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Fatbrain's eMatter Self Publishing 114

Posted by Hemos from the good-idea-who's-time-has-come dept.
blindambition writes "Fatbrain announced a new initiative called eMatter. Basically, for 1$ per month, you can put your book/paper online, set a price, and people can download it, while you get the royalties (between 50 to 100%) of each copy sold. " Excellent idea, although it's still not open-source writing, like Project Gutenberg. But then again, I suppose living authors need to eat too.
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Fatbrain's eMatter Self Publishing More

Fatbrain's eMatter Self Publishing

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  • Explanation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When a parrot hears a new word, the parrot will repeat the word when a cue is present. The parrot knows the word, but the parrot does not understand the concept the word represents. The cue is similar to the word, in the sense that nothing will prevent the parrot from using the cue, if the parrot does not understand it. Therefore, the parrot will frequently make ridiculous statements which are amusing to a rational human being, but to the other parrots this new word sounds pleasent and they repeat the cycle. Now that we have dissected the parrot, we can begin to understand the open source parrot's behavior.

  • *laugh* (satire, hold yer knickers) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Traditionally, in the software world, self-publishing is VERY much frowned upon. While I don't necessarily agree with some of the standards (or lack thereof) that certain publishers have, I do have to say that the theory behind having your software sold to a reputable publishing house or your code printed in a reputable journal is a good one. Case in point of what can happen when people *don't* pay attention to this: The entire linux operating system. Remember that? The one based off of an incredibly shoddy undergraduate "research paper?" Given that any fool with a buck to spare every month can upload whatever drivel said fool sees fit to ... I don't really find this terribly encouraging. Yes, it's good to have alternative sources of info. (That's why I read /. in the first place!) However, there really ought to be some sort of quality indicator in place, even if it's just abstracts and reviews of the software posted up there. And yes, I'm fully aware that some absolute crap gets published professionally (anything Microsoft). But on some level that I haven't figured out yet, as a coder, this new form of publishing bothers the heck out of me even though I theoretically think it's a good idea. *shrug* Just curious if the same comments in a different context wouuld incite riot...
  • No.

    $1 fine please

  • Sheesh... (Score:1)

    by Dj ( 224 )
    You know, I think there should be a $1 fine for each time a Slashdotter uses the phrase "But it's
    still not open source".

  • Yow.. This resembles the CIA (or CDC? Can't recall the acronym used) in Snowcrash...
  • While Project Gutenberg is a Good Thing, it is certainly not an example of open source applied to the world of words. A better example (the definitive example?) would be Open Content [opencontent.org]

  • The CIC (Score:1)

    by belial ( 674 )
    Central Inteligence Corporation.

    A mix between the Library of Congress and the CIA.

    Incorporated of course.

  • Newsflash: freedom entails responsibility.

    Judging quality is your responsibility. If you don't take up that responsibility, you don't deserve the freedom of reading.

  • I'm just saying that most people are NOT going to look upon books "published" on a site like this as valid or reliable information, and that there are some very good reasons for it.

    People should look upon any information with some suspicion. If it's not well documented, why should it be taken seriously? I think people take what they see on tv and what they read in newspapers and magazines as fact. That's just plain wrong. They've been shown to make plenty of mistakes and even to have deliberately mislead people at times. We should always be skeptical of what we read or see until we can verify it.

    That said, you're probably right that there will be a lot of unfounded garbage posted on the site. Anyone who reads the information should consider the source when they decide how much weight to give to the information, just as they should with any information they receive.

    I think this is a good thing though. We need open outlets for speech and opinions. The traditional media is becoming more and more concentrated under the control of relatively few people. That's not a good thing. Perhaps things like Slashdot and this new eMatter service are steps in the right direction. Give people a voice without requiring them to pay through the nose for airtime or support the views of a network or newspaper.

  • Hum. Watch what you wrote after "uses the phrase".
    You should be fined. Or lapidated (as in "Life of Brian")

    (I love self reference :) )

  • Xanadu (Score:1)

    by Waldo ( 4398 )
    This is a little bit like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, a nice idea , but not practical.
  • No, you're wrong. People put that dumbass copyright statement at the head of their files and one of the statements is that the end user may use that version or any later version of the GPL at their option.
  • CNBC is reporting some increased demand (and therefore price increase) in Fatbrain stock so somebody thinks they smell money to be made. Of course somebody may have just told them "Hey, it's another new way to make money with the internet so how can you loose?"


  • That being said, I can think of a few literary projects that worked like Open Source. The Cthulhu mythology is an example: one moderator who sets the vision and the standards (H.P. Lovecraft), a group of collaborators (A. Derleth et al) and a general public of writers bent on expanding the myth.


    One could argue that software development is best done this way as well: with a very small group of developers (or even an individual) "steering" the development, and many other developers actually implementing the various bits and pieces. Software developed by committees tend to suck. Take COBOL for example. Many open source software projects, and commercial projects for that matter, have a small set of "core developers".


    So maybe a more Open Source model is possible for writing; that sounds like it has a lot of potential. I know all you did was raise a potential flamebait in my post, Zagadka, but you did make me reconsider my position!


    I think you're a bit too sensitive if you thought that was flamebait. It always bothers me when people don't consider software development to be creative or artistic. Software development is just as creative as architecture or classical music composition. Yes, there are strict rules that must be followed, but the truly creative learn to work within the rules rather than be constrained by them.

