So, as an Australian I know complaining about this is going to do jack. So how can we protect ourselves?
As far as I can see, getting an Ipredator account (an encrypted VPN straight to Sweden) allows you to bypass the Australian system completely. All they know is "You have an Ipredator account." You can use Skype to do your telephony through the VPN and it, too, becomes obsficated and encrypted as well.
Now, doing this will basically protect you from most things. If you're looking at 4Chan, or weird arse but legal porn (mmm, mechophilia), or prank calling Christian Weston Chandler or whatever, yeah, you're basically safe.
Don't think that you can DDOS whitehouse.gov, though, or make bomb/assassination threats, or look up kiddy porn or whatever. If you piss off the FBI there's really not a lot, in the long term, you can do to avoid pound-me-in-the-arse prison.
I wonder how long Ipredator/etc will be legal for Australians, or if it remains legal but simply using it will get the attention of ASIO.
I wouldn't mind it, and freely give away copies of my book on a regular basis. Free days are one of the (major) KDP Select perks.
I chose Select because the alternative is to publish everywhere, but Amazon is the four $X kilogram gorilla in the ebook market and Select gives me (a basic unknown) a huge publicity boost. The alternative is to publish on Nook, Smashwords, Lulu, iTunes (with an ISBN and $99 yearly account fee), etc etc etc, and make about 20% of my Amazon sales spread out among all of them... and therefore cross no sales thresholds and get paid nothing, or get "currency exchange fee'd to death" by having 25 transactions coming in a month, all of $10 and all attracting a $2.50 transaction fee.
KDP Select is basically the major player in the indie publishing business and it's got some messed up rules, but I think there's enough room to compromise within its rules.
Actually, I'm really a big fan of CC-BY-NC-SA and I'd love to use it. What I really want is to free my work from "George Lucas-itis". That is to say, if I get old and fat(ter) and crazy and be all like "LIAO IS MY CREATION, NONE CAN WRITE IN MY UNIVERSE BUT MEEEEEEEEEEEE", then I want my fans to tell me to fuck myself sideways.
I've been struggling to find a way to do this that doesn't allow people to just republish my book 100% (there's no creativity in that, and I want to encourage creativity -- aka the WHOLE PURPOSE of copyright). I used to publish the first three chapters and prologue of my book as CC-BY-NC-SA, but then Amazon jumped on me because it violated the exclusivity of KDP Select, so I had to remove them from my website.
To try and more accurately do what I wanted to do all along, I've been meaning to publish a universe bible under CC-BY-NC-SA, which just haven't gotten around to it yet (It's only been like a month and I have a full time job and other writing thingies planned). I also plan to release it all into the public domain, or at least CC-BY-SA, as soon as I feel a reasonable period has passed since publication. Certainly before my death if it's timely, and at my death if it's not.
I have been kicking around the idea of publishing a story CC-BY-SA-NC and donating all the proceeds to Child's Play, but Amazon would pricematch it to free the moment someone gave it away, undercutting the whole "giving to charity" thing.
They don't represent me. They represent Hollywood, a part of America, which despite appearances is not Australia just yet.
The talks do nothing to further my interests (I don't give a shit about piracy, in fact it helps me a lot), and in fact are actively working against me.
Heh, thank you! I'm always happy to jump in on Slashdot articles I find interesting. Since KDP Select is one such area, and no other authors had posted, I thought I'd chime in.
At the moment there's no non-Kindle version, and any other electronic version would break the exclusivity agreement of KDP Select; I can't publish it on Nook, or I would. Note that you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books, there's a free app for Androids, iPhones, iPads, PC and Macs. Pretty sure there's not a version for Nook as that would be... strange. Don't know about Linux, possibly?
A paperback version (made via print on demand service CreateSpace) is something I have on my long-term horizon, but not for a while. Not until Book 2 comes out probably.;)
As a KDP Select author (I wrote Lacuna: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RZNR3Y), I have to say I'm a huge fan... and the borrows are just a nice perk.
Essentially what happens is this. Amazon puts $X in an account, your payout is that sum divided by total borrows, times by your borrows. So if there's $500,00 in the pool, and 500,000 borrows total, and you have six, you get $6. The cost of your book or its popularity don't matter.
