Path: news.tuwien.ac.at!aconews.univie.ac.at!newscore.univie.ac.at!newsfeed1.uni2.dk!newsfeed1.swip.net!swipnet!news-peer-europe.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!logbridge.uoregon.edu!sn-xit-01!supernews.com!sn-inject-01!news.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: pseingalt@hotmail.com Newsgroups: alt.binaries.e-book,alt.binaries.e-books,alt.books.electronic Subject: An interesting thread from Slashdot about electronic publishing Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 22:37:05 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Lines: 4155 Message-ID: X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.8/32.548 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Xref: news.tuwien.ac.at alt.binaries.e-book:22615 alt.books.electronic:4178 Here's the URL for those who have web access: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/24/1637254&mode=nested The tables were not reformatted here and so look horrible. "Big Publishing's Worst Nightmare" Posted by jamie on Monday July 24, @02:25PM from the by-the-way-which-one's-Pink dept. Stephen King is conducting a fiendish experiment. He - not his publisher - is putting the first installment of a novel online today, and then waiting to see how many people will pay a dollar for the download. The second part goes online next month, and then when it comes time to upload the third part, King will only release it if enough people have paid for the first two. This is the first high-profile test of a promising artistic compensation algorithm in the post-copyright world -- and when it fails, don't give up on it. "The average writer is really more interested in writing than the transaction part of the process." -- Jack Romanos, President/COO of Simon & Schuster, quoted in NYT "We're confident that publishers add enough value to the process that authors are still going to want to use them." -- Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, quoted by AP "My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare." -- Stephen King "Looks like the future of publishing to me." -- Bruce Schneier We've had a few people submit this news item, describing it as "shareware." It's not. This is shareware with a bite attached, something else entirely. What King is doing is a real-world test of the Street Performer's Protocol. The SPP is a proposal for artists to make money without retaining any control over their work (since, on the net, copyright is rapidly being rendered irrelevant). Here's the paper by Kelsey and Schneier if you'd like to get all the technical details. But the bottom line is that Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel. Readers aren't going to send in a flood of cash and money orders (!) -- that's a given -- envelopes and addresses are a hassle. Luckily for him, he's brokered a deal with Amazon to accept credit cards, which is pretty sweet considering that most places won't even look at $1 credit card charges -- too much overhead. (My guess would be that Amazon is doing this as a loss leader to get the attention and signups. That won't work forever. Amazon PR didn't return my phone call by press time.) But the real problem is that King demands that 75% of his readers be honest. That'll never happen. Kelsey and Schneier's original SPP proposed thoughtfully that authors ask for a flat fee: say, $100,000 for a novel. If the majority of an author's readers never pay, that's fine: as long as the remaining minority is large enough (or rich enough) to collectively make the payment. (If not enough pay, the money stays in escrow and then reverts to its owners.) King's terms make the question one of relative loyalty, not absolute popularity. He's not offering a transaction with his readers -- he's testing them. And the test is guaranteed to fail. What he's proposing is a Prisoner's Dilemma played between thousands of people. Because of the large nature of the game, the actual statistical "profit" returned by sending in your dollar is a tiny fraction of the enjoyment you'd get from reading the third installment that King would post. Your payoff matrix looks like: Novel Released Novel Not Released Cooperate (pay $1) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $1, profit: $9 $-1 Defect (pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0 No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.) Of course there are other considerations (can you sleep at night knowing you cheated Stephen King out of a dollar?) but for the most part, people will weigh these options and decide they're not going to pay. And once you start thinking that you're not going to pay, you realize that many others won't either, and it starts to look even more like throwing money down a drain. Vicious cycle. The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect. Unfortunately, if everyone behaves rationally, we all merely break even (and the novel never comes out); if only we were a little more irrational we'd all make a profit of nine dollars - or however much King's story was worth to us. Douglas Hofstadter ran an experiment for Scientific American in June 1983, asking twenty friends to play a similar one-shot Dilemma. Even though Hofstadter's was profit-only, no chance of losing money, and even though participants knew their choices would be reported in a national magazine, his cooperation rate was only 30%. I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient. The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right. First of all, the percentage thing needs to go. King doesn't write for the satisfaction of knowing that he has honest readers. He writes to make money. I suspect King is too used to thinking in terms of royalties, hoping for a good-sized slice of those unpredictably large pies he bakes. He might not know which novel will be the runaway best-seller that will make ten times the money he'd hoped for. My advice to him would be to relax; don't try to look for the gravy train. You're on the internet now, that won't work. Set a price for your time -- an obscenely high price, to be sure, you're one of the world's most popular writers -- and be content with what you get. When contributions hit that number, release the book. Second, invite readers to contribute as much as they like toward the novel. For some, a dollar; for real fans, ten dollars or more. Let us decide how much it's worth to us. Third, hold contributions in escrow until the novel is released, and if the limit is not reached by a certain time, give us our money back. As a contributor, this makes my cost negligible, and changes my payoff matrix to, let's say... Price Reached Price Not Reached Cooperate (pay $3) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $3, profit: $7 Get my $3 back: $0 Defect (pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0 This way, there's no risk; the worst-case scenario is that I lose some time and energy at the mailbox. It's a win-win situation, and I'm much more likely to play. If Stephen King wants to craft a real nightmare for Big Publishing, that's the plot he needs to use. (P.S. If you're interested in reading more about the Prisoner's Dilemma, I've assembled a few references -- and thoughts -- at thedilemma.org. See in particular Hofstadter, pp. 740ff., re the one-shot PD.) (P.P.S. Updated 90 minutes later. I had this link to "the download" up in the top paragraph, but took it out because some people didn't realize it led straight to the pay-me-a-dollar PDF file. Sorry; that's why the link is down here now. If you read it and want to pay your dollar, you can probably figure out to visit stephenking.com, eh?) < Civil Disobedience and DeCSS | ABC Ads Target Answering Machines? > Slashdot Login Nickname: Password: Don't have an account yet? Go Create One. A user account will allow you to customize all these nutty little boxes, tailor the stories you see, as well as remember your comment viewing preferences. Related Links Slashdot quoted in NYT quoted by AP Stephen King Bruce Schneier Street Performer's Protocol paper Prisoner's Dilemma thedilemma.org "the download" stephenking.com Stephen King first installment of a novel More on News Also by jamie Your Rights Online Censorware Flaws Shown To COPA Commission More Web Site User Data Gathering Revealed Court to FBI - Full Public Review Of Carnivore "If You Can Put It On A T-Shirt, It's Speech" NYT On DeCSS Case Microsoft Passport And Your Privacy Dick Armey's Freedom Page UK Passes Surveillance Law For ISPs Advertisers Agree To Privacy Restrictions - Kinda Sen. McCain Introduces Privacy Bill '"Big Publishing's Worst Nightmare"' | Login/Create an Account | 452 comments | Search Discussion Threshold: -1: 452 comments0: 434 comments1: 326 comments2: 125 comments3: 24 comments4: 12 comments5: 7 comments No Comments Threaded Nested Flat Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 (Slashdot Overload: CommentLimit 50) This is going to be fascinating (Score:3, Insightful) by dragonfly_blue (mbeihoffer@uswest.net) on Monday July 24, @02:19PM EDT (#5) (User #101697 Info) http://mark.dragonflydynamix.com I can't wait to see what type of success Mr. King has with this. He will *never* see 75% of the people pay for the book if it is enforced only through the honor system, but I'd be impressed if he got 10 million people to read it. That's a huge audience, and would certainly show that the right promotion can make online sales a success, even if only 10% choose to pay. 10 million downloads * 10% = 1 million * $1 'donation' = $1 million! I say, good sir; word up. [ Reply to This | Parent ] The King Virus! (Score:1) by tooth (dmarsh at iname dot com) on Tuesday July 25, @09:03AM EDT (#437) (User #111958 Info) http://127.0.0.1/ It's probably been already said, but just say that king charged no money for this (there is no paper involved, so expenses are only for the hosting, which amazon are paying, and his time for writting it (see below)) then a lot of people will read his work that might not have normally read any king books (like me). And then I read it and liked it, wouldn't I go out and buy other king books? making him more money? I see this as more of an investment on his part, even if/when it fails. It CAN'T be bad for him, because he will pick up more readers (consumers). So I don't see this as a gift, more like a trojan horse/virus for your brain ... hehe :) Hey, it's late, and I don't know what I'm talking about... -- tooth [ Reply to This | Parent ] 2 replies beneath your current threshold. too expensive (Score:2, Funny) by snarkh (snarkh@yahoo.com) on Monday July 24, @02:20PM EDT (#6) (User #118018 Info) Perhaps I will consider downloading the Stephen King's novel if I get paid $1. Of course I will have to be paid more to read it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:2, Interesting) by georgeha on Monday July 24, @02:20PM EDT (#8) (User #43752 Info) http://www.frontiernet.net/~ghaberbe/george2.htm every time you click to the next page, you deduct 5 cents from your PayPal account. George [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:1) by alexalexis (alexalexis@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:37PM EDT (#48) (User #31082 Info) Considering the average length of a King novel (600 .. 700 pages?), he'll be doing quite well if his fan base isn't familiar with grade school math -- That's $30 or $35 per book. :) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:2) by KahunaBurger on Monday July 24, @07:29PM EDT (#384) (User #123991 Info) Considering the average length of a King novel (600 .. 700 pages?), he'll be doing quite well if his fan base isn't familiar with grade school math -- That's $30 or $35 per book. :) Not bad for a hardcover, really, cut that in half and its softcover price in a searchable format. works for me. But the micropayment thing is going to have to come into its own before this stuff will work. On the Napster threads, people keep going on about artists doing it for the love of the work and people paying them what they're worth. The idea seems to be to make the internet a giant subway where street musicians wait for your quarters. The problem is, on the internet, no one has any quarters. We don't even have singles. We have our credit cards and thats it. And, as was pointed out in the article, taking a dollar on a credit card is a money losing proposition for the artist. Plus, going to the trouble of entering your card number eliminates the feeling that tipping has - a casual thank you for a small favor, not considered or counted out carefully, just taken out of your pocket and tossed into the guitar case. I don't know pay pals, but I do think that scemes like this are asking people to have a cash/small change mentality in a credit based/big bucks only environment until some micropayment system becomes standard. All IHMO of course. -kahuna Burger [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:1) by e-gold (_NOSPAM_jray@omnipay.net) on Monday July 24, @02:48PM EDT (#84) (User #36755 Info) http://www.FlyingRat.com That *might* be possible, when something like Robert Hettinga's IBUC is out (supposed to be 01/01/01, but I know how these things usually go, so I'd add "at the earliest" to that date). I don't think the PayPal interface (which is pretty good, don't get me wrong) or even my favorite, e-gold, can do that kind of thing at present without driving readers insane with constant passphrase/account# requests. (I could be wrong, as I have yet to see the latest PayPal shopping cart, and they're smart guys.) I look forward to IBUC and possibly others making this kind of thing possible soon, though. e-metal is cheaper to use than plastic, even if you don't make a market in it, and I wonder what kind of fee he's paying, or if he's getting many "charge backs." As always, /. readers can create a free e-gold account and nick me for a bit of gold, if you like. Thanks. JMR regards, Jim Ray Opinions are, as always, my own. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:1) by Master Bait (mbait@swnews.net) on Monday July 24, @04:08PM EDT (#279) (User #115103 Info) http://swnews.net I think that's not such a bad idea. Or even banner ads. Steven King's Shareware concept is silly. Why should I pay for his book if I don't have to? And downloading a pdf isn't slick either. pdfs are too hard to read on a computer screen. Simulated sheets of paper suck on a monitor with a horizontal aspect ratio. If he could get somebody to put the book into a php'ed html, the reader could choose the fonts, size, width, etc. to their own comfort. Top that off with a couple of 'slap the bitch' and 'spank the monkey' ads and he's scoring maybe 1,000,000 hits a day. Not too shabby. By the way, it looks like some amateur designed and produced his pdf download book. On page 11, there are three widows out of 5 paragraphs. And the aesthetic of those rules at the top and bottom sucks. Maybe Stevie designed the book himself with one of those Micros**t Publisher template Wizards. An e-book shouldn't try to look like a paper book. blessings, Master Bait [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:King should use micropayments and PayPal (Score:1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, @04:19PM EDT (#294) Steven King's Shareware concept is silly. Why should I pay for his book if I don't have to? For the same reason that I buy music rather than pirating it. I don't want the people who make it to get fucked. If you steal that file, you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life by the image in your mind, of Stephen King starving in the gutter, offering sexual favors in exchange for crack money. [ Reply to This | Parent ] I think he's been there already. (Score:1) by Perianwyr Stormcrow (stormcrow-at-bigfoot-dot-com) on Tuesday July 25, @04:52AM EDT (#426) (User #157913 Info) Wasn't he a heroin addict once? --Perianwyr Stormcrow Amor non tenet ordinem. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Heh. (Score:2, Troll) by Enoch Root (elijah[at]hushmail[dot]com) on Monday July 24, @02:21PM EDT (#9) (User #57473 Info) You know, when I see Stephen King saying, 'I can become a publisher's worst nightmare', this truly makes me laugh. King is, to put it bluntly, a publisher's bitch. He is one of those 'silver bullet' writers who can shit on a piece of paper and sell a million copies of it. And you know how he managed that? By sticking to a well-defined, rigid, and marketable formula. In short, he's producing the literary equivalent of hamburgers because he knows he'll sell them. So I'm wondering what King's incentive might be to backstab publishers. Has he suddenly decided he wants MORE money than the millions he already made by writing? To use a geek-friendly metaphor, this is like saying Bill Gates wants to screw capitalism. The truth is, King is the one who was best-served by the publishing world. So something is fishy, trust me. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1, Offtopic) by Enoch Root (elijah[at]hushmail[dot]com) on Monday July 24, @02:33PM EDT (#34) (User #57473 Info) The fact that this post was marked as flamebait is a sad testimony to Slashdot's current state. Thank you for proving my point. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:READ THIS (Score:1, Offtopic) by Enoch Root (elijah[at]hushmail[dot]com) on Monday July 24, @02:39PM EDT (#55) (User #57473 Info) Dude, lay off the acid. It's a bad batch. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:READ THIS (Score:2) by pb (pdbaylie@eos.ncsu.edu) on Monday July 24, @02:54PM EDT (#101) (User #1020 Info) http://www4.ncsu.edu/~pdbaylie Steven King bought your account? So he could post his book at +2? Now I'm confused... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. 1020 Signal is better than noise. