[Upd-discuss] More Thoughts

[Michael Hart]

This one doesn't seem as good to me as those I sent
earlier, and may not be included in the final form,
at least as it appears below.        Sorry, Michael


UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION

THE NEO-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION


What happens when publishing powers that used to be
the exclusive purview of ye olde boye networke come
to lie in the hands of any of a billion people with
personal computers around the world?

What happens when one single person at virtually no
expense can publish a book simultaneously worldwide
without charging for it, especially if these eBooks
are already known as best sellers?

They pass laws against it!

There is a Paradigm Shift that we are aware of only
to a limited degree, that of simulataneous editions
published in various countries at the same time.  A
perfect example is the recent Harry Potter books of
which dozens of editions in various languages in an
assortment of countries released simultaneously, at
different times in each time zone, so the worldwide
releases all happened at the same time.

This is somewhat unique in the world of paper books
but it is not at all unique in the world of eBooks,
which are placed on the Internet for downloading to
countries all over the world at the same time.  One
reason copyright are being changed is to stop these
"Unlimited Distributions" of public domain material
that can go to the entire world, without measurable
expense, thus being seen as competition, even by an
extraordinarily powerful publishing empire that the
Harry Potter books exemplify.

While on the subject of Harry Potter, we should say
that even though these books were published in wide
distribution, that there were millions of people in
the world who wanted to read these books, who could
not, simply because the books either were not there
physically for sale, or because such books were not
translated into the language of those readers.

The truth is there are extremely large parts of the
world where it is difficult, if not impossible, for
people to legally consume copyrighted materials.

I, myself, have lived in such portions of the world
from the Pacific Rim to the Iron Curtain, where the
distribution networks made little or no effort from
the local point of view to sell their products to a
large portion of the world.  The marketing geniuses
simply decided that these people were off the chart
as far as being worthy of consideration went, and a
world run by Masters of Business Administration, or
MBAs, is always going to make such choices.  In the
new "just in time ordering" world of the MBAs, your
lunch has now become simply a matter of rolling the
dice to find out if what you want to eat is ordered
each week in time for you to buy it.  I, myself, in
such a situation, have recently called one of those
Fortune 500 companies and complained that while the
decisions of their MBAs might save them 1% storage,
it is definitely hurting them more than 1% in their
customer satisfaction.  People simply are not going
to keep coming back when they are constantly out of
what they want to buy.

The same is true for the world of publishing.  Some
choices are made, as with the Harry Potter books, a
language here, and a country there are left out and
people take the matter into their own hand, to make
translations or copies when none are made available
by the marketing geniuses at the corporate level.

At the same time that these marketing geniuses fail
to make something available to these markets, their
response to the markets being filled by their local
people is instantaneously vilified, both in courts,
as well as in the media. . .even though the losses,
as reported in greatly inflated detail, were losses
that happened in a vacuum, a place where no profits
were expected because no products were placed.

How can you claim a loss where you could never have
made a profit because you weren't even there?

In the case of public domain materials being on the
Internet, especially in the case of books, each one
of the reports I have seen indicate that once eBook
editions are available on the Net, paper sales of a
similar edition increase rather than decrease.  The
corporate business model mind simply cannot fathom,
cannot accept, cannot decide to take advantage of--
the fact that a public that is interested in books,
books of any kind, buys more books.

However, the corporate discomfort with computers is
equally matched by the publics discomfort, which is
the reason the public ends up buying paper editions
of eBooks they find in cyberspace.

Not only that, but it should be obvious that public
consumption goes up when the public is literate and
public consumption goes down when the can't read.

One of the greatest effects of the Gutenberg Press?

Increased literacy.

An increased market for books.

Every time a new information medium comes to us the
powers-that-be are terrified, and this is true of a
much wider world than just the world of information
as we saw when the world switched to electricity as
many of the gas moguls stood by and watched, others
got into electricity, while yet others sabotaged an
early electric industry in the hopes it should just
vanish into thin air.

The question is:  would anyone be better off having
stayed with gas instead of electricity?

What we have now is a new world of electronics, and
that world can carry information from anyone to any
other person or group of people, no matter how many
there are, instantaneously and an no expense.  Well
. . .not enough to really measure.

Remember the promise of nuclear power?

"Electricity too cheap to meter?"

It never happened, did it?  But it scared most of a
whole world of producers of electricity.

Today we have books that are too cheap to meter.

I have, at my house, presuming things there are the
way I hope they are, a single DVD containing 20,000
separate eBooks, even allowing for a duplication of
several hundred titles, and this DVD costs about $1
to copy and mail to someone in the United States.

I couldn't bring it with me because your copyrights
are different than ours, and I didn't want to flout
your copyright laws in any way whatsoever.  Yet, it
IS my point that your recent copyright extensions--
and ours--were solely and completely created simply
to stop such things as this DVD.

To the best of my knowledge, everything on that DVD
is public domain in the United States, though a DVD
with 20,000 eBooks researched to a 99.99% accuracy,
as far as copyright goes, will still obviously have
2 items erroneously included on it, so I always ask
that people let us know if they find anything there
that ought not be included.

The idea of carrying 20,000 books in a package that
weighs one ounce and costs $1 to create and ship is
anethema to most publishers, and even to educators,
many of whom still want to keep as much of knowlege
in their own purview as possible.

This is as it always has been. . .those who want to
keep control of the past. . .versus those who would
prefer a better future:  even if it is out of their
own direct control.

I suggest you listen to the John D. Rockefeller-ish
character in The Man In The White Suit when he says
that the cotton gin was a bad thing, for those from
whom control of it was lost.  This is a great movie
starring Alec Guiness, most strongly recommended.

It addresses these concepts extremely well, what if
someone invents something that never wears out, has
little or no production cost, and would turn worlds
on their heads?  The movie is from around 1950, and
the subject is artificial fibers such as nylon.

Have you noticed that the nylon products of today's
marketplace are more expensive and do not last long
when compared to those of decades ago?