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"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?)
- 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.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.
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
"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.
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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.
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."
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!
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
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.
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
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
... 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!
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.