  • It may not be "open source", but indeed, writers need to make money somehow from this. The equivalent of open source for written works would be to put it up on your webpage and allow people to contribute to it. It's a neat idea, but I feel there is an additional factor with an artistic product, and that is artist integrity.


    Source code isn't an artistic product?
  • As someone who's owned a Rocket eBook since last December, i can say that I certainly thought that moving bits, not atoms, would be cheaper. As have a lot of other people. However, there have been some long discussions among people in the current publishing industry and the eBook world (see eBookNet [ebooknet.com], for example), and the conclusion seems to be that books are priced like CPU's; that is, you pay based on how much you want it, not on how much it cost to make (which for books, is not that much, maybe a buck). If you want that Pentium III 600MHz chip RIGHT NOW then you will pay a much higher price for it than if you wait six months. Likewise, buying a hardback book when it first comes out will cost you more than waiting until the paperback or cheap used editions become available. So, the fact that most eBooks are the same price as the current print edition makes some twisted sense, in that light.

    The publishers are the ones setting prices. The only explanation i can see for the fact that some eBooks cost more than hardbacks is that publishers figure that they can screw the early adapters.

    The other thing keeping eBook prices high is the small size of the market. The non-zero conversion costs must be amortized over a very small number of people, and with not many titles available, there's not much competitive price pressure yet.

    That said, i love my Rocket eBook. It's a sweet chunk of hardware, and it's wonderful for reading long web pages or Project Gutenberg texts away from the computer. I'm reading "Open Sources" on it right now.

    See the Rocket Library [rocket-library.com] for gobs of free text. They can even be read on an onscreen Windows simulator of the eBook, called the eRocket [rocket-ebook.com].

    mahlen

    During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.
    --Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"
  • While it's true that the self-publisher's lot is fraught is risk, there are some amazing success stories (http://www.bookmarket.com/selfpublish.html). Everyone from Tim O'Reilly to Richard Nixon.

    mahlen

    Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
    --Vladimir Nabokov
  • The main question after reading through their FAQ - their copy prevention solution is a special software that you need to read the document. Is there a Linux version? If it's another Winodoze only solution I'm not interested.

    I think there should be a simular facility in the Linux world. So that books can be written and downloaded for a small resonalble fee (which does not even contradict GNU GPL) - like $2-3 for example. Imagine if Linus would publish a book on his vision of Linux development. If couple million people download that paying $3, then he would not have to starve for the rest of his life :-)

    No encryption bullshit of course (since it can be cracked to begin with). Don't base your business on unrealstic assumptions (that floppies don't copy).
  • In general, VERY cool idea...

    Two things...

    1) $1 per month per file for "storage fee". Although you could consider this a way to keep people from uploading total junk, it's pretty steep.

    2) Download formats. This is a bigger issue. As of now, uploaded PDF or Postscript is served as PDF. Uploaded text or Word (97/98/2K) is served as WORD!! Blecchhh!! Plus, how does Word handle document purchase, rights protection, etc. anyway?? This could be easily altered, of course, but that's the policy as of right now.
  • Um...I guess you should bring that up with Neal Stephenson. It's his name, and his acronym, from his work of science fiction...have you READ Snowcrash? The CIC is a pretty cool/funny concept within the context of the work, IMHO. Actually, it's a pretty funny concept in general...
  • Actually its not so much like Xanadu, but it is exactly like Nelson, Steegler, & Walker's Amex (AMIX?) market that was attempted some 6-8 years ago -- around the dawn of the web. That effort was simultaneously way, way ahead of its time and too lacking in imagination to realize how revolutionary the web was to be.

    Its nice to see the idea reborn. I hope they find a niche with the right mix of traffic and authors to create a viable market. Eventually someone will have to work this out.

  • Here's a better idea:
    Upload your book in PDF/PS format. Users can download the files or portions thereof for free, but for $10 a printing press will spit out a dead tree copy for you. I am not sure if the publishing technology is all there yet to make if financially viable, but I sure think it would be neat.
  • Granted, I haven't looked at the site yet, which may answer this, but the first thing that jumped into my head is who retains the rights to the document? Does the website keep full rights? Do they revert back to the writer after x number of months?

    Just things to keep in mind, people. Don't rush up and accidentally sell the rights to your potential Great American Novel(tm), that someone else may reap the rewards.
  • It really depends on the market. In computer books anywhere from 20% to 5% is common. Regular books I am not sure, but usually are less since their volume is higher.

    While this is a very tempting offer it does not include tech editing and the likes. However, it may be interesting for people to team and create good books.

    Being a book author, I am excited about this...
  • Programming and book-writing are different. For one thing, no matter how the term Open Source is bandied about, you can't really have an "Open Source" book--someone doesn't know what he's talking about. First of all, a book is already source--it's the written code that our brains "compile" into understanding. This similarity is why we call programming formats "languages."

    Second, as for being "open"--well, the only way a book really could be open is if it were being written with contributions from any yahoo who came down the pike. Which, I suppose, might be an interesting idea...come up with character sketches and an outline, farm out each chapter to a particular person, then have an editor try to put them all together into something that made sense. But for the normal everyday definition of a book...how can you have "open source" for something that has already been completed? If it's public-domain...then yes, anyone who cares to can make "updates," yes...but since Shakespeare, Clemens, Burroughs, and all those other ancient pubdom authors are dead, there's no "project gatekeeper" to apply those updates. (And if someone claimed to be, how many literary authorities do you think would accept that?)

