Futurismic

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.

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OK, here’s another link-collection post, but there’s more of a theme to this one: I noticed I had a whole bunch of pieces about the economics of publishing, so why not shove ‘em together and see what juxtapositions we get?

We’ll start with this article discovered at TechDirt, an impassioned rant from a librarian that responds initially to the American Booksellers Association and their anger at big-box stores for deep-discounting books:

In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author’s books available for under ten bucks. (Wisconsin is missing all the excitement—they have a law against dumping goods below wholesale prices —but Amazon has joined in the fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers at low-low prices.)

The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. [...] But I’m also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they’re being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

Reminiscent of ebook pricing and the strange circular logics that emerge when it is discussed, no? There’s lots more good stuff in there, too, about the internet and libraries, peer-reviewed journals and the true value of information (as defined by its accessibility)… as a former library employee who was permanently frustrated by upper-management attitudes to changing technologies, it’s nice to see some common sense being spoken aloud in that sphere.

Ever wondered how much a “best-selling” author makes from a book? It’s less than you might think, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J K Rowling; via BoingBoing, here’s Lynn Viehl running the numbers on her latest novel:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8 percent of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40 percent of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshold (based on 2008 figures.) Yep, we’d almost qualify for foodstamps.

Now, what happens to the remainders after a debut book has passed its initial “window of opportunity”? Sometimes they’re pulped, of course, but sometimes they’re sold off super-cheap. Via Ian Hocking comes a bit of soul searching from new author MFW Curran, who wonders which is the best outcome for writers:

Judging by the people walking out of the shop with armfuls of novels, if someone did buy The Secret War for £3, would it be such a hardship? True enough, I won’t get anything from that sale, but if it leads that reader to pick up another of my books, that must be good, mustn’t it? I myself have bought books from remainder shops and have then gone on to pay full price for another of that author’s books [...]

So this leads me to another question about “what price is a book to an author?” Especially a debut book? Can a writer bear to have a debut book sold for bugger-all if it will lead to a following? Is it worth it for no gain in the short term only for a longer term outlook?

With the rights to my books reverting to me around summer of next year, there is a question about where do I go from here in terms of publishing and many people have suggested self-publishing. But what of the first book? Should this go out gratis to entice people to buy the next two or three? Maybe as an e-book? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

And while authors nervously joke about it, and friends and family may tease that they’ve seen your book in The Works or a similar remainder bookshop, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Remainder bookshops may seem like a graveyard for novelists, but perhaps its just a new beginning or an opportunity.

Whatever gets it out there, right?

Looking at the music business, I’d suggest that giving as much as you can bear away for free is the way forward… but as has been pointed out to me many times, music and written fiction are very different businesses in some respects. That said, I think the freemium business model is going to be hard to escape, at least in the near- to middle-term; it’s unappealing to many publishers and writers alike, but there aren’t many other options on the table.

Finally, another link from MetaFilter, though one of more general application. The last couple of years have made me realise that I need to undestand a lot more about economics, not only as a writer but as someone who wants to understand how the world operates as a system; hence, I’ve added the History of Economic Thought website to my list of resources that I really need to get round to reading. The web design is very late-nineties retro, but the actual content looks pretty useful.

If you’ve any further recommendations of good introductory sources on economics (or comments on the articles above, natch), please drop a note in the comments!

Just in case you thought Tom Maly’s speculations about fabrication tech eradicating Fed Ex were a stretch too far, and that the technologies required are no where near ready… well, you might have a point. But even so, 3D technologies are developing rapidly and cheaply, as demonstrated by some people from Cambridge University who’ve written software that allows a common or garden webcam to scan three dimensional objects in realtime as you turn them in your hand:

ProFORMA uses a fixed video camera to allow on-line reconstruction of objects held in a user’s hand. Partial models are generated very quickly and displayed instantly, allowing the user to plan how to manipulate the object’s pose in order to generate additional views for reconstruction. We demonstrate how augmented reality can be used to assist the user in view planning, guiding the user to collect new keyframes from desirable views in order to complete and refine the model.

