What we need is a direct, open, and non-monopolized marketplace.
We’ve had a few big companies running the show for years, and that’s why we get the bland tedium in the media and the market.
I love how things are today and am wild at what they could be.
Simply put, I could write a book, draw a comic, record a song, make an animation/video game and sell it directly to people at what price I could get for it, based on what others will pay for it. Yeah, there’s piracy, but its nothing compared to being one in a thousand writers tearfully begging some jaded, monopolized publisher to sign the pact with Baphomet and butcher one’s own work to get a tiny pitiful royalty check maybe later…
Writing, drawing, making music - is when all illusions are cast aside a form of “Busking” of asking others for money but not begging directly. If we can collapse these big companies, and we CAN if we push for smaller markets where there’s a strong ethic ANYONE can sell ANYTHING (1) and the price is what another will pay for it and what one will sell it for. We won’t have “The next Stephen King” but the publishers won’t let that happen either. We would have lots of people supplementing or replacing their incomes with their art - but not enough money the ‘big dogs’ chew it up and excrete it.
1 - on that note, here’s something to understand, forget the fake plastic PC of the 90s… “Free Speech” is <> with “popular”, “Convenient”, “Inoffensive” speech… What we have now is the bland, corporate Vomit that files off all life’s rough edges to ram it down the throat without cutting. The push for an open, de-centralized market MUST have rules that allow anything (save illegal stuff maybe) in, the only worry is the producer’s ability to sell what he or she makes.
Neil Gaiman is about 8 years older than me so both he and I came of age when access to content meant access to things. He and I both had youthful experiences with SF that posited “things might be duplicated at zero or near zero cost”. For many SF fans of this general generation the first experience of this idea might have been the replicators in Star Trek.
Both me and and Gaiman first started creating and selling works for others to consume during the access to things era. Needless to say he had more success than I did in this field. He unlike Dickens, established his reputation in the US by means of copyright protected and at the time expensive to reproduce print works. The technology required to produce comic books (as opposed to zines) required significant investment and there really was no consumer technology to cheaply reproduce and experience them as there is today.
It seems to me that when he first saw Napster, his reaction to his musician friends was “sucks to be you” as at that time the things required to reproduce and access his works at near zero cost weren’t really there yet (1). Once’s a writers fame is somewhat established, the likelihood of commercial success of a speaking tour is not such a risk.
What I like here is that unlike some other creators whose success came from the time of high cost to produce/access their work is at least Gaiman here has the grace to say that “it’s not a solution for everybody or even most of us.” Good on him for admitting that instead of preaching One Truth of Copying.
Napster came out in 1996, 3 years after Sandman finished its run in the US. Scanners, high resolution displays, storage and high speed networks were relatively uncommon at this time. Besides straight text files there really wasn’t an ebook file format standard nor had the idea of CBZ/CBR been developed yet so Gaiman’s works were “safer” than music.
I just encountered a Dickensian example in a modern sense - William Shatner is live tweeting along with his The Shatner Project reality TV show.
So, sure, you can torrent the show, or Tivo it, or whatever. But if you don’t watch it when it airs, you miss the opportunity to engage with The Shat while it’s on.
Admittedly, this is probably not an organised effort to bring more eyeballs to the advertising during the telecast, but it’s an idea for giving potential audiences that “value add”.
Do you have a hard time letting go of books and records (CDs in my case)? It took me years to gather those things, digging through every little used bookstore in every small town I came across.
Now? I can get it on Amazon (or download from… somewhere).
Lately I have ordered many books in the $1to $4 range from used book sellers on Amazon, such as Goodwill. These are mostly from the late 1920s through the 1960s.and I have found several authors whose work was basically ripped off after they died.
I remember reading scanlations at least as far back as 93 one slow loading image at a time, and books have always been easy to “share”, the big push with music filesharing came with mp3’s and filesizes coming down, napster just made it available to most people on a familiar platform.
So I don’t think it was just schadenfreude on Mr Gaiman’s part.
In fact, the big napster scare was driven by the gangsters at the RIAA and was aimed at listeners to stop them from downloading music and at artists to demand the industry not move forward. If they were scared, it was because of the fear mongering by record companies.
I remember books copied as ordinary black-and-white, “analog”, photographs. Made with an ordinary 35mm film snapshot camera, and turned from unreadable negative to less unreadable larger positive in a bathroom turned darkroom.
