While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing.  I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes.  The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in the following idea – what about a subscription model for authors.  Right now it sucks to be an author in that your pay is very irregular.  I know that my paycheck will be the same week to week.  But authors get an advance for a book and then some royalties depending upon how well a book sells.  So they can’t really plan their finances easily because they don’t know ahead of time how many books they will sell.  But, with digital distribution, it might be easier to sell the author’s readers on a subscription model.

Let’s taken an author like Terry Pratchet who has a body of work encompassing a universe and series of characters.  After building up a fan base from his first few books, perhaps he could end up telling people they could subscribe to get the future books in his series.  Now, with the current way books are written, this wouldn’t work because it takes years between books.  But what if the books were instead serialized.  I know in the old days (the 1800s, I think) a lot of books would first appear in newspapers a chapter at a time.  Then, when the book was complete, a reader could buy the entire story in book form.  So if Terry (or Tom Clancy, Dan Brown [ugh!], etc) could deliver a chapter every month to continue your story (like a comic book storyline) would you pay to subscribe?  This works out for the author because he/she now has a steady revenue stream.  It works for the reader because you don’t have to wait years for the next book to come out.

What are the pitfalls to this scheme?  First off, enough people need to have an ebook reader.  Second, this has to work within the framework of writing books.  I’ve never written a fiction book, so I don’t know exactly how the process works.  Perhaps the practice of refining earlier chapters of a book as you work on later chapters would preclude certain (or all?) authors from participating in such a scheme.

Another potential money-maker with digital distribution of books would be add-on content.  Perhaps for a premium, a reader could get commentary (audio or text) on the book.  This is not without its negatives.  The author would be busy producing add-on content instead of the next book.

Neither of these situations are perfect, but I think we need to continue to try and innovate as new technologies allow for abilities that didn’t previously exist.  After all, would as many people have bought DVDs in the early days if you couldn’t skip chapters?  That was the killer app for me when it was SO HARD to find the right spot in a movie if someone rewound it or if you just wanted to watch your favorite part over and over.  And now we have technologies like Hulu bypassing the concept of channels on TV.  Perhaps something just as disruptive could be on the horizon for books.  Get on it, innovators!

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3. Review: The Discworld Series

I think the Discworld Series is the greatest collection of books based on a single “world”.  Of course, you have to enjoy the genre I call “sarcastic sci-fi/fantasy”.  Other examples include The Hitchhikers’ Guide “trilogy” and Neil Stephenson’s earlier cypherpunk novels.  Part of what makes Terry Pratchett such an amazing writer is his ability to write amazing parody.  It ranges from subtle (The Builder of the Spacecraft in The Light Fantastic -> Taj Majal) to the obvious (Gollem-like creature in [I think] Witches Abroad).  To speak more about the parody would rob you of the pleasure of recognizing the parody.  (At least that’s how I usually feel about them)

The Discworld books are divided into stories about certain characters.  The Color Of Magic introduces The Wizards and Equal Rites introduces The Witches.  The wikipedia entry suggests you could read in publication order or read in the order of character stories.  I recommend against any reading other than publication order.  Even though Pratchett starts off with each book (other than the first two) being relatively self-contained, you will find yourself missing out on references and jokes if you skip around.  This is especially true on crossover stories.  For example, The Wizards appear in Carpe Jugulum even though it’s primarily a Witches story.  And there would be certain assumptions you would be missing.  This is especially true with the Moist von Lipwig and City Watch stories.  And, of course, The Wizards make cameos in City Watch stories.

A very interesting thing happened to me as I was reading through the series.  I started off really, really enjoying The Wizards.  I wasn’t too fond of The Witches and I definitely didn’t have that much fun with The City watch in their first book – “Guards! Guards!”.  But as time went on, I started to get a little tired of The Wizards.  I think Terry Pratchett did as well because they appear in a smaller and smaller percentage of the books.  I started to really like The Witches and by the end I REALLY liked The City Watch.  The appearance and description of Death in the first two books are what cemented my love for Discworld.  When I read his first lines, I was hooked.  As far as his own books, I’ve found myself really liking them at first and then dropping off with the later ones.  I think I like Death most as a cameo character.  His own books, especially later on, tend to get a bit dragged on.

