Interesting Links for 25-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Coalition, Government and the Lords
  (tags: government uk)
• Bullied by Gays- A catalog of pupils driven to suicide by gay bullies
  (tags: lgbt suicide satire)
• Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. I have experienced all five of these.
  (tags: internet psychology emotions funny)
• The downward spiral of ownership and value (It's happened to music, it's happening to books.)
  (tags: books copyright ebooks)
• Wolfenstein 1-D: The Game That Changed Everything, Converted to a 1-Pixel Line
  (tags: videogames wolfenstein funny)
• The economics of Net Neutrality
  (tags: internet economics markets)
• Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians - digs into the details of the actual ruling.
  (tags: christianity homosexuality law religion sex society)
• Genetically modified crops are the key to human survival, says UK's chief scientist
  (tags: environment gm food)
• BBC to cut online budget by 25% - close 180 websites.
  (tags: bbc online)
• Why Africa needs an agricultural revolution
  (tags: africa agriculture technology poverty government)
• Government scraps Labour plans to scrap the Common Travel Area between UK, Ireland and Isle of Man.
  (tags: government uk travel)

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The downward spiral of value in ebooks. Over the last week or so, I've actually seen a number of ebooks being given away for free, as the authors try I imagine to desperately get some sales, and perhaps just drum up some attention for their other works.

The trend is indeed towards zero.

[andrewducker]

The question, then, is what do they do when there are no "other works"?

I'm not seeing a positive outlook in the medium->long term...

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I imagine the market will increasingly focus around the big sellers, the ones the supermarkets carry at discounted rates. And the rise of the gentleman-of-leisure author, the ones who can afford to write and not have to worry about sales.

And we'll probably see more of the Tom Clancy Presents style book, where they sell the work of other writers under a Big Name, and create Established Brands, in much the same way Hollywood is now locked into making remakes and sequels to established brands.

Until or unless writers can start doing gigs, and selling merchandise, they just can't survive books going down the path music has been going down the last 10 years.

Because no, I can't see a positive outlook either. Too many people are too used and comfortable with the idea of getting stuff for free on the internet, and they no longer see anything at all wrong with it.

I saw a horrifying tweet from an author a few months ago, where he said he was eating ramen noodles again because his book had sold 18 copies that week, and on pirate bay, he could see that 800 people had downloaded it that very day. He was, needless to say, not a happy chap.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I suspect the numbers I'm after are somewhere out there on the intersphere, but I wonder how many of those alleged 800 have even looked at the first page (yet)?

[andrewducker]

Agreed. People will just download stuff at random when it's free. You can't assume that more than 1% would ever have paid real money.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Back when I paid attention to the war3z types, the mentality was all about quantity, rather than actually using whichever 0-day copy of Delphi/Potatoshop. Similarly, one could go poking about other people's computers on the Napster/Soulseek and see piles of stuff that no rational person would want to listen to. It wasn't that whatever pop group were any good, it was all in the having. Like a mob of toddlers with bandwidth.

I think. Maybe.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

True, good point. I can imagine quite a few people downloading huge numbers of books to create libraries that they'll never read.

I've had friends with immense music libraries they've downloaded, and looking through the numbers of times they'd played stuff, thousands of song they'd never even listened to.

Strange collector impulse at work.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, not that strange given the intersection of spod and record-collector.

There was a lot more going outside and speaking to people involved when one had to beetle off to record fairs on the hunt for Joy Division bootlegs, obscure On-U releases and 'A guy called Gerald' 12-inchers.

These days, one can just sit on one's arse and roundly curse gormless American teens for not getting the metadata right. (It's not a bloody Depeche Mode rarity, it's a Canadian DJ doing a remix, etc.)

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Are we talking about fiction, non-fiction or both, here?

[andrewducker]

Anything which can be copied.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Thing is, there's a strong argument backed up by real people making quite a bit of money that now is actually an excellent time to sell actionable, advice-based non-fiction. Direct marketing backed up by a decent sales page has never been easier, and if you're selling an ebook yourself, you get 100% of the profits.

(As I've mentioned before, I personally know people making comfortable six figures this way).

However, fiction's trickier, partially because no-one's really figured out how to sell any kind of fiction on the 'net yet. (And I mean "sell" in the sense of "persuade people to pay money for"). Traditional sales pages don't work for fiction and never really have.

Having said that, I believe there are people making a seriously comfortable living off selling self-published fiction out there too. (I think you linked one of them a while ago?)

Finally - music and books might both be IP, but there's not the same pressure on both to go "hosepipe" always-available. A single music track lasts 3 minutes, which is one of the reasons people are reluctant to spent a pound on them. A novel lasts the average person, what, 5 or 6 hours? And it's impossible to read a novel in a "background noise" fashion.

All of which means I can get through a lot less books in a month than I can music tracks. Which means that given the choice between paying a fiver for one or twenty quid for unlimited access, I might well still go with option A. Spotify shows the same is very much not true for music.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

A note here - the downside of the current climate for actionable non-fiction is that it's a very bad time to try and write it if you're not willing to also learn a lot about sales and copywriting. That's certainly a problem.

[andrewducker]

What do you mean by "actionable advice-based non-fiction"? Self-help books?

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Something that means people actually want the information in it. That could be self-help books, technical guides, business books, or even sufficiently compelling general-interest (or fiction - see Tucker Max) - anything that offers the reader a big enough benefit ("Yay, I can sell stuff better!", "Yay, I can now set up Apache 2!", "Yay, I now feel better about myself as a person thanks to this fascinating overview of Bolivian politics!") to get them off their arse to actually buy the book.

Or at least off one arse cheek to get their wallet out.

[andrewducker]

I wonder if there's something there about niches.