Hat tip to W. Eugene Smith’s ‘Walk to Paradise Garden’, a 1946 photograph of his children walking hand-in-hand in the woods behind his home. #historyofphotography
For me there are a few issues here, I still buy lots of physical media because:
That may be the only way to get that content. Some records I buy are relatively obscure and the content never appears anywhere else. Same for out of print books at times.
Art books and other oversized editions that just don’t translate well to digital use.
I’m shomer shabbos so I’ve got a need for physical books.
Comparison between texts just sucks in the digital world no matter how big a screen I have or how many devices I have.
I also still enjoy the physical experience of books, records, tapes, CDs etc.
As for getting rid of books, thats more difficult here in Japan where there is less demand for used foreign books. Sometimes I have done clear outs and taken things to a used book store to get maybe 10 Yen a piece because I can’t bear to just toss em out.
All that said, I do like the convenience of buying digitally and immediate gratification, especially since pretty much all my reading tastes can not be satisfied at the retail level here.
Did you look at my footnote? I didn’t say it was impossible, I merely said it wasn’t really there yet. There were damn fewer of us online in 93 and fewer still with access to the technology required to do this on any kind of regular basis.
Thats the popular mythology and there is some truth to it. OTOH many non RIAA record companies were not happy about Napster either. I’ve mentioned in many posts that I’ve run small labels on and off since the 80s and have known lots of other people who have done the same. Pretty much all of us, our reaction when we first saw Napster was “oh shit, this isn’t good”.
We didn’t get the quotes in the press like the RIAA level companies did but that doesn’t mean we too were unhappy about unauthorized mass distribution of our works. Some of us kept going and others didn’t or couldn’t. All these years later I’m not crying over spilled milk but I’m still willing to speak out.
Many observant Jews do not operate lights, computers, mobile phones, or other electrical appliances from sundown on Friday until three stars appear in the night sky on Saturday.
While the “three stars” criterion is poetic, is it interpreted as a subtle hint to move away from the cities and into the country where light pollution is not a problem?
I still collect a sizable amount of physical media, largely because of the you-don’t-own-it aspect of on-demand stuff. I hate to get a craving for a particular movie or show, only to find it’s been pulled from Netflix…
I download stuff from time to time, but for the most part, I found that I wasn’t actually using the stuff I downloaded en masse: If I buy a CD, I listen to it in the car on the way home, and tend to leave it playing there for a few weeks. When I was downloading songs a hundred at a time from Napster and Usenet, I’d put stuff in my listening queue, and then it would get buried by the next hundred songs and forgotten. When I got a B&N Nook, I did the same thing for a couple weeks and had to make myself stop before I started obsessing over collecting every last thing I could.
Three stars in the night sky is kinda poetic but its origins are talmudic. Its a way of making sure that its really night time now to prevent accidental violation of the sabbath rules. Since Jews tend to be primarily urban people, since long ago almanac type lists have been calculated and published for the start and end times of the sabbath. These days theres an app for that.
I’ve heard the same from many people. Somehow I find it interesting as a literal example of how “free” can really devalue things. Sort of “I paid for this damn thing so I’m gonna experience it.” There was a sort of twisted parallel phenomenon here in Japan called クソーゲー (kusoge literally “shit game”) with certain video games.
The idea was you bought this game and it turned out to be horrible for one reason or another (overly difficult, badly programmed, bad control system, etc) but since you’d paid your hard earned money the thing you were gonna finish the game come hell or high water. This idea was first in the “owning physical media” era but after the ROM download scene became common here, people just collected the game images without ever playing them and the meaning of the term kinda changed. People would just have a kusoge folder on a hard drive of game images that they never bothered to play.
the various calculators appear to use the “sun is so many degrees below the horizon” method, which of course depens on latitude.
One of the solutions to the polar problem is to simply use one’s home, ot port of embarkation, but this discounts the possibility of permanent settlement. But I haven’t read the original article.
The original article does not seem to be online and there is no library here in Japan from which I could consult on this. This summary isn’t too clear about who holds that there is no halachik day in space but that is certainly a “unique” opinion. Wikipedia’s summary and Star K’s article go with the mix of degrees to the horizon and keep your origin point calendar.
Not so many Jews living in the poles or in outer space but some in Alaska end up dealing with this. I don’t envy them…
