Full moon, psychotropics, or fever? You be the judge...

[triadruid]

So after my multi-day snooze-fest while fighting off the superflu, I managed to jack up my circadian rhythms enough that I could NOT get to sleep last night all the little plastic toys in China (the coughing whenever I laid down wasn't helping). So instead I stayed up on the couch, finished my second book in two days (popcorn books, of course; A.C. Crispin and John Ringo), had some minor waking dreams/hallucinations, and waited for the sun to come up.

But anyway. That's neither important enough nor unusual enough (well, except for the hallucinations part) to warrant an actual post. What is interesting to me is the way my brain started to synthesize together several books and concepts I've come across lately:

1. Intellectual Property protection is broken. Even I, who try to avoid piracy whenever possible, can recognize that. There's just no way to put the genie back in the bottle, and with recent changes to copyright law in the U.S. and the ability to patent "ways to amuse a cat (or other animal with a chase instinct) with a laser pointer", maybe little reason to want to do so. Many publishers appear to be acting from a pure profit motive, not the original protection-and-promotion-of-creative-works standard.
   
2. At the same time, remuneration of creators for their work is important to encourage further creation. The dirty little secret of Open Source Software is that a lot of it is done on "company time" or "when I get around to it". That's not a terribly productive model for encouraging future output, quality assurance, or continued employment at said company. But as copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution continue to outpace protection schemes (similarly to the War on Drugs and other failed "Ideological battles"), at some point either a paradigm shift or system collapse seems inevitable. Bruce Sterling's Distraction touches on one simple way to do this; in an economic 'war', broad distribution of all English-language intellectual property on the 'Net by China brings about the essential collapse of the American economy.
   
3. The recent strike by the Writer's Guild of America and the ongoing dramatics regarding royalties paid to musicians, for example, seems indicative that something is off-balance (this is, of course, debatable, as I don't have full facts to hand) between publishers and producers.
   
4. In addition to #3, I'm aware that there's a dynamic tension between the ecological/economic (econological?) benefits of such institutions as the used bookstore and the public library, and my native desire (which you are welcome not to share, or argue) to remunerate the creator directly. Needless to say, it's a little difficult to track down a way to send 6% or whatever to every author whose work you like... but then last year I read something by Lawrence Watt-Evans (which wasn't all that good, truth be told), but it eventually led to a page on his website describing an adaptation of the Street Performer Protocol to allow fans of his Ethshar series to fund the writing of another novel in the series, after his publishers discontinued support for it after lackluster sales. The experiment worked, twice even, which I find interesting. Webcomics seem to be another example of this... on the other hand, both Stephen King and Jason Kottke failed to make a sustainable wage with this type of 'micropatronage', although that could be for any number of reasons.
   
5. Copy-editing, as you've no doubt heard from both featherynscale, fionnabhar, or myself, is a Dead Damn Art. Nobody seems to want to pay/expend the energy for anything beyond the Microsoft Office Spell/Grammar Check, so you get things like "imbedding" on the first page of a recent book I read. First page! At the same time, many fans of particular authors/creators are ready and willing to stand in the rain, freezing wind, and what have you for the first chance to gain access to early/first releases; even Microsoft has been leveraging that for years with the way they utilize the pre-Service Pack 1 release as an "open beta" (in practice, if not in name).
   
6. So I have to wonder if there would be some sort of 'trust network' or patronage setup that would allow writers (in particular) to release drafts to a small set of loyal readers, wherein they could catch some of the grammatical/logical/ideological flaws in the manuscript (similar to how Wikipedia does a good job with fixing minor details in copy). That may be incompatible with my statements earlier about IP being broken, but I'm sure there's someone more clever than I out there thinking about this...

Anyway, that's what I got. Thanks for listening.

Comments

[gamera-spinning.livejournal.com]

My friend Fred runs a gaming company called Evil Hat, and when his company released its RPG Spirit of the Century for preorder (after significant development and rounds of playtesting), they offered a pdf copy of the game to buyers so they could actually play it before the book was printed and sent to them.

This actually worked out really well because people were able to point out a few typos and make suggestions in a couple of sections of how some items could be easier to reference. No errata needed. Because the final document hadn't gone to the printer yet, Fred was able to integrate the corrections before the book was printed and corrected copies of the pdf went out by e-mail to those who pre-ordered (and those who ordered the pdf after the book was published).

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was very much the model I was thinking of. Combining the distributed networking of Web 2.0/trust networks with a feedback loop should increase the quality of the product without increasing costs/risk significantly, I'd think.

[gamera-spinning.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it worked out really well for me as a consumer, plus as you say the informed Web 2.0 audience was able to fix imperfections in the product that creep into any involved project that has gone through multiple edits in its life.

I would love to see more of this kind of thing, but it seems ideal for smaller publishers.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

It does seem to fit pretty well with the Long Tail idea of niche publishing...