Slashdot Mirror
An Acerbic Look At the Future of Reading
theodp writes "Using Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' own words against him, Mark Pilgrim offers his chilling take on The Future of Reading with a mash-up of Bezos' Open Letter to the Authors Guild, the Amazon Kindle Terms of Service, Steven Levy's Newsweek article on the Kindle, 1984, and Richard Stallman's 'The Right to Read.'"
1st Objection - How does an author get started? Who is going to pay a penny for an unknown author to write something?
1st Answer - New authors just have to suck it up, the way the majority already do today and give away some of their work in order to develop a reputation.
2nd Objection - How is an author going to make a bazillion gazillion dollars if their book is super-duper popular? The price is fixed before release, what if they under-price it?
2nd Answer - If the book is super-duper popular, by definition that means there will be lots and lots of people who liked it enough to pony up for the NEXT book. So the author can increase their asking price for their next work based on the popularity of their previous work.
3rd Objection - How can millions of people all pay a dollar each to an author's escrow account?
3rd Answer - They can't, at least not without a lot of overhead. Today. But that's just a business opportunity waiting for the right person to come along and start the next paypal.
4th Objection - What if nobody is willing to pay the author's asking price?
4th Answer - That's business. Either lower the price, or cancel the offer. At least this way very little time and money gets spent on creating a product that no one wants to buy. It ain't a perfect system but at least the feedback comes from the actual consumers rather than some intermediate businessman whose only purpose is to sell eyeballs for advertising dollars.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
One sad element is that the technician class, of which almost everyone here at Slashdot is a member, has a tendency to the mistaken belief that they will be a part of the plutocracy, just because they can work on the plumbing of the information network that increasingly belongs to the real plutocrats. In reality, they are no better off than the car valet, who believes himself the equal of the jet setter, simply because he is allowed to drive the luxury car from the garage to the curb. The ugly secret is that their salaries, even $100k/yr, in support of their $150k per year lifestyles, is locking them further and further into digital serfdom.
How often I see these newly minted Web 2.0 masters, with their adjustable rate jumbo loans and 42" HDTVs and >$25k in credit card debt, who are convinced they are in charge of their lives and that they are somehow superior to the working-class when in fact the only thing that separates them from the young women sewing shoes in a Vietnamese factory is their enormous debt and high-calorie diets.
I think before the end of the next decade, long before the US sees its first black president, we will come to realize that we have more in common with the illegal-alien day laborers and the North African immigrants who are rioting in France than we do with the Mitt Romneys and George Bushes of the world.
Having become familiar with the plight of the upper-middle or middle-class American who has the ill fortune and bad manners to become sick and require health care and be unable to work, (a story eloquently, and only a tiny bit hyperbolically, told in Michael Moore's "Sicko"), and the middle-aged, advanced degree worker who found himself on the butt-end of the sick joke known as "outsourcing", or the two-income/two kids young professionals who have found that losing one's job to corporate "consolidation" doesn't come with one of those solid-golden parachute exit package, the last decade has served to radicalize me. I no longer see being an enthusiastic consumer as being the same as a loyal citizen, nor do I believe that "what's good for GM (or Microsoft, or AT&T, or Citicorp, or Haliburton) is good for America". I have peeked behind the curtain to find that the free-market orthodoxy that whispers in our ear that 9-figure "performance bonuses" and exploration subsidies to oil companies who have just enjoyed record profits, and a 13000 Dow, and "globalization" will all somehow "trickle down" to the rest of us, and the working-class families who will lose their homes to foreclosure while Countryside gets a nice fat bailout is all part of how a healthy economy works, is really little more than a dodge by those teflon "leaders" who seem to get rich no matter how their corporations perform or how badly the economy tanks.
It's all degenerating quickly. And like battered wives, we continue to pretend that another election is going to "turn things around", and we believe the politicians and their enabling media that it's somehow going to be different this time around. That's why I'm using the little bit of breathing room that my decades of hard work and frugal living have gotten me to do everything I can to subvert the meat-grinder of our corporate magesterium.
You are welcome on my lawn.