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The day democracy died

05Apr10

I greatly fear that tomorrow, Tue 6 Apr 2010, will go down in history as the day democracy died.

I am of course writing once again about the Digital Economy Bill [1] in the UK, and its big brother ACTA. Pieces of legislation penned by the lobbyists for media distribution companies and about to be rammed down the throats of their customers the general public. Pieces of legislation that are intended to protect corporate interests in cyberspace, but that have huge unintended consequences for freedom of speech and nascent innovation. Whoever said ‘never pick a fight with somebody who buys ink by the barrel’ was spot on. How ironic that this is about a world where there is no ink, and the only barrels to be seen are thrown by Donkey Kong.

I must confess here that I was naive and complacent. When the bill was formally announced in the 2009 Queen’s speech I thought that there was no chance it would make it through parliament before the looming general election. I thought that it was part of a vanity parade, where each department had to have a slice of the pie on their big day, but that this government would have more important things to see to in its dying days. I thought that the proposed legislation was too fatally flawed to make its way through parliament, that the abandonment  of the consultation process that was supposedly behind the bill would fatally wound it before it got anywhere. I thought that the process would slow it down too much, that it simply wouldn’t get through in time.

I was wrong on every count, and looking back to the summer I wish I had joined the fight sooner.

It is now clear that this is the keeper – the one bill that this government is hell-bent on ramming through. Baron Mandelson (of Modor) has a busy portfolio, but it seems that most of his energy has been expended into seeing this one over the line.

It’s now clear that there is no effective opposition to the bill. The Tories are just as in bed with the media lobby as New Labour, and the Lib Dems changed sides too late to offer much hope of repairing the earlier damage that they wrought. Without an effective opposition it doesn’t matter how defective a piece of legislation is. Sadly it seems that the main UK political parties are too often in violent agreement on what should be contentious issues.

Worst of all this bill has laid bare the damage accumulated over the last thirteen years on Britain’s parliamentary process. New Labour would never have been able to become the new crime a day sausage machine that it is without tearing the obstacles of due process out of their way. Much was made of the changes to who sat in the house of Lords, but I mustn’t have been paying attention to the part where they changed roles to tenderising the sausage before it goes through the machine rather than checking on quality when it comes out. I still thought that the Lords could send back bad legislation to the commons (at least for a few iterations), and that’s just not true any more – the process has been ‘streamlined’ in a way that must be the envy of every tin pot dictator on the planet.

I feel it would be over-egging the pudding to say that there’s been a popular backlash over the last few weeks. Yes, tens of thousands of people have written to their MPs, but I fear that the die is already cast. The digital early settlers that I count myself amongst have fooled ourselves that we have power, that what we say on social networks, in blogs etc. has real impact, that we reach millions at the click of a search button. It’s not true though; the digital natives seem to be just as unaware (or uncaring) of what’s going on as the analogue generation for whom popularity is defined by the talking head on TV (regardless of whether that TV signal is analogue or digital). It leaves me wondering if the media industry are in such a rush over this one because they sense that it’s their last chance?

As I said after my talk at CloudCamp London, I really hope that in a few weeks time I’ll be the idiot who was making a fuss over nothing. At this stage however I really fear that I was just too late, or even that I joined an impossible fight. The dark side to this legislation is that it hands control of the Internet or an Orwelian government machine. When Britain, the supposed home of democracy, becomes like China because the spin doctors and their cronies made it seem like a god idea then we all have something to fear, wherever we live.

[1] I’ve stopped linking to the Wikipedia entry on this, as it seems to me that nobody is keeping in top of the detail, and there’s much better coverage elsewhere. At this stage I can particularly recommend JP’s Blog.


