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Cory Doctorow is fighting back against Amazon's Audible
- hoistbypetard 6y agoIMO the coolest thing about this kickstarter didn't even get a mention in the fastcompany article. One of the premiums is, for people who donate $10000 or more, an opportunity to commission another story set in this universe based on a mutually agreed writing prompt. He's offering 5 of those, and 3 have been claimed. That's brilliant. Think what a windfall that could be for some writers. This is the first time I've noticed anyone trying this model. It's easy to imagine that it could work well for some creators (not necessarily only writers) with a small but ardent and growing fan base.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThat is of course Cory's genius. He sees the business model in the noise.
- golem14 6y agoDonate ( to a charity) or pay?
- Igelau 6y ago> another story set in this universe based on a mutually agreed writing prompt I have a feeling that conversation goes something like: "Yeah, that's interesting and all, but I was thinking something more along the lines of a plucky tech whizkid sticking it to a surveillance state infiltrated by megacorporations. Maybe with some early 90s tech? Do we have an agreement?" Caveat emptor? Unless you really feel like giving him a big stack of money, which I guess is alright.
- aasasd 6y ago> a plucky tech whizkid sticking it to a surveillance state infiltrated by megacorporations I mean, that's the ‘Little Brother’ dilogy, perhaps with the exception of megacorporations.
- an_opabinia 6y agoOn the one hand most people are awful writers. On the same hand, being Cory Doctorow’s boss would be stupid. The whole point of paying him ought to be to do his thing, not yours. On the other hand anyone who spends $10,000 on a story should already know that. Or maybe Cory Doctorow will tell the payer. Not all fanfic is bad. Particularly atmospheric stuff, normal people can do quite nicely.
- Semaphor 6y ago> This is the first time I've noticed anyone trying this model. It’s pretty common for crowdfunded video games to have anything from naming side-characters to working with writers for a complete quest line or NPC. This seems to simply introduce it to books.
- aasasd 6y agoThat's just writing-for-commission. I think that model is quite widespread among small-scale writers, of the Tumblr sort: with fanfics and such. At least, I know that artists can rake in quite some monies if they draw in a modern web-hipster style and agree to portray someone's fantasies. Specifically porn fantasies, and more specifically furry porn fantasies.
- 082349872349872 6y agoCompare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_of_Venus
- klondike_klive 6y agoI find it amusing that the cover photo of "Delta of Venus" is attributed to Richard Merkin. A merkin is a pubic wig.
- teddyh 6y ago“I wish there were a class of wealthy art patrons like in renaissance Italy.” — http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/move-with-the-times http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/move-with-the-times
- TekMol 6y agoSpeaking of audiobooks .. Is there a good place to buy audiobooks as simple MP3s?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYes there is! My go-to's at the moment are libro.fm and downpour.com. Google Play also offers downloads but it tends to be more expensive, assuming you're making use of Libro and Downpour's credit system.
- TekMol 6y agoI looked at libro.fm now, but I don't understand what I get if I buy an "Audiobook" over there. The word "mp3" seems to appear nowhere on the site. The situation is similar, though slightly better on downpour.com. At least they say "digital download". But not what you can download after you buy. They mention mp3s on their FAQ page. So it might be worth a try. But I would feel more comfortable if I really knew what I buy before I buy.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoLibro.fm gives you a .zip containing MP3 files. Downpour lets you choose between an .m4b (an Apple format using aac audio, basically an mp4) and .mp3's. Both websites say explicitly in the FAQ that all downloads are DRM-Free, although libro.fm makes a bigger deal out of it. If there's a screenshot or something that would make you feel more comfortable about what you're getting, let me know...
- forbiddenvoid 6y agoI understand the issues with DRM. I respect Cory's position. But honestly, Audible is how I listen to audiobooks. If it's not there, I'm not going to buy it. I've pretty much transitioned all of my casual, entertainment reading to audio (still using physical/digital for more technical reading).
- kick 6y agoWhat was the point of this comment? You listen using a service that abuses its users and you want everyone to know it, sure, but...there's literally no substance to the comment. It's pure fluff. You didn't even explain why or give any reasoning whatsoever. Just, "I do [thing]."