HOWEVER... not everyone can borrow. The only people who can borrow are Amazon Prime members ($79 a year), and they can only borrow one book a month. Prime's main attraction for most people is the ability to get free priority shipping (as I understand it). The book borrows are just a perk and from what we've seen so far most Prime members aren't even using that feature.
Over January there were a lot of borrows because Amazon gave anyone a one month free trial of Amazon Prime. That's why they upped the amount from $500,000 to $700,000 in January. For reference, the borrows in December paid out about $1.70, which equated to a pretty good deal for those who publish at $0.99 since the 35% royalty meant those people were getting $1.70 per "purchase" rather than 35 cents.
Rumour is that Amazon felt that $1.70 was still too low, that's why the pool in February is $600,000 (up from $500,000) even though the free month has expired. Since we're expecting a lot fewer borrows this month, it's anticipated that borrows are going to be worth a lot more. My own borrows have dropped off a fair bit even though sales have picked up.
All that said... the main benefit of Select is not the borrows. The borrows are just a nice perk. The main benefit is the KDP Free Days... you get 5 days per 90 days where you can set your book as free ($0). Doing so gives you a huge publicity boost since in every way (aside from pay, and paid rankings), Amazon treats these as paid sales. That means that if you push a lot of free books you get on the "movers and shakers list" and for people who bought your free book and something else, your book has a good chance of appearing on that other books "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..." list, which is a fantastic way to get a lot of publicity.
KDP Select has been a huge boon for unknown authors and in fact has encouraged the community over at www.kindleboards.com to grow substantially; there is now a massive so-called "MEGA THREAD" regarding KDP Select free days results and it's one of the most popular threads around.
For reference, I usually sell about 1-2 copies of Lacuna: Demons of the Void a day. Post free-days I get a massive boost, usually in the order of 10-50x more sales, usually 2-5 days after the free periods end as that's when Amazon does their "also boughts" recalculation.
KDP Select is awesome and the exclusivity of it doesn't matter to me since Amazon is the 300kg gorilla in the eBook market. It's important to note that the exclusivity does NOT apply to paperback versions of the same book, and in fact in the "Welcome To KDP Select!" email you get they actively encourage you to use various non-Amazon paperback publishing services.
All my works (including some shorts published under a pen name) are all in KDP Select and for the moment I'm sticking with it. The borrows are just a nice little garnish... the real benefits, especially for lesser known authors, lies elsewhere.
That's a very good way of doing things! I was actually thinking of doing something similar with a short story collection set in the same world as Lacuna, called Tales of the Toralii.
Good stuff you're writing, too. Keep up the good work... and drop me a line (uhh somehow?) when the short story collection gets released!
- If the book becomes popular, and I get fat and crazy like George Lucas, I want anyone who reads it and likes it to be protected. I don't want to turn into the next guy suing people for writing "Lightsaber" (or in my case, Toralii or whatever). - I want people to write fanfiction if they so choose, and I want their ability to write said fan-fiction to be protected by something more than my own word. As indicated above, I think suing your fans is really stupid, and I want to give anyone who did write something the confidence that they're not going to get fucked over later. - I believe copyright to be fundamentally broken in its current form and the Creative Commons scheme to be a vast improvement. What I'd prefer is something basically like the Creative Commons scheme I've picked, but one that's the opposite of "No Derivatives"; meaning that people can't redistribute perfect copies of the book, but only works based on it. By CCing the beginning, but keeping the end, I think this achieves the spirit of what I'm trying to get at; people can write fanfiction in this universe, but not basically just reprint the book.
While I happen to think it's a good book, the issue with self-publishing is that so much of the material out there is crap. Maybe my book is crap, too; I made the first three chapters and prologue not only available online for free, but also CC-BY-SA-NC, so anyone who reads it can expand them, write their own fanfiction, etc.
But one of the advantages of reading the works of self-published writers is that that you often have a more direct connection to them, since getting noticed is the hardest part of writing a successful novel. If someone gives me feedback on my book, good bad or indifferent, then I'm much more likely to listen.
And... look. Despite what I said about so much of self-published books being crap, well... there is a lot of good stuff out there, too. For example, Harry Potter got rejected by basically every publisher in England before Bloomsbury took it up and then you know what happened from there. So just because something's not listed by a big publisher, it's still possible to be good.
This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...
Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.
DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.
