See no evil.

[reddragdiva]

• NewsTechnica: "Free books for everyone," advertise publishers; Last Supper of Christ "happened in tenth dimension"; Virgin Media to sell 1.5 gigabit Internet to complete cocks; British girls' drinking culture just not up to scratch.

It's Easter break! And Freda is being a LITTLE TERROR. The ice cream pushers are hovering around the playgrounds, and of course she wants one. And turns into a crack-addled screaming horror within an hour. Doesn't do this at home. My mum says I wasn't like this after having an ice cream, so this is all original. I have taken to telling her that if she starts screaming I will leave her there and go home, which seems to work.

I have written new NewsTechnica for the first time in months. Because I just happened to damn well feel like it. (And updated the sidebar with "Top stories for 2010".) Don't get used to it.

(The publishing one is particularly apposite in that I am contemplating an excellent Bad Idea that involves dealing with artists. I know precisely how the record industry destroyed itself, and good fucking riddance; but I'm puzzled that it is actually possible for any author whatsoever to make cash directly from ebook publishing, even if they're just writing pulp. Why haven't books gone straight to zero the way records have? More in a later post, which some of you will have a draft of in your email.)

Another go at Pembury tomorrow likely. Anyone else?

Comments

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

Another go at Pembury tomorrow likely. Anyone else?
Oh, probably! Likely to be quieter than the average Sunday, given that for some reason people seem to want to get out of Hackney on long weekends!

[valkyriekaren]

Why haven't books gone straight to zero the way records have?

Largely a cultural issue, I think.

Copying music has been easy since the 70s/80s - home taping is killing music, remember? So there was already a culture of copying music. Plus, music's also available in other free formats - on the radio - often months before the physical record is there to buy in your local Our Price. So getting music for free was already an established cultural norm before the internet came along.

You could ask the same question about video - why haven't DVD and cinema ticket sales gone 'straight to zero'? The majority of films and TV shows are now available to download within days of them hitting the shelves in Blockbuster. Slightly different because torrenting video is more time-consuming and bandwidth-heavy than mp3s, but even so, internet film piracy is still much less prevalent than music piracy. Probably because, short of videoing shows/films from TV (in the case of films or US-import shows, often months or years after their original release), there was historically no easy way to see films without paying for them.

Books have never been copied wholesale for free distribution. The nearest things are libraries and photocopying - libraries involve going to a physical place, hoping what you want is available, and queuing and waiting around, and photocopying is both expensive and time-consuming. When you wanted to share a book with a friend, you didn't go and stand at a photocopier for 3 hours laboriously turning pages - you just lent them your copy when you'd finished it. This means the cultural value of books is set higher because historically they were not copyable. E-books are really new technology - much newer than mp3 - and the cost of e-book readers is still prohibitively high for most people. So it's still too niche, even though there's a huge volume of content available, for large-scale file-sharing to happen.

My hunch is that e-book piracy will increase in line with two factors - the prevalence of e-book readers, and consumer familiarity with the medium.

[mouseworks]

Amazon will probably have ebook readers priced at cell-phone prices within a couple of years, and even now, the price for a Kindle 3 is quite a lot lower than the first Kindle.

I also suspect that book readers are a bit more conservative than music listeners -- if they can get ebooks at sensible prices from a website that they trust not to stuff the files full of surprises (here in Nicaragua, buying a DVD on the street gets you everything from a decent copy of a movie to blank DVDs and a range of things in between).

Have records gone straight to zero? One factor is it's now easier for bands to make their own CDs or DVDs and sell directly to the audience. Previously, making a record took equipment that cost serious money, from the recording studio to the record manufacturing. Record companies tried to get the same prices or more for CDs, but it was far easier to make a CD at home than it was to make a record at home.

[reddragdiva]

I have an ebook reader at cellphone price. It's a cellphone.

(The only ebook format on BlackBerry is .mobi, which is a pain in the backside. And goddamn, Calibre is ugly shit and needs to be taken out and shot, or at least the file conversion part separated out so I never need to start the actual application.)

[pndc]

You're looking for pandoc.

[pndc]

Actually, a further look tells me that pandoc only gets you anything-to-epub, which doesn't help if you're after mobi. However, Amazon offer Kindlegen which is an epub-to-mobi converter.

I use pandoc and it's fine. I've not used Kindlegen.

[mouseworks]

I agree with you on Calibre. "Please convert my documents and have enough sense to take out Google's page marker for Google Books, and don't hijack my ebook library or I will delete you." Kindle/Amazon will convert documents you mail it to Kindle format: pdf, .txt, .doc, and most .docx.

I can read ebooks on my Sony-Ericcson Xperia 10 mini, but that's theoretical in two different ways as I need to get the machine back from its second trip to Managua to be updated to Android 2.1 (Claro Nicaragua and Claro Guatemala decided they/it didn't trust customers enough to let them upgrade by the net for free but seem not to get "Please upgrade this machine to Android 2.1 or don't charge me and tell me when Android 2.1 will be available in this market)."

The other reason reading on the Mini is theoretical is that it's got the smallest screen of all the Androids. It's small enough to pass for yet another Claro cheap brick phone, which is useful in Nicaragua.

I think Kindles could be somewhat cheaper ($75) but probably never as cheap as a US $16 dumb phone.

[mouseworks]

Video piracy is ubiquitous in Nicaragua -- and often of really crap quality (sometimes, just a blank DVD). Some of this is that downloading at night works if you've already paid for a connection since connections are expensive by local standards and the piracy subsidizes your cost to your service provider if you make DVDs and sell them; some of this is that people here can't see things that would be free to US viewers (USA network won't show anything free to people here), so stealing it is the honorable thing to do; some of it is that people will take a chance on a US $1.10 or so DVD when they would never buy a US $6 DVD. I don't think I've seen a legal DVD in my town.

DVDs are probably priced in the US closer to the technical hassle of producing them. Not the case in Nicaragua rolling your own might bring in extra money (this isn't the sharing sort of video copying you might see in the states).

books

[spz]

I give you four words:
reading in the bathtub

ISAGN :)

Re: books

[mouseworks]

With Kindles, you can plug the thing into powered computer speakers set on a shelf and let it read to you while you're in the tub.