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A tale of bad customer service – Lenovo

17Mar10
I’ve been pretty gushing in the past about Lenovo and their netbooks, but more recently they’ve not been doing much to keep me happy.
About 6 weeks ago I ordered an s10-3t ‘netvertible’ (a netbook crashed into a tablet). It wasn’t exactly what I wanted – I’d have liked a higher resolution screen, and built in 3G, but it seemed like the best option available at the time. When I ordered delivery was supposed to be in 2-3 weeks, so I should have got it by the end of February.
As the end of February approached I started to regularly check my order status online. On Mar 4th my order status changed from ‘released’ to ‘scheduled’ – signs of progress at last.
After days of my order being ‘scheduled’ with no sign of it actually shipping I called the customer services help line to find out what was going on. The customer service rep said that she didn’t know what was going on, would find out, and call me back. I wasn’t called back. Meanwhile when I checked my personal email I found the following (why wasn’t the rep aware of this when I called? The email was sent before my call):
Hi Chris,
We are writing to you regarding your recent purchase of the IdeaPad S10-3T.
Unfortunately we are experiencing some delays with the GPS software that is part of the laptop.
We can ship the laptop out to yourself without the software to save anymore delays.
The software will then be available to download free of charge from our website in April.
If you would rather the laptop is shipped with the software pre-installed there is going to be a delay on the shipment.
Can you please advise us on how you wish to proceed?
Kind regards
Teleweb Team
I replied on the same day (Fri 12 Mar):
Please ship it without delay. I can live without GPS software (that I never even knew was part of the bundle).
No response from Lenovo. No change in status on my order.
On Monday (15 Mar) I tried to call the sales team again, but got routed through to voicemail (despite following the instructions not to do that).
Yesterday (Tue 16 Mar) I emailed again (as it wasn’t convenient for me to call, since I’m at a conference in Barcelona):
Has anything happened about this? When I check my order status online it still says ‘scheduled’. I never received the call back I was promised on Friday, and when I tried to call yesterday I got routed to voicemail.
No reply.
Today I checked my order status again, wishfully hoping to see shipping details, but instead I see ‘cancelled’. WTF?
Since I’m still in no position to call the sales team I’ve sent another email into the black hole:
My order is now showing as cancelled. What is going on? I asked 5 days ago for it to be shipped without delay. Nobody seems to be replying to emails. Return calls that I was promised haven’t happened. I can’t get through to the call center when I try to call. All in all – very poor.
I can’t even reorder from the site, as the s10-3t isn’t available at the moment.
Is there any way that you can reinstate my order and get it on its way to me?
Lenovo – you suck. Doubly so because my mum has had similar issues with the U450 she’s trying to buy from you (twice).
Update (pm 17 Mar):
Hello,
We are writing to you with regards to your order as above.
As you are aware from our previous email we had issues with the GPS software.
Unfortunately now due to component issues we are now unable to fulfil your order for the following product:
IdeaPad S10-3T Cosmic Night (Black) Cover
We therefore will need to cancel your order, the warranty will be cancelled and refunded.
Please find below a 20% voucher code to be used on our website for a future order with ourselves as an apology.
I am still left wondering why people have these machines in other countries? This looks to me like the fiasco with shipping that we had when the X60 was first launched.

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Why are politicians so eager to sell our souls to the media industry?

13Mar10

In answering this question I want to move beyond the obvious – that the politicians sold their own souls years ago, and that the media industry is the devil incarnate, and thus hungry for more.

This is of course another post about the Digital Economy Bill (and ACTA). Pieces of legislation that will trade our freedoms in exchange for securing the business models of the incumbent media distribution industry. Pieces of legislation that will put the felony into felony interference of a business model.

It should surprise only the most naive that this legislation is being penned by the representatives of the media industry (as we have seen from leaks here and here). I find it quaint that we have an industry association called the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) – for real – a trade association that supports the makers of phonographs. I wonder if they have a museum somewhere that I can see a phonograph (I vaguely recall seeing such things in old people’s houses when I was a youngster). There couldn’t be any clearer link between this dangerous law, it’s potentially catastrophic consequences, and the analogue world of yesterday.

The people that make these want to turn off the Internet

Back to the politicians, the ones selling our souls. Why are they doing this:

  • The media industry are gatekeepers to spin. Politicians need TV, they need the papers, they are utterly dependent on the media industry to get their carefully manicured message in front of a celebrity obsessed public. There’s no point in having an army of highly paid spin doctors if the media won’t play along. Giving the media people exactly what they demand is just part of the quid pro quo.
  • The media industry are the gatekeepers to celebrity. Politicians are typically ugly and loathsome creatures. We don’t really want to see or hear from them. But if they’re up on stage with our favourite band then that changes things. Whilst the bands might have some say in which party they get to support, the industry as a whole has the whip hand.
  • There is no longer an effective public service counterbalance. Since Gilligham/Kelly/Hutton the BBC has been emasculated. First it became the Blair Broadcasting Corporation, more recently the Brown Broadcasting Corporation – too terrified of having to give up another radio station, or digital TV channel or chunk of web presence if the political overlords tilt the balance further in favour of commercial media.