I've always wanted to play a serious World War II shooter from the perspective of a German soldier. I mean, we've stormed Omaha beach so many times... it'd be interesting to defend it. And we'd get to participate in some really unique content that hasn't been completely done to death by every shooter ever.
Or even an alternate history, something like Modern Warfare series, but in World War 2 where some critical decision -- such as Hitler not deciding to turn the ME-262 into a bomber and mass produce it -- causes the stop of round-the-clock bombing, which leads to a revitalization of German industry, and a swing of the war against the Allies...
So the moral of this story is... no matter what anyone in the DOJ says, they are lying and the opposite to what they say is true? Sounds about right to me.
Features like this tend to creep their way in slowly.
- It's something you can turn on. - It's on by default, but you can turn it off easily. - It's on by default and you need a CS degree to turn it off. - It can only be turned off by hacking your system. - It can only be turned off by hacking your system, and this is illegal to do.
Google Sam Tsui, or Kurt Hugo-Schneider. Easily the most talented singer sI've heard in a while. While I couldn't find any information on their income, they appear to have made music their full-time job and obviously have enough money to buy expensive cameras and drum kits and the like.
You can make money without a record label. The book linked in my sig is now finished, undergoing the last few revisions before I put it to the Kindle store. I'm not expecting it to be the next Star Wars, but the point is, the barrier to entry is very low.
Record labels, publishing companies, other 'talent aggregators'... are now essentially obsolete.
If this law is ever enforced, then we'll just see a sharp contraction in MAFIAA profits, and it will serve them right. Nothing of real value will have been lost.
And all the losses will be blamed on piracy, and used to support even stronger and more insane laws.
I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. I'm just in the final review and cleanup pass now.
The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.
I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.
Anyway. This law is basically insane.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
The patent describes a method of chemical exchange by which carbon based humanoid life may expunge dyoxygen carbonate through a series of two (or one with minimal function) pouches lined with a series of thin-walled air sacs. Since this invention is a complex medical procedure and one with significant market potential, I think patenting this to prevent any unauthorized use is a wise choice.
I created this invention entirely on my own without any outside help from others, and it's taken me a lifetime of work to perfect.
Which does NOT including Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are approximately $900 billion, and does NOT including the care for the approximately 33,000 wounded veterans those wars have produced... which is probably a few billion, but I couldn't find an easy source so let's just go with nothing. But remember it's there.
That means that DOD gets 83 times as much as NASA gets. They could reduce their budget by 1/83rd and double Nasa's budget.
A country needs defense. I get it. But seriously -- NASA is one of those organizations that, if your pour money into it, does AMAZING things. Things that give so much back to the scientific community -- things like computers, insulation, search and rescue, navigation, everything. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many technologies can be traced back to the space program... and while DoD are great inventors too, especially in medical treatment, materials, transportation... NASA gives so much back too and no brown people have to die.
Can't we just have a couple less B2 Stealth Bombers (B-52's bomb brown people just fine) and a couple less F-22's (F-15 Eagles still have never been defeated in combat) and GET THE FUCK TO MARS?
I gave Calibre a shot -- it failed with the ODF, but the PDF worked fine. I didn't try HTML but I probably should.
I put the.mobi file into the Kindle simulator and it had a few obvious formatting problems (mostly to do with chapter headings and the occasional, minor issue) but it actually worked out fine. What I might do is use Calibre to convert the PDF or HTML to ePub, then use Sigil to clean it up as you suggest. The cleanup should be fairly minor and judging by how accurate it is I could probably get it done in a day.
I'm not closely wedded to the Kindle converter, nope, I just wanted to make sure that it was accepted by the Kindle people. I've heard of Calibre but haven't actually tried it yet. I'm actually downloading it now to give it a shot.
What I'd really like is some kind of WYSIWYG eBook writer, but I don't think such a thing exists...
Slashdot Mirror
So, as an Australian I know complaining about this is going to do jack. So how can we protect ourselves?
As far as I can see, getting an Ipredator account (an encrypted VPN straight to Sweden) allows you to bypass the Australian system completely. All they know is "You have an Ipredator account." You can use Skype to do your telephony through the VPN and it, too, becomes obsficated and encrypted as well.
Now, doing this will basically protect you from most things. If you're looking at 4Chan, or weird arse but legal porn (mmm, mechophilia), or prank calling Christian Weston Chandler or whatever, yeah, you're basically safe.