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Heh. (Score:2, Funny) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @02:46PM EDT (#77) (User #201561 Info) Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots. I'd say that the moderators count as a sufficiently large group. However, there are still a few good moderators that know a troll when they see it. Sad to say, some people can't tell a regular poster from a troll, and mark regular posters as trolls, and moderate up trolls. How would you propose fixing it? (This should really be on sid=moderation)... -- 11223, cracking the moderation system, one post at a time. Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @03:14PM EDT (#146) (User #201561 Info) Nitpick, but what you want is a low amount of signal and a high amount of noise, so that would be a low signal over noise number. I personally like the mwForum moderation system, as used by BeNews - no anonymous posting, no continual karma number, etc. And guess what? It works just fine! A lot of people like kuro5hin. I hate it personally - I'd rather an editor took care of stories and we did the posting. Once again, BeNews is a good example - now there aren't many trolls (with the execption of one guy named "Robbie"), but the stories get good comments. If you want to post a story yourself, it's a whole forum system. Go make a post. If you've got the bandwidth, give it a try. (BTW the href for mwForum is here.) Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @03:30PM EDT (#180) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net How about denying fully anonymous posts? You can post anonymously, but must register and negative feedback to that post is counted towards the registered user. I suppose people can make many many accounts, but it's a bit more of a hassle, and there could be some waiting period and other tracking methods? [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Heh. (Score:1) by MostlyHarmless (jlee@diespamdie.sidgames.com) on Monday July 24, @04:25PM EDT (#302) (User #75501 Info) http://www.sidgames.com/ I organize a group of people and we put the signal/noise ratio so high that slashdot becomes worse than alt.rec.social.misc At least one person (Error 808) thinks that's what you're already doing. You bought the Enoch Root account and posted as much as you could to gain moderator tokens. Then you used those tokens to moderate up your Sig11 account. Enoch Root has enough karma that it doesn't matter if you lose a little bit due to just posting mindless drivel; after all, as long as the karma stays above 0, you can still get moderation tokens. Error 808 put forth as evidence your sig quotes: "There are some things money just can't buy. For everything else, there's karma." Enoch's quote (paraphrased): "Well, I guess there isn't much that money can't buy". He finished by calling you and Enoch the Karma mafia. Crazy, but it's just crazy enough that it might be true... or not. :-) "skflsdfj fskj sdfkj sdkjl sdf" -- Rob Malda [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Heh. (Score:1) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @02:48PM EDT (#82) (User #201561 Info) If you log on on beta.slashdot.org, www.slashdot.org, or web.slashdot.org, you can keep multiple accounts open. (A duplicate of this post will be posted at the same time by Anonymous Karma). Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Anonymous Karma (testnull@I'mStupid.bemail.org) on Monday July 24, @02:48PM EDT (#83) (User #199687 Info) If you log on on beta.slashdot.org, www.slashdot.org, or web.slashdot.org, you can keep multiple accounts open. (A duplicate of this post will be posted at the same time by 11223). If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody PR2 for Intel to give away, drop me an email. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Fascdot licks mah ba on Monday July 24, @02:53PM EDT (#97) (User #208202 Info) Blah. Do you mean this formula? Don't try to paint the trolls as the problem with moderation. You know and I know that it's uber-zealots on this page that mod shit down. Come on, in my other accounts (that are well known by the trolls) I get overrated all the time. Since I am a troll why would they do this? Simple. They aren't. Why don't you just admit that you and enoch are a couple of losers who have absolutely no life outside of Slashdot. And now that people have gotten sick of your regular postings, you are strutting around pretending to be trolls. All I can say to that is Lick Mah Balls. Same goes for Fascdot killed my Pr, and dozens of others. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:READ THIS (Score:2) by PD (pdrap@startrekmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:55PM EDT (#105) (User #9577 Info) http://slashdot.org I'm not sure what you're whining about. I've got an extremely high karma, and I earned it fair and square. I haven't even been called a karma whore even once (though I expect I will be now...) I don't think Signal 11 needs to resort to activating other accounts to boost his karma. He's frequently insightful. You might disagree with me, but I just don't see the conspiracy here. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:58PM EDT (#113) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net Fine, I replied to something and reveresed my moderation. The truth is that I'm not organized with anyone else on slashdot and though I have not read one of Stephen King's books, I felt the post was mostly flamebait and mostly an opportunity to rip on King's writing style. As for taking apart the moderation system, you may be right, but dispite all the that, in most threats the first few replies end up being the good ones, right? But if everyone's going to whine about it, so be it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Nanookanano on Monday July 24, @09:35PM EDT (#403) (User #213568 Info) To return to the point at hand. Yes, Stephen King's writing is formulaic, and good formula at that. Many..many people will log on to download anything written by him. The sceptical view raised at the beginning of this discussion is no-one being honest enough to pay for it voluntarily. I think that will be the case. However, if downloading books become very common, I believe people will become habituated to the honor system for splinter and independant authors who wish to garner their own readership. Honor is a habit. I wonder if the openess of the media will stimulate some social change. Anarchists Unite!! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @03:35PM EDT (#197) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net Yeah, I am... I'm pretty easy going. I come to this site to read about news, not necessarily to argue with people. I haven't got it all figured out like the rest of the readers here, so I don't know how everything should work yet. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @03:45PM EDT (#229) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net Hehe. Well, I didn't think it was troll. I didn't take your remark as mean, and I my 'feelings' weren't hurt because you were responding to one post of mine, and anything you said couldn't have meant much to me in terms of evaluating my character. I don't think I've seen anyone here admitting to a moderation or claiming that they reversed it, so I thought you might be some reader surprised to see it, and you did have a valid point of view from the small amount of experience you have with my posts, which turns out to be true, on Slashdot, I am easy to push around. Nice talking to you, you so called 'troll'. :) [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:READ THIS (Score:2) by technos (technos@crosswinds.spam.net) on Monday July 24, @03:31PM EDT (#186) (User #73414 Info) http://www.crosswinds.net/~technos/ Time to come clean.. I control both Signal 11 and Enoch Root. 'Signal 11', complete with mail-forwarding from the given mail account, cost me a pair of Alteon 571 SS7 motherboards and 300 MII chips back in January. Everybody wondered why he suddenly went whacko; It was just me having fun! 'Enoch Root' was one of my old Karma Whoring accounts, and I used it from time to time after people caught on to my whoring keep the name fresh in their minds. I've been using 'Sig 11' for trolling mostly, in an effort to dwindle the 600 Karma down to +1 land (figured it might be good for a laugh) and 'Enoch Root' just when I feel like looking respectable. This account, 'technos' was one of my later failed attempts at abusing the moderation system. I only ever managed 300 karma on it, so it was a failure.. Sincerely, osm Proud member of the Slashdot Karma Mafia, La Cosa Hemos. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:READ THIS (Score:1) by Singal 11 (signal11@mediaone.net?Subject=Slashdot comment) on Monday July 24, @03:39PM EDT (#210) (User #204063 Info) http://www.malign.net/~bojay But you don't control me... What you say doesn't make any sense. If signal 11 had 600 karma (not 700, as he was claiming), then 300 karma is half as good as signal 11, the most notorious karma whore. That's not a failure on my book. Secondly, you are a troll. Enoch Root is an admitted troll (a while back, on k22320inchfan). Signal 11 never admitted he was a troll. Cross-post this to k22320inchfan with confirming posts from Enoch Root and Signal 11 and I'll believe you. (Keep in mind that you can log in multiple users on slashdot.org, www.slashdot.org, web.slashdot.org, and beta.slashdot.org). -- 11223 -o Who care's how corrupt our leaders are when they're political karma whores? o- [ Reply to This | Parent ] Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:2) by technos (technos@crosswinds.spam.net) on Monday July 24, @04:03PM EDT (#267) (User #73414 Info) http://www.crosswinds.net/~technos/ One, if this account really were an exploitation attempt, I'd consider 300 karma in a year and a half a failed attempt at exploitation. Others have ramped to the 150 mark in less than two months. Two, I'm only a part-time troll, but thanks for noticing! ;) Three, that was, and was supposed to be, more ridiculous than the conspiracy theory itself, eg, a joke. One would have to be an actor of top caliber, completely insane, and jobless to pull off a simultaneous performance of 'osm', 'Signal 11', 'Enoch Root', and 'technos', complete with supporting mail addresses and web pages. Proud member of the Slashdot Karma Mafia, La Cosa Hemos. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:1) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @04:07PM EDT (#274) (User #201561 Info) Troll feeding can indeed be fun. Keep in mind that I posted it as a lame fake Siggy account instead of my real account to get an impression of how serious I was. Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:2) by technos (technos@crosswinds.spam.net) on Monday July 24, @04:41PM EDT (#323) (User #73414 Info) http://www.crosswinds.net/~technos/ After someone took a bite at it, I was honestly thinking of mailing the three of them to con em into pulling the hoax off. At least two would be sick enough to join the conspiracy.. Proud member of the Slashdot Karma Mafia, La Cosa Hemos. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:1) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @04:44PM EDT (#326) (User #201561 Info) ... and siggy appears to be fed up enough to try. Perhaps they're already in league with each other and trying to do this on purpose? Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:2) by technos (technos@crosswinds.spam.net) on Monday July 24, @10:16PM EDT (#408) (User #73414 Info) http://www.crosswinds.net/~technos/ I doubt they're formally 'in league', but in league in spirit nonetheless.. More often than not I find myself in their camp, but I digress.. I honestly think Sig is irrationally peeved enough with the troll population (yourself included, no doubt) to jump ship, given a site with sufficient educated traffic and similar content.. Look at any of his good rants from Feb.. Enoch Root I have little opinion on, other than he seems to follow the same behavioral pattern as the other infamous longtime /. participants.. Now you strike me as an 'old newbie'. Semi-permanent Slashdot incarnation like me?? Or (And I use the term in the best possible sense; I am one of the trolls. afterall!) are you solely a troll? Proud member of the Slashdot Karma Mafia, La Cosa Hemos. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Someone forgot their sense of humor today! (Score:1) by 11223 on Tuesday July 25, @08:59AM EDT (#436) (User #201561 Info) You'd only think me a newbie if you looked at my user number... my first account number is 98984, and I lurked for quite a while even before that. Not CND, but been here for a while. Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 5 replies beneath your current threshold. Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Adversary on Monday July 24, @02:36PM EDT (#43) (User #7517 Info) Its a gimmick. The idea of a "publisher's worst nightmare" is a nice geeky dream fit for a nice geeky media such as the net. It works great for generating interest. I'm sure everyone reading this article and the various links will agree. I don't think there is any way he could make more money selling novels on the net (currently). That means you will continue to see Stephen King novel's on display at your local mega-bookstore. Also, what the hell does this have to do with my rights online? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Fishy (Score:2, Interesting) by chorder (enzo(at)blacksun(dot)org) on Monday July 24, @02:45PM EDT (#74) (User #177607 Info) http://www.bluefirecafe.org The 'fishy' something may be very obvious. It could very simply be an "I told you so" game: I (Stephen King, publisher bitch) am a happening twenty-first century writer, I am hip, and I am open to new ideas. I want to cater to those who believe the centralized publishing machine is fascist and outdated, therefor I will try out one of your new fangled 'internet' schemes for reimbursing an artist/writer for his/her time. Let's see how it works. 3 months later Okay, this failed, (as I knew it would) and I didn't get reimbursed for my time. You geeks and your high faluten talk of a new artistic econony, look here, it didn't work! Now we can all go home, back to our centralized fascist distribution system, and hopefully now you wont keep bothering me (and the whipcracking publishers above me) about free(speach/beer, doesn't matter)dom of information. Now, I like Stephen King, I've always had a soft spot for the little wierdo ever since The Shining and The Gunslinger, so I hope this isn't the case. But its very plausible, and a little thing called Ahkam's Razor (sp?) keeps poking me in the back. Maybe he is doing this, but without realizing the publisher's motives. I don't know, we'll see how it pans out. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Fishy (Score:1) by jafac on Monday July 24, @03:36PM EDT (#201) (User #1449 Info) Give the man some credit. He's onto "us". As individuals, we may have honor, but you know as well as I do (and he does), that as a group, the logic here is pure Prisoner's Dilemma, and since most people read Stephen King (well, he's kind of passe now, isn't he?) and not Scientific American, he's just reproducing the experiment for the masses, taking "us" to task on this IP system. He's basically saying, okay all you info-pirates out there. Put your money where your mouth is. I'm betting y'all just want your free beer. if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is! [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Fishy (Score:1) by pcidevel (j.fairch-AT-gte-DOT-net) on Monday July 24, @03:53PM EDT (#251) (User #207951 Info) I think it's Occams Razor.. and I have to say that the simpilest explanation is that he just doesn't understand the monumental feat of humanity he's asked for (requiring 75% of us to have honor is quite a request, from anyone, including Stephen King).. So Occam's Razor points towards he just didn't think about the math.. ------- I thought someone said there was going to be free beer! [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Heh. (Score:2, Funny) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @02:57PM EDT (#111) (User #201561 Info) And we now know exactly who'se bitch he'se become... People choosing to pay before downloading will proceed to the Amazon.com Payments site. - from the Stephen King website. I smell a high-profile boycott... Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Performer Guy on Monday July 24, @03:37PM EDT (#205) (User #69820 Info) http://www.dorbie.com/ You're exactly right. The fact is that if you or I did this we'd get nowhere. It would be a complete non event. The only reason King can even think about doing this is his prior relationship with publishers. Even if he makes it with this it's not a nightmare for the publishers. This business is all about distribution and name recognition. You'll know the world has changed when we get a famous author who has "made it" entirely through self publishing on the web, until then the publishers can rest easy. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by LWeinberger on Monday July 24, @04:18PM EDT (#292) (User #180036 Info) I guess I just don't get it. Why does he want to publish on the web? It's really not for the reader's good because if it doesn't work, then you've just let down a bunch of people who got hooked on the novel by reading the first few chapters. If I were one of those people and he didn't finish, I would feel very abandonned as a reader. Also, books are not exactly expensive and if you can't afford a book or simply do not want to buy one, you can always go to a library. Now, what i think would be cool would be to have an on-line type of library where you can check the book out onto your computer for a certain amount of time and then it maybe self deletes or something when the time limit is over if you haven't renewed it. I think when people think Internet, they should be thinking, really big library and stop thinking so much about profits. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by NetFu (craig@netfu.com_no_spam_please) on Monday July 24, @04:32PM EDT (#311) (User #155538 Info) I have news for you: a Stephen King novel costs $7 for paperback and $15+ for hardcover. $1-$3 is a helluva lot cheaper (per book) and I don't think you have to be cheap to think so. If you lose $1, who cares? It's not like I spent $7-$15 for one of his books that I thought was great and later found out sucked -- when that happens I have no recourse, I just lost the $7-$15. The internet should represent a way to get an even-cheaper-than-paperback novel. You buy a paperback because you're not sure if it's a long-term purchase -- you'll buy the hardcover if it's REALLY good. You should be able to buy an "ebook" (or whatever you call it) for about $1-$3 and you pay more for a paperback ($5-$7) or even more for a hardcover. Would I try/buy music this way? Sure, as long as I can listen or try it before deciding I want it and as long as the low-permanence of digital media is compensated to me in the price (i.e. the hard drive crashes and I lose my books plus it's cheaper for you to publish so I shouldn't have to pay much). [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by felix rayman on Monday July 24, @09:22PM EDT (#401) (User #24227 Info) Now, what i think would be cool would be to have an on-line type of library where you can check the book out onto your computer for a certain amount of time and then it maybe self deletes or something when the time limit is over if you haven't renewed it. I think when people think Internet, they should be thinking, really big library Hmmmmm.....a library...... Can book publishers legally prevent libraries from loaning out books they publish? How about music? Can music publishers prevent libraries from loaning out CDs? What if they're CDs of MP3s? What if the libraries loan them out by putting them on the web? Aren't public libraries exactly as ethical/unethical as Napster? [ Reply to This | Parent ] What formula? (Score:1) by brogdon (andrew(at)imagersoft.com) on Monday July 24, @03:40PM EDT (#213) (User #65526 Info) http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~brogdon I freely admit that Stephen King is not a Pulitzer Prize-worthy of writer, and I haven't even read any of his new stuff in the last five years or so, but what I have read has certainly not been trite or formulaic in any capacity. His short stories are particularly well varied, as are his works published as Richard Bachman. Although I've not read all his novels, those I have - Insomnia, Gerald's Game, Through the Eyes of the Dragon, The Long Walk, Rage, etc. - have been no more a result of a formula than any other author of a particular genre. I'd be interested in hearing your idea of what "formula" Stephen King writes by. --Brogdon There is nothing more odious to me than an expensive church. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:What formula? (Score:1) by sredding (sandman nine three five at yahoo dot com) on Monday July 24, @04:35PM EDT (#316) (User #107116 Info) http://home.earthlink.net/~sandmanr/index.html Wasn't The Long Walk published in the Bachman Books? ... ..- -.-. -.-. . ... ... / .- .-.. .-- .- -.-- ... / --- -.-. -.-. ..- .-. ... / .. -. / .--. .-. .. ...- .- - [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:3, Insightful) by Ian Bicking (ianb@murphyarts.com) on Monday July 24, @03:42PM EDT (#216) (User #980 Info) http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~bickiia King is, to put it bluntly, a publisher's bitch. He is one of those 'silver bullet' writers who can shit on a piece of paper and sell a million copies of it. And you know how he managed that? By sticking to a well-defined, rigid, and marketable formula. In short, he's producing the literary equivalent of hamburgers because he knows he'll sell them. You make it sound like hamburgers are bad. I like hamburgers, and I'm very annoyed when I order a hamburger and get something on wheat bread with sprouts -- I know it's good for me, but I ordered a hamburger. King doesn't write great fiction. It does follow a formula, like most traditional stories and most of the rest of fiction. People like it. They don't become Better People through it. Sorry. I mean, I can appreciate difficult literature. But I enjoy traditional literature with traditional formulas more -- and so do most people. Not everyone likes King's formula, but a lot of sci-fi and almost all fantasy is from a formula. King writes to a formula and he does it pretty well. He doesn't jerk people around. He gives them their hamburger. -- Ralph Nader for President. www.votenader.org [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by the N man on Monday July 24, @03:49PM EDT (#236) (User #206082 Info) In short, he's producing the literary equivalent of hamburgers because he knows he'll sell them. Sizzling novels by Stephen "Burger" King: !!!Now ONLY $1!!! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Heh. (Score:1) by Skid (wellma15@GUESSWHATTOREMOVEHEREBUNKO.marshall.edu) on Monday July 24, @04:20PM EDT (#296) (User #38470 Info) It's completely true that King is selling the written equivilent of a hamburger. So? He ADMITS IT HIMSELF! He has said before in at least one interview that the majority of his work is a Big Mac for the mind. Sure he wants more money (only a fool writes for anything but, &etc)... but I bet he also wants less bullshit from a publisher. I'm not a big fan of his work other than the Dark Tower books, but I can respect his rationale. -- These are *MY* opinions. They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operational. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:READ THIS (Score:1) by DonkPunch on Monday July 24, @04:08PM EDT (#278) (User #30957 Info) It doesn't stop there. I have proof that Signal 11/Enoch Root was the second gunman on the grassy knoll. Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 2 replies beneath your current threshold. 75 percent!!?!? (Score:2, Insightful) by fence on Monday July 24, @02:21PM EDT (#10) (User #70444 Info) http://www.colotto.com I like Stephen King's work, but I think that he must be smoking something pretty nice to think that 75% of the people who download his online book will send him a dollar. I think that he will be lucky to get a 30% return rate...and if he does, he will still make a pretty nice profit. It will be interesting to see if he truly will NOT release the final chapter when he still makes millions on the novel. --- Interested in the Colorado Lottery? check out colotto.com [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:75 percent!!?!? (Score:2) by Tony Hammitt (tSPAMhammitt@kc.rr.com) on Monday July 24, @03:25PM EDT (#166) (User #73675 Info) Cripes! you're right... I think that if anyone got around to thinking about it, they'd throw him in jail for fraud. How are _we_ supposed to know that the 75% hasn't been achieved? Can't he lie? OK, so we know that it is almost impossible for the scheme to result in his publishing the book (excpet if he decides to do so just for the normal amount of money). So why would he get to keep the money? Who knows how many people are going to be ripped off from this scheme. He ought to have some preset dollar amount that requires him to publish the whole book. Like whatever he would be getting as an advance. Otherwise it's premeditated wire fraud. The easiest solution is to get your copy from someone other than the official website. Then he'll think that only one person dl'd the installments. This is such a bunch of shit. His books have a lot of variance in quality, so we may all be defrauded for a crappy book (with the inevitable cliffhanger). This scheme is not the way to go about internet publishing. We need micropayments, badly. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:75 percent!!?!? (Score:2) by Chiasmus_ (jc@chiasmus.reno.nv.us) on Monday July 24, @03:43PM EDT (#220) (User #171285 Info) http://www.xyxx.com/chiasmus Here is a surefire way to ensure that the third installment is posted. 1) Have CmdrTaco pay $1 for the text. He has an actual job, so he can probably afford it. 2) Have Jon Katz post the entire novel as a Slashdot article. It has to be Katz because a 90-page post would look suspicious if it were any other author. 3) Tie all the trolls' machines together in a gigantic beowulf cluster and launch a massive brute force DoS against King's website. Total downloads: 1. Total payments: 1. Honesty rating: 100%. "When I am king, you will be first against the wall/ With your opinion which is of no consquence at all" - Radiohead [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:75 percent!!?!? (Score:1) by jafac on Monday July 24, @03:39PM EDT (#212) (User #1449 Info) I can't believe you people just don't "get" it! Have you ever read one of his books? He doesn't expect to get 75% either. He's teasing us on purpose. if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Escrow (Score:2) by SheldonYoung on Monday July 24, @02:23PM EDT (#13) (User #25077 Info) Perhaps he has already thought of the escrow idea. Once the initial portion of the novel is out you can bet people will want to pre-order, and Amazon will be happy to take their money. He may have his required cash for the third novel before it's even "published". Honestly, any predictions of what is going to happen is just a wild guess about uncharted territory. People don't think in terms of the Prisoners Dillema, and if they did everybody would just stop paying once that magic $100,000 point was reached. I say, just wait and see. The worst thing that happens is it doesn't work and the experiment fails. That's all, no collapse of civilization. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Welcome to no-man's-land.. (Score:1) by BilldaCat on Monday July 24, @02:24PM EDT (#14) (User #19181 Info) http://www.frungy.com It appears this story has vanished off the front page.. BilldaCat - http://www.frungy.com [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Welcome to no-man's-land.. (Score:1) by Yhcrana (jfairfax@:SPAM=PAIN:gladstone.uoregon.edu) on Monday July 24, @02:27PM EDT (#21) (User #88366 Info) http://yhcrana.dyndns.org/index.asp Yah I noticed that also, thank goodness that was still stored in cache. Yhcrana Insanity isn't a disease, it's a way of life [ Reply to This | Parent ] Appears to be back (Score:1) by Yhcrana (jfairfax@:SPAM=PAIN:gladstone.uoregon.edu) on Monday July 24, @02:29PM EDT (#27) (User #88366 Info) http://yhcrana.dyndns.org/index.asp Whoops, it appears to be back. Intersting... Insanity isn't a disease, it's a way of life [ Reply to This | Parent ] Branch into other industries (Music, Movies) (Score:1) by Yhcrana (jfairfax@:SPAM=PAIN:gladstone.uoregon.edu) on Monday July 24, @02:25PM EDT (#15) (User #88366 Info) http://yhcrana.dyndns.org/index.asp I agree completely with the above comments. If this takes off, which it probably wont, it will be great. We need to branch this into the music, motion picture, and any other industry that we can. What would the RIAA be able to say about that, nothing. ditto for the MPAA Yhcrana Insanity isn't a disease, it's a way of life [ Reply to This | Parent ] Idea has been implemented for music. (Score:1) by mgoyer (mgoyer@fairtunes.com) on Monday July 24, @03:28PM EDT (#175) (User #164191 Info) http://www.fairtunes.com The idea of voluntary payments over the net for music has already been implemneted and is very similar to Stephen King's idea. Check out Fairtunes. Fairtunes enables the listener (only been done for music so far) to download their favorite songs via Napster/Gnutella/Scour.. And then once they've determined that they like the song and feel it is worth remunerating/compensating the artist they will visit Fairtunes and charge a completely voluntary amount to their credit card. Fairtunes will then send that money to the artist selected in either the form of a check or a direct money transfer. It is now up to the artist to distribute the funds as they see fit. This is opposed to the record label doing it because we all know the record industry is not the fairest. A similar idea has been implemented at PayLars but they only send money to Metallica. Whereas you can use Fairtunes for any artist. Do people think this idea is completely off the wall? Will it work for music? Or will the participation rate just be too low for the artist to make any real money off of it? Do we live in the kind of society where people can be "trusted" to remunerate as they see fit? Or do we live in a society that has to have rigidly enforced pricing policies and intellectual property laws? Matt. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. I think the game theory matrix is wrong (Score:1) by scott@b on Monday July 24, @02:26PM EDT (#16) (User #124781 Info) YOu get $10 enjoyment from one chapter ofa book? Is't this like seeing the trailers for a movie and saying that you've gotten the full enjoyment of the movie (well, for some films that would be true). Some might say that reading the start of a suspense/mystery novel and not being able to finish it gives you negative enjoyment. I know someone who went out at 1AM and drive miles to get another copy of a book because the last 50 pages was missing, and they couldn't sleep until they'd read the entire thing. I will agree that 3/4 of the readers paying is far to high of a percentage. Better to base it on how much he takes in. What's better pay - 75% of 5000 downloads or 1% of a million downloads. But it is an iteresting experiment. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:2) by BenHmm (ben.hammersley@SPAMMENOTthe-times.co.uk) on Monday July 24, @02:26PM EDT (#17) (User #90784 Info) http://www.the-times.co.uk ooh Stephen you big rebel you... playing devil's advocate here - I'm interested in the aspect of why this/linux/napster etc etc is all to do with taking on Big X. Every other story on /. seems to be how x technology spells the end for the dominent publishing/music/OS business. So here's a question for y'all: What things are these big companies actually good for? Under what circumstances - Right Now - do you agree with Big X? i don't mean if they did this or that, but actually right now...what good things do you see Microsoft, record labels, publishers etc doing that others are not? just wondered ------------------------------- It's only kinky the first time [ Reply to This | Parent ] Why publishing companies are good (Score:3, Offtopic) by georgeha on Monday July 24, @02:34PM EDT (#38) (User #43752 Info) http://www.frontiernet.net/~ghaberbe/george2.htm So, why are publishing companies good? I can only speak for the books that I have written, but I do see some advantages to using a publishing company that you have a hard time matching if you do it yourself. Distribution: This is one of the big ones. A good publisher can get your book into every Borders and Barne's & Noble across the country, as well as Amazon. This is hard to do by yourself. Editing: Editing is a hard job, and underrated. I've dealt with two kinds of editors, the main editor who keeps the books focused, and makes the grammar and syntax more readable, and the techinal editor who tries everything you write about, tells you where you went wrong, and suggests alternatives (I'm talking computer books here). These two editing functions are very hard to do for your own book, you never see your own flaws. If you want to publish your own book, you need to find and pay an editor or two. That's a big chunk of upfront money. Market Research: If you're writing for money (and Boswell said only a fool writes for anything but money), you should have an idea of how big your market is. You might be fascinated with Gnobots, and willing to spend a year of your life and thousands of dollars writing the definitive guide to Gnobots, but will anyone buy The Compleat Gnobots? Thanks, George [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Why publishing companies are good (Score:2) by A Big Gnu Thrush (elineberry@iname.com) on Monday July 24, @02:58PM EDT (#114) (User #12795 Info) http://sandbox.freeservers.com Thank you. I couldn't agree more. Publishers have a lot of faults, but they aren't market leeches. They provide valuable services and take legitimate risks. Editing any book is a huge task. As I mentioned in another post, take a look at self-published, unedited works on the internet, and you'll realize how hard this can be. King has an editor for this book. Side note: he needs much more aggressive editors for anything he produces. Read my novel: Much of Madness, More of Sin [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Publishing companies good for less now (Score:1) by satanic bunny on Monday July 24, @03:28PM EDT (#173) (User #69378 Info) Yes, everyone who writes books needs an editor. Or another pair of eyes. Or time. Or experience. But: even if you DO have great editors, you can still have crap PR and distribution or a designer can irritate someone "in-house" and screw yr project, etc, etc, etc. I mean from BIG publishing houses...the bigger the house, the more they focus on their biggest names. Let's face it, Stephen King is hardly yr average technical writer. Nor is the scheme he endorses the only Web alternative. The Web is already a FANTASTIC plus for authors. Especially anyone who writes _because_ they know a good idea is good without "market research". The more aggressive e-publishers, such as iuniverse.com and Bertelsmann Arvato, are setting up now to absolutely cream offset publishing. Plus, at only $200 for a starting fee (as long as you know enough about digital design and PR), most authors can already benefit. You just have to have the energy. If you still leave it to agents, publishers, editors, etc - well, they deserve your money! Someone like iuniverse (like all the big-name publishers who just don't say so), uses Lightning Print, Ingram Books' pioneer plant in Tennessee. Lightning has very interesting IBM-provided technology which can print and bind a book in 30 to 60 seconds...changing titles one by one, if that's what's needed. The books look just as good as anyone else's but they don't incur the costs of shipping and sitting unsold in warehouses. Instead, you can order a book every time someone wants it. This beats the download-by-parts or pay-as-you-go schemes, plus actual booksellers like it. (Barnes & Noble own 49% of iuniverse and they stock various iuniverse titles on the shelf.) It also means the independent, non-chain, booksellers can now afford to launch imprints of their own. Currently, the only drawback is: you can only print novels or academic books. Because, with half-tones or anything like that, the technology isn't cost-effective. No-one is doing color plates at all...not YET. So it's still great for Steven Kings or technical writers. But anyone doing a book on Web graphics or art must wait. Meanwhile, that agent who takes 10%-15% of the work you did (and the same off yr royalties, as well as delaying your check) is losing his or her valued prestige and power. Your publisher has to re-evaualate how he or she treats authors. And the in-house imprint staff are scrambling to become REALLY literate. For anyone who writes, this is hardly bad news. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Boswell (Score:1) by rodentia (possum@UNSPAM.haarman.net) on Monday July 24, @03:29PM EDT (#179) (User #102779 Info) http://www.haarman.net/ For a free copy of Stephen King's new book, name something Boswell wrote, other than the Life. Boswell was a punter, here's a taste from the London Journals: Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person. Turgid, pompous dreck, notwithstanding the absurd chauvinism, exagerated even for his enlightened era. Only a self-important fop writes for money. illegitimi non ingravare [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Boswell (Score:1) by LWeinberger on Monday July 24, @04:27PM EDT (#305) (User #180036 Info) Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person. What muddled garbage! What is Boswell trying to do, get the maximum number of syllables in a paragraph. Convoluted messiness is the result. people don't write for money, or at least the good writers don't. They write because they NEED to. They write because they have something to say. Of course they have to get by in life but nobody goes into writing to make money. They go into it because they are artists. Do painters paint to get rich? No. Well neither do writers and i think that in the face of a weathly writer like King, it's easily forgotten but he did not start writeing to make money. he started because he had a story to tell. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Why publishing companies are good (Score:1) by NetFu (craig@netfu.com_no_spam_please) on Monday July 24, @03:57PM EDT (#258) (User #155538 Info) I agree with you about publishing companies having a use, but not your reasons: Distribution: This is one of the big ones. A good publisher can get your book into every Borders and Barne's & Noble across the country, as well as Amazon. [snip] Uh-uh, sorry -- this argument is made irrelevent by the web itself. By yourself you can do the internet equivalent of "getting your book on the shelf" by putting up a site with your novel, but who's going to find it? Well, go buy a net self-marketing software for $100 and you CAN get yourself ranked higher than the publishers themselves -- the web/internet levels the playing field. I'm not saying publishers can't provide internet marketing services -- I'm just saying they'd better or they're due for a Napster-like rude awakening. Do the publishers even help market your book so people even know about it or does that cost extra? It doesn't really do much good to get your book on the shelf so it can collect dust. Hmm, lots of similarities here -- you're starting to convince me publishing companies have less use than I thought. Editing: Editing is a hard job, and underrated. [snip] If you want to publish your own book, you need to find and pay an editor or two. That's a big chunk of upfront money. This is true except for one thing: how easy is it for me -- a nobody in publishing -- to get a book published? How long would it take? My only real alternative is to publish it Stephen King's way on the web. I don't think I could afford to pay an editor (only from the sound of what you're saying) and I don't think I'd want to if I was experimenting with career alternatives. In the end, if you have a good product the worst that would happen is that your work would be called good or OK but unpolished. Market Research: If you're writing for money [snip], you should have an idea of how big your market is. [snip] Market Research: all I can say is, the biggest reason (IMHO) we have so many sh*tty products on the market and have lost so many worthy products is Market Research. It may work fine for you, but I KNOW we are missing a lot of products because "market research" says there is no market or not a significant one. I wonder what "market research" said about the first personal computer ideas? Probably something along the lines of a Dell exec who said, "Who would want a computer in their HOME???" [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Why publishing companies are good (Score:1) by georgeha on Monday July 24, @04:08PM EDT (#281) (User #43752 Info) http://www.frontiernet.net/~ghaberbe/george2.htm My point on distribution. I've written two computer books. When I need to buy a computer book, I don't buy off the web, I go to Borders or Barnes & Noble, pull out 3-6 books on the subject, get a coffee and skim through each one. I look at the level of technical skill required, I check things that I know about the subject, and see that the author's got it correct, and I look at the subjects. If I was in a hurry for a book, I'd still go to Borders or Barne's & Noble, if I need to the book today or tomorrow morning, I'd rather trust myself than Amazon or some self published author. My point on editors You don't appreciate an editor until you see what they do to your work. It's humbling, every page has your words changed, your ideas challenged and your uses of utilities questioned. I think it makes for a better book. Editor's can make for a more consistent book, too. My next book is in the Dummies line. I like the Dummies book, and have bought several (even despite the tax advantages). If you buy a Dummies book, you have a pretty good idea what kind of book you are getting. (No, I don't approve of their aggressive defense of their title, but I understand it). If you read my books without editing, many phrases wouldn't make sense, and there's less chance what I tell you is right. That's kind of important for a computer book. PS. If you want to write a book, let me know, ghaberbe@frontiernet.net. My agent specializes in computer books, and would be glad to hear you out. George [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Why publishing companies are good (Score:2, Interesting) by Xoro on Monday July 24, @04:11PM EDT (#284) (User #201854 Info) Whoa. The Internet handles Distribution, and Market Research is used by publishers to see if they should publish, not by authors to see if they should write (at least not by good authors!). In any event, if the cost of distribution is reduced to an FTP site, most of the publishers' risk (and therefore, value) has been removed. While there's some justified cynicism about Mr King's real intentions here, the "Worst Nighmare" quote is very real. I work at [Large Unnamed Investment Bank] and publishers aren't laughing. Nobody is surprised that someone is doing an end-around, but the fact that it's King -- a huge draw, whatever the quality -- unnerves people. If properties with enough pull to sell w/o publishers' promotions (Clancy, Grisham, etc.) start to go solo, the publishing cos could wind up like the Motreal Expos of business...producing stars, but never able to ride the gravy train. Also, I agree completely about editing being vital and underappreciated. Unfortunately, I also agree that SK's editors failed him long ago. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Why Online Publishing Is Better (Score:1) by Westacular (wes@[ANTI-SPAM]shadnet.shad.ca) on Monday July 24, @06:30PM EDT (#365) (User #118145 Info) I agree, the "write the book, we'll take care of the other details" assistance that a publisher brings is definitely helpful... But online publishing combined with a model like the Street Performer's Protocol (SPP) has the potential to make those moot points. Distribution: They go to your website and get it. That's it. No problems there; only the cost of hosting and bandwidth. Editing: There probably are (or soon will be) niche for-hire editing services that you can contract to edit your work. When using the SPP, you just use some of that money you have built up to pay them. Market Research: If there's really no demand, then noone's going to give you the money to write the book anyway. The tricky part is getting the word out, and showing them your idea... so that, if interested, they can give you money. That's going to be one of the bigger problems... Spreading the word. At least until you get /.'d :) Word of mouth works well on the Internet -- provided people talk. Cheers, Wes [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:2, Insightful) by egore (egore100@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:52PM EDT (#93) (User #212436 Info) what good things do you see Microsoft, record labels, publishers etc doing that others are not? Microsoft brings a lot of software to the average consumer. Most users would not be able to handle something like Linux, it's too complex (I'm specifically thinking of my parents, I just taught my mom how to reboot Windows a week ago...). Record labels allow those people with relatively slow 'Net connections (me and my 56k modem...) to easily purchase music. They also can work wonders for marketing. If a record label already has a deal with several major stores (Best Buy and all of the CD retail stores in the malls) then they can get the artists music out to a lot of people. What's bad is that the record labels take a huge chunk of cash from the artists and Microsoft tries to run other companies out of business or buy them up. I really like a lot of MS products (Visual Studio, Win2k, Office and Age of Empires I and II) but that doesn't mean I always agree with them. With all that said, we do not need to take on "Big Publishing" or anything like that, we just need to get them to give the real talent (the authors, musicians, artists, etc.) what they deserve. If this mean boycotting them for a while (effectively what King is doing) then so be it. Whatever gets the point across that they're screwing over the people that create something useful. 'Nuff mindless rambling... - Alex [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:1) by VAXman on Monday July 24, @03:02PM EDT (#124) (User #96870 Info) Record labels allow those people with relatively slow 'Net connections (me and my 56k modem...) to easily purchase music. They also can work wonders for marketing. If a record label already has a deal with several major stores (Best Buy and all of the CD retail stores in the malls) then they can get the artists music out to a lot of people. What's bad is that the record labels take a huge chunk of cash from the artists and Microsoft tries to run other companies out of business or buy them up. I really like a lot of MS products (Visual Studio, Win2k, Office and Age of Empires I and II) but that doesn't mean I always agree with them. The best function of the record industry is that they redistribute wealth from profitable artists to unprofitable artists, and every gets an equal share. This is good. 90% of artists are not commercially successful, and the profits from the 10% cover the rest. Who pays for the best music to be produced? Britney Spears. When artists start selling direct, only the 10% which are actually profitable (i.e. Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and N*Sync) will become filthy rich (MUCH more so than they are now, since there profits aren't taken away and given to unproftable artists), and the rest will have to get day jobs. -- The Linux Promise: Crash Early, Crash Often [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:1) by FirstEdition on Tuesday July 25, @12:59PM EDT (#444) (User #79762 Info) Surely you are kidding. There is a grain of truth in your argument that profitable artists subsidise non-profitable ones, but the insisputable fact is that record companies are in it for themselves. Yes, they screw the artists because it's more profitable to do it than not to, and they are effectively a cartel. Everyone should read what Courtney Love has to say about it from her personal experience: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:1) by VAXman on Monday July 24, @05:25PM EDT (#342) (User #96870 Info) The Britney Spears get all of the attention and investment and the other 90% is pretty much ignored. These are record companies. Are you seriously trying to get us to believe that they function as welfare agencies? It is a documented fact that they do. Before you make one more comment on slashdot, you need to read _Who Killed Classical Music_, (c) 1997 by Norman LeBrecht. Bands don't need to indulge in the studio excesses of the like of a Def Leppard to get an album made. Infact, home recording equipment now is as sophisticated as what was used to generate many of the older studio works. It is precisely this sentiment which is going to destroy the recording industry. It is amazing how many people actually believe this. For starters, there is a HUGE world of music which has nothing to do with "bands", but I'm sure you're not familiar with it. Will the WHOLE Chicago Symphony Orchestra fit in your computer room, and will the little microphone on your $400 Compaq capture ALL of the subtleties in an orchestral piece? -- The Linux Promise: Crash Early, Crash Often [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Taking on Big Publishing? (Score:1) by jafac on Monday July 24, @03:43PM EDT (#223) (User #1449 Info) Every other story on /. has been about how x technology spells the end for the dominant publishing/music/OS business, because that has been THE whole idea of the computer revolution. It's been sitting in the back of everyone's mind ever since we figured out: hey, you can digitize information, and if everyone had a computer, information ultimately cannot be protected, and will be literally free to make unlimited copies. That's what went through my mind the day I read the article in Popular Science back in 197x, about Compact Disks. I thought to myself, well, if that information is digital, if these personal computers ever "take off", these guys are going to be in big trouble. I didn't see the MP3 coming until it was here, but I knew that the genie had finally arrived. And he's PISSED! if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Please... (Score:5, Informative) by amitb on Monday July 24, @02:27PM EDT (#18) (User #103243 Info) ... remove the direct link to the PDF from /. . People should read the agreement before downloading the novel. I've downloaded it and paid for it, because I like his work and think it's worth every penny. Also, he's counting EVERY DOWNLOAD. That means if you download it twice, he wants $2 for it! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2, Insightful) by MrEfficient on Monday July 24, @03:08PM EDT (#134) (User #82395 Info) That's really great Jamie. Provide a direct link to the download for the ultimate self-fullfilling prophecy. If it ever had a chance to work before, this will surely kill it. I've never read a Stephen King book but I paid the dollar for part 1 and downloaded it primarily because I believed in the idea. Please take that link down quickly. ---------- AbiWord: The BEST opensource word processor [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Please... (Score:1) by ttyRazor (slapinski@bigfoot.nospamforyou.com) on Monday July 24, @03:19PM EDT (#158) (User #20815 Info) heh, the Slashdot effect alone could murder this thing. -- It's all fun and games until someone loses a mind [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Another reason for publishers (Score:2, Insightful) by twoAM on Monday July 24, @03:33PM EDT (#190) (User #214620 Info) As obvious from the person above who just complained "if you download it twice, HE wants $2 for it", the publisher becomes the person to blame when things get messed up, not the author... The publisher is a buffer zone... [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2) by brunes69 (nighthawk@n2.com) on Monday July 24, @03:36PM EDT (#199) (User #86786 Info) http://www.geekboxmicro.com I agree! I'm on a fast connection, and I often open links in article son /. before reading the post... I ended up having the PDF downloaded (and thus wasting the dollar) before I realized that I was supposed to pay for it! I think this si a good scheme, I didn't want to help it fail! ---There is no spoon....