (after all, its not likely that King will keep it all under his bed until the minimum amount is reached). What happens to the interest that this money generates? Will it come back to each contributer based on the amount that they paid, or will King keep the interest and justify it on the grounds that it is compensation for his time writing the novel?
2) If the interest is not returned to individual contributers, then they _do_ incur a cost; that of lost interest on the $X they paid King, that they would have received if they had invested that $X amount elsewhere (usually at the prevailing bank interest rate) for the same amount of time.
Janie took my gun...
Basically, you pledged to buy the set at a given price. If they didn't get enough pledges by the deadline, then the set wouldn't be produced. Otherwise, they'd press the disks, and you'd be (morally) obligated to buy them. The actual price would depend on the total number of pledges; as more people signed up, the price per set went down.
That seems a lot more workable than King's plan. The creator is guaranteed a minimum number of sales, and the consumer doesn't have to worry about donating money and getting nothing in return.
Animeigo has some similar programs going on today with DVD's, at: http://animeigo.com/products/~survey.t
(If you visit, please sign up for "Yawara!" The series sub-title is "A Fashionable Judo Girl", and how can anyone not like a series with a sub-title like that? Thanks!!!)
Many of you here commented that King will *never* get the 75% loyalty from readers who would pay $1. Well, you're dead wrong. Apparently King's spokesman has said that they have received in excess of $50,000 from credit card payments on the first day alone, which was roughly 75% of the total number of downloads. This doesn't include dollars in the mail which have yet to arrive. Looks like this is really going to shake up the publishing industry. Somebody think up a business model to make this pay-as-you-read work for the lesser-known writers, and you got yourself a business worth some serious VC. As I'm somewhat involved in this business, if you're actually interested in taking this discussion further, you can correspond with me at my email account. Thanks.
As obvious from the person above who just complained "if you download it twice, HE wants $2 for it", the publisher becomes the person to blame when things get messed up, not the author... The publisher is a buffer zone...