When writing is done to produce a product for mass consumption, the quality of literature goes down.
While some fine modernist literature has come from people who were not targeting a mass audience and were able to depend on patronage or another line of work while writing, the English canon clearly offers abundant counter-evidence for the idea that mass-market writing results in lower quality. Shakespeare was knocking out plays at a fairly rapid pace for the plebian theatre-goers at the Globe, while Dickens was writing his novels in installments published in the ordinary magazines of his day. Mark Twain wrote for a general American public and enjoyed making a mint off it.
The problem is that -- as I already pointed out in another comment here -- most self-published authors are not prepared to spend their scanty resources on editing services. The sort of self-published books I often get asked to review are written by working-class dreamers who think they can make it big, and the tiny amount of money they have to invest upfront goes straight to marketing.
You also think proofreading is cheap. While I mainly work as a translator, I occasionally accept proofreading work, and I know that in my market (Finland) I could easily charge 8–10&euro per standard page, so a 200-page novel could easily reach 2000€. And that's just proofreading! Editing would cost much more. There's enough opportunities out there that I don't feel any pressure to lower the price, so a self-published author asking me to translate his book for $250 would just get laughed at.
Assume there is a world where I as an author can contract with a third party for proofreading and editing at a fixed cost
You can do that, but as an Amazon top reviewer that often gets solicitations for a review, I find that few self-published authors are doing so. With very little money to invest -- these people are often working-class dreamers -- they often have to spend what little they have on marketing, and there's just nothing left for proofreading and editing (and the result is embarassing). At least a traditional publishing house covers those costs for you.
While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.
Furthermore, the publishers also provide some level of advertising. Often the books I am asked to review are hyped through a marketing agency that the author had to hire at his own expense, and considering how unreadable some of these books are, I highly doubt the authors will make enough money back to compensate for what they paid on marketing. For the vast majority of authors, the new economy is just money down the drain with nothing to show for it compared to the old model.
The title of this comment may be provocative, but after buying a Kindle Paperwhite, something that Amazon does really well (and just keep it in airplane mode all the time so you don't have to deal with Amazon's ecosystem), I have found myself with such a huge choice of classic literature titles from either Project Gutenberg or pirate ebook sites, that I feel I'll never catch up with all the old stuff, let alone hunger after anything new. For Mr. Stross, I'm sorry, but you're competing with the past, and there are a myriad of science-fiction writers like yourself that already have more books out there than anyone can read.
Could you cite that this is an actual Chinese saying? I have only heard this kind of quotation repeated as a racial slur by Westerners. The Duke of Edinburgh, for instances, has been reported by several sources to have once said "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."
A recent visit to Madagascar really put paid to any naive belief I might have had that "primitive tribes" lived in harmony with nature. Sure, the death blow to the island's forest cover is being dealt now by an industrial China hungry for exotic wood, but in fact the bulk of deforestation happened before European colonialism. The island's giant bird (said to be the inspiration for the roc of Arab legend) was also hunted to extinction well before human beings showed up.
A pre-industrial society can do plenty of damage on its own.
They wanted to send me, but I had 0 interest in learning a middle eastern language.
I don't know how much things have changed in the decade-plus since I trained as a military linguist, but I was allowed to choose from among the languages that my DLAB score qualified me for. I said I wanted to learn Chinese and that's where they put me; they didn't try to decide for me e.g. Arabic or Korean instead.
Now they have to hire thousands of Afghan translators. It will give all the liberal arts graduates something to do.
A great deal of linguistic support for the NSA comes from the branches of the military, where enlisted people are sent to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California to train in the language if skills-testing shows they have linguistic aptitude. A prior university degree -- let alone a liberal arts one -- is not necessary.
This reminds me of that passage in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun where the inhabitants of a far-future Earth note how the debris of past ages is all around them:
I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea.
Instead of aeons needed to turn glass to microparticles, humanity has managed to litter the seas with plastic bits in only around a century. If humanity goes extinct, perhaps one day visitors from another planet would know there was once sentient life here from the remains of our PET bottles and beer six-pack rings in the ice?
Tallinn only made the public transportation system free for residents. There continue to be ticket inspectors moving around checking if people are local residents. Foreigners visiting Tallinn and using the system without buying a ticket are fined. I see this often because, as a foreigner, I often take one of Tallinn's longest trans-city bus routes and have been challenged by inspectors on several occassions since the new rules came in.