    I know this won't do any good, but please, people, try to think before you apply the term "open source"? It's a term with a very specific meaning, and by misapplying it and broadening its use into a general-purpose buzzword, you make it that much less useful.

    Second, to the issue of literary quality. The original poster's point about the publishing industry is actually pretty much true, as is the objectivity of programming. Still, I think some people might not quite get it, and maybe this example will help clarify things a little.

    What if 99.999% of all Slashdot posters were all high-posting-volume, low-content Anonymous Cowards (instead of only seeming that way sometimes :) and there were no moderation system? Would you even bother reading the discussion threads anymore? I don't just mean would you still read it as it is now, but would you still read it if it were a hundred times worse?

    Well, that's the way it is in the literary world. With /., at least people have to have some modicum of technical knowhow to even want to read it, much less post to it. But to write, you only need to know how to write--so out in the greater world, any ten-year-old can crank out bad fiction (and looking at the fanfic newsgroups sometimes, it often looks as though most of them do). The vast majority of things that are written are things that nobody except their authors would want to read.

    And so the whole vast system of publishing houses, editors, slushpiles, agents, and so on gradually evolved as a form of self-defense, as a system to provide some level of quality control to the consumer, so in return the consumer will have good books to read, rather than spending his time doing something marginally more useful and enjoyable, like clipping his toenails.

    Looking at the current e-publishing sites out there, you won't find very many successful ones (at least, of those that are better-known) that have no submission standards. AlexLit [alexlit.com] requires it to have been published elsewhere already. Online Originals [onlineoriginals.com] has a board of editors who go through submissions. And so it goes.

    Self-publishing outfits have existed in the "real world" for a long time; they're called vanity presses. They charge you some ridiculous amount of money to publish your book--the name comes from the fact that it's presumably your vanity that makes you pony up the cash for it. With a more legitimate publisher, of course, they'll foot the bill themselves, and pay you royalties...but thence comes the problem of the midlist [nytimes.com]--shipping and storage expenses have gotten so high that publishers can't afford to publish anything less than a bestseller.

    Which is where, hopefully, e-publishing could provide some breaks, letting more "good but not great" writers get published by eliminating storage and shipping costs...but all the same, there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff...and I believe most people will think that anything someone has to pay to get published probably isn't worth reading.

    (It also doesn't help matters, in my opinion, that fatbrain wants you to register before you can even see what they have available at the moment.)
  • He was doing a satirically ironic riff on the original post.

  • Zip is an excellent container format (really an encapsulated filesystem), and well documented/open. It even comes with a nice compression method that is patent-free and supported by a number of libraries, including free open-source onces like zlib. And there's already a ton of tools that can read Zips, so you're ready to hit the ground running.

    Now all you need is for your pet OS to be able to treat Zip files as directories, an extension to the filesystem. Heck, the Amiga guys did it years ago with .LHA archives; so it ought to be easy, right? :-)


    ---
    Have a Sloppy day!
  • Nothing in the current publishing industry prevents authors from controlling their product from start to finish. I know of several authors who self-published their books precisely because they didn't want to hand over editorial control to someone else.

    Oh, wait I see. You mean you want to use someone else's distribution channels and capital so that you can make money without letting them say jack about it. Okay, but that's not really the same thing as being forced to give them editorial control.
  • So ?

    As the copyright holder you can change the wording to specify that it is only covered by the version you specify.

    If I remember, the FSF suggest you allow it to be used under any later license, but you don't have to, it's not part of the GPL.
  • If you have a book that you want to see published, there are four ways to go:
    • Royalty -- in exchange for publication rights, the publisher prints and sells the book, and gives you royalties if the book is successful; you pay the publisher nothing.
    • Vanity -- you pay the publisher to print and bind your book; the printed books are your property, and you have to sell them.
    • Subsidy -- a combination of the above two; you pay the publisher some money up front, and they print the book, sell it, and pay royalties.
    • Self -- you form your own little publishing company, choosing your book's graphic design, hiring a printer, etc., etc.
    As a general rule, subsidy and vanity publishers do hardly any work to promote a book -- why should they, since they already have your money? Reviewers are unlikely to review subsidy- and vanity-published books, and bookstores are unlikely to stock them -- if the publisher isn't betting any money on the book's success, why should anyone else risk wasting time or shelf space on it? Furthermore, a number of vanity and subsidy publishers have been outright scams, conning thousands of dollars out of writers.

    For more details, see SFWA [sfwa.org]'s excellent page on subsidy and vanity publishers [sfwa.org].

    Fatbrain's program doesn't seem as bad as some of the outfits described on SFWA's site. But this program looks like a way to separate foolish writers from their money. As such, it's likely to be a smashing success. I can imagine thousands of people writing what they imagine to be the Great American Novel, uploading it to Fatbrain, fantasizing about the fame and fortune that awaits them, and not missing the leak from their credit cards.