So that’s the good stuff.  What’s the bad stuff?  I’ll start out with something that is only the tiniest bit negative.  The plots of many (maybe most?) of the Discworld books revolve around macguffins.  It’s only a tiny bit negative because, really most fantasy or sci-fi novels are macguffin-heavy.  The point of the Discworld books is to explore the Discworld and its many hilarious inhabitants.  I’m not saying that the plot suffers.  But sometimes I found the resolution to the conflict pretty darned anti-climactic.  Also, at first Pratchett seems to suffer from Sitcom-itis.  Many of the early books wrap up their plots so that in the end everything is returned to the status quo.  He seems to be afraid of changing too much of of the Discworld.  That’s probably a good thing early on since he didn’t want to get pigeon-holed.  But it does take away some of the punch of the episodes.  The reason why I never got engaged with most sitcoms is that I knew nothing would change after 30 minutes – so what was the point of all the mayhem?  It’s not until “Guards! Guards!” that the Discworld begins to have a history to refer back to.

A few other niggles I have are with some continuity problems.  WARNING THIS PARAGRAPH WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS!  And Pratchett does such a GOOD job overall with maintaining an extremely rich continuity and I think that’s why it hurts so much when it isn’t there.  Examples include the fact that it was SUCH A BIG DEAL for Esk to become the first female wizard.  Yet she has never appeared again.  It also seemed a bit cheap that after Gaspode lost his Movie-Magic reason to speak, he gained it from the Unseen University.  In one book, it is explained how Vetinari will never allow a printing press in Ankh-Morpork, but just a couple of books later he is endorsing it.  One other thing I think killed a lot of the fun of The Wizards is that they are no longer trying to kill each other.  Munstrum Ridcully comes in and suddenly everything’s normal.  I know Pratchett needed to do that for character development reasons, but it really stinks.  END OF SPOILERS

I would love to see Pratchett explore the lands mentioned in Pyramids a bit more.

Right now I’m reading ancillary books related to the Discworld, but not in its continuity.  This includes The Science of Discworld (an awesome book!).  I think the reader is in a very unique opportunity.  Right now there are 30 or so Discworld books to read.  The early ones are read rather quickly, but the later ones get lengthier.  It might easily also take you a few months to read them through, but you are able to read them back-to-back as I did.  This means that, unlike people who read them as they came out, you can easily remember the continuity and will therefore enjoy a lot more of the jokes.  (The same thing happened to me with Clerks -> Jay/Silent Bob.  I was able to get jokes seeing them back to back that others in my group had never seen)  It’ll cost a few hundred (the books are $8/ea in the US), but it’ll be money well-spent as far as books go.  If, like me, you find the first book amazing – you’ll like the entire series.  If you find the first book ok, give the next three a shot.  And if you don’t like the book, you probably won’t like the series much.  His writing gets better, but the tone stays more or less the same.

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I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie.  I mean, the movie does a good job of showing the despair of the city Minis Tirith, but the book really shows it much better.  I found myself at times forgetting that I already knew the ending and that most of the characters would be fine.  Speaking of already knowing the story, I kept waiting for the part where Gollum tricks Frodo into thinking that The Fat Hobbit has eaten the bread.  It’s not in the books – they added that for the movie.

In “The Scouring of the Shire”, which was left out of the movie, I felt it was a huge allegory about the failures of communism as implemented by Russia and other countries.  (As opposed to communism the theory which should be an awesome world)  Lotho and Sharkey have instituted a policy where they confiscate the goods from the Hobbits and claim this is so that they can be shared amongst all.  Yet the only people who end up getting the goods are Lotho, Sharkey, and their cronies.  Similarly, during the “Golden Age” of communism, the state would collect everything for redistribution, but only the Party Members got access to the high quality goods.

