My latest Locus column, “Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers,” just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there’s plenty of programmers who’ll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there’s a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who’ll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that’s likely to continue for some time.
China has experienced the largest migration in human history — 160,000,000 people moved from the inland farms to the coastal manufacturing cities — but it is not endless. Most of the world has shut down most of its factories, shuttering domestic manufacturing capacity in favor of the cheap labor, poor working conditions and environmental controls of China’s factory cities. When you go to China to get your Kindle or your Wii produced, you’re competing for space among the factories that produce socket wrenches, Happy Meal toys, laptop computers, prison cafeteria trays, decorative tin planters, vinyl action figures, keychain flashlights and cheap handguns.
Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.
Meanwhile, handheld game consoles, phones, and other multipurpose devices have found their way into the hands of people from every walk of life. In some countries, mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent — that is, a significant proportion of the population maintain more than one phone, for example, a work cellular and a home cellular.
Not only can these devices command the lion’s share of China’s high-quality manufacturing capacity, but they are produced in such staggering volume (and often distributed with a subsidy — game devices are sold below cost in the expectation of selling games; phones are subsidized by carriers) that they can be had for a pittance.
My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe has been published in German by Heyne, under the title Upload. As with the German edition of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (published as Download), they’ve released the German text under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Given that Heyne’s a division of the mega-publisher Bertelsmann, this is pretty cool news — especially considering that the CC release was their idea!
I did a recent interview about CC licensing and science fiction with the German net-show WatchBerlin, too.
Link to free text of Upload/Eastern Standard Tribe, Link to WatchBerlin episode
Update: There’s also an interview with me from the German netcase NetzPolitik: Link
My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe has been published in German by Heyne, under the title Upload. As with the German edition of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (published as Download), they’ve released the German text under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Given that Heyne’s a division of the mega-publisher Bertelsmann, this is pretty cool news — especially considering that the CC release was their idea!
I did a recent interview about CC licensing and science fiction with the German net-show WatchBerlin, too.
Link to free text of Upload/Eastern Standard Tribe, Link to WatchBerlin episode
Update: There’s also an interview with me from the German netcase NetzPolitik: Link
My latest InfoWeek column, “In Defense Of Complaining,” went online while I was on break earlier this month — it’s a rebuttal to people who say that people who are upset about bad products should just buy something else, rather than complaining:
I’m always astounded by this reaction. Companies aren’t charities. They’re businesses. It doesn’t matter why they’re offering an unacceptable product — all that matters is that the product is unacceptable. Companies aren’t five-year-olds bringing their fingerpaintings home from kindergarten. We don’t have to put on a brave smile and tell them, “that’s just lovely dear,” and display their wares proudly on the fridge. I don’t care if Apple adds DRM because Lars from Metallica has incriminating photos of Steve Jobs, I don’t care if Sony BMG put a rootkit on its CDs because they were duped into it by a trickster spirit that appeared to their technologists in a dream. I care whether their product is worth my money. It’s the market — there’s no A for Effort.
Even weirder is the idea that companies shouldn’t be criticized because in a market, you should just take your business elsewhere. Free markets thrive on good information. For a market to function, customers need to have good information about which goods are worth buying and which ones should be avoided — that’s why we complain in public, to help companies make better decisions.
French version (Hervé Le Crosnier)
Japanese version (Yutaka)
Russian version (Ruslan Grokhovetskiy)
Knowledge isn’t property: Guardian column
My latest Guardian column, “‘Intellectual property’ is a silly euphemism” is online — in it, I argue that although knowledge is important and valuable, it’s not property, and when we treat it as such, it makes us do dumb things. Hervé Le Crosnier liked it and translated it into French and put it online under a CC license.
It’s this disconnect that makes the “property” in intellectual property so troublesome. If everyone who came over to my flat physically took a piece of it away with them, it’d drive me bonkers. I’d spend all my time worrying about who crossed the threshold, I’d make them sign all kinds of invasive agreements before they got to use the loo, and so on. And as anyone who has bought a DVD and been forced to sit through an insulting, cack-handed “You wouldn’t steal a car” short film knows, this is exactly the kind of behaviour that property talk inspires when it comes to knowledge.
But there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s valuable even though it’s not property. For example, my daughter was born on February 3, 2008. She’s not my property. But she’s worth quite a lot to me. If you took her from me, the crime wouldn’t be “theft”. If you injured her, it wouldn’t be “trespass to chattels”. We have an entire vocabulary and set of legal concepts to deal with the value that a human life embodies.
What’s more, even though she’s not my property, I still have a legally recognised interest in my daughter. She’s “mine” in some meaningful sense, but she also falls under the purview of many other entities – the governments of the UK and Canada, the NHS, child protection services, even her extended family – they can all lay a claim to some interest in the disposition, treatment and future of my daughter.
Link,
Metropolis, a German/French documentary series from Arte.tv, shot a short documentary with me about online freedom and surveillance, and science fiction. They’ve put the episode online as a free, remixable, Creative Commons licensed download.
Posted to Boing Boing yesterday — but in the hustle and bustle, forgot to put i t here!
I am ecstatic to announce a new Happy Mutant on the scene:
Doctorow. Hatched at home, in a pool, this morning, in London, weighing 9 lbs and 6 oz. All bits correct and accounted for. Already stolen the hearts of all who see her.
Consider me on paternity leave until further notice.