- TylerE 6y agoIf the way Audible treats me is abuse, I can only say I wish more companies were abusive. It is absolutely frictionless and cheaper than competing services. All my titles are available on all my devices, and progress syncs perfectly. As a consumer, it is far far easier and more convenient than having to manually download mp3s off a shared drive or something, never mind the issue of how you sync progress.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThis gets to one of the main issues. Opponents of DRM need an equivalent service (ubiquity of apps for listening, reliability of progress syncing, discoverability of new content) and they need to market it. Audible has become synonymous with audiobooks for many people, so alternate services need better marketing to reach those consumers.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> You listen using a service that abuses its users It doesn't abuse me. It makes my life net better than it was before I used it. This is a really important point for you - many people value what they practically get from a service - not abstract concepts of freedom. What I care about is getting to listen to the book. I don't care about your DRM problems. I don't care about file formats. I care about the words that the author wrote going into my head. That's what I came for. If they give me that I'm a happy customer.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoThe kick stater campaign is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book/rewards https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface... I'm very curious to know what the original ending of little brother was. Sad to say it's sold out, and even if it weren't, I don't have 1k to find out. I hope we can all find out eventually.
- kkdsafjid 6y agoShouldn't it be available as a free download somewhere?
- e12e 6y agoSeems unlikely - at least until someone receives via the KS and scans it: > The first draft of Little Brother had a VERY different ending. No one except my editor and my agent have even seen it. I will hand-copy it for you in my atrocious handwriting and mail it to you to use as you see fit.
- kkdsafjid 6y agoAh didn't know that story, thought it was just about the first book.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoI've long bemoaned the sorry state of English audiobooks in comparison to Russian audiobooks. Audiobook interpreters like Игорь Князев or Александр Клюквин are household names to Russian speakers. Can any English speaker remember the name of the interpreter of their favourite audiobook? Only when it's the author himself, I guess. And only because of the abysmal quality. There were once radio plays, but with the demise of radio, audio plays barely exist nowadays in English while they still strive in Russian. This largely due to the difference in markets. English-speaking market is dominated by corporations and is severely policed. Russian-speaking market is grassroots, uncensored and abundant in small producers / new names. P.S. Aside from the hard-to-find recordings from 1960..1990ies, French audiobooks are even worse.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoMy favorite audiobook, The Golden Compass, does so happen to be narrated by the author (with a full cast of different actors reading dialogue), but Michael Kramer is my favorite single-narrator, and I do remember his name.
- TylerE 6y agoThere are absolutely "name" audio book recorders in English. Scott Brick being the most well known, probably, although there are several others.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoThanks for the hint, Scott Brick is gorgeous, indeed.
- riffnote 6y agoI'll take this opportunity to recommend Downpour, an Audible alternative I use. No DRM, you can download your audiobooks in mp3 format: https://downpour.com https://downpour.com
- elFarto 6y agoThe DRM on the Audible downloads is so easy to remove, then you can have it in whatever format you want: ffmpeg -activation_bytes <your magic bytes> -i inputfile.aax -vn -c:a copy output.m4a You'll need to search around for how to find out your magic bytes, but it's not difficult.
- mxuribe 6y agoBut i guess the point is that it sorta sucks that such a thing even has to be done/considered, right? I happily pay an author for their work, but dislike drm and other similar controls.
- kick 6y agoCongratulations, you've committed a felony. That's what Doctorow's protesting: that Amazon forces you to commit a felony to do something as basic as changing a file format. He points this out in his Kickstarter: What's more, Audible won't allow you to sell your audiobooks through their store unless you allow them to wrap your books in their DRM, which cannot be removed without committing a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Every audiobook you buy from Audible is locked to Amazon's platform...forever. They can revoke access to the book (they've done this with Kindle ebooks, starting with -- I shit you not -- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four... You can't make this stuff up!).
- m463 6y agoIt kind of depends on the location of the commenter. He could live in a country without those pesky US laws or be posting from international waters.