I wonder if it was a very barely concealed hint that the Elves and their companions went to Heaven as they went to a place called Haven and then they were able to live forever.

Other than Tom Bombadil, the only thing that I didn’t like over the course of the series was the way the author dealt with the story temporally.  Instead of going from character to character in each paragraph or chapter, as most authors do, he would go an entire ridiculously large amount of chapters with one set of characters and then go back and start again with other characters.  Although he provided some hints, this made it really hard for me to see when things were happening.  For example, when Frodo was being bitten by Shelob, what was happening with the battle in Gondor and so forth.  Perhaps that’s just the way books were written back then.

Finally, I found it a bit confusing that everyone had a ton of names.  For example Strider, Elfstone, Aragon, and something of the Dunedain are all the same person.  Gandolf is often called Mithrandyl (or something like that) and it makes it a bit harder to keep track of what’s going on.

In the end, I’m glad I read it and spent the money on it.

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I also really liked the descriptions during the war.  I feel like I got a lot more about the history behind certain events and definitely got more insight into what the characters were thinking.

Finally, Gollum comes off as way more treacherous and smart in the book.  In the movie he seems to be tricky, yes, but not quite as smart.

So overall, I’m now very glad I’ve chosen to read the books and I’m about 1/4 of the way through The Return of the King.

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“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

“And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).

Tolkien did go on to analyse the character’s role further:

“I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…

“It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war… the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”^[3]

Tolkien even seems to justify Tom Bombadil’s presence:

At any rate, what I like about the book over the movies in the last half to fourth of the book is that a few of the plot elements get explained a little more clearly.  Sauron’s origins are explained a lot more clearly.  Gandalf and others talk about how he came to power and why he’s just an “eye” now.  Gollum is a lot more treacherous in the books.  The characters know who he is and he menaces them a few times.  I think this elevates his dangerous aura and prepares the reader for the fact that Smeagol has been following our protagonists.  Finally, the elven queen Galadrial is given a much more cohesive treatment in the book.  In the movie, from what I can remember, she just talks to Frodo in a dream.  In the book, all of the characters leave the forest changed in some way because of her.  Also, she gives everyone a special gift.

So, perhaps LoTR can be enjoyable….if you can get past Tom Bombadil…

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I have absolutely no idea how the Lord of the Rings became such a revered book amongst the fantasy crowd.  Tolkien appears not to have had an editor, or perhaps his editor was a pushover.  If I were his editor I would certainly have made him remove the stupid chapter and a half about Tom Bombadil.  This chapter does not further the story in any way and just leaves you with the same feeling as when you thought you’d be getting lucky to realize that your girl was only wearing the sexy panties because everything else is in the laundry basket.  I kept reading thinking that Tom Bombadil would drop some bombs about some key part of the story or that the Black Riders would show up and tear his place apart and  kill his wife.  Oh, and the insufferable singing!  It didn’t even make any sense!  What’s with everyone speaking in the third person?  Eric doesn’t like that.

And the hobbits are always breaking into song.  One could be forgiven for thinking that Peter Jackson would have make Lord of the Rings the Musical.  They sing songs about everything from travel, to hotels, to taking baths.  And I’ve found out more about hobbit genealogy than I ever cared for.

Interestingly, the relationship between Frodo and Sam doesn’t seem to have the same sexual overtones that it does in the movie.  And, I’m pretty sure Peter Jackson didn’t do that on purpose.  It just came out so ridiculous that TBS had everyone almost literally rotfltao when they had a commercial for their broadcast of LoTR featuring clips of Frodo and Sam and the song “Secret Lovers”.