    But read the fine print [fatbrain.com]: After the promotional period, Fatbrain takes $12/year/book from your credit card, and half of your book's download price -- in exchange for what labor or risk? The company doesn't promise to do anything to promote your book. It doesn't even promise a quality-of-service level for its download site!

    So why should anyone interested in self-publishing go through Fatbrain, rather than setting up an ecommerce site through a regular ISP?

  • My understanding is that the GPL makes future
    projecs which use it potentially GPL'd as well,
    whereas public domain is free for any use, and
    can therefore get "trapped" in commercial software.

    Yes, the original public domain software is out there
    but none of the added code needs to be released,
    as it would under the GPL. That was always one of
    the things I admired about the copyleft.

  • Publishing On Demand, or POD, is based on this idea.

    A short article in a recent TIME attributed this to:

    1. New printing technology it described as a machine that looks like 12 copy machines in one.
    2. Amazon.com and other online book merchants, which reduce marketing costs and bring your book to a wide audience.

    One service, for example, charges about $900 for set-up, but hard copies of your book can then be ordered on a single-item basis for pricing comparible to standard publishing methods. (Here I refer the reader to http://www.trafford.com/ [trafford.com]).

    If anyone has expeience with this, please post. I can get into hard copies so much easier than reading a monitor. You can't curl up on a sofa with the monitor.

  • Snowcrash mentioned a similar idea where freelance information gatherers would submit information to a central library, and get paid it each time it's accessed. This seems like a very relevant information dissemination model for our increasingly information overloaded times.
  • The agreement says $3 per file per quarter, which works out to $1/month.

  • If somebody wants to make a buck from something they wrote, thats there perogative. To be honest, going through most of the so-called "academic" journals are only there so professors and wannabe professors can get published and say "oohh oohh Look at me." Publish or perish is a very bad thing. Those that benefit from a system such as academic publishing are those that protect it the most. Guess what, Im a big boy and I can take care of myself. If your in the market for the material at ebrain, I believe you will be smart enough to know the wheat from the chaff. Take the same approach to /. Highest scores first but set to 0. You will be amazed at the insightful comments that never get a rating. For those of you that believe we need some sort of editorial control on papers, I think there is some baby proofing in your house that needs to be done.

    BTW I have been published in a real magazine.

    'Old Ugly' Saving Face
    http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164 ,408616,00.html


    http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164 ,408616,00.html
  • You are right: things don't have to be "open source" to be good. (Reminds me of a sarcastic comment in a book about confusing "object oriented" and "good", but I digress).

    The thing is, however, that to a certain extent there's an "open source/freeware/public domain" _ideology_ ... and a lot of people who are into the open source movement, Linux, whatever, believe strongly in this ideology. There is a feeling (and I don't know how strong it is right now because i lost touch with this part of the internet when I graduated from school and went off to work in the proprietary software world) that the next large-scale ideological conflict will be between open-source public-domain vs. proprietary closed systems.

    This is about the point where a lot of people start falling asleep: big revolutionary schemes that will overthrow the established order, yeah, yeah, sure. uh-huh. History is over, doesn't anyone remember, we've won all the large ideological debates and reached the eternal now of modern technological capitalism ...

    Only we haven't: history doesn't stop, and societies continue to evolve. Right now it _appears_ that that evolution is away from closed proprietary systems towards open systems --- but the economics hasn't been worked out yet, and people on both sides of the fence are scrambling to figure out how the economics will work.
  • I suspect that the real problem is that the publishers are setting hte prices, and so they set them (a) to not undercut their other products, and (b) to maintain overhead.

    Once you see clearing-houses where authors sell directly to the consumer and the clearing-house takes a percentage, prices should fall.

    That does raise a question, though: what about editing? Almost all books need some of it, at least for the same reason code needs testing; in a clearing-house model, who does the editing? A third party? Who pays for it? Do clearing-houses provide editing services for a fee, or does that just come out of their cut? If so, then clearing-houses could develop editing reputations, and houses with better editing could charge more.
  • But then again, I suppose living authors need to eat too.

    I hope this is sarcasm, otherwise this comes across as incredibly arrogant.
  • My sentiments exactly.

    I remember reading "the Crucible," and the same method of thinking was there: yup, it prays like a Christian, it confesses like a Christian, and it floats on water like a Christian; but nope, it's still not Open Source, so it must certainly be a witch.

  • Don't be ridiculous, of course any Joe Schmoe can contribute a random "update" to War and Peace. I don't believe anyone would want the "updated" copy, but you never know.

    Whatever happened to public domain software? Unlike other kinds of "free" software, it doesn't place any claim on the work of others, whereas the GPL automatically grabs all the rights to your work for the FSF (remember that they retain the right to issue new versions of the GPL). Free software, eh? Free to dump your work into it and never get anything back is more like it.
  • Editors and factcheckers are useful to the reader, although often irritating to the writer. Mercy knows too many books get published with homophone typos, including Cryptonomicon.

    Another e-publisher, which does light editing & seems to be trying to be format-neutral, is HardShell [hardshell.com].

  • I don't think you've used PDF. The search capacities in a pdf docuement are excellent fully boolean capable + page awareness (look for Doctor near the word Riverside).

    Those capabilites are nice, but I think the original poster meant that you can't use grep and friends (i.e. the "text-based tools" to which he/she refers) to search your documents, which I agree would be a good thing. As it is now, you need to load your favorite pdf viewer to search for terms within the document.