Were Stockholm to make public transportation free, it would probably only be for locals, as the city attracts a much larger amount of tourists than Tallinn and the Swedes would want to take advantage of those relatively affluent people with money to spend in order to subsidize the system for the locals.
I suspect that would be impossible from a legal standpoint since that would require a database of offenders and there are extremely strict regulations on such a thing.
I don't know about Sweden, but over here in Helsinki, the fine is treated as a debt. If you don't pay it, it goes on your public credit report. So, it is obvious that the public transportation authority (and the credit reporting agency) have a record of repeat offenders and could easily demand high fines for consecutive violations.
Home-schoolers are one of the biggest markets for "e-learning" products. I don't think the average home-schooling parent is aware of the privacy-violation potential.
While the seller may collect sales tax, the state needs some kind of paper trail of the buyer's finances as well to catch tax cheats. It may be that a person has declared their income at one figure and pays taxes on that, but is out there making purchases that suggest his income is actually much higher. With electronic payment systems like a bank or credit card, you can ensure that all of a person's money is accounted for and penalize him/her if it is not declared it as income, but anonymous payment methods like Bitcoin or cash allow people to hide undeclared income.
A government paper trail of every detail of your life is "progress"?
One's cash flow is not "every detail of one's life". To suggest it is makes you sound unintentionally Marxist. There are all kinds of activities that one goes about and wishes to keep private that do not involve the exchange of money.
But as far as a government paper trail of every detail of cash flow being progress, yes, yes it is. I happen to pay taxes in a state that uses those funds for all kinds of nice things in a policy supported by the majority of the population (even our cantankerous far-right party supports the welfare state). Legislation designed to ensure that everyone's income is declared to the last penny so that it can be taxed is a big part of this.
I can understand Bitcoin's anonymity being sacred in the US, where suspicion of the government is rampant (just as the strongest point of 3D printing for some American Slashdotters is that you can print the Liberator handgun), but elsewhere Bitcoin will have to compromise on anonymity to fit with the society people say they want.
The problem is that as a physical, government-issued object, it is easier for a state to limit the availability and appeal of cash. Strategies that have long been used include circulating fewer coins and banknotes, restricting cross-border movements of cash, forbidding certain businesses from taking cash, and placing restrictions on how many ATMs can be located in a community so that getting cash just becomes a hassle.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is an electronic concept floating around in the ether, and will be treated just like any other electronic form of payment. So, there definitely seems to be a need for a different kind of legislation to target this anonymous payment method.
Many countries are slowly transitioning away from cash to electronic payments in order to ensure that there is a paper trail and people can be forced to pay taxes on all their income. Terminals that accept anonymous Bitcoin seem to undo much of that progress. Will we see legislation to require terminals to also take a form of ID (or another document linked to one's ID) when paying with Bitcoin?
The average person doesn't use pirate and torrent sites.
As I posted in response to another user, you really ought to visit the world outside North America or the UK. I know from my day-in, day-out experience here in Eastern Europe that the vast majority of people do use pirate and torrent sites. That has been the usual way of getting the content we want since broadband first came here in the early millennium. Paying for authorized downloads is not at all popular, and people only buy the physical media (which is prohibitively priced considering local salaries) if they particularly treasure the film/album in question or want to give it as a special gift to someone else.
"one letter from their ISP"? ISPs here just don't care. Me and my friends torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. In fact, when I first signed up for broadband over a decade ago, my ISP gave me the address of a huge filesharing server where I could trade pirated content with other people in my town at lightning speeds.
Having travelled widely all over the world and see the same internet culture in Russia, China and India, I feel pretty safe claiming that, globally, the average internet-connected person does use these sites. Those that don't are still buying physical media from a bootleg seller who likely did use those sites to burn the DVDs he sells.
Which is funny -- She wrote a lot of pages -- more than I care to read in one sitting. In all that, somewhere, you'd think there's be fertile soil for a response more intellectually stimulating than, "she's a crank".
You might have a look at Atlas Sucked, which has become my go-to rebuttal for at least that particular novel. It is such an in-depth critique of Rand's odd ideas about running a business that I just ask people to read that instead of posting e.g. the old joke about Tolkien and Rand.