At any rate, this is mostly a rant about how slow-going this book is.  Had it not had so many decades of reputation to rest upon, I would have probably returned the book to Borders and not even attempted to finish.  Then again, I found the movies really boring, so perhaps the Lord of the Rings just isn’t for me.  Ironically, I’m loving Terry Prachet’s Discworld series which is, partly, a parody of the Tolkien universe.

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While the comic book is an extreme possibility of this research created in the 1960s and for the purpose of drama, I think that it shows (along with the basic theme of the series) that blind belief in the powers of science can have dire consequences. This appears to have been a central theme of other Marvel stories as well, such as The Fantastic Four. I think it’s time for a little bit of 1950s-60s suspicion about the claims of science. After Vioxx and the other recent revelations that drug companies are shoving drugs through the FDA, we need to take a look and see whether we can find a balance. We don’t want to reject all new technology, but we need to stop what some think is the inevitable march of progress. More testing needs to be done on our meds and therapies before releasing them to the public.

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Why is DRM so bad? This is why!

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3. My first published book of photography!

One of the interesting things about basing a book on my top rated photos on flickr is that they not only changed while I was writing the book, but even now they are radically different in some places while remaining the same in other places. It’s a snapshot, no pun intended, of where my work was at one particular point in time – April of 2006.

So why make a book of images freely available on the net? Well, there are two reasons. The first one is that Internet access is not yet ubiquitous and there’s a certain something about books that people still love. I know that I am a very technological guy, but I just don’t enjoy reading a book off my computer screen. I prefer good old paper and used to even print my college readings when they were given as PDFs. The second reason for the book, is that when I put my pictures on flickr, I usually don’t put any comments along with the picture because I want others to enjoy the picture through their own eyes, not the filter I have set up. I’m not a total purist, as I do give the pictures titles and thus a frame of reference. But beyond that, I don’t want to talk about what went on behind the picture or even the technical aspects if it happens to be a complicated one. In this book, I take each of the pictures and talk about how I got the inspiration for taking them, some of the technical difficulties, and sometimes the plain dumb luck involved.

I know it sounds a bit cliche, but I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

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The intro to the first book, which set the tone and got me very happy about the book to follow:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughtly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the time the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean and more of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and tha tno one shoul dever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small face in rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going worng all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible stupid catastraphe occurre, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

And from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide, which is a book in the book for which it it named.

‘The Babel fish’, said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, ‘is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then extretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious though frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existance of God.

‘The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without fait I am nothing.”

‘”But,” says Man, “the Bable fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore by your your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

‘”Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

‘”Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.’

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wget -nd address

it would have just saved to my current directory and the code would have worked perfectly. It would have also worked the roundabout way that I showed.

2) If you like Neal Stephenson’s style of writing then you MUST read Catch-22! Catch-22 is the literary father of his style of writing so be sure to check it out! I just finished the book a couple of days ago and I loved it! It was a little confusing at first, but then I couldn’t put it down.

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First of all, they got rid of a lot of entries from the Hitchhiker’s Guide. I consider the book to be, in a sense, the book’s main character. To leave out so many entries was akin to leaving out Arthur Dent, in my opinion. Additionally, to me it was the entries from the Guide that really made the book so fun for me. The story was pretty neat, but the hilarious entries were what I loved. Some of the entries I truly missed were (in summary):

-the entry about how the Babel fish disproves the existence of God
-the entry about the girl who had just figured out the key to happiness before the Earth was distroyed
-the entry about teenagers in the universe who would mess with Earth yokels as a prank
-the entry explaining the reasons for buying planets and why the earth-building planet had to be blown up
-the entry about Arthur screaming something which started an intergallactic war
and a few others.

While they would have added some length to the movie, it would have totalled to maybe an extra 15 minutes, if that! I was really dissapointed by that.

Also, perhaps it was just that we watched the movie in a crappy movie theatre, but I found it hard to sometimes hear what the characters were saying. This took away from the film since I had to be straining to hear what they were saying a majority of the time.