    -jason

    "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

  • It looks like they own the electronic distribution rights, for the duration of the contract, which can be terminated at any time, with a thirty day notice, by either side.

    I'm only mildly bothered by that exclusive right, but it's seems to be JUST for the duration of the contract, and the contract is easy to break, so not too bad.

    IANAL, so ready the thing for yourself. ;)

  • I'm not a writer, and don't know what the current royalty rates are, but if they are as bad as some people suggest, like on the order of 1% or less, even if you lose 20:1 due to piracy, you could still be much better off. e.g. If your new cypherpunk novel sold for $6.00, and you got 1%, that would be .06 dollars per book. However, if you sold it on eMatter at 6.00, you would be earning $3.00 per book, so could lose 50:1, and break even (almost).

    Aside from this, though, you've gotta wonder what the distribution will be like. The above doesn't take that into account at all.

  • Right, ideally you would need some kind of rating/moderating system for this, where eveyone who has download sometbing can rate it.

    That way, you can tell when someone knows their stuff, and when someone dumped a bunch of man pages into a file and loaded it with keywords.

    George
  • AFAIK Gutenburg is not "open source" writing per se...it's just a whole bunch of people trying to get public domain books into electronic text format. This doesn't mean any Joe Schmoe can contribute a random "update" to War and Peace.
  • Hell, when the actual news posting is flamebait I think we really have a problem. Damn, this one is "flamebait" and "philosophic-ramble-bait".. please don't rate your news postings by the number of comments you get.. most are just slants upon one another or raging illogical attacks (flame). Just the facts will do fine, but that's never been the slashdot way.
  • This scheme plus public moderation/rating might have some value. Otherwise, it's worthless. Or, to be precise, not worth my $1.
  • I guess the idea, then, is to write an overly cryptic book (a la James Joyce's Odyssey), give it away for free, but charge people to have it explained to them. :)

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • I think you're a bit too sensitive if you thought that was flamebait. It always bothers me when people don't consider software development to be creative or artistic. Software development is just as creative as architecture or classical music composition. Yes, there are strict rules that must be followed, but the truly creative learn to work within the rules rather than be constrained by them.

    Oh, I meant, you underlined what could have been interpreted as flamebait in my own message.

    I agree with your assessment of coding as an artistic activity. All "traditional" arts work with constraints: grammar is one, canvas size and types of brushes and paints is another one; the most obvious one is rhyme and meter in poetry.

    The true artist will acknowledge these rules, respect them most of the time, break them when it suits them. There are rhymers and there are poets.

    And likewise, I suppose, there are coders and there are... Hackers. :)

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • This is a fantastic idea, which I love both as an avid reader and a struggling writer. Anyone in the deadtree business will tell you that you basically get screwed every time you go through a publisher to get your work printed. They ask you to rewrite it most of the time, and you make perhaps a dime per sold book for a hardcover $30.00 bestseller.

    What this has the potential to do is revolutionise the publishing industry in the same way that MP3 is taking over the record industry. It means artists can control their product from end to finish. It means they can make a lot more money per sale than if they have to go through a publisher.

    It may not be "open source", but indeed, writers need to make money somehow from this. The equivalent of open source for written works would be to put it up on your webpage and allow people to contribute to it. It's a neat idea, but I feel there is an additional factor with an artistic product, and that is artist integrity.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • What I mean is, this sounds like a great way to use the Internet as an alternate distribution channel that doesn't require outside capital that may compromise my work's integrity.

    You can certainly manage this with self-publishing, but it's a heck of a lot harder to do than use the Internet. Ditto for self-recording: can you manage a distribution of 100,000 CDs traditionally? The Internet can allow you that. And no one will try to convince me to write in their wife or their dog as main protagonists because they feel that making money off my work is reason enough to control something else than its distribution.

    So, in essence, if you want a decent exposure for your work, you indeed are forced to compromise it by relinquishing editorial control.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Source code isn't an artistic product?

    Er- now, that's an interesting point. I'm a fervent defender of Open Source, yet I wouldn't want someone else to "improve" upon a written fiction work I created. Why is it that I feel proprietary with fiction, but I don't mind sharing code? I don't know. The reason why I share code is because it becomes a collaborative work, and many contributions can enhance the code. Is it artistic? Well, yeah, in that it involves an intuitive creative process.

    However, I don't feel treating any work of fiction like an Open Source project would better it. I quite welcome anyone to prove otherwise; but my feeling is, when you write fiction in commitees, you end up with something whose quality is on par with Star Trek: Voyager.

    That being said, I can think of a few literary projects that worked like Open Source. The Cthulhu mythology is an example: one moderator who sets the vision and the standards (H.P. Lovecraft), a group of collaborators (A. Derleth et al) and a general public of writers bent on expanding the myth.

    The important part is that the whole mythos is the Open Source work, and not individual stories. Yes, individual writers have seen their work retouched over the years, dusted off in places, or translated; the history of changes is established clearly (written by A, translated by B, etc.) and credits is given where credit is due.

    So maybe a more Open Source model is possible for writing; that sounds like it has a lot of potential. I know all you did was raise a potential flamebait in my post, Zagadka, but you did make me reconsider my position!