Of course with this in mind it should be no surprise that people haven’t heard of the Digital Economy Bill and ACTA – how would they without the media industry to spoon feed it to them – the same media industry that’s behind all this. They may be backward, but they’re not stupid. If you do one thing beside writing to your MP today about this scandal then tell a friend, a relative, anybody about what’s going on, because the papers and TV certainly won’t.

The message is clear. The politicians value the media industry more than they value you (and your vote). They’re sure that you’ll just suck it all up as part of your all sugar diet of celebrity. Prove them wrong.


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My letter to my MP about the Digital Economy Bill

12Mar10
Dear Mr Soames,
As the Digital Economy Bill leaves the Lords and heads to the Commons I’m writing to you in the hope that you can help stop (or fix) this damaging piece of legislation.
Much ink has already been spilled on the issues around ‘piracy’ of media content such as music, videos, games and ebooks. Whilst I hope that the industry can adapt so that it better serves the digital generation this is not my concern.
The problem with the bill as it stands (and particularly amendment 120) is the potential for unintended consequences. An area of great interest to me as a Corporate Finance professional is the development of the IT industry. One of the places that we’re seeing great growth, and a real opportunity for British firms to compete on a global scale, is Software as a Service (SaaS). These companies depend on a working Internet, an Internet where somebody can’t just shut parts down with a court order.
Let me give you an example. Most of the services that my firm uses on a day to day basis make use of a web service called S3 offered by Amazon. Clients that are building SaaS solutions also rely on S3. S3 presently hosts over 100,000,000,000,000 pieces of content, some of which are sure to infringe upon copyright. With an amendment 120 court order a rights holder could require UK Internet Service Providers to block S3, and in so doing render useless the applications that depend upon it.
This is not far fetched hysteria. We have seen many damaging effects from the unintended consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States – a piece of legislation that the Digital Economy Bill is loosely modelled on. Sadly in their haste to rush the Digital Economy Bill onto the statute books before a general election Labour have had far less time to thoughtfully consider what some of the unintended consequences might be.
As the bill passes through the house I hope that you will consider it’s impact upon the full range of British industry, and not just the media distribution firms and their desire to cling onto analogue generation business models.
Please join the fight to stop this dangerous and poorly thought through piece of legislation before it wrecks the very parts of the British economy that it’s name suggests it’s there to help.
Yours sincerely,
Chris Swan
BEng MBA MIET CEng
Director
Capital SCF

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Digital Economy Bill vs SaaS

11Mar10

This evening I was supposed to be doing a lightening talk on PaaS at London CloudCamp, which would cover the stuff that I did over Christmas and New Year. Hopefully I’ll get to do that another day, as right now I feel obliged to speak out about an amendment that’s been introduced to the Digital Economy Bill by the House of Lords.  Here are the slides that I’m going to be presenting  (register at http://cloudcamplondon7.eventbrite.com/ if you’d like to come along):

There’s been some good coverage already of the (unintended?) consequences of amendment 120. Cory Doctorow pointed out what this could mean for ‘web lockers‘, and Richard Clayton examines whether it’s intended to be a wrecking amendment.

My concern is that it could be used against Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, especially their storage services such as Amazon’s S3. Such action could have enormous collateral damage on Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that rely on these underlying storage services. A good deal of the SaaS that I use day to day, that we depend on to run our firm, makes use of S3 and similar.

I hope that Richard is right, and that this wrecks a massively misconceived piece of legislation. I do however fear that there’s worse to come under the auspices of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Whilst I’m as sick of the sight of knock off Louis Vuitton bags as the next man, and don’t want to be buying brake pads that are made from cheese, I have deep fears that ACTA will impose an international copyright regime that will break the Internet as we know it. Of course it’s hard to substantiate these fears as the whole thing is being negotiated in secret, and the established media aren’t doing much to report on it (as it’s their owners that we find behind the whole thing). The first step is to get the agreement out into open public debate – sunlight is a great disinfectant – and it’s good to see some steps in that direction coming from the European Parliament.


