Archives for February 2010

Formatting Documents for e-Publishing

February 9, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

I have a collection of short stories I would like to publish online. I’ve been working on cleaning them up for the past six months or so, and I’m now at the point where I need to confront a variety of technical questions. I know that a lot of people have already wrestled with these issues before me, so I’m asking for links/comments that will shorten my learning curve and prevent me from having to reinvent the wheel.

Questions:

I write in Word, and that’s not going to change any time soon. My goal here is trying to develop a clean, clear work flow that makes the transition to any/all online publishing options as simple and painless as possible. (Including print-on-demand.) The first thing that (I think) I need to know is whether I should convert my original Word docs into another file format first (say, e-Pub, but that’s only an example), then change that internet-friendly file to meet the requirements of any particular publishing site/service, or whether I should only do so on a case-by case basis. What’s the right first step here?
I need all the how-to links and advice I can get. I’m willing to read until my eyes bleed, but again, the goal is short-circuiting the learning curve. Who’s been down this road recently and written about it? Site-specific feedback is fine: I’d like to read about Smashwords author experiences, Amazon, etc.
I know there are passionate views on both sides of the e-Pub file format issue. I’m not even sure what all the fuss is about, but I’m willing to learn. Who should I be reading? I like the idea of non-proprietary file formats. I know I’ll have to deal with Amazon’s proprietary format at some point, but I’m not eager to abet its dominance. Opinions? Links? Is this even worth wading into, or should I just stick with the practical issues related to getting my text ready?

Any and all feedback/links/comments appreciated. [ Read more ]

A DRM Question Worth Asking

February 8, 2010 By Mark 8 Comments

Imposing technological solutions for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is, in theory, a viable way to stop the piracy of online content. In theory. In practice DRM presents a host of implementation problems and customer service headaches because legitimate content owners are punished or disadvantaged alongside thieves.

Because of the gap between current theory and practice, proponents and opponents of DRM attempt to dominate the DRM debate with apocalyptic rhetoric, political gamesmanship, and the kind of righteous indignation that is both an intellectual guilt trip and calculated lie at the same time. Neither side is really interested in what is practical or effective, or even in learning how pirated content is actually consumed by the end user.

The reason they are not interested is because they cannot sell the products they want to sell in a calm atmosphere. It takes fear of nuclear annihilation to sell both bomb shelters and bombs, so both sides in the DRM debate stoke the rhetorical fires and present their hard-line solutions as the truth, the light and the only way. All of which I’ve talked about here, here and here.

Still, it seems to me that there is one DRM question worth asking. Here’s how I referenced the issue in one of those previous posts:

Elsewhere in the clip, Mr. Doctorow makes a good point when he says that books will be copied and scanned regardless of the DRM that publishers employ. I agree. But that’s not necessarily saying something important. Scanned versions of books are almost inevitably going to be less clear than licensed e-books or even licensed digital copies. Yet even assuming someone cracks a DRM-protected book and makes it available for free, the book business has a kind of built-in protection against wanton piracy simply by nature of its content.

Music comes in small files. Movies are dumb — you just stare at them. Books, however, are big, and require active engagement over a long period of time in order to be consumed.

Maybe someone somewhere is downloading two hundred cracked e-books at a whack, then reading the first sentence of each in order to find a great read, but I think it’s unlikely. In fact, it’s unlikely that most pirated books are ever completely read, precisely because a book is relatively hard to digest. This means the ratio of thefts by end-users who intend to enjoy the content they steal to thefts by pirates who intend to profit from the content they steal may be lower in the book publishing industry than in any other medium. Which means the book publishing industry has more to gain by going after traffickers and less to gain by going after end-users than any other industry.

[ Read more ]

Superbowl Sexism and Sports Narratives

February 7, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

We watch sports for the same reason we watch movies. We like narratives. Movies (and books, and stage plays) are pre-designed: they are prepared for us, in order to induce the greatest amount of entertainment and emotional involvement. Sporting events play out in real time: the end result is not known in advance, and that creates its own kind of drama. You do not know what is going to happen when the curtain goes up on a game: you only hope that it will be great. (More on game and story here.)

Tonight’s game was a good game. It had a lot of narratives running through it, and in the end they played out as I would have liked as a storyteller. That’s not always the case, obviously, but that’s part of why we watch sports: it’s an act of faith. Sometimes we’re rewarded for believing, and sometimes our hearts are ripped out of our chests.

Going into the game the Colts’ quarterback, Peyton Manning, had ascended to god-like status on the wings of sporting pundits who know everything except how the game will actually turn out. And Manning played an excellent game. Unfortunately, everybody else on both teams played well, too, and as the game wore on Manning was not able to impose his will on the New Orleans Saints. When the Saints finally moved ahead late in the game, I said out loud that the only thing that would make the narrative complete would be if Manning threw an interception as he was trying to lead his team back for a tie — because the meta-narrative assumed that Manning would score the tying touchdown. When he did throw that interception, and it was returned for a touchdown, I could only shake my head. It’s not often, as a storyteller, that you get to see that kind of unscripted narrative play.

Apart from the game, however, I have to say that I was more than a little concerned with what can only be described as a parade of misogynistic, sexist commercials that played during the breaks. I know Superbowl commercials are supposed to be a big deal, and I know that advertising agencies pull out all the stops in an attempt to make their commercials talked about the next day. I fully expected, and got, a fair share of sex-driven commercials, but there also seemed to be a good deal of woman-bashing and wife-bashing aimed at what I can only presume to be a large demographic of stone-age male sitcom caricatures tuning into the game. Funny stuff if you’re a wife beater.