    If anyone would like to discuss an Open Source model for written fiction, and perhaps work on a prototype for one which could be built and designed through the web, then please, don't hesitate to Email me.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • I think you have a valid point that most people expect their reading to be subject to critical review prior to purchasing it. I don't understand what will happen when someone downloads a $20 work from ematter and then finds it's just a one page piece of junk. Refund? Never use the service again?

    I've also noticed that there has been severe pressure on small independent bookstores -- they are going out of business, leaving me with less choice. Many new SF authors are forced to find an established author to collaborate with to get noticed and "break in". Critical review today is too influenced by "sure fire" returns -- already known author or formulaic work. To some extent the publishing industry is partially responsible for these trends, and I welcome any competition for them for that reason.

    Like slashdot, you'll mostly want to read the stuff that gets moderated/reviewed way up. This is another way for new authors to break in to a somewhat closed business, so I like it.

    Jim
  • I agree they should at least have an editor look at the material before they publish it. If the editor of the Times magazine had done his/her job the articale wouldn't have been printed. But then again who wants to sit and read every random book and rate it ? hmm maybe someone should point them to the /. moderate system. It would be intersting to see a collection of authors moderate themselves.
  • I can't believe I used ul instead of u for underline.

    Anyway: check out RMS's "Right to Read" as 'published' by PG at Metalab [unc.edu]
  • Say, this could be a great way to publish Open Source software. You could put it up as 'eMatter' (or in someplace similar) complete with extensive application notes, interesting historical notes (why was it written? What alternatives were explored?), etc. All the code could be GPL (or some similar Open Source licensing).

    This way, authors of Open Source could get remunerated for their work up front a bit, which would encourage it. Nobody is held hostage here either. Once the article is downloaded, the source would be available to all (or it could even be made available in the usual net-download avenues at the same time the document is made available).

    Why shouldn't this text be Open Sourced along with the source code?

    I feel that source code should be Open Sourced wherever possible, but I'm less clear on the benefit for other texts. Source code is best Open Sourced because that's when it's value is maximized for everyone. Source code is a living document, it has the most value when it can be modified to meet your needs. This is one of the great things about Open Source software. It truly evolves to meet user needs rather than to meet some business goals of the producer. For example, with Open Source, the evolution of a body of source tends to become more stable and robust (or at least, if it becomes too instable, people generally start to use older revisions and update those). With commercial software the code often is as stable as is allowed by some arbitrary release deadline with some arbitrary set of release features.

    I'm not opposed to Open Sourcing of texts, I just don't see as much benefit from it when compared to Open Sourcing code. I am opposed to efforts to extend copyrights, as you can read about here [eeicom.com], as I don't see the benefit to doing this.

  • The reason that self publishing is looked down upon in literary circles is that these people can't convince some gatekeeper book publisher that her or his ideas are of any value, therefore, it is assumed, they must be valueless.

    This has led to a lot of good works being completely ignored. Ever hear of John Kennedy O'Toole? He committed suicide when his book, A Confederacy of Dunces, wouldn't get a second look by publishers. This book later went on to receive a National Book Award when it was published after his death.

    I expect that for some time to come, most people will pretty much discount the intellectual content of anything that you might find on the Web. Those people are elitists and snobs.

    The Web allows there to be more publishers and more reviewers.

    The situation will be much like it is now. You'll trust the opinion of your friends, reviewers with a good track record, the current 'buzz', etc. You surely don't believe now that just because it's published it's any good do you? So, a quality filter based on whether it's been published is not really effecting your opinion today.

    With the Web, you don't have to own a printing press and have expensive distribution deals with mega book chains, or deal with a publisher who has all of this, to get your work out there.

  • Post an article by 11/15.

    Buy said article a few thousand times.

    Pay off your credit card with that fat %100 royalty check you just got.
  • the GPL does not automatically grab all rights of your work to the FSF. Even if they update the licence unless you said other wise your software is only coverd by the version you specify.
  • I agree with the last point, that the Web allows for publishing costs to be near-zero.

    This means that an online editor won't have to refuse publishing a book because it lacks enough commercial potential to turn even slightly profitable.

    An editor choosing to publish not-so-easy-to-read books, I assume, risks money and 'literary' reputation. Thanks to Web publishing, s/he could at least rest assured that economic losses won't be a big deal. Of course, that implies that smaller revenues should be expected.

    Yet again, reputation could still be a good reason to filter books to publish.

    Or, a company might be betting on ad revenues and writers' fees to make a profit, but I wouldn't call that a publishing company. That'd sound more like Usenet, where (more or less) anyone can coin their two cents. Only this time the 'messages' would get longer...

    In conclusion, less expenses mean a greater ability for indipendent publishers to reach their market share, and cheaper products for the readers, be they good or bad pieces of literature.

    In the long run, though, a screening of published works will be imperative for a publishing company to preserve their identity, thus their target market, and their reputation. The writers left out of the game, I'm afraid, will have to turn to Geocities or the like.

    But let me recommend they first check the Terms of Service or they might wake up one day to find their works finally published with a Y! where their name should have been...

  • from the faq at http://www1.fatbrain.com/ematt er/support/faq_027.asp [fatbrain.com]:

    In most cases, you know if you own the copyrights to content that you created. But, if you created something while working for a company, you're not quite sure if you retain the copyrights of a particular piece of work or if you are interested in officially registering your work, we recommend that you visit the American Bar Association (ABA) web site and explore their copyrights information.

