No story this week, just a reminder that I’ll be in Seattle this coming weekend for NorWesCon!
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.
Earlier this month, the UK publisher Bloomsbury (best known for having struck gold with the Harry Potter books, though also a real leader on the use of Creative Commons in publishing) invited me to give a talk to its staff over the lunch hour at its London office. I gave a talk about the theory and practice of book pricing in the age of the Internet, talking about the way that strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue from existing customers can cost you access to new markets. I got into the economics of distribution channels, DRM, lock-in, and talked about what I see as the top priorities for publishers looking to continue with their success in the Internet age. Bloomsbury video’ed the proceedings and have put it up on Vimeo. It’s licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, so go nuts!
One erratum: I was dead wrong about the German book market: prices there aren’t fixed by the state (I was confusing the German and Norwegian book markets), and Holtzbrinck made most of its fortune from news services, not trade book publishing.
Here’s me at yesterday’s Digital Economy Bill protest outside of Parliament in London, bellowing at the top of my lungs!
I’m absolutely tickled to announce that my novel Makers is up for the 2010 Prometheus Award, given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society. My last novel, Little Brother won in 2009, and it was an incredible honor. Once again, I’m sharing the ballot with some tremendous books and authors, including Liberating Atlantis by Harry Turtledove and The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin.
I’m absolutely tickled to announce that my novel Makers is up for the 2010 Prometheus Award, given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society. My last novel, Little Brother won in 2009, and it was an incredible honor. Once again, I’m sharing the ballot with some tremendous books and authors, including Liberating Atlantis by Harry Turtledove and The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin.
I’ve just set up a store selling direct MP3 downloads of the Random House audiobook for my last novel, Makers, thanks to the good offices of Random House Audio, the eShop WordPress plugin, and Mike Little, my WordPress tech guy.
The Makers audiobook runs 18.5 hours and is formatted for burning onto 15 CDs. It’s read by Bernadette Dunne. I really like Dunne’s reading (here’s a sample) and RHA’s production job is tops. The MP3s are 128K/44KHz.
I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
Right now, sales are only available through PayPal, though I hope that’ll change soon. And if this is successful, I hope to add the audio for Little Brother and my forthcoming YA novel, For the Win.
The Open Rights Group is looking for British individuals and organisations to sign onto its comments to the UK TV regulator, who is on the verge of giving into blackmail from the BBC and an offshore DRM cartel, crippling TV in Britain forever.
The BBC has asked Ofcom, the UK telcoms regulator, to give it permission to put DRM on digital TV signals. Anyone who wants to make a receiver that can unscramble the DRM will have to sign up with an offshore consortium called DTLA, agreeing to a whole raft of DRM requirements, including a ban on making TV receivers and recorders that users can modify (which amounts to a ban on free/open TV equipment like MythTV, as well as free/open drivers for laptop TV cards).
This is a bad idea for lots of reasons: it’s our TV, paid for with the license fee. The BBC claims that some unspecified rightsholders will withhold some unspecified programming from TV if they don’t get this, but so far, no one’s come forward to specifically say, “I won’t release the following programmes,” so we’re just left with this kind of vague, nonspecific threat.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the BBC hasn’t identified anyone who has promised to make programmes available if the DRM is added — so we’re being asked to turn regulatory control over the public service broadcaster to a corporate cartel without even being promised anything in return!
Worst of all: the BBC’s DRM scrambles a block of data that includes the assistive information used by visually impaired and hearing impaired people to watch TV, meaning that it will be harder than ever to deliver low-cost, robust technologies for these audiences. Fancy using blind and deaf people as human shields in the copyright wars! Now that’s public service!
The rightsholder companies made the same threats in 2003 when the USA was considering adding DRM to its digital TV, and none of them followed through. The idea that broadcasters will simply stop airing programmes, or that new suppliers won’t show up to sell shows if old ones boycott the system, is just ludicrous. These businesses have shareholders who want to see a return on their investment, not a public tantrum.
ORG has written a thorough response to the Ofcom consultation on BBC DRM, and now we’re looking for individuals and organisations to sign on to it. We’ve already got sign-on from the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Somethin’ Else, and many other consumer rights groups, tech groups, and entertainment companies are considering signing up.
We’re open to signons from any license payer or UK resident, but we’re especially interested in:
Stop BBC “Digital Rights Management” from disabling your HD TV
I’ve just set up a store selling direct MP3 downloads of the Random House audiobook for my last novel, Makers, thanks to the good offices of Random House Audio, the eShop WordPress plugin, and Mike Little, my WordPress tech guy.
The Makers audiobook runs 18.5 hours and is formatted for burning onto 15 CDs. It’s read by Bernadette Dunne. I really like Dunne’s reading (here’s a sample) and RHA’s production job is tops. The MP3s are 128K/44KHz.
I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
Right now, sales are only available through PayPal, though I hope that’ll change soon. And if this is successful, I hope to add the audio for Little Brother and my forthcoming YA novel, For the Win.
Buy my novel Makers as a DRM-free download.
The Makers audiobook runs 18.5 hours and is formatted for burning onto 15 CDs. It’s read by Bernadette Dunne and produced by Random House Audio. I really like Dunne’s reading (here’s a sample) and RHA’s production job is tops. The MP3s are 128K/44KHz.
I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
Right now, sales are only available through PayPal, though I hope that’ll change soon.
Lab out Loud, a podcast for science teachers, interviewed me — they’re fun guys!