--- [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2, Insightful) by jafac on Monday July 24, @03:46PM EDT (#232) (User #1449 Info) What he doesn't account for, is peer-peer sharing, like if someone put his novel up on Gnutella (hint!) then lots of people could get at it, not be counted as the % who don't pay. Then there could be some nasty hacker out there who will just set up a perl-script to download the thing a million times, to throw off the stats. All it would take is one jerk-wad to blow it for all the honest folks out there. if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is! [ Reply to This | Parent ] And Blow It They Should (Score:2, Troll) by **SkipKent** (skipkent@usa.net) on Monday July 24, @05:11PM EDT (#339) (User #4128 Info) http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/11/the_projectiles.html I hope the experiment is a dreadful failure. One dollar for 20 pages is not a fair bargain by any stretch of the imagination. If the man wants to play for tips, fine, but let each person decide how much (if anything at all) the story is worth to them. True street performers have no guarantee whatsoever that they will cash in regardless of whether or not they succeed in entertaining passers-by. Why should SKing have such a guarantee? He can refuse to put out the final chapters if he so desires, so he has created an 'experiment' in which HE can't lose. Regardless of what happens he get's lot's of press and his happy little footnote in Internet history. I'm supposed to be impressed? I'm supposed to cheer the man on? F*CK THAT! Repeat, F*CK THAT! The only one being served here is Stephen King. Forgive me if I don't weep for joy as he 'sticks it to the Man' by sticking it to his readers, most of whom are undoubtedly loyal enough to fuel his fantasy with their cash. Put the WHOLE thing out there with "Please Feel Free To Send Tips To:" info and LIVE or DIE by your little experiment. friggin' in the riggin'.mp3 (fsck all else to do) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Such venom... (Score:2, Insightful) by andy@petdance.com (andy@petdance.com) on Monday July 24, @06:05PM EDT (#355) (User #114827 Info) http://petdance.com He can refuse to put out the final chapters if he so desires, so he has created an 'experiment' in which HE can't lose. Of course he can lose. He knows going into it that he's going to lose on it. Stephen King could shit on a piece of paper and it would sell a zillion copies. He must know full well that he won't get nearly as much revenue doing this on the net than if he just cranked it out and had his publisher print it. Regardless of what happens he get's lot's of press and his happy little footnote in Internet history. You think Stephen King is concerned about getting press? True street performers have no guarantee whatsoever that they will cash in regardless of whether or not they succeed in entertaining passers-by. Why should SKing have such a guarantee? Why shouldn't he? Who says that the Street Performer Paradigm is the One True Way? I applaud King for being in a position to try this out, and being willing to do so. He can afford to lose a few grand (hundred grand?) by doing this, and does so. How else would you have any industry try out new approaches? Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:And Blow It They Should (Score:1) by Alan on Monday July 24, @06:13PM EDT (#359) (User #347 Info) http://arcterex.net Well, following the model of a street performer, they can pack up and leave any time, even if it's right in the middle of your favorite [song|act|juggling|magic trick]. They have no obligation to go on and it's up to the people who are the fans to throw $ in their hat (or into the amazon website). I personally don't think he's really trying to make money here but is conducting an experiment to see if you can cut out the middleman and communicate directly with the fans. I plan to download it and I plan to pay my $1, if for nothing more than to prove to myself that when I say that I want to get rid of the evil middlemen and that I'll directly support the artists that I'm a fan of, I will. my $0.02CND. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:3, Insightful) by WNight (wnight@rocketmail.com) on Monday July 24, @04:03PM EDT (#264) (User #23683 Info) It'll die anyways, some script kiddy will download ten thousand and kill it. It was fairly obvious even without the article that it won't work if it's based on percentages. Two things *need* to be changed... First, there needs to be a set ammount of money per installment, not a percentage. Second, there needs to be a limit of the number of installments. I'm not a SK fan, but I might download a free book to give it a read, *if* it's free and won't hurt anything. Then, if I like it, I'll pay for it. Not before. But I won't do that now because it hurts the whole process if I don't like it and choose not to pay. I'd also feel cheated if I payed for the first few parts, then found out that instead of ending it in a reasonable ammount of words, SK decided to stretch it out to 500,000 words, in $1/8000 word installments. At some point, if he decides to keep going, the installments should be free. Otherwise he's suckering people in with the idea of paying less for a book then milking them... I'd say that the installments should stop at four, or be free from then on. I'd only pay $4, *tops*, for an e-book. It does seem that he's set it up to fail. He's getting a large whack of cash from fans, and a large percentage of that will go straight to him, and it's gonna go down the tubes, 'forcing' him to stop, and because there's no escrow involved, he has to keep the money... poor boy, cheated by the evil internet. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2, Informative) by jheinen (jheinen@summerwalk.delete_this.com) on Monday July 24, @07:55PM EDT (#390) (User #82399 Info) Bzzzzt! According to MSNBC, ~78% of the 41,000 downloads so far have paid. -Vercingetorix "Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2) by John Jorsett on Monday July 24, @08:57PM EDT (#397) (User #171560 Info) some script kiddy will download ten thousand and kill it. At least that would be detectable, since all the requests would come from the same IP. If King's people are on the ball, they'll filter the logs and the script kiddie will only count as one download. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2, Interesting) by jheinen (jheinen@summerwalk.delete_this.com) on Monday July 24, @10:07PM EDT (#407) (User #82399 Info) According to MSNBC, the novel is already finished. He wrote it in the 80's but never published it due to similarities it bears to "Little Shop of Horrors." It isn't a question of him "finishing" the book, but of him releasing the rest. I have a hard time believing he would take what will amount to at least several tens-of-thousands of dollars (it's already made >$32,000 today alone) without ultimately releasing the whole thing. That would be a sure way to piss off your paying fans. So far, 78% of the people who've downloaded have paid for it. It looks as thought the naysayers in this case are wrong. -Vercingetorix "Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2) by WNight (wnight@rocketmail.com) on Tuesday July 25, @10:40AM EDT (#440) (User #23683 Info) I have no idea that King's fans will avoid screwing it up, they want it to succeed. But it'd pretty easy to set up something to download the book from a bunch of different IPs. And I'm sure someone will, eventually, just to fuck stuff up. The fact that 78% of serious fans obeyed King isn't suprising. I'm not a fan and I didn't download, because I wanted to give it the best chance, but there are people out there who don't just not care, but actively care, about ruining everyone else's fun. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Please... (Score:2) by jovlinger (NOjohanCAPS@ccs.neu.edu) on Monday July 24, @08:09PM EDT (#391) (User #55075 Info) http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=jovlinger Hrm, The error lies rather with the person who decided to offer the content as a static link, rather than hidden behind a form forcing you to read and accept the licence. I had rather assumed that amazon would have taken care of this; pay the dollar, get taken to a dynamic url to grab the pdf. Of course, that would have completely ruined the hair(hare?) brained scheme of measuring honesty to begin with... As it is, of course people are going to send the link to their friends, spiders that don't understand/listen to robots.txt will crawl it... complete and utter stupidity. Set up to fail, as Jamie said. I quite liked the write up, btw. [ Reply to This | Parent ] What about downoad managers? (Score:1) by Snaller on Monday July 24, @08:48PM EDT (#395) (User #147050 Info) Something like Download Accelerator, it opens four streams and fetches different parts of the file: lets say a file of 40000 bytes Stream 1, takes from 1 to 10000 Stream 2, takes from 10001 to 20000 Stream 3, takes from 20001 to 30000 Stream 4, takes from 30001 to 40000 At the same time... this is much faster, but would his site consider that 1 download, or 4? -- Hmmm...how do you export a quicktime movie when quicktime says it can't be exported? [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Isn't this the same idea behind third parties? (Score:3, Insightful) by Mark F. Komarinski (markkATcgipcDOTcom) on Monday July 24, @02:27PM EDT (#19) (User #97174 Info) http://www.cgipc.com/ No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.) This is the same logic that has kept the democratic and republican parties "in power" for the past 200+ years: the idea that your dollar (vote) doesn't matter. On the smallest level (you) that's right. Your dollar (vote) won't change anything. From a macro view, 1000 people saying that they'll pay (vote) does make a difference. You (the individual) are now part of the 1000 people that made a difference. $1/book isn't bad. It's better than buying used books. Then again, I prefer King's short stories over the long-drawn-out novels so I won't download or pay for it. -- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:third parties...instant runoff voting (Score:2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, @03:02PM EDT (#119) Actually it's $1 per chapter. Maybe a bit overpriced, given the lack of physical media, shipping, etc. However, I'm doing it anyway just because I think it's mighty cool of him to say "go ahead and give copies to your friends, just don't sell it." As for third parties, it's really another dynamic--the fact that voting your third-party favorite ends up helping the guy you hate the most. This can be fixed with instant runoff voting: You pick your first choice, second, third, etc. Count up all the first-choice votes. If no one gets over 50%, eliminate the candidate with the least, take all the people who voted for him as first-choice, and count their second-choice votes. Continue until one candidate has over 50%. This way if, say, you like Keyes and hate Gore, you can vote for Keyes first, Bush second, and Gore last. You don't abandon your first choice just because the media says he can't win, but if he doesn't win it's just like you voted for Bush. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Better than charity! (Score:1) by devilsadvoc on Monday July 24, @03:30PM EDT (#184) (User #133293 Info) I, for one, will be downloading it AND paying the $1 . . . and I don't even like Steven King. but I do support digitally released content. If someone asked me to donate $1 to charity to promote online music/books/movies I'd do it - at least this way you get something besides the smug satisfaction of being a "good human being." I see calls to arms daily about calling your Rep/Senator to oppose/support Bill #1234. . . god forbid we use the Slashdot effect in the market and not politics! Tell your friends, or pay for multiple downloads yourself! There's WAY more at stake than the third installment. . . paying $1 might prevent the MPAA/RIAA from saying "See, most people prefer to steal even when the price is modest." Don't gripe about the $1 while sitting at your $500+ PC. . . and don't bitch about your $1 not making a difference. If you'd like to see more of this, then do the right thing and support it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Better than charity! (Score:2) by Mark F. Komarinski (markkATcgipcDOTcom) on Monday July 24, @03:49PM EDT (#238) (User #97174 Info) http://www.cgipc.com/ Don't gripe about the $1 while sitting at your $500+ PC. . . and don't bitch about your $1 not making a difference. If you'd like to see more of this, then do the right thing and support it. I believe you misunderstand. I'd download and pay the $1, but I don't want to read it. Giving a false impression of support is probably worse than downloading and not paying. There are many books and short stories I'd pay $1 for. King just isn't one of them. I downloaded the free PDF he gave away a few months ago and didn't like it. However, I did download, enjoy, and pay for a They Might Be Giants CD from emusic.com at more than $1. I'll continue to support artists I like in the way I see fit and pass over artists that I don't prefer to benefit. Isn't that really what the street performer protocol is all about? I purchased previous performances (the older books), decided I didn't like them, and am now passing by on the latest performance without "watching" the entertainment or paying. -- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Better than charity! (Score:1) by JackVance (JackVanceWouldEatNoSpam@mailcity.com) on Monday July 24, @04:36PM EDT (#319) (User #104529 Info) If you really want to help, pay the $1 without downloading the installment. ~ I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Failure For Sure with /. Effect (Score:4, Insightful) by pbur on Monday July 24, @02:27PM EDT (#20) (User #88030 Info) Hmm, putting a link to the download on /. will not help the $$ to downloads ratio King is looking for. I am a big King fan and I would like to see this novel finished. Please /., be kind to the King readers and remove the direct link and put up a link to the King Website. [ Reply to This | Parent ] WTF, slashdot? (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, @03:51PM EDT (#242) I totally agree with this. WTF, slashdot? Why completely screw with people like this? This is the most irresponsible thing I have EVER seen ANY online news source do. Worse than being pro-microsoft because microsoft pays you. To add, EVERYONE WHO CLICKS ON THAT LINK NEEDS TO PAY THEIR $1. To further add, WTF, SLASHDOT? If you want to make a mockery of this entire site, you've done a SMASHING job. You ask people to respect the GNU copyright and then TRAMPLE over steven king's. I simply do not understand a single thing in the world after this moment. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:WTF, slashdot? (Score:1) by ODiV ((my nick)@subdimension.com) on Monday July 24, @06:38PM EDT (#370) (User #51631 Info) http://www.crosswinds.net/~odiv It explains in the opening paragraph that if you download the pdf you are expected to pay for it. I don't see how this is any different from SK's site. - I am ODiV, hear me type [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:WTF, slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful) by substrate (substrate@engineer.com) on Monday July 24, @10:00PM EDT (#406) (User #2628 Info) slashdot is part of a corporation now, they should pay for damages, say 75% of the clickthroughs from slashdot. That'd nullify the thoughtlessness of puting the direct link down. Substrate has left the building. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Yet Another Option (Score:2) by jyuter (jyuter@yucs.org) on Monday July 24, @02:28PM EDT (#22) (User #48936 Info) http://www.yucs.org/~jyuter/ The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right. Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but he could still publish an actual "book." I for one could care less about the net as a distribution method for books. I like reading from actual pages and not spending even more time staring at a computer screen. Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another - Hobbes [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Yet Another Option (Score:1) by Pablonius on Monday July 24, @03:47PM EDT (#234) (User #3962 Info) http:/www.btgi.com/ Fine, print the pdf... Personally, I bought the first installment, because I like the concept of moving the middleman to the side (make the middleman more of an advertiser than a publisher...) and dealing pretty much directly to the author. People, this is where the rubber meets the road! Whatever your position is on King is irrelevant. If you want micropayments, if you don't want the record companies and the publishing houses saying "see they are cheap, want-something-for-nothing theives" then grab the pdf and pay, otherwise we're just giving them ammunition. We have a real chance here to prove those neysayers wrong! Dont Screw This Up! Long journeys start with a first step. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Yet Another Option (Score:1) by jafac on Monday July 24, @03:51PM EDT (#241) (User #1449 Info) You know, that's probably what it is. He's probably already got a deal with a publisher to let him do this, the publisher's laughing because people are going to pay him for the first two parts, and then pay THEM for the dead-tree edition because they bought the first two parts, and couldn't get the third one, (because I am 100% certain that the conditions wont be met). if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Stephen King reviews Harry Potter (Score:1) by Mzilikazi (Sviluppo@nospam.ematic.com) on Monday July 24, @02:29PM EDT (#25) (User #115009 Info) http://alberti.ciaweb.net Not entirely related, but... http://www10.nyt imes.com/books/00/07/23/reviews/000723.23kinglt.html It's a pretty in-depth review of the Harry Potter books by Stephen King. He's generally impressed by them, although he has two main complaints: 1. The latest book is too long (700+ pages) 2. The first book is being adapted for the big screen Pause, digest, pause. An obvious case of the blood-stained crucible calling the witch's cauldron black. Now I realize that King is writing from the lofty peaks of successful writer Olympus, but c'mon now... Mar chir mheala tha briathra taitneach milis do n'anum, agus n'an slaointe do na cnamhan. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Salem's Bot (Score:5, Funny) by laborit (laborit@uts.cc.utexas.edu) on Monday July 24, @02:29PM EDT (#26) (User #90558 Info) http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~laborit/ Of course, the real nightmare comes when most of the readers are honest, but some Moral Majority-type group sets up a bot to download the novel over and over and over and over... And of course it eventually develops a malevolent, superhuman intelligence and kills them all one by one, but we still don't have the novel. An unlikely group of slashdot misfits convince the bot to look at the RIAA website, and it decides it would be deliciously evil to deprive King of his unwritten intellectual property by finishing the novel in his style... But it still goes around killing and eating people and stuff. The evil is finally quieted - but never destroyed - when it's convinced to settle down and become a node on Freenet. - Michael Cohn [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:2) by jyuter (jyuter@yucs.org) on Monday July 24, @02:56PM EDT (#108) (User #48936 Info) http://www.yucs.org/~jyuter/ I'd buy that for a dollar :-) Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another - Hobbes [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:1) by lennon on Monday July 24, @03:16PM EDT (#151) (User #200343 Info) "I'd buy that for a dollar " is a quotation from Robocop, but actually it is based on "I'd buy that for a quarter", taken from an amazing story "The Marching Morons" by C.M.Kornbluth , which I would definetly buy for a dollar :)) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:1) by babbage (st90300@jaguar1.usouthal.edu) on Monday July 24, @03:01PM EDT (#115) (User #61057 Info) http://chris.slab.org/ :) Heh -- actually I think that was going to end up being the plot of his next book... poof [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:1) by Fesh (fesh@ebicom/net) on Monday July 24, @03:11PM EDT (#140) (User #112953 Info) Yeah, I know it's pretty funny, but underneath that is a nasty grain of truth. A minority group could conceivably effectivly censor any work they didn't approve of through such tactics. The question is, how to keep it from messing up the system? I guess the obvious answer would be to discount massive amounts of downloads from the same place... But what if the would-be censors used a network of machines... DDOL (Distributed Denial Of Literature)? Eek. The prospects are pretty scary. --Fesh Neo: "There is no spoon." Spoon: "There is no Neo." My email has been /. encoded. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:2) by laborit (laborit@uts.cc.utexas.edu) on Monday July 24, @03:52PM EDT (#246) (User #90558 Info) http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~laborit/ DDoS is a problem because 1) it goes over systems that have to respond quickly and 2) it actually overloads the capacity of the network. If we assume that the goal of the DDoL group isn't to actually take down King's computer, we can ignore 2). In this case, 1) also isn't a problem. A 1-second delay in every packet going over a network would be a complete disaster, but taking an extra 10 seconds to get a copy of a novel won't be a problem for anyone who's already willing to pay the dollar. Given that, there are all sorts of solutions that are open. The system could require that you enter an e-mailed password, or it could display one graphically and ask you to retype it (I stole this from a recent posting about stopping slashdot trollbots). It could just block a domain for a brief time after each download; even in a DDoS each box sends a relatively large number of requests, and this would slow them all down (this would inconvenience some humans, but perhaps it could put them on queue and display the first few pages to whet their appetites). Or, to be realistic, the administrator could look at the logs, note that one domain increased its downloads a thousandfold for a couple of hours at 0200, and throw those out of the average. It's not like King is looking for an excuse not to write the book... - Michael Cohn [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:2) by WNight (wnight@rocketmail.com) on Monday July 24, @04:06PM EDT (#271) (User #23683 Info) You think not? He gets to keep the money from this even if he doesn't put out any more installments. And it's blame-free, because he just points a finger at the evil internet who tried to cheat him. Great way to get a few quick $s. Not saying he *is*, but he very well might be... [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Salem's Bot (Score:2) by WNight (wnight@rocketmail.com) on Monday July 24, @04:08PM EDT (#280) (User #23683 Info) Yup, it's trivially obvious so we can pretty well count on some jerk doing it. It'd only take one guy with a fast connect to do it. And it probably counts when it starts the download, just start the download and drop the link. This will fail the way it's written, it has to be set to a flat fee, and a counter so people can see how close they are to it. The escrow idea would help, but I'm sure he's famous enough that he can get people willing to lose a buck, at least in the beginning. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Post-copyright? (Score:2) by 11223 on Monday July 24, @02:30PM EDT (#28) (User #201561 Info) Geez. I think you mistake King's intentions too much. He's not concerned about any 'post-copyright' athenian vision you might have for the future. Plain and simple, he hopes to get more money out of this. I think that King would be very upset if you would copy his work at will. He's trying to make a buck in the digital world, and wouldn't hesitate to call the DMCA upon anybody who copies it. Be careful who you say your allies are. Moderators: To avoid losing karma, please use Underrated and Overrated. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Post-copyright? (Score:2, Informative) by rkent (rkent(at)acm.org) on Monday July 24, @02:53PM EDT (#95) (User #73434 Info) http://cc.kzoo.edu/~k96rk01/ Hmm. I don't know about this. For one thing, he's NOT using the eBook format (which has some encryption, apparently...?), and the webpage even says "download it and pass it around to your friends." That's kind of like the napster theory; if you're a small, unknown band, it's only better the more people here you, whether they all pay or not. Then again, steven king is not exactly a small unknown author. So why's he actually doing this? I don't think it's some big Athenian crusade either, but it can't have that much to do with money, if he's making it so deliberately easy to circumvent the payment system. So, we're faced with the possibility that he is indeed testing his audience for loyalty... it's all a big ego-stroke for King. Which I can kind of understand, actually. There's a comment below (marked "flamebait," currently) that accuses King of really pandering to the publishers. I'm sure he's heard this accusation before; maybe he wants people to prove they really like him. "Hey guys, this one's just for you! I'm not being self aggrandizing and making a million bucks, see?" Of course, if all goes well for him, he will ;) "We are the most ripped-off company around..." - Bill Gates, 1980 [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Post-copyright? (Score:1) by sensate_mass (sensate_mass@buggeroff.hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @04:02PM EDT (#263) (User #171138 Info) Plain and simple, he hopes to get more money out of this. Absolutely right. I worked for several years at King's publisher, and we let him go because we were losing money on his books. They'd sell 1.3 to 1.5 million copies, but, after we'd paid him and all the contractually-obligated promotional costs, there'd be nothing left. Remember The Green Mile? We took a bath on it, bigtime. His next publisher came up with a different method of getting him to sign, moving more of the payments onto the royalty end of things. From the buzz I hear, they're not making any money, either. King is definitely interested in money, not only for its own sake, but also to see to it that he's among the most highly paid. It's an ego thing. Now that publishers are balking at blindly signing him up in hopes of making a few measly dollars from backlist sales 10 years down the road, he's pursuing alternate means of distributing his product. As seems obvious to everyone here, it won't work. --- Submission is feudal. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Post-copyright? (Score:2) by ronfar on Monday July 24, @04:42PM EDT (#324) (User #52216 Info) http://gamesandpolitics.tripod.com He's not concerned about any 'post-copyright' athenian vision you might have for the future. Ah, but why not? If this works, it won't affect his ability to make money. I mean he'll still get royalties from every video of Children of the Corn (ok, he'll probably make more from The Shawshank Redemption or Carrie) sold. I don't think he's in any danger of going broke. He's not trying to destroy copyright on traditional distribution methods... just trying to find a new way to make money publishing in a digital format. In fact, why is he publishing digitally at all? It can only be that he likes to experiment... because it's like saying, "here, pirate my book." What do rich people do when they're bored? I assume one thing is look at various causes they are interested in. He might be interested in this, if it works, he'll probably get credit in the history books, somehow. I think he has an idealistic streak, because of The Dead Zone. Of course, it might just be a revenge thing because he's a Mac fan and his last book was legally illegible on a Mac. I think revenge might be a good motivator for him too, see Creepshow. legally illegible: The latest fun creation of the DMCA. A Response the the MPAA FAQ [ Reply to This | Parent ] Interesting. (Score:2) by Matt2000 (matt@KILLTHIS.hotnutz.com) on Monday July 24, @02:30PM EDT (#29) (User #29624 Info) http://www.hotnutz.com An excellent analysis of the probability of success of this experiment. These questions are of interest to us all, and I guess they must be because at least 1/3 of the stories on here are related to these issues. Authors seem to have it both the best and the worst on the interenet currently. The best because it's easy to distribute their content economically and the baseline machine / internet connection can handle their medium easily. The worst because they're the poor cousin on the bandwidth requirements scale so their stuff is also easiest to rip off. I hope something's worked out so we can all benefit. Hotnutz.com - Funny Intergalactics - Realtime Strategy [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. You're leaving out one thing... (Score:5, Interesting) by jheinen (jheinen@summerwalk.delete_this.com) on Monday July 24, @02:30PM EDT (#30) (User #82399 Info) You forget to deal with the fact that people often do not act rationally. If the first two installments are good enough that people *really* want to read the conclusion, the money will pour in. I think this strategy is brilliant. It's sort of a "cliff-hanger" marketing scheme. You can bet that the second installment will end with an extremely tantalizing cliff-hanger. To look at it from another perspective, how many people do you think would send in $1 if King announced that the next novel in the Dark Tower series would be published next week if only people would send in $1 to indicate reader interest? If enough people didn't respond the book wouldn't be published. A whole lot of people would be sending in a buck. The unfortunate part of this is that it only works for wildly popular authors like King. Joe Q. Author could probably not rely on such a strategy to make a livable income. -Vercingetorix "Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine [ Reply to This | Parent ] Philip Greespun and photo.net (Score:1) by ChiaBen (spam.bcarlson@idiotusers.com) on Monday July 24, @03:20PM EDT (#159) (User #160517 Info) http://www.idiotusers.com Let's ask Philip if he's reaped any benefits from online publishing. He has written "Travel's with Samantha" and countless articles about photography online, on what could possibly be considered the foremost photo community online photo.net. He is very intelligent, and has been interviewed here before... "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY [ Reply to This | Parent ] It's been done before (Score:2) by cvd6262 on Monday July 24, @03:52PM EDT (#248) (User #180823 Info) I think this strategy is brilliant. It's sort of a "cliff-hanger" marketing scheme. You can bet that the second installment will end with an extremely tantalizing cliff-hanger. It wasn't until the advent of the pocket book that people started to expect great novels to be published all at once. Have you ever seen the unabridged version of Les Misérables? It's around 1,500 pages (no relation to Battlefield Earth). You can sometimes find it in 3 volumes (usually in French), but the original was 9 books. Many of the classic novels in history were published in this cliff-hanger marketing scheme (as you put it). Today, though, we think of it as more of a soap opera scheme, where writers create a story to keep people buying rather than write a cohesive plot in one book. Kinda' like Micro$oft shipping software with bugs and then fixing them in the next release. I really oughta' come up with a .sig, huh? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:You're leaving out one thing... (Score:1) by TerryG on Monday July 24, @04:02PM EDT (#262) (User #84835 Info) http://terrylorber.dhs.org Joe Q. Authur would probably not be able to earn a living, but can Joe Q. Authur earn a living now? Lots of 'zine writers charge only to re-coup printing costs, and only hope to earn a few extra dollars for their efforts. While King's model might not work for big name authors, it will probably (and might already) be viable for unknown writers to score some dollars to pay for an internet account. People who are into the 'zine scene tend to be considerate on compensating an author (most 'zines are a buck or two). The publishing industry does provide other services than killing trees...editing & publicity namely, albeit the publishing portion is the most expensive and hardest to come by. I don't think the publishing industry is going to go away, it's services might morph a bit, though. TGL is this a .sig? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:You're leaving out one thing... (Score:1) by Alpha_Geek on Monday July 24, @04:46PM EDT (#328) (User #154209 Info) how many people do you think would send in $1 if King announced that the next novel in the Dark Tower series would be published next week if only people would send in $1 to indicate reader interest? I would send in (at least) 100 $1 bills separately. The dark tower series is brilliant. I rank it up there with the Foundation Series (Isaac Asimov) and the Gap Series (Stephen R. Donaldson) which are my two favorite series. - "There are few problems that can't be solved with high explosives." [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:You're leaving out one thing... (Score:1) by ethereal on Monday July 24, @05:32PM EDT (#345) (User #13958 Info) http://slashdot.org/users.pl If I may say so, you have excellent taste. I'd chip in at least $50. I'm on my 10th or 12th time through the existing 4 novels, and every new novel which isn't the sequel to Wizard and Glass just makes it worse. Especially since it's starting to sound like this series will bring in elements from many of his other books. Pretty amazing, considering the spartan beginning of The Gunslinger. New potentially illegal .sig: You can find out more about methamphetamine by searching for "methamphetamine". [ Reply to This | Parent ] that's the wrong approach (Score:1) by Segfault 11 on Monday July 24, @02:31PM EDT (#31) (User #201269 Info) Release Part 1, an incomplete and unusable product for a reasonable price. Release Part 2 a year later, which gets much closer to being an actual solution, charge a little bit more. Release the final Part 3 four years later. Give the reader a solution to a problem they had not been thinking about for years. Make it contrived enough to be all things to all people, include parts 1 & 2, then charge 10 times as much as Part 1. You might know someone named Bill, who happens to do that, but there's another guy named George that does the same thing... To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison [ Reply to This | Parent ] Yeah sure...Where is my creditcard ;-) (Score:1) by jawtheshark (jawtheshark@sdniwssorc.ten) on Monday July 24, @02:31PM EDT (#32) (User #198669 Info) http://www2.vo.lu/homepages/willekens/jorg/ Well, IMHO a nice initiative, though I won't flip out my creditcard for 1$. Besides why pay for a book if you can read tons of books that are already in public domain now. Just go an look at Project Gutenberg. I actually paid for the complete works of Shakespear and now I know I could have gotting it for free. But then nothing compares to reading the dead-tree version :-)))) -- I only exist in my imagination. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Yeah sure...Where is my creditcard ;-) (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:37PM EDT (#44) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net You won't flip your creditcard for $1? That doesn't really make sense.. maybe you mean you won't flip your credit card to buy the book because you're not that interested in it? I mean if you saw a bar of gold on sale for $1, you'd flip it then, right? I don't get it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Oops, you're right (Score:1) by jawtheshark (jawtheshark@sdniwssorc.ten) on Monday July 24, @02:40PM EDT (#57) (User #198669 Info) http://www2.vo.lu/homepages/willekens/jorg/ Sorry, yes...Thanx for pointing out my lack of accuracy. I should have been more clear. I won't flip my credit card for buying a book I won't enjoy reading (No, I don't like the horror genre) But then my sister loves Stephen Kings and well 1$ wound't be a bad investemnt to make her read more. *grin* Still considering ;-) Oh, and for the goldbar? Was that on ebay? ;-) -- I only exist in my imagination. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Oops, you're right (Score:1) by Municipa (saganagush@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @03:05PM EDT (#130) (User #99320 Info) http://www.dpds.net That cleared it up, I thought I might be missing the point to your post. Oh yeah, next time I see a gold bar on ebay for $1, I'll email ya right away! [ Reply to This | Parent ] He's being quite generous (Score:1) by haystor (spiff@waymark.net) on Monday July 24, @02:34PM EDT (#36) (User #102186 Info) Since he is only requiring that he money from 75% of downloads, he is being quite generous. Consider for a second that the book is redistributable, and may make it to many people based solely on one download. It would even be possible to have a total payment of greater than 100%. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Maybe you all can just theorize about it (Score:1, Redundant) by Benjamin Shniper (bshniper@NOSPAMyahoo.com) on Monday July 24, @02:34PM EDT (#37) (User #24107 Info) Maybe it's enough for some to theorize. I payed my dollar and read the darn thing. It was mildly suspensefull as promised. Think about it this way: Do you buy cds online? Books online? Stuff online in general? This is just another way to do payments for entertainment, and we should support him if the novel is good. -Ben Anonymity is a prison - Freedom comes through knowlege. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Maybe you all can just theorize about it (Score:2) by Benjamin Shniper (bshniper@NOSPAMyahoo.com) on Monday July 24, @02:56PM EDT (#107) (User #24107 Info) Some theorizing myself would include: 1. Boycotters of Amazon will hate the blatant 1-click shopping. 2. How many 20-page installments will this book have. I would guess he has the $10,000 already and could go on to installment #2 tomorrow. 3. If this experiment is succesfull it doesn't mean joe schmo writer would be successful this way, even if amazon agreed to give them a similar deal. 4. The "honor system" is avoidable, but I think he meant to show that it is only at the expense of risking people going elsewhere. As a publicity stunt, this will gauruntee page hits to his site which valued at a penny a hit will far exceed dollar revenues. (yes a penny is an arbitrary figure). 5. This is a good system for an online learning course. If people find a course useful they might pay to get the instructor to continue. It's a paradigm for many things. 6. Holding people in "escrow" by getting the money up front and returning it later is far far more annoying than the likable 1-click credit card payment that has been arranged. 7. Anyone who sets up an ftp site with this novella is a bad person (tm) and also breaking the law. -Ben Anonymity is a prison - Freedom comes through knowlege. [ Reply to This | Parent ] I'm a bit disappointed (Score:2, Interesting) by pjl5602 (pjl@patsoffice.com) on Monday July 24, @02:35PM EDT (#40) (User #150416 Info) http://patsoffice.com I bought the first installment this morning, and it's 20 pages long (including the title page.) If I were buying a full-length Stephen King book (estimate it to be 400 pages) this would mean that I would be paying $20 which is a bit high to me. Perhaps Mr. King needs to make his micropayments a little more "micro" so that customers are being offered a better value. This brings up a question. How much of the cost of a new book is material and distribution and how much goes to the author? In this scheme, he has to pay for bandwidth, a web presence and credit card processing fees which are fairly low (I'd estimate to be less than 20% of the $1 cost of the book.) That means by my calculations that 80% of the dollar goes to Mr. King which is likely a much sweeter deal for him than any of his deals with a publisher. Does anybody have real numbers instead of these that I just pulled out of the air? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I'm a bit disappointed (Score:1) by Peyna (peyna@[spamischeese]parlorcity.com) on Monday July 24, @02:57PM EDT (#110) (User #14792 Info) http://www.parlorcity.com Short Stories in bookstores usually still run for at least 5 or 6 USD, so really, $3 for a 60 page book, is a pretty good deal. The length of the book really doesn't have much to do with the price. "Just because I don't look like you or act like you, that doesn't make me any better or worse." [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I'm a bit disappointed (Score:2) by LLatson (latsonl@bme.ri.ccf.NOSPAMM.org) on Monday July 24, @03:01PM EDT (#116) (User #24205 Info) http://www.cwru.edu Perhaps Mr. King needs to make his micropayments a little more "micro" so that customers are being offered a better value. This is assuming you are measuring the 'value' of a book by the number of pages it has. This seems pretty silly and arbitrary to me. LL "If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I'm a bit disappointed (Score:1) by pjl5602 (pjl@patsoffice.com) on Monday July 24, @03:09PM EDT (#136) (User #150416 Info) http://patsoffice.com This is assuming you are measuring the 'value' of a book by the number of pages it has. This seems pretty silly and arbitrary to me. I disagree. You really can't tell much of a story in 20 pages (at least Stephen King can't. :-) Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary". [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I'm a bit disappointed (Score:1) by LLatson (latsonl@bme.ri.ccf.NOSPAMM.org) on Monday July 24, @03:49PM EDT (#240) (User #24205 Info) http://www.cwru.edu Also, writers are typically paid for the number of words that they write, so I don't see how you can consider it "silly and arbitrary". What I was trying to say was that I don't think that the length of a book (and we'll limit ourselves to fiction) has any kind of correlation to the quality of the book. I've read some great short stories and novellas and novels, and I've read some really crappy 1000 page monsters. LL "If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell [ Reply to This | Parent ] Pay what its worth (Score:1) by jhittner (jon@nospam.com) on Monday July 24, @02:35PM EDT (#41) (User #66567 Info) King has some realy good books (the stand) and also some realy bad ones (insomnia). I think that he should set up a pay what you think its worth program. Where you have a subjected domaintion to the author. I would definitly give some extra money to see another dark tower book. All in all, I think this is a great way for king to get his revenge with book publishers. Jon [ Reply to This | Parent ] Great financial stunt (Score:1) by VirtualUK on Monday July 24, @02:36PM EDT (#42) (User #121855 Info) http://help-me.to What a great idea! You write two chapters which you publish in monthly installments, meaning that it is likely to be at least three months before the third chapter is published. You get say half a million people to "donate" $1, which you keep in the bank account for a cpl of months. At the end of the holding period you return the copius amounts of $1's via some electronic means (eg. a gift token for his publishers) because returning a $1 any other way would not be worth it, and he wouldn't want to be called a scam artist. What your left with is a couple of months interest of $1/2M plus your publishers are laughing because they've just swept up the $1/2M in the first place in terms of gift certificate payments most of which nobody is ever going to redeem. Very ingenius, or am I just paranoid? V:) [ Reply to This | Parent ] I encourage everyone to pay. (Score:1) by rotor on Monday July 24, @02:37PM EDT (#45) (User #82928 Info) If he were in this for the money, as the author seems to think, then he wouldn't be limiting the number of downloads to 50,000 and charging $1. $50,000 minus the costs of running the website don't amount to a drop in a bucket when you're got the net worth of a man like Stephen King. Mr King has said that he's doing this as a test of honesty on the internet to see if this type of distribution works. If it does, you can expect to see others start to use it. Unfortunately, it will still require authors to have some following beforehand for the most part (how many bands have gotten popular off mp3.com?) [ Reply to This | Parent ] The web has changed the publishing landscape. (Score:2) by www.sorehands.com on Monday July 24, @02:37PM EDT (#47) (User #142825 Info) http://www.sorehands.com The internet has turned the lonely pamphleteer into a publisher with a huge potential audience. This has both good and bad. The good -- more information can get out. The bad -- more information can get out. Since there is a very low barrier to entry, almost anyone can be a publisher. So, any writer the good, bad, or ugly can "publish" what they want. There are no copy editors, fact checkers, etc. This has opened up a myriad of legal issues, libel or just plain bitching. It also scares the likes of RIAA and MPAA where they are losing their control over publishing. Now the small guy for little money, can get their music or short movies out on the net. RSI injured geek wins against Mattel, Mattel still retaliates! [ Reply to This | Parent ] The exciting part of this... (Score:2) by Amphigory (ROT13:cngevpx@rkgerzrubcr.bet) on Monday July 24, @02:38PM EDT (#49) (User #2375 Info) http://www.answers.org The exciting part of this is that there is no limit on redistribution, even after King has made the final installment. Yes, Jamie, it probably won't work. But can you imagine if it did? Finally, you could create a virtual library that wouldn't be castrated by copyright laws. -- "The cynical spirit...insists on security before it will affirm and, lacking that, retreats into the false security of denial and humbugging" D. Taylor [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. One-shot? (Score:5, Insightful) by FascDot Killed My Pr on Monday July 24, @02:38PM EDT (#51) (User #24021 Info) "The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect." You mention Hofstadter's column, but you neglect to mention his conclusion that the REAL rational strategy is to cooperate, even in a one-shot. Of course, his experiment with rational people didn't pan out as he wanted... In any case, there are two flaws in your argument: 1) This isn't a one-shot. There are other writers in the world and probably other novels from this writer. Thus we could play the game many more times. For this to work, we'd need some way of identifying the "players" however. In this case, that would also include "did they give copies to other defectors?" 2) (most importantly) You've got the payoff matrix wrong. In addition to the $1 vs $0 in the "Novel not Released" column, you need to add "Didn't get to read the end of the book". Assign tags like so: A: I defect AND novel released B: I cooperate AND novel released C: I defect AND novel not released D: I cooperate AND novel not released A game only counts as the Prisoner's Dilemna if A > B > C > D. As it stands, B (coop and get novel) is greater than C (defect and lose novel). But to some people the risk of a dollar is negligble compared with the cost of missing the end of a King novel. To determine the real chances you'd have to do a poll to find people who cared enough about King that they would download a partial novel. Then ask them for numbers that would satisfy $1 x (risk of losing dollar) - (value of reading FULL novel) x (risk of NOT reading FULL novel) = 0 That said, I think King's choice of a percentage rather than a straight dollar amount will doom this to failure AND I think your idea of escrow is a good one. -- Unify your UNIX and Windows mail systems [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:One-shot? (Score:1) by The Other Dan on Monday July 24, @04:03PM EDT (#266) (User #30260 Info) Further, one of the key conditions for the evolution of cooperation (as defined by Axelrod) is that not only do we play repeated games with a group, but we know who we are playing against. In short, how you act towards someone should depend on how they last acted towards you (Tit-for-tat). But in this case, we don't know how other indviduals acted. We just know the sum of how many cooperated and how many did not. Beyond that, I really know nothing about how game theory scales up beyond two player games (which is what we are talking about here), so I don't know if any of this discussion applies! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:One-shot? (Score:1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, @04:21PM EDT (#297) He also ignores the multiple schelling points which is not present in the traditional prisoner's dilemma. * Each player does at least as well and sometimes better by cooperating. There are also multiple moves and the payoff is many more installments than 3 (until the book finishes). What he doesn't realize (and this is short sighted stupidity) is that n cooperators will always beat n freeloaders in this example. King's model even allows for 25% freeloaders. Now, I think King writes trash, so I'm wondering just how many people out there are actually willing to buy his stuff. The potential buyers may be skewed by thousands of non fans just hearing about it, downloading the pdf and then deleting it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:One-shot? (Score:1) by FascDot Killed My Pr on Monday July 24, @06:20PM EDT (#360) (User #24021 Info) "What he doesn't realize (and this is short sighted stupidity) is that n cooperators will always beat n freeloaders in this example. " I'm not sure who "he" refers to in this sentence, so I'll just respond to the last portion. Yes, N coops will beat N defectors. But the pool of defectors is not liable to "predation" by a lone cooperator while a pool of coops IS liable to predation by a single defector. Only if the coops can identify the defector (and, if the pool is large, communicate that identity to each other) can defectors be kept out. Neither of these conditions holds for the King example. -- Unify your UNIX and Windows mail systems [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:One-shot? (Score:2) by Chalst (cas-at-achilles.bu.edu) on Monday July 24, @04:33PM EDT (#314) (User #57653 Info) http://achilles.bu.edu/cas Another factor is the: well I payed my dollar, and King didn't release any more chapters. This can piss people off, who figure they have been screwed by the contract, even if the amount at stake is just a token. Depressing the utility of D (this worst case outcome) is a deterrent to people to take part, another reason why the `target percentage' is a bad idea. The real Street Performers Protocol has a refund system in it. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Escrow sounds painful. (Score:1) by ddt (ddt_nospamplease@transmeta.com) on Tuesday July 25, @02:50AM EDT (#424) (User #14627 Info) The escrow idea sounds pretty hard. Not only do you have this extra, painful obligation to keep clients' payments in escrow in a safe place (banks do fail), but you also have to keep ridiculous records on who paid and where they can be found. What happens if I pay for my book, then I move, then the payments don't hit the watermark, and ol' King is obligated to send my money back? Kind of a pain, aint it? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Won't this cost the readers more? (Score:1) by evanbd (evand@pobox.com) on Monday July 24, @02:39PM EDT (#52) (User #210358 Info) Here's my thinking. Suppose for the sake of argument that 1) I am honest and pay up. 2) Enough other people are that the novel gets written. OK, now, the novel comes out in what, ten installments? So I pay $10, which is MORE than I would pay for a paperback (at $8 or so these days. Unless King's sell for more? I don't read his stuff anyway.) So now lets look at things: If this succeeds, I pay $10 for the next Stephen King novel. If it fails, I pay $8 for the next (different) novel (it is two months late cuz he wasted time, but still.) So, what benefit do I get aside from being able to read this particular novel? As best I can tell, I pay extra for no gain... Thats my quasi-game theoretic analysis. I would, as a reader, prefer that King continue in current form. Of course, that assumes I don't think King should be given lots of money just because, or the fact that I prefer my books in bound form anyway. My answer: write a script to download it 100K times and make it fail! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Won't this cost the readers more? (Score:1) by yack0 (yacko at mint dot net) on Monday July 24, @03:56PM EDT (#254) (User #2832 Info) http://www.mint.net/~yacko/penguin.html No, there are not (only) three installments. The Faq: --quote-- How many installments will there be? That depends on your honesty. If more than 75% of you pay, it rolls. Any less, it folds. When does the next installment come online? The second installment will go up August 21st. If people show that they can be trusted to pay, then the third installment will go up in September. We will keep you posted about later installments. -- end faq quoting-- There will be enough installments to finish the novel. That means enough to finish the story. They will post when they have more info about more installments. Darn those FAQs, always telling people correct information. -- Buy a Linux penguin damnit! http://www.mint.net/~yacko/penguin.html [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Must have hardcopy! (Score:1) by Kondoor on Monday July 24, @02:39PM EDT (#53) (User #135852 Info) I don't know about anyone else, but I still like hard copies. I like to highlight my training manuals and user manuals. I like the fact that I can earmark a page in my favorite novel and immediatly flip to that page. Reading for long periods of time on a computer monitor usually starts giving me a headache and i get sick of it really fast. I think this distribution method won't take off because of those facts. And for $1 a chapter thats prett steep, your average paperback is like $5.95 or so. If a book has 30 or 40 chapters thats more than you would pay for a hardcover. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Lotto (Score:2, Insightful) by azuretongue on Monday July 24, @02:40PM EDT (#59) (User #180140 Info) It is clear that people do not use the Prisoner's Dilemma as a model for making decisions. Just look at the lotto. here is the matrix: play : $-1 dont play $0 (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the number.) [ Reply to This | Parent ] Maybe You Are Wrong! (Score:1) by LaNMaN2000 on Monday July 24, @02:41PM EDT (#61) (User #173615 Info) Remember that King is only counting those who download from his web site. Assuming that his text files are transferred over Gnutella and not counted as the number of downloads, many more people will have the opportunity to send him $1 than those who download from his site. Consequently, 75% of the downloads from his site may be equal to about 15-25% of the total readership. Also, there is a novelty to this distribution scheme. I have never read King's work and really do not have an interest in horror, but I may just send him $1 because of his application of this interesting distribution mechanism. Plus, think of all the free press that he is getting, easily worth a few thousand dollars. Besides, King is also capitalizing on the Internet community's need to feel honest and moral now that their value system is coming into question. Many people may send him money to alleviate their own guilt instead of rewarding him for his work. There was a study on "tipping" published a few months ago that claimed our desire to top is not motivated by rewarding the person providing a service but rather making ourselves feel better and reinforcing our own sense of power and control over the transaction. Regardless of how it pans out, King should be rewarded for the effort. Besides, how many authors get paid lots of money before they even finish their books (not an advance that must be paid back, but actual compensation)? [ Reply to This | Parent ] The Stephen King Public License... (Score:5, Insightful) by xinit on Monday July 24, @02:42PM EDT (#64) (User #6477 Info) I rather like his version of a license.... Especially the bit where he's blatantly honest regarding the user's obligations; 2. Not to print extra copies and sell them to your friends. If you want to print copies and give them away, I can't stop you (in fact I can't stop you from doing anything, which is the beauty of this thing-think of it as web-moshing). But don't sell them. Two reasons: first, it's against the law, and second, it's nasty behavior. Respect my copyright. As a writer, it's all I've got. It's not the standard legalese agreement, and it gets right to the SPIRIT of the other licenses out there from the GPL and others. This is a Good Thing (tm), and I'm for the theory that is consumer driven, and not prisoner driven - ie, I want to see more books released like this - cheaply, efficiently, etc. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:The Stephen King Public License... (Score:3, Interesting) by AndrewD (AndrewSD@fidai.clara.net) on Monday July 24, @03:29PM EDT (#177) (User #202050 Info) http://www.fidai.clara.net Actually, it is in legalese. That is, it sets out one part of a scheme of obligations and considerations in clear terms. The fact that it's in colloquial legalese rather than the rather pompous version most of my learned colleagues use most of the time is neither here nor there. Most of what you usually ID as "legalese" is in fact the result of re-using the contract wording from last time you wrote one of these. Which of course you re-used from the time before that, and you could probably trace the actual piece of white-page drafting back to 1842, or similar... And yes, writing a contract is as much like writing a piece of code as it sounds. Most of it's bits of stuff you used before. -- AndrewD A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:The Stephen King Public License... (Score:2, Informative) by bgarcia (garsh@home.com) on Monday July 24, @04:54PM EDT (#331) (User #33222 Info) http://members.home.net/garsh 2. Not to print extra copies and sell them to your friends... ...it gets right to the SPIRIT of the other licenses out there from the GPL and others. This is not in the spirit of the GPL! The GPL allows and even encourages you to sell copies for whatever price you desire. Laurel Networks. Check us out! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:The Stephen King Public License... (Score:1) by bgarcia (garsh@home.com) on Tuesday July 25, @01:01PM EDT (#445) (User #33222 Info) http://members.home.net/garsh I said the spirit of the GPL - not the Stallmanesque propaganda. Sorry, but the GPL is a document, not some spiritual being. And if you go and read the document, you'll see that it is absolutely, positively NOT against selling the software for money. I know that RMS would disagree with me, and that's fine. He disagrees with a lot of rational arguements. Perhaps, but how you can invoke the "spirit" of the GPL, and then call your argument "rational", is beyond me. Laurel Networks. Check us out! [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Legalese has its uses (Score:2, Funny) by mrogers on Tuesday July 25, @06:13AM EDT (#432) (User #85392 Info) At least when you agree to the GPL you're not agreeing to "think of it as web-moshing". I'm not sure I could agree to that with a clear conscience. $ cat < /dev/mouse $ killall cat; more /dev/mouse [ Reply to This | Parent ] Again, this isn't anything new. (Score:2, Informative) by buss_error on Monday July 24, @02:42PM EDT (#65) (User #142273 Info) Baen Books has been publishing on the web for over a year now. This is just the first person that is gennerally known doing this. My reaction is half "So what?" and half "Yippee!". So what because it's nothing new, and Yippee because this could be the death knell of Big Publishing, a dinosaur that won't die. Anyone doing a bit of writing knows that Big Publishing, by and large, does not care about anything other than dollars. Most authors I've spoken to feel cheated by Big Publishing with respect to the amout paid for the work. Only the big names get the big bucks, and they still get big bucks even when the work is a flop. [ Reply to This | Parent ] I don't buy unfinished books. (Score:2, Insightful) by BoLean (TLowing.nospam@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @02:43PM EDT (#66) (User #41374 Info) http://www.nlinux.org I really have to wonder how any people are like me and won't even look at a incomplete book. I'm sure as hell not gonna pay $15 (assuming 15 chapters) for a damn downloaded book. King's just a money grubbing scammer leeching off the talent he used to have for writing interresting horror. People buy his books at this point because 1)He is in a niche genre - and there are very few new authors getting published.--Don't even think about bringing up the Bachman crap. I the writer wan't you he wouldn't have gotten published in the first place. 2)People are in the habit of buying his books. Hey Steve, howsa bout you dump a little of that payola back to the community by starting a book publishing house and publishing books by new writers. Didn't you ever write a book about some guys greed coming back to haunt him? "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I don't buy unfinished books. (Score:1) by MrEfficient on Monday July 24, @03:18PM EDT (#156) (User #82395 Info) I'm sure as hell not gonna pay $15 (assuming 15 chapters) for a damn downloaded book. Read the article moron. Its only 3 chapters. I doubt that three dollars is going to break anyone. ---------- AbiWord: The BEST opensource word processor [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Read the article (Score:1) by BoLean (TLowing.nospam@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @03:27PM EDT (#171) (User #41374 Info) http://www.nlinux.org You wrote:Read the article moron. Its only 3 chapters. I doubt that three dollars is going to break anyone. Why don't you read the article. King Rogered up to publishing the first three chapters, more only if enough people pay. You could wind up wasting $3 reading three chapters of a book that may never be complete. And my argument that it could tally to more than $15 for an average length book. At least if I buy the real thing in hardcover for the same price I have somthing tangible to resell. "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Read the article (Score:1) by MrEfficient on Monday July 24, @03:42PM EDT (#219) (User #82395 Info) Um..oops. Sorry. The info on King's website yesterday made it sound like there were only going to be three parts. Now, from what I read on the FAQ, it looks like their may be more. Although I seriously doubt he's going to get 75% pay-through, especially with slashdot linking directly to the download. ---------- AbiWord: The BEST opensource word processor [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Read the article (Score:1) by BoLean (TLowing.nospam@hotmail.com) on Monday July 24, @05:49PM EDT (#349) (User #41374 Info) http://www.nlinux.org Good point, I have to admit that I'd rather donate to a free project than pay for somthing essentially free. "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein [ Reply to This | Parent ] 2 replies beneath your current threshold. Author's worst nightmare. (Score:2) by A Big Gnu Thrush (elineberry@iname.com) on Monday July 24, @02:43PM EDT (#67) (User #12795 Info) http://sandbox.freeservers.com I speak from experience when I say that it's not easy to step out of the standard publishing industry. It's also not easy to step into. King can be successful with this method, but I don't think it's viable for your average author. I also don't think the SPP is viable. But for most writers and readers, the biggest problem for non-standard publishing is the lack of an editor. Take Katz for example. Not to pick on him, but if anyone remembers his early articles, they were ripe with typos and inaccuracies. My novel is published at www.xlibris.com, and if you look through the excerpts from other writers, you'll notice the same trend. Writers are notoriously bad at editing their own work. Most wouldn't even know where to begin. King can afford his own editor. Jim Munroe self-published his second novel. Check it out at www.nomediakings.com He is good enough to edit his own work, and the result is an excellent novel. Most readers will be profoundly disappointed by the quality of a raw novel. Read my novel: Much of Madness, More of Sin [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Author's worst nightmare. (Score:2) by A Big Gnu Thrush (elineberry@iname.com) on Monday July 24, @05:31PM EDT (#344) (User #12795 Info) http://sandbox.freeservers.com This is a good idea, but I think an easier solution would be for authors to take ownership of their work. Editing is a lot more than just finding typos. Read my novel: Much of Madness, More of Sin [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Wrong world (Score:4, Insightful) by sirhc on Monday July 24, @02:44PM EDT (#70) (User #213562 Info) post-copyright world Tell me when we get there because I don't ever see it happening. The world we live in is one where breaching copyright is becoming easier, and no doubt will continue to get easier, but it is still illegal. Just because you can do something, doesn't make it right. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Wrong world (Score:2, Insightful) by look (fran0382 -(a)- tc.umn.edu) on Monday July 24, @05:17PM EDT (#340) (User #36902 Info) And just because something is illegal, doesn't make it wrong. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Wrong world (Score:1) by jmkelsey on Monday July 24, @06:34PM EDT (#367) (User #214679 Info) The issue isn't whether it remains illegal to violate copyright, but whether there's a practical way to keep people from violating copyright. If there's not, then it will become very hard for anyone to make a living enforcing copyrights. This is a large part of what (for example) record companies have to do. It's possible to sell CDs for $15 only because they use the law to go after anyone making unauthorized copies of that CD and selling it for $5. This may mean that it will become very hard for anyone to make a living writing books or music, but I hope not. It almost certainly means that there will be a big reshuffling of how money is distributed between publishing/record companies, authors/musicians, shippers, local book/record stores, etc. --John Kelsey, k e l s e y (at) p l n e t (dot) n e t PGP: 5D91 6F57 2646 83F9 6D7F 9C87 886D 88AF [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Wrong world (Score:1) by Snaller on Monday July 24, @08:54PM EDT (#396) (User #147050 Info) Tell me when we get there because I don't ever see it happening. The world we live in is one where breaching copyright is becoming easier, and no doubt will continue to get easier, but it is still illegal. For now... i suspect one day it will get the way of dodo -- Hmmm...how do you export a quicktime movie when quicktime says it can't be exported? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Wrong world (Score:1) by Frodo (TheHobbit at usa dot net) on Tuesday July 25, @05:26AM EDT (#429) (User #1221 Info) If the law becomes unenforceable, it should cease being the law. Prohibiting people of doing what they regard as they basical right to do (en masse) is plain wrong - state should serve the people, not other way. -- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. [ Reply to This | Parent ] A month too long (Score:1) by fonebone (fonebone at home dot com) on Monday July 24, @02:44PM EDT (#72) (User #192290 Info) http://members.home.com/fonebone/ The thing is, with a chapter coming out only once a month, nobody's going to be continuously interested in the book. Well, Steven King is quite the author, so he *might* be able to pull it off, but not most authors. Go read a chapter of some book, and see how urgent it is to read the next chapter a month from now. This is the biggest flaw with this payment method, the time between installments. I suppose it depends on the medium. Novels, I don't think, fit too well. Music might. I'm a Beck fan, and if Beck were to release one song a month, I'd pay to get the next song to come out, for sure. And if the artist/author is smart, they'll release it in stores afterwards as well. --- visit scribblezine, an ezine for the bored. issue #2 just released. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:A month too long (Score:1) by msm1th (msm1th@email.com) on Monday July 24, @04:04PM EDT (#268) (User #68753 Info) with a chapter coming out only once a month, nobody's going to be continuously interested in the book. I don't know about that. The Green Mile was quite a success, wasn't it? [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:A month too long (Score:1) by fonebone (fonebone at home dot com) on Monday July 24, @04:07PM EDT (#275) (User #192290 Info) http://members.home.com/fonebone/ Sure it was. I own a copy. But I wouldn't have read it a chapter per month, thats for sure. I tend to lose interest in books quickly, even if I own the thing, let alone a month per chapter. visit scribblezine, an ezine for the bored. issue #2 just released. [ Reply to This | Parent ] 1 reply beneath your current threshold. I disagree with the analogy. (Score:2) by kootch on Monday July 24, @02:45PM EDT (#73) (User #81702 Info) http://www.jambase.org/~nugget/freebies.html and I think Stephen King is one of the few authors that could pull this off. it's not about whether someone is going to pay the $1 because they feel inclined to or feel guilty, but if you start to think that you're paying $1 for reading an entertaining part of the story, and to hopefully be able to read the next installment. I think King is correct in putting money in the belief that the majority of his readers will chalk up $1 to guarantee themselves the next installment. Who the hell wants to read 2/3 of the story and not get to read the conclusion??!? If this novel can build the climax the way Stephen King is known to, then EVERYONE that reads the novel with pay the $1 to read the conclusion. Again, who would read 300-500 pgs, only to not finish the book? Visit Dave's Cheapies! [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:I disagree with the analogy. (Score:1) by phong3d (ilovespam_jim.jerri@worldnet.att.net) on Monday July 24, @04:51PM EDT (#330) (User #61297 Info) http://www.inomi.com who would read 300-500 pgs, only to not finish the book? Oh, that's an easy one - ladies and gentlemen, may I present Battlefield Earth. I got about 500 pages into it before I couldn't bring myself to read another paragraph. I'll happily download and pay $1 for this. It may not be perfect, but it's a worthy experiment. And, if it sucks, I've only spent a dollar on one chapter. Unlike Podgorney, I defeated the blancmange 6-1 6-3 6-0 [ Reply to This | Parent ] Metaliking (Score:4, Interesting) by MouseR on Monday July 24, @02:45PM EDT (#75) (User #3264 Info) Then, Lard Ulrich will release a drum-only MP3 soundtrack and see how many people pays a dollar to download it. Then, they'll add a bass guitar track and see how many people pays a dollar and download it. If this is successfull, they'll add a guitar track and see how many people pays a dollar to download it. And if THAT is successfull, they'll add the lyrics track and see how much people they'll have coned into paying four bucks a song. [ Reply to This | Parent ] (OT) Techno has lyrics sometimes. (Score:1) by yerricde (abuse@pineight.8m.COM ... s/abuse/slash/) on Monday July 24, @11:41PM EDT (#415) (User #125198 Info) http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~yerricde/sd.html Yes, he said lyrics.