  • if you submit a book between now and october 15th, you get 100% royalties through jan 1, 2000. if you submit aftward october 15th, you get 50%.

    (more info at http://www1.fatbrain.com/ema tter/details_royalties.asp [fatbrain.com].

  • Isn't that a contradiction in its' very description? The CIA is noted for its' repression of basic knowledge about operations and information that they have culled from different sources. The Library of Congress (although not always totally open in the open-source sence) is still avaible to anyone who is willing to go there or go through ILL.
  • How do the rates of this service compare to standard royalty rates for standard publishing houses? If this really does streamline the process it may make publication better, but stopping piracy may bring fear into people's hearts over how successful something will be. I know I would if I had spend 6 months writing something and lost a huge wad of money on it.
  • I can understand about this. Keeping a stable income under difficult conditions without a guaranteed paycheck every 2 weeks is not really a nice experience (at least for me).
  • Doing some research on Nuvomedia's (Berthelsmann) Rocket EBook I was dismayed to find out the prices for books were very high. Some paper books were even cheaper, both on Barnes & Noble (a Rocket E-book partner) and Amazon, than electronic versions for their electronic reader. Weren't electronic books supposed to free us from the economic constrains of paper publishing, atom shifting and all?

    eMatter books should be cheaper. Lets Assume royalties stabilize at 50%. regular author can expect to receive between 7% and 12% of the cover price on a paper book, so expect to pay for eMatter between 14% and 24% of an equivalent paperback title. Assuming authors will not settle for the minimum, (and that they would much rather command a 15% royalty rate), that means eMatter books should cost between 1/4 and 1/3 of the price of an equivalent paperback. You pay for the reader, though (your computer? or one of those electronic book thingies?).

    Well, if the system takes hold, we can foresee competition, and royalties for authors can escalate up to 80% *before* any special arrangements. Stephen King will probably get 100%. Or more :).

    Candyman [barrapunto.com] is not an Anonymous Coward. He just poses as one on Slashdot.
    -----------

  • Now there just needs to be a standard means
    for packing all the multimedia and structured
    docs into one nice package like pdf.

  • Quality control is useful and sometimes necessary, but it doesn't have to be tied to the distribution mechanism (as is currently the case in the publishing industry). This sort of self publishing divorces these two aspects.

    Other entities, better suited to the task and the individual consumer, can provide the quality control. Bravo!
  • There's a way to do it while authors still get paid-- we've been doing it for years. Check BiblioBytes [bb.com] out.

    It's not "open source" publishing-- authors still controls their own copyright and we pay them out of ad revenue, so living authors can continue to live-- but it is free to read online, which is as much as we can ask for.

  • open source publishing.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i fail to see why anyone would need a centralized
    site for open source publishing...isn't that what homepages are all about?
    while the lack of security within the "web
    medium" makes it difficult to enforce copyright
    / ownership, i tend to think of it as relative.

    if someone were to make unparalleled fame and
    fortune off of my work, perhaps i would be pretty miffed
    to some degree, but i highly doubt that would
    ever come to pass, heh.

    also i feel that open source
    lends itself to the origional intent of
    the writing i do quite well;
    in the sense that it is provided more as
    a brainstorming and thought provoking tool,
    rather than trying to rant my personal
    theories and such.perhaps more opinionated
    authors would have more dificulty than i with
    such an arrangement.

    *digression*
    i currently maintain many open source
    pieces of writing (both prose and short story)
    on my personal website: [javanet.com], and although this site may have more
    exposure currently, the downside is obvious in that it would be "lost in the crowd" so to speak.
    open source literature at least has the potential that someone will build upon it,
    and perhaps i would become known, at the very least,
    as the origionator of a genius' inspiration.

    .02, and too lazy to log in at work -adam showtell.com javanet.com/~user
  • Must _everything_ be an "open source" issue?? keerist already. there is a place for commercial information and software on this rock. some of us would be _very_ unemployed if it weren't for commercial apps/information technologies and to be honest, most of the mainstream devel would not have gone as far as it has (albeit the open source community has taken their knowledge of the commercial world and used it to create and extend current technology, but that is another story). and that's the point, isn't it? not _everything_ has to be open source to be a good thing(tm).

    l8r.

    --bc

  • If I understand right from what I read, here's a few bullets of interest:
    • I saw one page say that it was $1/file, but the Agreement seems to say $3/file. Would want that cleared up - which is it?
    • Royalties "between 50%-100%" means that for normal operation, you get 50%. The 100% is a special promotion that goes through the end of the year if you publish before 10/15. I didn't see any mention of any sort of sliding royalty scale.
    • There are minimum prices based on filesize, with $2 being the minimum selling price for files up to 5 meg.
    • The license does appear to say that you are the owner of your content, and that you are granting fatbrain the rights to distribute it digitally. Hopefully that means that you're not giving away the rights to the great american novel. But I couldn't find mention abouthow long the agreement lasts.
  • "Cluster This!" by DonkPunch (electronic - 23 pages)

    Join Slashdot nuisance poster DonkPunch as he shares with you a shovelfull of his ASCII output.