If I had to sum it up I would say that the book was overly complex – the genius of Douglas Adams and his cheeky humor. However, the movie was considerably less complex. The fans would have been done a better service had the movie done a much better job of potraying this complexity. Doubtless some people will be so fanatically dedicated to the series that they will find no fault with the movie. I, however, would probably give it a B- or worse. One thing is for sure, if they bring out the sequels, I will have to go by myself or with my brothers for my fiancee found the movie dreadful.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes out and Daniel’s girlfriend comes up to Ithaca.

I’m really excited about the movie because it’s been getting some awesome reviews and I think that it is a wonderful and smartly funny story. Douglas Adams is awesome.

I’m happy that Ash is coming up because that makes my brother so happy. Anything that makes my family happy is awesome. I know he misses her a lot so I hope she arrives on time and they have have a good week together.

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my book at Lulu.com

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Let me offer one other example which he doesn’t talk about in the book, or, if he does, he hasn’t mentioned it yet. While the RIAA may consider MP3s to be the bane of their industry, it has been a boom to indie musicians. Unlike .wav files, which take up 10 MB per minute of music, MP3s take up about 1 MB per minute of music at 128kbps sampling rate. This has allowed, as everyone reading this knows, for music to become small enough to transmit over the Internet. While the recording industry claims that this is bad because of piracy, the true reason that they hate it is because it threatens their entire industry! While this is a slow process which may or may not ever reach fruition, MP3s allow artists to be independent of record labels. If I were an indie group or a garage band who didn’t get signed by a label, I could put up a website and post MP3s of my music. If I were good, word would spread over the Internet and everyone would download my MP3s. Then, if enough people from my surrounding area liked me, I could throw a concert. Maybe it couldn’t be at Madison Square Garden, but some smaller venue (like my friends in High School used to do). In the “real world” artists never make money on their CDs anyway, they make money on Tshirts, hats, and concert sales. Therefore, they can bypass the record companies and still make money if they are good. Of course the RIAA feels threatened by this!

Some groups have already begun to do this. I wish I knew the name of the group, but an old 80s group has revived by doing this. Their label didn’t want to resign them so they began releasing MP3s on their website and have gained a huge following of fans who have begun to pour money into them through merchandise and ticket sales.

So what does all of this have to do with writing? Well, Lulu.com is poised to do to publishing what MP3s are doing to music. I discovered this company yesterday because a flickr group I am involved in is using Lulu to create a quarterly photo magazine. They were only charging $20 so I had to see what this was all about! Lulu levels the playing field for indie writers by not charging any money at all up front. If I create a book and upload it to Lulu, they charge me no fees. They tell me how much the book costs to print and then they ask how much profit I want to earn. Profit I want to earn + book cost = sales price. Lulu keeps 20% of this. So you only pay anything if someone buys a book. If no one ever buys your book, it’s ok because Lulu doesn’t charge you. In this scheme the reader really does cover all of the costs! You can even create an ebook, in which case it’s pure profit!

This gives indie writers many, many advantages. First of all, they can set a lower price because they do not have to cover the cost of distribution and markups from the distribution channels and store markups. Second, it allows an author to get his or her work out there without having to lay out any cash. Before, if an author couldn’t get signed by a publisher he or she had to pay for the printing themselves and then get it out and convince Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com to carry it. This is no longer the case! This is truly a wonderful time to be a great writer and you don’t have to remain unknown until a publisher finds you. Just as indie films are often the best, but studios wouldn’t produce it, indie books can be awesome, but not signed. This is dumb because it signals that publishers and producers don’t know what they are doing because good ones are not getting produced – their filter is too strong and it’s filtering out good work.

Andrew, you have some amazing work – get to Lulu now! The rest of you who have always had aspirations of being an author, get to Lulu now! I will blog about this again once I have my first book out. q:o)

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