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Review – TomTom for iPod Touch

07Mar10

I was a GPS refusenik for quite a while. The problem as I perceived it was rarely knowing where you are, I can get a decent road atlas for a few quid, and years on the bridge of Her Majesty’s ships has instilled strong navigation fu that doesn’t wear off. I finally caved and bought my wife a TomTom One after a trip home from the Lake District where it became obvious that none of this helped much when I was behind the wheel. Since then I’ve gotten kind of lazy, and will normally grab the PND before heading somewhere unfamiliar.

With a family holiday coming up in the States I thought it would be a good idea to get some US maps for the One. At least until I saw the price, and also that there wasn’t enough memory on my device (in fact it seems that only the most expensive devices have the space for you to buy more expensive maps – an odd choice in my mind). So… what would I do?

I’ve dabbled with using a GPS on my netbook, but it doesn’t seem to fix fast enough, it’s hard to position it right, and the (Microsoft) software is a bit clunky. Certainly a cheap option, but probably not something that’s going to work when I’m driver rather than copilot.

I considered buying a PND in that US, but it seemed hard to justify getting something that would only ever have US maps on (I go there a fair bit, but most trips I don’t drive). It also appeared that anything that could handle more maps for back at home was going to be expensive (e.g. as expensive as buying something at home and getting US maps).

TomTom for the iPhone/iPod looked like a nice idea, but it’s not particularly cheap, and the reviews of v1.2 seemed pretty mixed. A sals offer with $10/€10 off the maps, and a free upgrade to the next release was too tempting though, and I was able to find a TomTom car kit for my iPod Touch on eBay for a reasonable discount against the list price (which is frankly insane, given that you can get a TomTom Start for the same dough).

I gave it a road test yesterday, which revealed some good points:

  • The car holder attaches easily, holds firmly and allows you to choose between portrait and landscape orientation
  • It seems to fix quickly
  • It works just like I’d expect a TomTom to work
  • The built in speaker might be a sanity saver for those hire cars without a line in jack or bluetooth

and some bad:

  • It only works when plugged into the USB charger
  • It forgets routes if you have to exit the app to change the music that’s playing
  • Pausing any music that you have playing for turn by turn instructions gets annoying really quickly
  • No downloadable voices (we’ve got to quite like having Homer Simpson on the One)
  • The adaptor will probably take nearly the same space in a travel bag as a separate PND would
  • The ‘advanced lane guidance’ isn’t all that good, for example coming off the M3 to the M25 it showed that we could use either of the exit lanes when in fact we needed to be in the right one if we didn’t want to find ourselves heading the wrong way.
  • The ‘advanced lane guidance’ also doesn’t seem to respect the choice of day/night colours
  • ‘Advanced lane guidance’ as you leave a motorway can leave you with little time to figure out which lane you’re supposed to be at the top of the slip road
  • I’ve never used TomTom’s traffic or ‘Live’ services, so I don’t miss them, but I suspect this may be a huge omission (especially on an iPhone or MiFi’d iPod)
  • Position tracking on roundabouts seems a little behind the curve (e.g. not as good as I recall from my One)

That seems like a lot of bad versus good, which probably distorts the overall picture. It’s not THAT bad, there’s just plenty of room for improvement. Fingers crossed for v1.3 and that free upgrade. I’ll post again following the upgrade or if I have a significantly different experience with the US maps.

Update – 24 Mar 2010

Well, that 1.3 upgrade came out shortly before my trip to the US. The best part seems to be that it talks over the (faded) music now rather than stopping it, and there are controls for the music that’s playing (though no ability to select a new album or playlist). There’s no sign of the traffic features on my iPod, so I’m guessing that’s an iPhone only feature – a shame, as I’d be happy to pay for a day here or there, and it should work fine with a MiFi. On my run from Tampa to Kissemmee the route was fine (and I’m starting to find that portrait orientation makes loads more sense for a wider screen device). My only disappointment is that TomTom though that huge chunks of the I4 had a 65mph speed limit where the posted limit was actually 70mph (and those signs looked far from new) – dodgy data like that undermines confidence.