Don't think that you can DDOS whitehouse.gov, though, or make bomb/assassination threats, or look up kiddy porn or whatever. If you piss off the FBI there's really not a lot, in the long term, you can do to avoid pound-me-in-the-arse prison.
I wonder how long Ipredator/etc will be legal for Australians, or if it remains legal but simply using it will get the attention of ASIO.
Years? Months? Maybe it already does...
I wouldn't mind it, and freely give away copies of my book on a regular basis. Free days are one of the (major) KDP Select perks.
I chose Select because the alternative is to publish everywhere, but Amazon is the four $X kilogram gorilla in the ebook market and Select gives me (a basic unknown) a huge publicity boost. The alternative is to publish on Nook, Smashwords, Lulu, iTunes (with an ISBN and $99 yearly account fee), etc etc etc, and make about 20% of my Amazon sales spread out among all of them... and therefore cross no sales thresholds and get paid nothing, or get "currency exchange fee'd to death" by having 25 transactions coming in a month, all of $10 and all attracting a $2.50 transaction fee.
KDP Select is basically the major player in the indie publishing business and it's got some messed up rules, but I think there's enough room to compromise within its rules.
Actually, I'm really a big fan of CC-BY-NC-SA and I'd love to use it. What I really want is to free my work from "George Lucas-itis". That is to say, if I get old and fat(ter) and crazy and be all like "LIAO IS MY CREATION, NONE CAN WRITE IN MY UNIVERSE BUT MEEEEEEEEEEEE", then I want my fans to tell me to fuck myself sideways.
I've been struggling to find a way to do this that doesn't allow people to just republish my book 100% (there's no creativity in that, and I want to encourage creativity -- aka the WHOLE PURPOSE of copyright). I used to publish the first three chapters and prologue of my book as CC-BY-NC-SA, but then Amazon jumped on me because it violated the exclusivity of KDP Select, so I had to remove them from my website.
To try and more accurately do what I wanted to do all along, I've been meaning to publish a universe bible under CC-BY-NC-SA, which just haven't gotten around to it yet (It's only been like a month and I have a full time job and other writing thingies planned). I also plan to release it all into the public domain, or at least CC-BY-SA, as soon as I feel a reasonable period has passed since publication. Certainly before my death if it's timely, and at my death if it's not.
I have been kicking around the idea of publishing a story CC-BY-SA-NC and donating all the proceeds to Child's Play, but Amazon would pricematch it to free the moment someone gave it away, undercutting the whole "giving to charity" thing.
If anyone has any bright ideas, let me know.
Or put a little bit more simply,
"It's like sex. Fifty no's and one yes is a yes."
Those people can GET FUCKED.
They don't represent me. They represent Hollywood, a part of America, which despite appearances is not Australia just yet.
The talks do nothing to further my interests (I don't give a shit about piracy, in fact it helps me a lot), and in fact are actively working against me.
Heh, thank you! I'm always happy to jump in on Slashdot articles I find interesting. Since KDP Select is one such area, and no other authors had posted, I thought I'd chime in.
At the moment there's no non-Kindle version, and any other electronic version would break the exclusivity agreement of KDP Select; I can't publish it on Nook, or I would. Note that you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books, there's a free app for Androids, iPhones, iPads, PC and Macs. Pretty sure there's not a version for Nook as that would be... strange. Don't know about Linux, possibly?
A paperback version (made via print on demand service CreateSpace) is something I have on my long-term horizon, but not for a while. Not until Book 2 comes out probably. ;)
As a KDP Select author (I wrote Lacuna: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RZNR3Y), I have to say I'm a huge fan... and the borrows are just a nice perk.
Essentially what happens is this. Amazon puts $X in an account, your payout is that sum divided by total borrows, times by your borrows. So if there's $500,00 in the pool, and 500,000 borrows total, and you have six, you get $6. The cost of your book or its popularity don't matter.
HOWEVER... not everyone can borrow. The only people who can borrow are Amazon Prime members ($79 a year), and they can only borrow one book a month. Prime's main attraction for most people is the ability to get free priority shipping (as I understand it). The book borrows are just a perk and from what we've seen so far most Prime members aren't even using that feature.
