For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.
No, actually there is not a flat royalty for each type of book sale. Different types of publishing rights are negotiated separately. An author may make 15 percent on hardback bookstore sales, 5 percent on book clubs, and 0 percent on international sales. There is no reason why publishers and authors could not negotiate a separate royalty rate for 'pay per read.' That said, an author would have to be very stupid or very generous to settle for 0.000000001%. After all, the publisher's cost of distribution is much lower for this type of publishing. If anything, authors should negotiate higher royalties for pay-per read.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%.
Where did you read this? I spent many years working in the publishing industry, and the royalties ranged from 10 to 20 percent. A big name author like Tom Clancy could probably get an even higher rate. What kills authors is not the rate, it's the other expenses that get deducted from royalties before a penny is paid--the biggest one is permissions: the cost not only of paying for any excerpts of copyrighted material appearing in a book, but also of tracking down the rightsholders.
A more realistic way to use this system is as it is intended. Surely there's some dollar amount at which you'd be willing to read an unsolicited e-mail. $5? $100? Whatever it is, that's where you set your threshold. Then your read the message--obviously someone willing to pay that much must be fairly well convinced they have something you're interested in buying (perhaps they want to offer you a job).
Needless to say, simple economics would preclude using the system (on the receiving end) as a money-making technique. Smart spammers would find ways to locate willing buyers. Stupid spammers would go broke.
... is copyright-rich deep pockets (like Disney) would have no incentive to lobby for longer and longer copyright terms. They care about profits over the next 5 years, tops. So if there's nothing Disney can do to extend the copyright-milking period of Steamboat Willie, they're not going to bother with extending the copyright of Treasure Planet II into the next century. No retroactive copyright law changes could effectively mean the end of big business's meddling with freedom of speech [of course, we'd still have the DMCA to worry about, but that's another thread....]
in first-world countries there are slightly more women than men
Yes, I understand. I was trying to keep my example simple for the statistically disinclined. The point is that this method can be used to take all that (and more) into account. You could compare the sample to all Internet users, the general population, or any other population of which the sample is a subgroup.
But by "skewed" I think the original poster meant that the data wasn't being collected in a consistent, methodical manner. I'd say that the problem is that they're misstating what they're recording: weblogs are not the same thing as financial transactions. There's *no* uniform API that can tell you when someone bought something.
No, the point is that you can adjust statistically for data that is not "collected in a consistent, methodical manner." And yes, they can tell when someone bought something. They have access to 30,000 credit card statements. About the only thing they'd have trouble adjusting for is the fact that users must "opt-in" to using their spyware. What we're all curious about in this discussion is how, exactly, did they convince *anyone* to opt-in.
There is no way of compensating for inherently skewed data.
This is simply incorrect. Pollsters do it all the time. Here's a simple example. Suppose a poll surveys 100 people. In the survey sample, 75 are men and 25 are women. In the population, the genders are divided evenly. So you multiply the results for women by 3 so that you have the same number of responses from men and women (obviously you would then calculate the margin of error taking your original sample size into account).
When you have a huge sample size such as the data from this company, such adjustments can be done to an amazing level of precision. The margin of error would be tiny.
I would imagine this data is skewed towards the mid and high-end income brackets
There is a way of adjusting for such skewed data. It's called statistics. At $50,000/year/subscription, I think they can probably afford to keep a statistician on payroll. Or clients who can afford the subscription fee could afford one.
I missed the part of Lessig's presentation where he said 'contributing to the growing body of Open Source work is valueless, and should not be counted as a contribution'.
Did you see the presentation? He kept hitting us over that head with the idea that the only real way to contribute was to donate money to EFF. Not a bad idea, but not the only way to contribute.
Actually, no, I was talking about creating copyright-free or publicly licensed works. In the case of software, this would generally be working on open-source software. Personally, I'm working on a system to create new copyright-free textbooks to be used as an alternative to copyrighted ones.
I guess technically you're right--none of this actively moves works out of copyright, but it does increase people's opportunity to use public domain/publicly licensed materials.
I saw a webcast of Lessig's presentation, and I found it fascinating and inspirational. However, I question whether donating to EFF is the only way to measure "what you have done." What about doing actual work: contributing to the public domain or to the growing corpus of publicly licensed works? Shouldn't that "count"?
What's better--working for an hour to remove works from the tyranny of copyright, or working in a "regular job" for an hour and donating the proceeds to EFF?