Update – 3 Apr 2010

More disappointment followed over the last couple of weeks using my iPod and TomTom in the US. It wasn’t just the I4 where it got speed limits wrong. To be honest it seemed so inconsistent that speed limits were more guidance than rules. I was also deeply unimpressed with the user experience as I left Tampa for the airport – the route through the city’s grid system felt like a torpedo avoidance zig-zag – far too much turn right, then get in the left hand lane, turn left, then get in the right hand lane (which was bad enough for me, but a real struggle for my poor father in law following behind). The system seems to badly need something akin to advanced lane guidance for city grids (it is after all easy to place yourself into the right lane if you know ahead of the turn which one you’re going to need for the next turn).


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Fixing the fan on my noisy Lenovo s10e

23Feb10

I’ve written before about my trusty Lenovo s10e, which I’ve had for about a year now.

Recently though I’ve been loving my little netbook a lot less, as the fan was making such an atrocious noise that people on the other side of my office were complaining. Sadly this seems to be a common problem.

Today I decided to dive in and have a look, using the hardware maintenance manual as my guide. There was nothing obvious wrong with the heat sink and fan assembly (other than the pathetic jury rig of spacers and heat conductive plastic). I was however able to remove the fan itself from the rest of the assembly (after taking out 3 more little screws), and it turns out that it’s held together by magnetic force, making it a snap to detach the fan vanes from the motor mechanism.

After putting on a dab of high temperature CV grease (of the sort that I have for motorcycle maintenance) I put everything back together and we’re back to silent(ish) running. Hopefully I’ll have a few days of happy use before my s10-3t arrives and the s10e heads into the family hand-me-down hardware cascade.


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3 MiFi mini review redux

09Feb10

A little while ago I wrote about my 3 MiFi. To cut a long story short I wasn’t impressed, and rather wish that I had sent it back and got a refund. My mood wasn’t helped by the subsequent price drop of the PAYG package from £99 to £49 (albeit without 3 months of PAYG data that I didn’t need in the first place).

Crippled

It turns out that the device can actually do many of the things that I wanted it to do, it’s just that Three had crippled it. The main problem is the removal of the web interface (though there are rumours that Three may sanction a firmware update that will bring it back). The web interface presents options so that the MiFi can be ‘always on’ (as I think it should be when powered up).

Unlocking

It seems that DC-unlocker is now able to unlock the Huawei E5830, so for €15 you can use it on any network. I’ve also read various reports that Three will unlock a MiFi for £15, which seems pretty reasonable. Sadly the web interface lacks the ability to reconfigure APNs, so if you’re swapping SIMs around then you’ll need to use the WiFi Manager application.

Sadly PAYG SIMs that you might use when roaming seem to be no easier to get now than they were 6 months ago.

Upgrading Firmware

After getting my MiFi unlocked I was able to get at the web interface by doing a firmware update, following the instructions I found here. It was a hairy experience, and at one stage I thought I’d bricked the device. Luckily it has a maintenance mode that I found out about in this Chinenglish upgrade guide, which is entered by pressing and holding the mobile dial button then the power button for 5 seconds (after which the signal LED turns red and the battery LED turns yellow). After going into that maintenance mode I was able to get the firmware updater to talk to it again, and eventually managed a successful update. Huawei certainly have some work to do on their firmware update software to stop it from being so much like playing Russian roulette.

Web interface

The web interface is basic but functional. Having found the default username and password (admin/admin) I was able to get in and set it up so that it would establish a 3G/HSDPA data connection whenever powered on (which I still think should be the default). It works reasonably well on my iPod Touch as well as my netbook (at least on FireFox), making it easy to check on device status without having to physically poke and prod at it.

Residual concerns

Battery life is still a bit of an issue. It’s probably enough for my daily commute, but anything longer than that means you need USB power from somewhere (and the cable to hook it up).

