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Doctorow and Stross Release Latest Novels for Free
FleaPlus writes "Two prominent science fiction authors have recently released their newest
novels as free downloads to coincide with their in-store releases. The first is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow. This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network, among other things. The second is Accelerando, by Charles Stross, which tells the tale of three generations of the Macx family (beginning with perptually-slashdotted venture altruist Manfred Macx) in the years leading up to and beyond a technological singularity."
Personally I like sitting in a deck chair in the sun with a nice paper book. My puter is for work or baiting slashdot copyright whingers .....
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
DRM doesn't work. Every file ever released with DRM locks on it is currently available for free download on the Internet. You don't need any special skills to break DRM these days: you just have to know how to search Google for the name of the work you're seeking.
DRM does work. It doesn't have to work all the time. As long as it is still easier to purchased DRM'd stuff than search for cracked stuff on the internet there will still be sales of it and people will make money. People here kid themselves that if everything was available for free with no DRM at all content providers would still make some money. It's a war and nobody will ever trully win it. Content providers will come up with ingenious ways to protect thier new works which *will* work for a short while and then somebody will crack it. Content providers move to new tech. It doesn't have to work forever. Just enough time to cash in.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
Being anti DRM is the flavor of the month with a certain demographic. This little rant above and the release of a non DRM'd book is great marketing. Look he got himself posted on slashdot!!!!
It is a bit like Metallica in reverse. Hard angry men encouraging other young angry men to break societies rules but wait
Just as Metallica is hard and angry for *marketing* purposes when it suits them I can't quite believe this guy is anti DRM for any reasons other than it is good marketing for the moment.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
I think what is meant is that DRM doesn't stop people who want to get the media illegally AT ALL, it only inconveniences their customers.
You say a protection scheme works for a short while. With the latest protection schemes, they were hacked within a few days; most people wouldn't even have had the time to buy the player yet.
So for the benefit of just a few days of additional income, DRM inconveniences all paying customers for the rest of the DRM's existence.
DRM doesn't work since nobody who matters benefits, not the companies nor the paying customers.
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On the other hand, Doctorow has had success in the past by making books available in print and via free download. His success flies in the face of the assumption that downloads kill sales. That's what much of the anti-downloading argument hinges on, isn't it, an assumption? What if that assumption is wrong?
Maybe it doesn't stop a core of people who know how to apply the patches, upgrade thier firmware or browse warez sites but there are plenty of people who wouldn't have a clue. These are the people the content providers have to muddle to keep them in the shops and they are the majority. It doesn't have to be impossible just inconvienient.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
I'd still pay for a paper book over a download just for the ability to sit in the sun on a deck chair with it. If E-book readers approach the quality, feel and experience of paper books I'm sure the assumption will hold just fine.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
You miss the crucial difference between fiction and non-fiction. Of course we can imagine what it would be like after the singularity - it is our ability to give meaningful predictions of the future that is reduced. That doesn't mean we can't try. We just have to accept that the odds of being correct will be tremendously low, but in this case being right isn't the point. Being interesting and thought provoking is.
Why wait? A $200 PDA will probably pay off for itself before you need battery replacement on eBooks alone. Also it is a nice pocket DB, notepad, reference tool (PDA dictionaries are a blessing if you learn foreign language(s)) and a game console.
Hints: you need a good (around $10) antiglare "screen-protector" and a book-reader with "RTA-like" scrolling. For PalmOS I may recommend this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmfiction/
I don't see it in the comments yet, so I'll say it myself: thank you Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross!
I think giving away a book at publication gets plenty of attention today, but I wonder whether it will help much when it's not news any longer. When hundreds of authors follow his lead, as they will, it won't be Slashdot-grade news. Does anyone believe that they'll all sell tens of thousands of books just because it's free? Oh, I'm sure it will lure some people in. Perhaps the sales lost to the free loaders will always be cheaper than paying for ads. Lord knows that good advertising isn't cheap. So maybe it's still a viable strategy. But the 104th person to do this won't have the same success as the first.
Cory's publisher says that 10,000 copies of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" have been sold in the 2.5 years it has been out in hardcover and paperback. If this is success, I'd hate to see failure or mediocrity.
Cory's a commited activist and a great blogger but as a novelist I'm sorry to say he can't match other new writers like China Mieville or Richard Morgan, not to mention oldsters Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Ballard, etc. Cory's genius is in using his blog to get as much publicity as the aforementioned writers even though not nearly as many people are reading his novels.
Article that quotes Cory's publisher
There's a problem with 1a. I don't HAVE to buy CDs anymore, I could download everything I want from p2p. But I don't, primarily because I want the physical disk and want the sound quality. As it turns out I buy probably 10 a month or so. Look even at Cory himself - all his books are available online for free, but guess what? He still sells plenty because people want a big papery thing they can read on the bus.
The key here is to understand that while people might not pay directly for the work in question because they can download it for free, they will pay for a convenient, collectable, tactile container for that work.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I think we can look at computer games: they have been fighting DRM longer than music has. Initially, no game was protected. Now, some games can be copied trivially (i.e. no DRM), many are protected to the extreme (require the CD to start, or even require an internet connection to start(!)). And yet, hacked versions of the games are easily available. This is similar to your scenario no 2.
And what happens? Most people buy games (possibly because we feel the makers of the game deserve our money), and the industry is still very alive and prosperous.
So my prediction would be that music will go the way of the video games: lots of yucky DRM and there will still be freeloaders, but not enough to entirely trash the system.
I can't say I'm happy with the current state of video games protection, because none of the non-independent games I bought will work once their CD gets scratched. I cannot make backup copies.
Maybe we'll see more independent work? That's certainly happening these days with video games.
I agree with the earlier poster who said that a DRM success wouldn't be any good for the consumers. We are living in a period of DRM success - just look at anyone who owns DVDs and doesn't use DVD Shrink.
They are forced to watch trailers on many disks (Sixth Sense for one), can't screenshot or record a quick excerpt, and often can't play it to secondary video devices.
This world of DRM Success shows that nobody in charge cares about the customer. Stores refuse to take back broken movies like Sixth Sense, or even ones that for a software glitch refuse to work in computer players (I have a few that won't play in PowerDVD or Xine). And then there's the fact that using non-authorized software is illegal. I'm not allowed to try to fix this.
DRM is never going to not suck - there will always be reasons for wanting to prevent things that people are free to do with unprotected media like books (annotating, removing unwanted pages, skipping dull crap). Studios don't want you to do anything to their media, or watch it any way other than they intend. Allowances for consumer choice would be a hole their ideal total DRM, as such, they'll fight against you ever getting choice.
There was a major change in the business model for games just as bandwidth was approaching the size required to make pirating them trivial. That same bandwidth that was about to destroy them allowed many of the most popular titles to be online multiplayer. Online servers make for very reliable DRM, and users support it because circumventing it would also allow cheaters.
This suggests a very reasonable business model for musicians if no other IP authors. Hmm...