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cory doctorow
tered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style,
and it’s not much like the cognitive style invented with the first
modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it),
Don
Quixote
, some 400 years ago.
The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by tech-
nological changes in information display, reproduction, and dis-
tribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the
cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer
is different from the cognitive style of the novel.
Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Net-
worked computers doubly so — they (another RSS item) have a
million ways of asking for your attention, and just as many ways
of rewarding it.
There’s a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world
of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In
the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for elec-
tronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over
again. In the nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and
no one ever gets to sell a novel again.
I think they’re both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright
ignores the “decision cost” borne by users who have to decide,
over and over again, whether they want to spend a millionth of
a cent on a millionth of a word — no one buys newspapers by the
paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim fraction of
any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be
used to read all day long, but most of us won’t spend most of our
time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.
Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically
pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to
differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by
the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus.
The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the
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