I’m still not entirely convinced by the sensitivity of the antenna and receiver (which may just have an optimal orientation that I haven’t figured out yet). My sense right now is that it’s not quite as good as my Novatel XU870, but probably better than most USB dongles. I guess in the non commuting use case it has the advantage that you can place it where signal strength is best, which isn’t so easy with something attached to your laptop or whatever.

The 5 device limit for WiFi connections makes little sense to me. I get it that sharing a 3G connection with 5 laptops would probably be stretching things thin, but even on my commute I’d probably use it with 3 devices (netbook, iPod and BlackBerry) – so there’s not much to spare. A friend recently installed a MiFi in his rural house that suffers a lack of wired broadband. He’s very happy just to be online, and pleased that he often gets around 1Mb/s (sometimes a little more), but 5 devices goes quickly when you have a kids PC, a Wii, Nintendo DSIs, iPhones, netbooks etc. Of course most of these devices aren’t actually making use of the connection at any given time, but having to manually switch their WiFi on and off to keep within the connection limit will be a pain. I’ve suggested to my friend that he puts Windows 7 onto an old netbook and then uses Connectify to extend the WiFi bubble and work around the connection limit.

It’s still plasticky, though with the always on mode in action I can leave it in an old sunglasses bag and ignore the ugliness (and prevent scratches and other wear and tear).

For keeps

I’m well past being able to send it back, but with unlocked SIM capability and upgraded firmware that lets me do what I want with it I’m much happier with it. Happy enough that it will soon become my main means of mobile access as I ditch my old s10e netbook in favour of a new s10-3t ‘netvertible’ (which lacks the expresscard slot I need for my XU870).


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iPod, eBook, dAllowance

02Feb10

‘Can I have an iPod Touch for my birthday?’ asked my five year old daughter yesterday (the birthday isn’t far away), ‘Susie has one, and she’s 6’. ‘No’, came my reply, ‘I gave you an iPod mini just a few weeks ago’. We’ve been going through a bit of an iPod upgrade cycle around the house since I filled up my old 1G Touch and decided to splash out on a newer 32GB model.

The physical kit is just the start of the problem though – what about content?

I was rather surprised to discover during my upgrade process that I didn’t have to rebuy my apps for my old iPod touch. It seems that the 5 ‘authorised’ machines that Apple allows me also translates to 5 devices worth of apps from a single account. To be honest I wouldn’t have minded buying Bejewelled 2 and Drop 7 again for my wife, as they’re only a couple of quid each.

Having a ‘family’ account for iTunes seems like a good plan (especially when it means that I don’t have to repeat buy the same stuff), but I sense trouble ahead…

  • Firstly I’m not going to give my kids my iTunes password. Not only does it almost certainly break the terms of service (though why should I really care about that?), but it’s the digital equivalent of handing over an entire book of blank cheques. For similar reasons they also don’t get to have my eBay, Amazon or PayPal passwords (and I’ve started using two factor authentication for eBay and PayPal so that saved passwords don’t make my machine a soft target to work around this).
  • Secondly what happens when they grow up and leave home? Do the mp3s that I bought for them (with my email address or some other identification almost certainly burnt into the metadata) have legal right of passage? When they are old enough to have a credit card and their own account will they be obliged to repurchase all of their old favourites? Will the ACTA empowered copyright goons at international borders be understanding when my daughter has married, but still carries content with her old the wrong name burnt into it?
  • Thirdly I don’t always want to be the bottleneck on this stuff. If the kids want to spend their Christmas, birthday and pocket money on Hannah Montana mp3s, or Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters then I’d rather be out of the loop. If they wanted to buy the physical versions of these things (or even vouchers for some of the relevant services) then they can just walk into a shop and put cash on the counter.

What seems to be missing here is some sort of flexible electronic payments system for kids. Something that puts them in control of whatever allowance or gifts that they’re given (and let’s not forget that vouchers are like cash, only less good) – this needs to be better than cash, money that you can spend anywhere on the internet (that kids would go). Maybe when Rixty escapes from the US (and provided that it gets some broader adoption with the relevant services) it will be the thing? There is however a LOT going on in the payments world at the moment, particularly with prepaid debit, so plenty of scope for innovation and competition.