I'm not a Harry Potter fan. With that warning, here's my take on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It's slow, plodding, almost boring at times. While the first Potter film did an amazing job capturing the eccentric charm of Hogwarts, this movie tries to do the same thing again. But now, we've seen all these things before, so we're not as caught up in the wonder of it all. Not good enough for a sequel. Show me something new.
Even the "exciting" scenes such as the spider's lair or the climactic fight with the basilisk don't have quite the right energy. We're just never convinced that Harry even cares. He certainly never shows fear--just the same wide-eyed blank stare.
The biggest problem with the movie is not just that it's a sequel, but that it doesn't give us anything new. Perhaps that's an inherent problem with the series of books it's derived from--we're limited to the same setting and the same cast of characters. But contrast it to the Star Wars series, where each time we were able to see a new world, with new characters and a completely new adventure. The only new character in this film is the idiotic fraud, Gilderoy Lockhart, played with a gaming effort by Kenneth Branagh. But even Branagh's effort falls short--he's unable to convince us why anyone would have ever fallen for his schtick. Also unanswered is why such an incompetent fool would have been hired at Hogwarts at all.
The special effects were all very competently done, but there was nothing truly "special" about them. I agree with CmdrTaco's analysis of the handling of Dobby--he looks good until he starts to move. Unlike Jar-Jar, however, at least he is necessary to advance the plot of the film. The basilisk was big and scary, and the spiders were icky, but nothing made me gasp in amazement--there was no new rush like I felt with the battle on the ice planet in Empire, or even like the first time Harry used the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter I.
Apparently, I'm also one of the few people who don't fawn over the books themselves [I find Rowling's writing style overly bland and preachy. She certainly doesn't have the command of the language that Tolkein does {and I'm not a Tolkein fan either}], so maybe there's something in the film for fans. Judging from the rest of my family's take on the film [my wife and kids are all big fans], perhaps not. We all agreed that this movie was a big step down from the first film.
The most apt analogy is not the accelerator and the break pedal, but simply adjusting the position of the seat
No, it's not. The accelerator and the brake pedal control the operation of the car. The menu controls the operation of the software. Changing the seat position in your car is like... changing the position of your chair in front of the computer. By this measure, Apple offers complete customizabity!
and even more apt analogy would not be a rental car, but a car I bought and paid for
Fine. It has been scientifically proven that 99.99 percent of all car drivers prefer their accelerator to the right of the brake pedal, whether they drive a rental car or buy their own. But of course, most people don't buy their own computer. They use the computer their employers have purchased for their use--that's why I used the rental car analogy.
Actually, the *best* use for Kaleidoscope was to use it on someone else's mac. Did you ever see that god-awful Halloween theme? It made the box borders about an inch thick, filled with a tacky pumpkin pattern that would have made Martha Stewart drop her double martini! It's great to see the expression on your co-worker's face [especially a really cutting-edge designer] when they boot up to THAT on Halloween Morning!
But the more apt analogy would be a rental car: imagine if someone had decided to switch the accelerator and the brake petal. A menu is a fundamental part of the Mac OS interface, like the accelerator in the car. We expect it to be in a certain place, all the time. And because it is always in the same place on every computer, we can be more productive.
What the article talks about isn't tweaking... It's cosmetic changes to the user interface. Apple isn't preventing users from doing useful things like modifying printer drivers, or creating time-saving macros.
Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer. There's nothing that irks me more than working on a different computer at the office, and some wiseacre has removed the menus from MSIE.
Besides, most Kaleidoscope interfaces were ugly as sin....
J.D. Salinger's wife gets nothing. See the problem?
Yeah, I see the problem. The book is 51 years old. Should Salinger's left niece twice removed still be making money off something great granduncle wrote half a century ago? I did some pretty good work back in the 1980s. I don't see my family making a dime off it today. Salinger made plenty off Catcher in the Rye.
Now, probably a more reasonable copyright term would be 20 years--same as a patent. Then if Salinger got hit by a truck in 1958, his third cousin's wife could have bought a new mink when they made the movie.
We used to use them as coasters.... Had a whole stack of them in the conference room. Clients really got a kick out of it: "So you finally found a use for those 500 free AOL hours!"
"Written by a Finish graduate student"?
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
Shouldn't that be "written by a Finnish graduate student"? Actually, the program was largely written by American Richard Stallman, then later finished by Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds.
Perhaps to avoid confusion we should say it was finished by a Finlandian graduate student. Or completed by a Finlandic graduate student. Or finalized by a Scandinavian graduate student. Or hammered out by a graduate student predisposed to Finnosity. Or, since it's now presumed dead, we can say its final death knell was struck by a mysterious, shadowy Finn.