    Chapter 1 - "Make a Beowulf cluster out of it!" -- with special contributions from Anonymous Coward, PHroD, and others

    Chapter 2 -- "You're a Wimp. REAL hackers use _______"

    Chapter 3 -- "______ is Dead. Use _______."

    Chapter 4 -- "Drooool... and How to Clean It Off Your Keyboard"

    Chapter 5 -- "Dealing With Slashdot Story Reposts -- A 12-Step Course in Anger Management"

    Special Bonus Section -- "The Ultimate Slashdot Stress Test" -- A fictional Jon Katz article about teachers who support gun control teaching evolution on a KDE desktop using a Red Hat system on which the students are required to use vi.

  • I'm not saying that this service should be shut down. Far from it. I'm not even saying that it's a bad idea, per se.

    I'm just saying that most people are NOT going to look upon books "published" on a site like this as valid or reliable information, and that there are some very good reasons for it. In fact, personally, I would consider what I found there LESS valid for informational purposes than something I linked to by way of /. or WitchVox or another source of info I've come to trust.

    I'm also saying that I don't expect the things that appear there to be taken seriously by most people who care about intellectual integrity. Then again, it'll probably do a good business -- Ralph Blum certainly does, and he's not exactly known for accurate scholarship or accurate ANYthing. :P

  • *chuckles*

    Point taken.

    However, there is an important distinction that the satire does not acknowledge:

    Programming is more objective than writing. At a minimum, you can see if the end-result is functioning or not. :)

    The great self-help fad notwithstanding, books don't usually have the same "this will work" characteristic implied in their use. The best you can really do is "Based on [insert data and/or personal ranting here], this is what should work for someone in your situation." But overall it's not going to be anywhere near as objective.

  • It would certainly be an interesting way to get sources for a research paper. Then again, the vast majority of professors won't take that seriously. You'd better have at least a few papers that were published in actual honest-to-Deities scholarly journals. :P

    Or do you mean a verbatim reprint? Yeah, I can see that happening. Not that it's a good thing Then again, the same thing would apply. You'd damn well BETTER have some journal sources, preferably journals-available-at-your-university sources, or someone will smell a rat REAL fast.
    :)
  • when I am asked a question that is directed to my field of expertise I write, and write. I will give the partitioner a full explanation of what ever technology s/he is looking to get information on. For instance I was approached by a woman that wanted to pick my brain about e-commerce, I told her I would be glad to write my thoughts about her project down. I did this for free like a moron. As I have done a hundred times, now I can build a library of whitepapers that can be downloaded by people that ask flak for help. I charge 10-15 bucks and boom The reader/buyer is rewarded with knowledge and I am rewarded with a contribution to the buy Flak a Cray fund. Great idea Fatbrain.
  • I'm the FTP site maintainer for Project Gutenberg, so wanted to add my $0.02. PG texts are pretty close to "open source." The standard PG license was developed at about the same time as the GPL, but independently. It basically says that you can remove the license and do what you want with the text, or keep the license and abide by it.

    Anyone who wants to submit a book - even if it's copyrighted (some of the PG books are, like Bruce Sterling's

    • Hacker Crackdown
    ) should contact PG's top dude, Michael Hart (hart@pobox.com). He's touchy about stuff that's likely to be censored (no
    • Kama Sutra
    yet...) but generally PG is quite eclectic, with a strong bias towards stuff out of copyright (older literature).

  • Re:What about quality control? (Score:3)

    by GeorgeH ( 5469 ) on Tuesday August 31, 1999 @09:18AM (#1713650) Homepage Journal
    I agree whole heartedly. Quality control of information is an utmost concern. I think everyone will agree with me that we cannot have people posting whatever information they feel like without strict editorial control.

    Imagine a worst case senerio: Some screwball decides to open up his computer, and send whatever information he or she wants to whomever asks for it! No editorial control whatsoever! And worse, the information could somehow reference other information on other computers, "linking" it, if you will. Who knows how big this could get? It would be a gigantic mess, tangled in a web of lies that spans the world wide!

    Luckily, we have strict editorial control over information, and won't ever have to deal with descerning for ourselves what information is true or false.

    (Props to Swift)

    --

  • What about quality control? (Score:3)

    by fable2112 ( 46114 ) on Tuesday August 31, 1999 @08:34AM (#1713651) Homepage

    Traditionally, in the literary world, self-publishing is VERY much frowned upon.

    While I don't necessarily agree with some of the standards (or lack thereof) that certain publishers have, I do have to say that the theory behind having your book sold to a reputable publishing house or your paper printed in a reputable journal is a good one.

    Case in point of what can happen when people *don't* pay attention to this: Time's "cyberporn" article. Remember that? The one based off of an incredibly shoddy undergraduate "research paper?"

    Given that any fool with a buck to spare every month can upload whatever drivel said fool sees fit to ... I don't really find this terribly encouraging.

    Yes, it's good to have alternative sources of info. (That's why I read /. in the first place!) However, there really ought to be some sort of quality indicator in place, even if it's just abstracts and reviews of the books/papers posted up there.

    And yes, I'm fully aware that some absolute crap gets published professionally (said Time article being an excellent example). But on some level that I haven't figured out yet, as a writer, this new form of publishing bothers the heck out of me even though I theoretically think it's a good idea. *shrug*

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