If those books were massive sellers then they'd be on Pirate Bay and people could get them for free. By energising a niche market you can get them to hand over cash for something that they see as giving them an advantage they cannot get for free. If an author outgrows that niche then they'll hit the point where their work becomes available for free and their revenue will go down.

Hmmmm.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting thought.

However - do we actually have any examples of people who have suddenly seen a massive drop-off in cash flow thanks to piracy? Most superstar authors still seem to be doing OK.

(Not trying to destroy the argument, geninuely interested. I think your niche idea is a valuable one.)

[andrewducker]

I have no idea what the sales figures for major authors are like, and whether they are taking much of a hit from piracy at this point.

Hard to tell, I'd guess, as you can't really compare sales across different books for the same author. You'd have to look at (say) the sales across the NY Times bestsellers year-on-year and see if they dipped.

The thing is that ereaders, successful as they are, haven't yet taken a massive bite out of the book market, so far as I know. There are, what, 12-15 million Kindles out there, and maybe the same again of other ebook readers? Compare that to the number of MP3 players on the market. If ebook readers become the norm then the market will be quite different to a situation where ebooks are only a small fraction of the book market.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I'd love to know the extent to which wikipedia is affecting the sales of non-fiction books, given how many students both at universities and high schools, are now no longer needing to purchase text books, and just going to wikipedia for their research.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

LOL, trust me in this, although it's contested somewhat in the Humanities, citing 'Wikipedia article X' in a paper will get you in deep doodoo.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Apparently it's a lot more common in schools, where teachers are reluctant to fail too many of their classes because it looks bad on the league tables. But that's just anecdotal.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Something random and awesome for you: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2011/01/watching-our-researchers-like-a-hawk/

Heeeeeeeeee.

[andrewducker]

Awesome! Thanks!

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Maybe pirated eBooks are the alternative to publically funded libraries! A back of the fag packet calculation suggests that the amount spent by central and local governments in the UK on public libraries each year is more than enough to buy an eBook reader for every regular library user...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Alas the 25% of people who have no internet access wouldn't be able to either download their pirated books or sell their reader on Ebay.

[heyokish.livejournal.com]

Except authors get do paid for library rights and use...

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the pdf sales model seems to be working in knitting design right now - there are several people making a living (and many more people supplementing their income) selling their designs in the form of pdfs. Many of the people doing well started with a free pattern, either via a site like Knitty.com or via their own blog.

The average price is around $5, you can either run a cart yourself or use a site like Ravelry (which is brilliant in many different ways - the use of metadata to let people really dig through their database is excellent[1]) to sell it and I rarely see much evidence of piracy. This has been a massive change in favour of the designers because before this became popular most designers sold to magazines who pay them a fixed amount per design. And this amount hasn't changed since the 80s, which means the real value of what they were making from them has dropped significantly in that time.

The most popular (I'm using made the most often as the metric for this) for sale design on ravelry right now is made by a woman who lives in Edinburgh, there are 8700ish versions of it made or being made and the pattern costs 3 quid. I've made that project twice, so even assuming some piracy and and some duplicates, 4000 times 3 quid is not to be sniffed at. It also isn't the only source of money for the designer, as a popular and well respected designer and blogger she gets paid to do classes too.

So digital versions doesn't have to automatically lead to piracy wrecking everything for the producers.

[andrewducker]

I wonder what the difference is. Wheher Knitters are just not the kind of people who break copyright for moral reasons, or for technical reasons, or something else.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I say this as a hooker (er, crochet-er) who loves the Rav: there's not a huge demand for knitting/crochet patterns, at least when compared to things like mainstream fiction, so your sharing options are basically a) send the file to a friend you know, or b) create a torrent that no one's going to know to go looking for to download. It seems to me like if I wanted the pattern and I didn't know a buddy who had it to share, I'd be better off just coughing up the few bucks than trying to magic some free version of it.

I think the 'few bucks' part of that statement is important, too, because I'm disinclined to pay $30 to someone I perceive as a rich and famous author (especially if I know a lot of it will be going to the publishing company), but I'm very pleased with the idea of giving the price of a coke or two to a fellow crafter directly.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - it seems to be the "niche" thing I mentioned earlier. Which is fair enough - it looks like niches will be safe from mass copyright infringement.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Depends upon the niche - I know lots of authors of role-playing game pdfs for whom piracy is a big issue/ I think you hit the knitting needle on the head when you said that knitters just aren't the kind of people who break copyright. I fear that role-players (at least some of them) just might be.

[andrewducker]

I think that roleplayers skew that was an unusual amount. As we're a massive bunch of geeks. Knitters less so, but they'd probably still have problems if they were mainstream.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Classical economics would suggest that as the price falls supply falls until a new equilibrium is reached where supply equals (paying) demand. If piracy and discounting continue as implied and drive the price of new fiction down there must come a point where the price is so low that authors stop producing new works.*

I wonder what then happens to the price of new works and how the structures of supply might change. For example might authors might become paid employees of Amazon, hired to produce new works for Amazon to stream to its customers

Are there suffient works already in existence that new fiction is almost unnessary? When I draw up my list of books that I would like to read this year many of them are avaible on Kindle etc for free. I could fill a lifetime of reading with free books.


*This wouldn’t be all authors all the time. Some might authors might want the aclaim or to satisfy their own need to write. Some might be independently wealthy or retired with a pension.

re: GM food & Africa

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

If you haven't read Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto yet, please get it.
The guy who made this picture famous, and created The Whole Earth Catalog, currently thinks that cities, nuclear power, and gm food are the green options for the 21st century.

Re: GM food & Africa

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it seems like the pragmatic greens have all realised that (short of a miracle breakthrough) we're going to need nuclear energy. I'm glad GM is following behind.