I don't claim to be any sort of expert on domain name theft, but if you take his comments at face value--i.e. he's being totally honest, and he's REALLY Vicente--then it looks to me like Vicente's the one who's been duped. To believe that buying up expired domain names isn't going to piss some people off is at the minimum unbelievably naive.
It sounds like someone a bit more savvy sold Vicente on this scam, so the "true" thief's identity remains hidden. Vicente looks like an innocent samaritan, when in fact he's the victim of a scam. But again, I don't know much about these things, so I guess it's possible that Vicente is doing all this out of the kindness of his own heart.
Handspring announced when the 180 came out that the color version would be out a few months later. Since you *had* to be an early adopter, you paid the price....
Slashdot Mirror
Free as in "free speech" or free as in "free beer, whiskey, vodka, grenadine, etc."?
No, actually there is not a flat royalty for each type of book sale. Different types of publishing rights are negotiated separately. An author may make 15 percent on hardback bookstore sales, 5 percent on book clubs, and 0 percent on international sales. There is no reason why publishers and authors could not negotiate a separate royalty rate for 'pay per read.' That said, an author would have to be very stupid or very generous to settle for 0.000000001%. After all, the publisher's cost of distribution is much lower for this type of publishing. If anything, authors should negotiate higher royalties for pay-per read.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%.
Where did you read this? I spent many years working in the publishing industry, and the royalties ranged from 10 to 20 percent. A big name author like Tom Clancy could probably get an even higher rate. What kills authors is not the rate, it's the other expenses that get deducted from royalties before a penny is paid--the biggest one is permissions: the cost not only of paying for any excerpts of copyrighted material appearing in a book, but also of tracking down the rightsholders.
Needless to say, simple economics would preclude using the system (on the receiving end) as a money-making technique. Smart spammers would find ways to locate willing buyers. Stupid spammers would go broke.
... is copyright-rich deep pockets (like Disney) would have no incentive to lobby for longer and longer copyright terms. They care about profits over the next 5 years, tops. So if there's nothing Disney can do to extend the copyright-milking period of Steamboat Willie, they're not going to bother with extending the copyright of Treasure Planet II into the next century. No retroactive copyright law changes could effectively mean the end of big business's meddling with freedom of speech [of course, we'd still have the DMCA to worry about, but that's another thread....]
Yes, I understand. I was trying to keep my example simple for the statistically disinclined. The point is that this method can be used to take all that (and more) into account. You could compare the sample to all Internet users, the general population, or any other population of which the sample is a subgroup.
But by "skewed" I think the original poster meant that the data wasn't being collected in a consistent, methodical manner. I'd say that the problem is that they're misstating what they're recording: weblogs are not the same thing as financial transactions. There's *no* uniform API that can tell you when someone bought something.
No, the point is that you can adjust statistically for data that is not "collected in a consistent, methodical manner." And yes, they can tell when someone bought something. They have access to 30,000 credit card statements. About the only thing they'd have trouble adjusting for is the fact that users must "opt-in" to using their spyware. What we're all curious about in this discussion is how, exactly, did they convince *anyone* to opt-in.
This is simply incorrect. Pollsters do it all the time. Here's a simple example. Suppose a poll surveys 100 people. In the survey sample, 75 are men and 25 are women. In the population, the genders are divided evenly. So you multiply the results for women by 3 so that you have the same number of responses from men and women (obviously you would then calculate the margin of error taking your original sample size into account).
When you have a huge sample size such as the data from this company, such adjustments can be done to an amazing level of precision. The margin of error would be tiny.
There is a way of adjusting for such skewed data. It's called statistics. At $50,000/year/subscription, I think they can probably afford to keep a statistician on payroll. Or clients who can afford the subscription fee could afford one.
But I can tell it's not the same "M" just by looking at it. Even if it was, fonts can't be copyrighted.
Did you see the presentation? He kept hitting us over that head with the idea that the only real way to contribute was to donate money to EFF. Not a bad idea, but not the only way to contribute.
I guess technically you're right--none of this actively moves works out of copyright, but it does increase people's opportunity to use public domain/publicly licensed materials.
What's better--working for an hour to remove works from the tyranny of copyright, or working in a "regular job" for an hour and donating the proceeds to EFF?
Even the "exciting" scenes such as the spider's lair or the climactic fight with the basilisk don't have quite the right energy. We're just never convinced that Harry even cares. He certainly never shows fear--just the same wide-eyed blank stare.
