3 ms·

Lets mature web standards so that one can write and publish a book - with just html. Then also do distributed search so that one can find things. Something wi

by 6510 6y ago

Lets mature web standards so that one can write and publish a book - with just html. Then also do distributed search so that one can find things. Something with supper nodes for those of us who want faster and more complex queries. html, with some minor upgrades, again seems good enough. DRM is a silly idea, we should forget about it. Just write free works until the audience is impressed enough to donate to current effort. And finally some simple to use aggregation formula so that authors can learn what we want to read about. No more middle men.

hk__2 6y ago
> Just write free works until the audience is impressed enough to donate to current effort. I get the rest of the comment, but I don’t understand that part: unless you already have too much money, there’s absolutely no reason you should work for free.
- 6510 6y ago
  You don't need to much money to do what you like. I want to see a basic income which makes DRM one of the many "old world" formulas that cant work perfectly even if you throw infinite money at it. To pay people to write is as simple as it sounds. While some components might be legitimate there is really no end to greed in rent seeking formulas. We can look at the TV license in the UK to see what the future might look like. They didn't even have the modern tools to monitor everyone. The system involves a database of houses where the license was not purchased. Agents will make unannounced visits to search your house. In stead of impossible some would argue it was simply a hard problem to write into law. From that perspective we failed to create a carefully balanced set of rules. As long as the demands are small steps the copyright industry gets what they want every time while the consumer, the party argued to so greatly benefit from these laws (what a joke),..... well.... the consumer gets to play and sing songs from before 1923! When Swartz downloaded a pile of ancient garbage articles he was going to get 35 years in prison for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. This is complete nonsense and everyone knows it. If the industry wants to go full retard it should be treated as such. Therefore we should burn it to the ground and keep the authors and keep the artists. Pay them for what they do. The only thing that matters is that the unwashed masses who already cant find work get access to educational materials. Everything else is either not important or simply entertainment. You cant use tax money for entertainment as long as you are taking it from people who can barely pay their bills. You can use it to sponsor crowd funding so that they can learn useful things and ponder the many intelligent thoughts others wrote down. To me this sounds a lot better than [say] sponsoring scientific journals with public funds so that they can paywall the stuff we've paid for. There are tons of old books. People can go read those first before demanding more free work from authors for the benefit of publishers. It is also easy to remove % fees from app stores by writing some laws. Or are we to think it will bankrupt google and apple? I cant recall paying Microsoft any fees. It is my country. The legal system is there to serve me.
gamblor956 6y ago
You can already do all of that. Epub is just html in a wrapper file. I don't know what a supper node is. Is it anything like a breakfast node or dinner node? Seems like it would be quite messy to mix food with ink. Writing free stuff works for a few people. Most people can't afford it. This means we'd end up with significantly fewer written works, and almost of what remained would be the highly-marketed James Patterson-type formulaic crap that sells well. In fact...James Patterson is the personification of your aggregation formula. He doesn't even write his own books anymore (and hasn't for almost a decade); he looks at trends in reader data and pays other writers to ghost-write his novels for him. Middlemen exist because they provide valuable services: editing/proofreading, printing, distribution, and marketing. And in book publishing, they provide one of the most valuable services of all: discovery based on an author's talent, not their personal marketing abilities.
- 6510 6y ago
  > You can already do all of that. I can already do all that, you can too but everyone should be able to publish without depending on anyone or any corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_(networking) >Writing free stuff works for a few people. Most people can't afford it. This means we'd end up with significantly fewer written works You cant monitor and control what people read nor should you want to. The desired goal imho is to make available to the reader as much material as possible. Readers have finite funds (if any) You could similarly argue that if some 4% ends up with the writers most can't afford to write. > James Patterson-type formulaic crap... I don't dare have an opinion. If people are buying this its their money. > Middlemen exist because they provide valuable services We buy lots of services. They should ideally never control us. If measuring talent is worth something the author can pay for it. Your suspicion is right tho. Indeed I would prefer to see the entire industry die and switch to a basic income. I get that people think if the music industry dies some will drop their instruments and stop singing. History was the other way around. When people got radios everyone stopped making music themselves. I think we don't even have to bother comparing it to the polished fast food. I liked how Prince put it: Finally people can make music for the sake of making music.

by 6510 6y ago

hk__2 6y ago

> Just write free works until the audience is impressed enough to donate to current effort. I get the rest of the comment, but I don’t understand that part: unless you already have too much money, there’s absolutely no reason you should work for free.