You can think negatively of pirating all you want, but my point was that, in spite of the OP's claim that pirating is some kind of fringe behaviour, getting whatever music and films one wants from pirate sites instead of purchasing a CD or DVD, is normal for a majority of people in many countries now. There are few shops in Eastern Europe to legally purchase the breadth of content people want, and the prices of what CDs and DVDs are available are considered prohibitively expensive against local salaries, so watching films or getting one's music* from pirate sites has been the usual way of consuming content since broadband first became available here in the early millennium.
(* As I mentioned above, it may be that YouTube has now become the standard venue for listening to music. While some copyright holders may be getting paid for this, whether the upload is authorized or not, is not something that troubles the average person.)
Slashdot Mirror
While some fine modernist literature has come from people who were not targeting a mass audience and were able to depend on patronage or another line of work while writing, the English canon clearly offers abundant counter-evidence for the idea that mass-market writing results in lower quality. Shakespeare was knocking out plays at a fairly rapid pace for the plebian theatre-goers at the Globe, while Dickens was writing his novels in installments published in the ordinary magazines of his day. Mark Twain wrote for a general American public and enjoyed making a mint off it.
Sorry, that should have read "a self-published author asking me to proofread his book for $250..."
The problem is that -- as I already pointed out in another comment here -- most self-published authors are not prepared to spend their scanty resources on editing services. The sort of self-published books I often get asked to review are written by working-class dreamers who think they can make it big, and the tiny amount of money they have to invest upfront goes straight to marketing.
You also think proofreading is cheap. While I mainly work as a translator, I occasionally accept proofreading work, and I know that in my market (Finland) I could easily charge 8–10&euro per standard page, so a 200-page novel could easily reach 2000€. And that's just proofreading! Editing would cost much more. There's enough opportunities out there that I don't feel any pressure to lower the price, so a self-published author asking me to translate his book for $250 would just get laughed at.
While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.
Furthermore, the publishers also provide some level of advertising. Often the books I am asked to review are hyped through a marketing agency that the author had to hire at his own expense, and considering how unreadable some of these books are, I highly doubt the authors will make enough money back to compensate for what they paid on marketing. For the vast majority of authors, the new economy is just money down the drain with nothing to show for it compared to the old model.
The title of this comment may be provocative, but after buying a Kindle Paperwhite, something that Amazon does really well (and just keep it in airplane mode all the time so you don't have to deal with Amazon's ecosystem), I have found myself with such a huge choice of classic literature titles from either Project Gutenberg or pirate ebook sites, that I feel I'll never catch up with all the old stuff, let alone hunger after anything new. For Mr. Stross, I'm sorry, but you're competing with the past, and there are a myriad of science-fiction writers like yourself that already have more books out there than anyone can read.
Could you cite that this is an actual Chinese saying? I have only heard this kind of quotation repeated as a racial slur by Westerners. The Duke of Edinburgh, for instances, has been reported by several sources to have once said "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."
Oops, sorry, my mistake, I meant to write "Well before Europeans showed up".
I don't see any margin of error. This claim is scientifically worthless.
A recent visit to Madagascar really put paid to any naive belief I might have had that "primitive tribes" lived in harmony with nature. Sure, the death blow to the island's forest cover is being dealt now by an industrial China hungry for exotic wood, but in fact the bulk of deforestation happened before European colonialism. The island's giant bird (said to be the inspiration for the roc of Arab legend) was also hunted to extinction well before human beings showed up.
A pre-industrial society can do plenty of damage on its own.
I don't know how much things have changed in the decade-plus since I trained as a military linguist, but I was allowed to choose from among the languages that my DLAB score qualified me for. I said I wanted to learn Chinese and that's where they put me; they didn't try to decide for me e.g. Arabic or Korean instead.
A great deal of linguistic support for the NSA comes from the branches of the military, where enlisted people are sent to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California to train in the language if skills-testing shows they have linguistic aptitude. A prior university degree -- let alone a liberal arts one -- is not necessary.
Instead of aeons needed to turn glass to microparticles, humanity has managed to litter the seas with plastic bits in only around a century. If humanity goes extinct, perhaps one day visitors from another planet would know there was once sentient life here from the remains of our PET bottles and beer six-pack rings in the ice?
Tallinn only made the public transportation system free for residents. There continue to be ticket inspectors moving around checking if people are local residents. Foreigners visiting Tallinn and using the system without buying a ticket are fined. I see this often because, as a foreigner, I often take one of Tallinn's longest trans-city bus routes and have been challenged by inspectors on several occassions since the new rules came in.