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- aasasd 6y agoDunno how I'm expected to read that article while a jumpy vid is playing next to it on the right, being nailed to the screen despite my scrolling, and a keyboard-focus-stealing popup opens on the left, covering the content. Regarding Doctorow, afaik he took the Audible-avoiding course years ago, negotiating with his publisher that the audiobooks are to not have DRM. I went through his books in 2018, so the story must be at least that old.
- dcow 6y agoDoes your browser have a reader mode? Firefox and Safari do and it works wonderfully. I use it all the time in situations like this.
- thayne 6y agoGood for him!
- chrisseaton 6y ago> to sidestep the walled garden of Amazon-owned audiobook platform Audible Aren't all stores a 'walled garden'? They decide what they want to sell. Curation. Seems completely reasonable to me? > Instead, Doctorow is selling the recorded version of the book through a Kickstarter campaign, and it will also be available through non-Amazon vendors like Google’s Play store and libro.fm So there's multiple competing options he can already use? What on earth is the problem here?
- choward 6y ago> Aren't all stores a 'walled garden'? I'd call them "gardens". I'd called them "walled" if they use DRM and force you to consume it in their garden.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> if they use DRM and force you to consume it in their garden Like a restaurant without a takeaway service? How evil.
- choward 6y agoNot even close to being the same at all. For starters, I'm sure they'll give you a togo box if you don't finish unless it's a buffet. When you "buy" a book you should be able to read it whenever you want forever and not rely on the company you bought it from not going out of business. Or they may add ads to the app you HAVE to use to consume it. With food, you're paying for that one experience of eating the food. It's not like the company can take that away from you in the future. It's not supposed to last forever. It's one and done.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> I'm sure they'll give you a togo box if you don't finish In the UK restaurants don’t do this so your surety is misplaced. > When you "buy" a book you should be able to read it whenever you want forever and not rely on the company you bought it from not going out of business. That’s what you care about. What I care about is most convenient access now. Why is your priority the true one and mine a result of abuse?
- scrame 6y agoCory Doctorow has been irrelevant for 15 years. There is a good case to be made for people not reading any more, and a concern of amazon owning the listening time of people like they own the delivery and server space, but a marketing gimmick from the former editor of boingboing.com aint gonna turn the tide.
- pmoriarty 6y agoIrrelevant for whom exactly? He's relevant enough to make HN's front page. I've also been following his blog (and the Boing Boing website) for years (and the Boing Boing paper zine before that). I've never read his fiction, but his writing on technology, privacy and surveillance capitalism is eloquent, interesting, and insightful and has always been worth my time.
- m463 6y agoI think science fiction authors never become irrelevant. They tend to grow in popularity like new technologies - overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the long term.
- 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 6y agoI would like to point out that there is a thriving torrent scene for ebooks and audiobooks.
- vaccinator 6y agolibgen for audio books?
- superkuh 6y agoText to speech that you can run on your own computer is not great but it gets the job done without involving audible. I personally like it because it doesn't have the interpretation that human readers bring to stories. Of course I still find myself still battling DRM for even text ebooks just to get access to the raw text itself for use with command line tools.
- ebg13 6y ago> Text to speech that you can run on your own computer is not great Understatement of the century. > I personally like it because it doesn't have the interpretation that human readers bring to stories. I suspect that you're in the minority for audiobook listeners. Does this mean that you don't like movies because of the interpretation that human actors, directors, videographers, and composers bring to the scripts? I don't enjoy _ever_ narrator, but there are a lot of really fantastic human narrators out there.
- superkuh 6y ago> does this mean that you don't like movies because of the interpretation Pretty much everyone acknowledges the books are almost always better. Part of the reason is this, yes.
- ebg13 6y ago> Pretty much everyone acknowledges the books are almost always better. Part of the reason is this, yes. It's usually not the reason, though. People say "the book is better" because films necessarily have to remove a bunch of content in order to fit within a movie timeframe, which requires changing the narrative arc. That's an entirely unrelated issue.
- bawana 6y agoSo when is the app coming out that reads the epub of my choice in the natural voice of the narrator I like? You cant tell me that Google didn't already show this a couple of years ago - it was making restaurant reservations back then.