6510 6y ago
You don't need to much money to do what you like. I want to see a basic income which makes DRM one of the many "old world" formulas that cant work perfectly even if you throw infinite money at it. To pay people to write is as simple as it sounds. While some components might be legitimate there is really no end to greed in rent seeking formulas. We can look at the TV license in the UK to see what the future might look like. They didn't even have the modern tools to monitor everyone. The system involves a database of houses where the license was not purchased. Agents will make unannounced visits to search your house. In stead of impossible some would argue it was simply a hard problem to write into law. From that perspective we failed to create a carefully balanced set of rules. As long as the demands are small steps the copyright industry gets what they want every time while the consumer, the party argued to so greatly benefit from these laws (what a joke),..... well.... the consumer gets to play and sing songs from before 1923! When Swartz downloaded a pile of ancient garbage articles he was going to get 35 years in prison for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. This is complete nonsense and everyone knows it. If the industry wants to go full retard it should be treated as such. Therefore we should burn it to the ground and keep the authors and keep the artists. Pay them for what they do. The only thing that matters is that the unwashed masses who already cant find work get access to educational materials. Everything else is either not important or simply entertainment. You cant use tax money for entertainment as long as you are taking it from people who can barely pay their bills. You can use it to sponsor crowd funding so that they can learn useful things and ponder the many intelligent thoughts others wrote down. To me this sounds a lot better than [say] sponsoring scientific journals with public funds so that they can paywall the stuff we've paid for. There are tons of old books. People can go read those first before demanding more free work from authors for the benefit of publishers. It is also easy to remove % fees from app stores by writing some laws. Or are we to think it will bankrupt google and apple? I cant recall paying Microsoft any fees. It is my country. The legal system is there to serve me.

gamblor956 6y ago

You can already do all of that. Epub is just html in a wrapper file. I don't know what a supper node is. Is it anything like a breakfast node or dinner node? Seems like it would be quite messy to mix food with ink. Writing free stuff works for a few people. Most people can't afford it. This means we'd end up with significantly fewer written works, and almost of what remained would be the highly-marketed James Patterson-type formulaic crap that sells well. In fact...James Patterson is the personification of your aggregation formula. He doesn't even write his own books anymore (and hasn't for almost a decade); he looks at trends in reader data and pays other writers to ghost-write his novels for him. Middlemen exist because they provide valuable services: editing/proofreading, printing, distribution, and marketing. And in book publishing, they provide one of the most valuable services of all: discovery based on an author's talent, not their personal marketing abilities.

6510 6y ago
> You can already do all of that. I can already do all that, you can too but everyone should be able to publish without depending on anyone or any corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernode_(networking) >Writing free stuff works for a few people. Most people can't afford it. This means we'd end up with significantly fewer written works You cant monitor and control what people read nor should you want to. The desired goal imho is to make available to the reader as much material as possible. Readers have finite funds (if any) You could similarly argue that if some 4% ends up with the writers most can't afford to write. > James Patterson-type formulaic crap... I don't dare have an opinion. If people are buying this its their money. > Middlemen exist because they provide valuable services We buy lots of services. They should ideally never control us. If measuring talent is worth something the author can pay for it. Your suspicion is right tho. Indeed I would prefer to see the entire industry die and switch to a basic income. I get that people think if the music industry dies some will drop their instruments and stop singing. History was the other way around. When people got radios everyone stopped making music themselves. I think we don't even have to bother comparing it to the polished fast food. I liked how Prince put it: Finally people can make music for the sake of making music.