Over January there were a lot of borrows because Amazon gave anyone a one month free trial of Amazon Prime. That's why they upped the amount from $500,000 to $700,000 in January. For reference, the borrows in December paid out about $1.70, which equated to a pretty good deal for those who publish at $0.99 since the 35% royalty meant those people were getting $1.70 per "purchase" rather than 35 cents.
Rumour is that Amazon felt that $1.70 was still too low, that's why the pool in February is $600,000 (up from $500,000) even though the free month has expired. Since we're expecting a lot fewer borrows this month, it's anticipated that borrows are going to be worth a lot more. My own borrows have dropped off a fair bit even though sales have picked up.
All that said... the main benefit of Select is not the borrows. The borrows are just a nice perk. The main benefit is the KDP Free Days... you get 5 days per 90 days where you can set your book as free ($0). Doing so gives you a huge publicity boost since in every way (aside from pay, and paid rankings), Amazon treats these as paid sales. That means that if you push a lot of free books you get on the "movers and shakers list" and for people who bought your free book and something else, your book has a good chance of appearing on that other books "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..." list, which is a fantastic way to get a lot of publicity.
KDP Select has been a huge boon for unknown authors and in fact has encouraged the community over at www.kindleboards.com to grow substantially; there is now a massive so-called "MEGA THREAD" regarding KDP Select free days results and it's one of the most popular threads around.
For reference, I usually sell about 1-2 copies of Lacuna: Demons of the Void a day. Post free-days I get a massive boost, usually in the order of 10-50x more sales, usually 2-5 days after the free periods end as that's when Amazon does their "also boughts" recalculation.
KDP Select is awesome and the exclusivity of it doesn't matter to me since Amazon is the 300kg gorilla in the eBook market. It's important to note that the exclusivity does NOT apply to paperback versions of the same book, and in fact in the "Welcome To KDP Select!" email you get they actively encourage you to use various non-Amazon paperback publishing services.
All my works (including some shorts published under a pen name) are all in KDP Select and for the moment I'm sticking with it. The borrows are just a nice little garnish... the real benefits, especially for lesser known authors, lies elsewhere.
Set up an anti-patent advocacy group?
That's a very good way of doing things! I was actually thinking of doing something similar with a short story collection set in the same world as Lacuna, called Tales of the Toralii.
Good stuff you're writing, too. Keep up the good work... and drop me a line (uhh somehow?) when the short story collection gets released!
The reason why I did this is threefold.
- If the book becomes popular, and I get fat and crazy like George Lucas, I want anyone who reads it and likes it to be protected. I don't want to turn into the next guy suing people for writing "Lightsaber" (or in my case, Toralii or whatever).
- I want people to write fanfiction if they so choose, and I want their ability to write said fan-fiction to be protected by something more than my own word. As indicated above, I think suing your fans is really stupid, and I want to give anyone who did write something the confidence that they're not going to get fucked over later.
- I believe copyright to be fundamentally broken in its current form and the Creative Commons scheme to be a vast improvement. What I'd prefer is something basically like the Creative Commons scheme I've picked, but one that's the opposite of "No Derivatives"; meaning that people can't redistribute perfect copies of the book, but only works based on it. By CCing the beginning, but keeping the end, I think this achieves the spirit of what I'm trying to get at; people can write fanfiction in this universe, but not basically just reprint the book.
Sure, why wouldn't it be?
My (finished, in editing and rework stage) Kindle book: http://www.lacunaverse.com/reading/lacuna-demons-of-the-void
While I happen to think it's a good book, the issue with self-publishing is that so much of the material out there is crap. Maybe my book is crap, too; I made the first three chapters and prologue not only available online for free, but also CC-BY-SA-NC, so anyone who reads it can expand them, write their own fanfiction, etc.
But one of the advantages of reading the works of self-published writers is that that you often have a more direct connection to them, since getting noticed is the hardest part of writing a successful novel. If someone gives me feedback on my book, good bad or indifferent, then I'm much more likely to listen.
And... look. Despite what I said about so much of self-published books being crap, well... there is a lot of good stuff out there, too. For example, Harry Potter got rejected by basically every publisher in England before Bloomsbury took it up and then you know what happened from there. So just because something's not listed by a big publisher, it's still possible to be good.
Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.
This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...
Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.
DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.
I wrote a book where the heroes are Chinese and Iranians (and one EU member from Belgium), shameless link-whoring here.