One potential spoiler is that many services (e.g. Amazon) insist on a credit card for digital products (presumably because the know you customer stuff that sits behind these products provides a stronger anchor to a given geography so that content distribution companies can play their stupid games with windows). Maybe those companies don’t see kids as an important market? Maybe they think that by pissing them off when they’re teenagers they’ll be all the more keen to buy their stuff when they’re ‘grown up’ and allowed proper plastic? Or maybe something new will come along and dis-intermediate these people back into the 20th century where their business model came from.


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eBooks and price discrimination

01Feb10

The weekend brought a bit of a storm over Amazon booting Macmillan off its platform, which has brought lots of worthy analysis from Charles Stross, Tim Bray and others.

Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that the whole problem with eBooks is that they have only one dimension for price discrimination – time. For dead tree traditional books there tends to be a conflation of physical form discrimination (hardback versus paperback) and time discrimination (the hardback gets released first), but there’s loads of scope for making things very special indeed – author’s signed copies, custom bindings and more.

I’ve been frustrated in the past by having to buy a heavy hardcover when I want to get the latest release from one of my favourite authors. I’d have happily paid much the same cover price for the smaller lighter paperback. So maybe price discrimination on time only can be made to work for eBooks. But, the medium does constrain choice from a distribution point of view – as the eBook device owner has already chosen physical size and weight, what the outside looks like (a leather binding to fool airline stewardesses perhaps) etc. I also wonder if cover art is dead (removing some cost from the overall value chain, but also end of lifing a small creative channel)? It is clearly going to be hard to make a bunch of bits special.

This is a very different phenomenon versus what digitisation has done to the music industry, where the ‘1000 true fans‘ approach allows more performers to earn a living being creative (and not have to have a day job). Books are not performance art. I don’t necessarily want to hear my favourite author read their work (live or on an audio book), I won’t go on their stadium tour, I may buy the T-shirt (and perhaps that’s where the cover art gets displaced to). Books are also BIG compared to songs, it takes months to write a novel (and many train rides and flights for me to read one).

As the value chain between author and reader gets squeezed we need to find some new local optimum where the author earns enough to keep writing, and the other ancillary people like editors get paid. I notice that whilst many of my favourite authors like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are keen to see their work in eBooks, and keen to avoid nasty DRM etc., they also seem go out of their way to support their publishers, editors etc. by not providing a side channel around them (where the fan could go straight to the author and pay them for content in certain forms). This contrasts with the possibilities that digital distribution opens up, which I experienced first hand when Craig Murray took the decision to self publish The Catholic Orangemen of Togo (having been threatened with litigation under the UK’s rather onerous libel laws). Having ordered a hardcover from Amazon that clearly wasn’t going to get to me any time soon I ended up cancelling my slice of dead tree and sending Craig what he said he’d get from the cover price (if I bought direct) and printed the PDF to read on the train. The economics of this transaction are interesting – cover price £17.99 (discounted to £11.87 on Amazon), profit to Craig £3.60 (only £0.80 from Amazon), cost for me to print 226 page PDF on my duplex laser printer £1.13. So…

  • Craig doing his own distribution gets him £3.60/£17.99, or around 20% – and £14.39 is left on the table for ‘distribution’
  • Me printing Craig’s PDF gets him £3.60/£4.73, or around 76% – with nothing left on the table for ‘distribution’
    • Of course if abuse DRM hadn’t put me off buying an eBook reader then I wouldn’t have needed to do any printing at all
  • Amazon selling Craig’s book gets him £0.80/£11.87 – just 7% – and £11.07 goes into ‘distribution’

Obviously Amazon is much better at ‘distribution’ than Craig is, but more obviously self publishing eBooks could totally ruin the ‘distribution’ business. No wonder Amazon is being heavy handed, but I sense that there’s more at stake here in the long run, and that the time dimension of how we consume from established authors is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Updated to add and moments after I pressed publish another great piece of commentary from Charles Stross. I think we can agree on the end game ‘the correct model for selling ebooks (profitably and at a fair price) is to establish a direct-to-public retail channel, like Baen’s Webscription subsidiary. Oh, and once you’re there, you can ditch the annoying DRM.’ All I’m left wondering is how much of a role publishers will have in that direct-to-public channel, especially for new authors?


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