Yeah, sure, it looks a little janky and lo-fi. The point is, ten years ago it would have been pure speculation; so where might we be in another decade?

Those of you in the States may not be aware (or even care) that the staff of Royal Mail were recently engaged in wildcat strikes as a protest against the machinations of their management. Much as a lot of us have sympathies with their plight, it’s hard not to see them supplying the nails for the business’s coffin lid in the process; for example, in my guise as a music reviewer, the last two months have seen a sudden massed move by music PR outfits from mailing CDs to using file transfer services. It’s a sad story, really, the sort of thing I dare say someone will make a movie out of; by using the only method available to him to protect his job, the humble British postman is unwittingly hastening his own demise*.

But don’t feel too comfy over there, Statesiders, because Fed-Ex won’t last much longer in the grand scale of things. Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon points out that as old-school letters are trumped by email, Fed-Ex’s business shrinks down to authenticated documents and object transfers. The former won’t last much longer:

For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

That’ll leave Fed-Ex with what you might call “molecule moving” as its last major specialisation. And while the internet can’t dissolve that as quickly as data and authenticity, the writing is already on the wall, albeit faintly:

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

Given that I’m moving house in about three weeks, I have a close and direct sympathy with what Maly is saying there – I’m not looking forward to disassembling my furniture and having it driven 270 miles in a van just so I can reassemble it at the other end. Molecular-level fabrication may seem that little bit too science fictional to believe right now, of course, but that’s what we thought about ubiquitous consumer-grade computing back in the early eighties… [image by Dano]

And by the way, if you like the cut of Mr Maly’s jib, keep your eyes peeled – there’ll be some interesting news in the next week or so here at Futurismic.

[ * Please note that I have no wish to see postmen put out of work, and I'm not the sort of person who believes that unions or striking should be illegal. However, striking in this age of social media is observably self-defeating, and as much as corruption and mismanagement have exacerbated the problem, the business model that the Royal Mail has been operating under for so long is withering away as a result of circumstance and technological change as much as malice. Or to put it another way, playing King Canute is only going to get you wet feet. It's a sad thing, but it's also inevitable. ]

You can’t so much as turn sideways without stumbling over this story, especially in the transhumanist and Singularitarian neighbourhoods of the web, and with good reason. So let’s just cut straight to the meat of it:

Scientists, at IBM Research – Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. [via KurzweilAI]

(And I’ll tell you, much as I love the web and the young crazy companies that throng through it, no one writes a press release like the guys from IBM.)

Additionally, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, IBM scientists have developed an algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene® supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

These advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions. The team’s work stands to break the mold of conventional von Neumann computing, in order to meet the system requirements of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow.

All the pomp and majesty of the best publicity material, but still somehow stately, dignified. You’ll have to forgive me, but I see a whole lot of press releases on a daily basis, and when I see one this well crafted, I just have to sit back and admire it (or envy it) for a moment.

But delivery systems aside, what’s the story here? Basically, IBM have built a computer that simulates the complexity and interconnection of a cat’s brain, which is significantly more complex than previous neuro-cortical simulations. Why does that matter? Well, because for those who theorise that the human mind is an entirely emergent property of the brain (that there’s no such thing as a soul or spirit, in other words) the ability to simulate the hardware that the mind runs on should provide us the ability to simulate the mind itself. And once we can simulate it, we can probably record, transfer, tweak and tamper with it. Think human-level artificial intelligence; think Technological Singularity predicated on a point where intelligent machine become intelligent enough to redesign themselves. Think brain uploading, Moravec cyborg bodies, a panoply of simulated virtual universes… think hard and crazy science fictional stuff, in other words.

Of course, there’s no certainty that any of these things will result from IBM’s simulated cat brain, but it’s another proof-of-concept step along that road. Now all they have to do is keep the BlueGene computer from chasing dust motes in sunbeams and taking a nap every time they want to run some tests. [image by avatar-1]