- teekert 6y agoI've been bitten by DRM and I know people that have lost music they paid for because of it. I once ran into a DRMed version of Little Brother, reported it and got a personal response from Cory. I think that is pretty cool. He's definitely one of my heroes and I love to support these kind of initiatives.
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- rrauenza 6y agoI'm confused and haven't found an answer in the comments yet -- he won't release the audiobook on Amazon because of DRM -- but he is releasing the ebook on Amazon? Isn't that also DRM? Is he just picking his battles one by one? Or is somehow the Amazon ebook DRM acceptable whereas the audio isn't? (Genuinely curious...)
- frio 6y agoYou can sell DRM free ebooks on Amazon.
- kikokikokiko 6y agoHe's just using this gimmick to draw attention, and it worked.
- trissylegs 6y ago> For traditional e-books, Amazon lets publishers offering titles on Kindle decide whether or not to include DRM.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwawaynothx 6y agoI find it hilarious the Ebook is bundled with massive amounts of DRM and hes fine having that on amazon, But NOOOO not the audio book?
- hutattedonmyarm 6y agoIt’s not though? You can get the ebooks DRM free directly from him and amazon offers the ability to not use their DRM for ebooks
- edanm 6y agoHonestly, I respect Cory Doctorow for sticking to his principles and doing something that is sure to hurt financially. Unfortunately, like many other people, I only ever listen to audiobooks on Audible, and if something isn't there - I won't listen to it. This is rare enough that it almost never happens - and my list of books to read is long enough that I will never ever run out of things I want to read. I've actually never read Cory Doctorow's books (yet!), so I'm obviously not the people he imagines as the prime market for this in any case.
- mjburgess 6y agoIt's not clear to me that this is "sure to hurt". Whilst dressed up in the language of principle it is, in economic terms, just another creative whose reputation provides for a "pre-sold" market he is able to exploit for greater personal profit. Pretty standard: Louis CK was the first mover in comedy on this; pop artists are following. The "basic internet" works extremely well as a dumb & free distribution channel if you don't need to build an audience. I'm not saying Cory is insincere, but I am unconvinced his sincerity would hold were he a budding author. On the surface at least, it just reads like yet another artist hamstrung by their distributor whose reputation has superseded their need. If one were to be even more cynical, as Cory himself admits, you could see the whole anti-amazon complaint as a mere marketing tactic. It is, in any case, /why/ this has succeeded and why we are talking about it.
- webmaven 6y ago> I'm not saying Cory is insincere, but I am unconvinced his sincerity would hold were he a budding author. On the surface at least, it just reads like yet another artist hamstrung by their distributor whose reputation has superseded their need. Umm... Cory has been doing this sort of thing (such as releasing his novels as gratis+libre ebooks in multiple formats) from the very beginning (2003), eg.: https://craphound.com/down/download/ https://craphound.com/down/download/ You can find them freely (and legally) distributed by various 3rd parties: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826 https://manybooks.net/authors/doctorow.html https://manybooks.net/authors/doctorow.html http://www.feedbooks.com/author/93 http://www.feedbooks.com/author/93
- kkdsafjid 6y agoIsn't a paper book also kind of DRMed? It's pretty difficult to copy? You could put it on a photo copier, but then I guess you could also tape record an audible book to copy it. I respect that he wants his books to be available without DRM, but why not simply offer a way for audible shoppers to download a DRM free copy from another source?
- LibertyBeta 6y agoCory, first and foremost, sticks to his guns and writes what he believes. Glad to see this getting some press. He makes me want to ditch my kindle for a kobo, but the book buying experience is just not as good/workable for me along with rebuying my catalogue. Not to mention cost of hardware.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoI guess it is good publicity and easy money. I dont see how an established author like Cory needs a Kickstarter to finance an audiobook. I think he can do easily on his own, and have various companies queuing outside his door to finance or publish it. If you were an unknown author and none of the established publishers were interested I see that as a Kickstarter candidate but then raising funding would be difficult. Cory has all sorts of means og financing and getting paid