Would this book be banned in Iran? Or lauded? I wonder what they think of it...
I've always wanted to play a serious World War II shooter from the perspective of a German soldier. I mean, we've stormed Omaha beach so many times... it'd be interesting to defend it. And we'd get to participate in some really unique content that hasn't been completely done to death by every shooter ever.
Or even an alternate history, something like Modern Warfare series, but in World War 2 where some critical decision -- such as Hitler not deciding to turn the ME-262 into a bomber and mass produce it -- causes the stop of round-the-clock bombing, which leads to a revitalization of German industry, and a swing of the war against the Allies...
That'd be interesting.
So the moral of this story is... no matter what anyone in the DOJ says, they are lying and the opposite to what they say is true? Sounds about right to me.
For now.
Features like this tend to creep their way in slowly.
- It's something you can turn on.
- It's on by default, but you can turn it off easily.
- It's on by default and you need a CS degree to turn it off.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system, and this is illegal to do.
Google Sam Tsui, or Kurt Hugo-Schneider. Easily the most talented singer sI've heard in a while. While I couldn't find any information on their income, they appear to have made music their full-time job and obviously have enough money to buy expensive cameras and drum kits and the like.
You can make money without a record label. The book linked in my sig is now finished, undergoing the last few revisions before I put it to the Kindle store. I'm not expecting it to be the next Star Wars, but the point is, the barrier to entry is very low.
Record labels, publishing companies, other 'talent aggregators'... are now essentially obsolete.
If this law is ever enforced, then we'll just see a sharp contraction in MAFIAA profits, and it will serve them right. Nothing of real value will have been lost.
And all the losses will be blamed on piracy, and used to support even stronger and more insane laws.
I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. I'm just in the final review and cleanup pass now.
The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.
I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.
Anyway. This law is basically insane.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I'm patenting the following, the pulmonarius.
The patent describes a method of chemical exchange by which carbon based humanoid life may expunge dyoxygen carbonate through a series of two (or one with minimal function) pouches lined with a series of thin-walled air sacs. Since this invention is a complex medical procedure and one with significant market potential, I think patenting this to prevent any unauthorized use is a wise choice.
I created this invention entirely on my own without any outside help from others, and it's taken me a lifetime of work to perfect.
You are correct, and I stand corrected.
It's still what I call a metric fucktonne of money, when the entire budget for NASA is a rounding error for the DoD.
We could easily have both. Easily. Let me show you how:
NASA's budget: $18.724 billion (Fiscal Year 2011) (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
Department of Defense's budget: $663.8
Which does NOT including Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are approximately $900 billion, and does NOT including the care for the approximately 33,000 wounded veterans those wars have produced... which is probably a few billion, but I couldn't find an easy source so let's just go with nothing. But remember it's there.
Adding those into DoD's budget gives: $1,563.8 billion. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States)
That means that DOD gets 83 times as much as NASA gets. They could reduce their budget by 1/83rd and double Nasa's budget.
A country needs defense. I get it. But seriously -- NASA is one of those organizations that, if your pour money into it, does AMAZING things. Things that give so much back to the scientific community -- things like computers, insulation, search and rescue, navigation, everything. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many technologies can be traced back to the space program... and while DoD are great inventors too, especially in medical treatment, materials, transportation... NASA gives so much back too and no brown people have to die.
Can't we just have a couple less B2 Stealth Bombers (B-52's bomb brown people just fine) and a couple less F-22's (F-15 Eagles still have never been defeated in combat) and GET THE FUCK TO MARS?
I gave Calibre a shot -- it failed with the ODF, but the PDF worked fine. I didn't try HTML but I probably should.
I put the .mobi file into the Kindle simulator and it had a few obvious formatting problems (mostly to do with chapter headings and the occasional, minor issue) but it actually worked out fine. What I might do is use Calibre to convert the PDF or HTML to ePub, then use Sigil to clean it up as you suggest. The cleanup should be fairly minor and judging by how accurate it is I could probably get it done in a day.
That's actually a huge relief! Thank you! :D
I'm not closely wedded to the Kindle converter, nope, I just wanted to make sure that it was accepted by the Kindle people. I've heard of Calibre but haven't actually tried it yet. I'm actually downloading it now to give it a shot.
What I'd really like is some kind of WYSIWYG eBook writer, but I don't think such a thing exists...