I’m in the current Swords and Lasers podcast, talking about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It was a lot of fun!
Monthly Archives::
February 2010
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Here’s the first installment of “Clockwork Fagin,” a young adult steampunk story commissioned for a Candlewick Press anthology edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. The story runs to 12,500 words and should take about a month to read for the podcast.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
(Image: Dodger introduces Oliver to Fagin by Cruikshank (detail) Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
My latest Publishers Weekly column, “The Price Is Right,” looks at the Amazon-Macmillan price dispute as a fight between two strategies for maximizing profit: price discrimination (getting the most out of each customer) and demand elasticity (sacrificing some per-customer revenue to sell to more people) and how these two strategies are challenged by the nature of digital goods and complexified by proprietary formats and DRM:
Everyone with a product to sell practices both price discrimination and demand elasticity in varying degrees. But when the product you’re selling is digital, the correct ratio of one to the other becomes a lot harder to calculate. If you’re selling hard goods, whether books, shovels, or coffee beans, the math is easy: you can’t make money if you drop your price below the marginal cost of production. But digital goods, like e-books, have almost no marginal costs. Things like credit card processing fees, electricity and bandwidth, and a few other considerations keep the cost from truly falling to $0, but the low marginal cost of selling digital copies opens up some very exciting possibilities for publishers. Could the pool of people willing to buy books—the total number of regular readers—be increased by dropping the price? And could that increase in new customers be large enough to offset losses from smaller margins? Amazon clearly thinks so.But pricing and profit-maximizing strategies aren’t the whole story. Consumer electronics buyer demographics tilt heavily to the coveted 18–34-year-old who’ll buy anything slim with an eggshell finish. Turning those big spenders into readers is an exciting prospect for anyone who cares about bringing in new business—and Macmillan executives are keenly aware of the opportunity e-books represent for turning nonreaders into new customers. Tom Doherty, publisher of Macmillan’s Tor imprint (Tor publishes my novels), is positively luminous on the importance of inducting nonreaders into the practice of regular reading. And there’s no bookseller on earth with more nonreader customers than Amazon, which, in addition to books sells everything from server space to freeze-dried steaks, sex toys, and uranium ore.
In my latest Guardian column, “Why did Ofcom back down over DRM at the BBC?” I look at how lamentably credulous both the BBC and its UK regulator, Ofcom, have been in accepting US media’ giants threats to boycott the Beeb if it doesn’t add digital rights management to its broadcasts. The BBC is publicly funded, and it is supposed to be acting in the public interest: but crippling British TV sets in response for demands from offshore media barons is no way to do this — and the threats the studios have made are wildly improbable. When the content companies lost their bid to add DRM to American TV, they made exactly the same threats, and then promptly caved and went on allowing their material to be broadcast without any technical restrictions.
How they rattled their sabers and promised a boycott of HD that would destroy America’s chances for an analogue switchoff. For example, the MPAA’s CTO, Fritz Attaway, said that “high-value content will migrate away” from telly without DRM.
Viacom added: “[i]f a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom’s CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season.”
One by one, the big entertainment companies – and sporting giants like the baseball and American football leagues – promised that without the Broadcast Flag, they would take their balls and go home.
So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren’t broadcasting anything this year is because the government wouldn’t let them control TVs?
No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.
They were full of it. They did not make good on their threats. They didn’t boycott.
They caved.
“Sensored” is a short-short story commissioned by the UK Open University’s computer science department for use in My digital life (TU100), its ubiquitous computing course. It’s licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. I’m pleased with how it worked out, and I’m honoured to be a Visiting Senior Lecturer in the OU’s comp sci department.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Hey, this is cool! I made Forbes’s 25 Web Celebs list again — I’m in the top 10!