The biggest problem with the movie is not just that it's a sequel, but that it doesn't give us anything new. Perhaps that's an inherent problem with the series of books it's derived from--we're limited to the same setting and the same cast of characters. But contrast it to the Star Wars series, where each time we were able to see a new world, with new characters and a completely new adventure. The only new character in this film is the idiotic fraud, Gilderoy Lockhart, played with a gaming effort by Kenneth Branagh. But even Branagh's effort falls short--he's unable to convince us why anyone would have ever fallen for his schtick. Also unanswered is why such an incompetent fool would have been hired at Hogwarts at all.
The special effects were all very competently done, but there was nothing truly "special" about them. I agree with CmdrTaco's analysis of the handling of Dobby--he looks good until he starts to move. Unlike Jar-Jar, however, at least he is necessary to advance the plot of the film. The basilisk was big and scary, and the spiders were icky, but nothing made me gasp in amazement--there was no new rush like I felt with the battle on the ice planet in Empire, or even like the first time Harry used the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter I.
Apparently, I'm also one of the few people who don't fawn over the books themselves [I find Rowling's writing style overly bland and preachy. She certainly doesn't have the command of the language that Tolkein does {and I'm not a Tolkein fan either}], so maybe there's something in the film for fans. Judging from the rest of my family's take on the film [my wife and kids are all big fans], perhaps not. We all agreed that this movie was a big step down from the first film.
I'm just curious.... what were you trying to type?
Me too--Awesome--tho only 3 bars in my LR. Better than 1 or 0 I got before. And WAY cheaper than a new card with a bulky antenna.
No, it's not. The accelerator and the brake pedal control the operation of the car. The menu controls the operation of the software. Changing the seat position in your car is like... changing the position of your chair in front of the computer. By this measure, Apple offers complete customizabity!
and even more apt analogy would not be a rental car, but a car I bought and paid for
Fine. It has been scientifically proven that 99.99 percent of all car drivers prefer their accelerator to the right of the brake pedal, whether they drive a rental car or buy their own. But of course, most people don't buy their own computer. They use the computer their employers have purchased for their use--that's why I used the rental car analogy.
Actually, the *best* use for Kaleidoscope was to use it on someone else's mac. Did you ever see that god-awful Halloween theme? It made the box borders about an inch thick, filled with a tacky pumpkin pattern that would have made Martha Stewart drop her double martini! It's great to see the expression on your co-worker's face [especially a really cutting-edge designer] when they boot up to THAT on Halloween Morning!
But the more apt analogy would be a rental car: imagine if someone had decided to switch the accelerator and the brake petal. A menu is a fundamental part of the Mac OS interface, like the accelerator in the car. We expect it to be in a certain place, all the time. And because it is always in the same place on every computer, we can be more productive.
Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer. There's nothing that irks me more than working on a different computer at the office, and some wiseacre has removed the menus from MSIE.
Besides, most Kaleidoscope interfaces were ugly as sin....
Yeah, I see the problem. The book is 51 years old. Should Salinger's left niece twice removed still be making money off something great granduncle wrote half a century ago? I did some pretty good work back in the 1980s. I don't see my family making a dime off it today. Salinger made plenty off Catcher in the Rye.
Now, probably a more reasonable copyright term would be 20 years--same as a patent. Then if Salinger got hit by a truck in 1958, his third cousin's wife could have bought a new mink when they made the movie.
Not Half Full? You must be an optimist. I'd say it's more than half empty.
We used to use them as coasters.... Had a whole stack of them in the conference room. Clients really got a kick out of it: "So you finally found a use for those 500 free AOL hours!"
Perhaps to avoid confusion we should say it was finished by a Finlandian graduate student. Or completed by a Finlandic graduate student. Or finalized by a Scandinavian graduate student. Or hammered out by a graduate student predisposed to Finnosity. Or, since it's now presumed dead, we can say its final death knell was struck by a mysterious, shadowy Finn.
It sounds like someone a bit more savvy sold Vicente on this scam, so the "true" thief's identity remains hidden. Vicente looks like an innocent samaritan, when in fact he's the victim of a scam. But again, I don't know much about these things, so I guess it's possible that Vicente is doing all this out of the kindness of his own heart.
As of Friday at 10:56 am EDT, I can get to macslash using macslash.org but not macslash.net. But none of the links work.
Handspring announced when the 180 came out that the color version would be out a few months later. Since you *had* to be an early adopter, you paid the price....