Were Stockholm to make public transportation free, it would probably only be for locals, as the city attracts a much larger amount of tourists than Tallinn and the Swedes would want to take advantage of those relatively affluent people with money to spend in order to subsidize the system for the locals.
Home-schoolers are one of the biggest markets for "e-learning" products. I don't think the average home-schooling parent is aware of the privacy-violation potential.
While the seller may collect sales tax, the state needs some kind of paper trail of the buyer's finances as well to catch tax cheats. It may be that a person has declared their income at one figure and pays taxes on that, but is out there making purchases that suggest his income is actually much higher. With electronic payment systems like a bank or credit card, you can ensure that all of a person's money is accounted for and penalize him/her if it is not declared it as income, but anonymous payment methods like Bitcoin or cash allow people to hide undeclared income.
One's cash flow is not "every detail of one's life". To suggest it is makes you sound unintentionally Marxist. There are all kinds of activities that one goes about and wishes to keep private that do not involve the exchange of money.
But as far as a government paper trail of every detail of cash flow being progress, yes, yes it is. I happen to pay taxes in a state that uses those funds for all kinds of nice things in a policy supported by the majority of the population (even our cantankerous far-right party supports the welfare state). Legislation designed to ensure that everyone's income is declared to the last penny so that it can be taxed is a big part of this.
I can understand Bitcoin's anonymity being sacred in the US, where suspicion of the government is rampant (just as the strongest point of 3D printing for some American Slashdotters is that you can print the Liberator handgun), but elsewhere Bitcoin will have to compromise on anonymity to fit with the society people say they want.
The problem is that as a physical, government-issued object, it is easier for a state to limit the availability and appeal of cash. Strategies that have long been used include circulating fewer coins and banknotes, restricting cross-border movements of cash, forbidding certain businesses from taking cash, and placing restrictions on how many ATMs can be located in a community so that getting cash just becomes a hassle.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is an electronic concept floating around in the ether, and will be treated just like any other electronic form of payment. So, there definitely seems to be a need for a different kind of legislation to target this anonymous payment method.
Many countries are slowly transitioning away from cash to electronic payments in order to ensure that there is a paper trail and people can be forced to pay taxes on all their income. Terminals that accept anonymous Bitcoin seem to undo much of that progress. Will we see legislation to require terminals to also take a form of ID (or another document linked to one's ID) when paying with Bitcoin?
Leaving money to charity upon one's death is a matter of public record in many jurisdictions. If it had happened, we would have heard about it.
As I posted in response to another user, you really ought to visit the world outside North America or the UK. I know from my day-in, day-out experience here in Eastern Europe that the vast majority of people do use pirate and torrent sites. That has been the usual way of getting the content we want since broadband first came here in the early millennium. Paying for authorized downloads is not at all popular, and people only buy the physical media (which is prohibitively priced considering local salaries) if they particularly treasure the film/album in question or want to give it as a special gift to someone else.
"one letter from their ISP"? ISPs here just don't care. Me and my friends torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. In fact, when I first signed up for broadband over a decade ago, my ISP gave me the address of a huge filesharing server where I could trade pirated content with other people in my town at lightning speeds.
Having travelled widely all over the world and see the same internet culture in Russia, China and India, I feel pretty safe claiming that, globally, the average internet-connected person does use these sites. Those that don't are still buying physical media from a bootleg seller who likely did use those sites to burn the DVDs he sells.
Are you confusing me with another poster? I never said that Assad’s popularity with the public in that part of the country he still controls is low.
You might have a look at Atlas Sucked, which has become my go-to rebuttal for at least that particular novel. It is such an in-depth critique of Rand's odd ideas about running a business that I just ask people to read that instead of posting e.g. the old joke about Tolkien and Rand.
You can think negatively of pirating all you want, but my point was that, in spite of the OP's claim that pirating is some kind of fringe behaviour, getting whatever music and films one wants from pirate sites instead of purchasing a CD or DVD, is normal for a majority of people in many countries now. There are few shops in Eastern Europe to legally purchase the breadth of content people want, and the prices of what CDs and DVDs are available are considered prohibitively expensive against local salaries, so watching films or getting one's music* from pirate sites has been the usual way of consuming content since broadband first became available here in the early millennium.
(* As I mentioned above, it may be that YouTube has now become the standard venue for listening to music. While some copyright holders may be getting paid for this, whether the upload is authorized or not, is not something that troubles the average person.)