Then again, empowerment of women also seemed to be sadly lacking, and here of course I’m referring to Danica Patrick’s Go Daddy commercials. If you don’t know Danica Patrick, she’s a female race car driver of moderate talent, who, if she were male, you would never hear anything about as long as you lived. Because she is female, and TV-pretty, however, and more than willing to throw the cause of equality under the bus when there’s money to be made showing some skin, she’s decided to work her way up not by winning races, but by exploiting her physical appearance. Because it’s a TV world we live in, she’s of course having moderate success.

If I feel bad for anyone it’s the fans of the Indianapolis Colts. I don’t feel bad about this loss, but I feel bad for the way they were abused earlier in the year when the Colts’ ownership and coaches pulled the starting players off the field in the middle of a game, forfeiting a win. The Colts were undefeated at the time, the Colts’ fans had bought into the dream of an undefeated seasons, and yet the team’s ownership threw them overboard with as much concern as Danica Patrick gives to your daughters. The stated reason for throwing the game, it was said, was to limit the chance that someone on the team might get hurt, crippling the Colts’ chance of winning the Superbowl. Now that the team has lost the Superbowl, yet another narrative is complete because the Colts have not been rewarded for what they did — which, to my mind, was inexcusable.

Finally, a footnote. I won’t explain this fully, but somewhere tonight Brett Favre is laughing his ass off.

— Mark Barrett

On Being Smarter Than the Problem | Copyright

February 5, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

Every once in a while I run across someone very smart who has become completely lost by intellectualizing out of all proportion to the issue at hand. In some cases this is intentional: the objective is to display dizzying mental agility, then perform some sleight of logical mind that allows the smart person to convince others that up is down. At other times the smart person has actually deceived themselves, losing the forest of reality for a theoretical tree that some other intellectual lifted a leg on.

I don’t think there’s anybody who has a higher ratio of smarts to brain cramps than Christopher Hitchens. I could read Hitchens all day, just to enjoy the flow of his language and the logic of his ideas, even as he launches many of those diatribes from premises I consider invalid, destined for conclusions I deem absurd. In the more duplicitous camp I think of none other than George Will, the humorless columnist who enjoys nothing more than turning his megawatt mind to the subjects of both politics and baseball, with equally dubious results.

I mention all this as preface to a post* a couple of days ago by Matthew Yglesias, who is a smart person. Regarding the effect of free (stolen/pirated) content on the record industry, Yeglesias writes:

But under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0.

It’s of course amazing to me that someone could write something like that and not recognize the obvious problem, which is that this paradigm allows for no costs associated with the creation of the music that is being distributed, nor any opportunity to recoup those costs — let alone turn a profit. Then again, this is what happens when smart people talk about things like intellectual property as if it simply exists inside the walls of a black corporate castle, rather than as something that someone — an artist or craftsperson — makes.

Obliquely recognizing the potential problem, Yglesias adds:

It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things.

In reply, Sonny Bunch makes the obvious point in a post titled Piracy. Is. Stealing.:

No! False! The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs.

Yglesias, in his reply to Bunch, again ignores the question of authorship, or even the existence of the artists and craftspeople who create content:

He’s being sarcastic, but that is, in fact, an absolutely insane idea. The point of intellectual property law is to benefit consumers, not producers.

Note that last word: “producers”. That’s not the same as: artists.

To the Matthew Yglesias’ of the world, no human being with a passion or a vision actually makes music or tells stories that they hope to sell as a product. That’s all done by corporations and copyright holders, who are just looking to make a buck. Admitting as much, Yglesias reaches for an analogy and comes up with…the pharmaceutical industry.

Does Bunch think it’s a terrible affront to the moral rights of pharma researchers that there are generically available drugs? Does he want to see ibuprofen and penicillin and measles vaccines taken off the market? That’s crazy.

The only thing crazy here is the inability of a very smart person like Matt Yglesias to wrap his mind around the idea that without copyright protection, there exists no object — no ibuprofen pill — for artists to sell. That’s how complicated it isn’t.

*Links from Andrew Sullivan’s blog yesterday. Additional comments today from Sulivan’s readers here. The Ditchwalk take on this issue, also posted three days ago, and reader comments, here.

— Mark Barrett

GBS Copyright Hijacking Attempt #2

February 4, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Yes, I’m against the (re)proposed Google Books Settlement with the Authors Guild. Which is why this seems like a bit of good news:

In another blow to Google’s plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

…

The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.

I say “a bit” because one never knows how these things are being staged. My hope is that the Justice Department is sincere in its objections, and not just covering its ass.

— Mark Barrett

What You Steal

February 2, 2010 By Mark 38 Comments

The Premise
A month ago I engaged in an interesting conversation with Luke Bergeron on his [now defunct] blog, about copyright law. My interest was prompted in large part by Luke’s incisive generational examination of the question of piracy.

Here’s how Luke initially framed the issue:

The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.

So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.

Last week I read a post on The Millions called Confessions of a Book Pirate. On the subject of piracy the confessor had this to say:

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.

Two days ago I read a post from Marian Schembari on Digital Book World, called
A Gen Y Reaction to Macmillan’s Piracy Plan. In her comprehensive rant, Marian had this to say about piracy:

I’m not condoning piracy (sort of), but if major publishers are only going to look at the “legal” side of things and spend precious time and money fighting the inevitable, they are going to crash and burn.

I’m poor, I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it.

In response to Marian’s post, Debbie Stier of HarperStudio/HarperCollins wrote a post on her company blog, congratulating Marian for stating her overall case regarding Macmillan, and for giving insight into the Gen Y perspective.

Here’s the bottom line for me — whether you agree or not with Marian Schembari’s views on piracy, she has given us a glimpse into the psyche of a Gen Y reader. I appreciate her honesty. I believe this is a gift. I think we should listen.

I agree with Debbie. We should listen. But then we should reply. [ Read more ]