Futurismic

Wired ed-in-chief Chris Anderson emerges from the back rooms once again with a lengthy piece lauding what he calls “the next industrial revolution” – which is, in essence, the imminent explosion of small companies using modern fabrication equipment and outsourcing techniques whose agility and low overheads will enable them to sweep away the old guard of corporate giants. [image by oskay]

That’s the theory, anyway, and it should be fairly familiar to regular Futurismic readers: we’re talking consumer-price-point 3D design software; 3D printing and fabrication; outsourced manufacturing; garage-industry electronics assembly techniques; open-source designs; hardware and software hacking; crowdsourcing for ideas, designs and feedback. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a slice that captures the spirit:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

From a globalist perspective, it’s pretty optimistic – as you might expect from the guy who came up with the concept of the Long Tail. That said, it’s not what the big corporations want to hear… and that’s probably the main stumbling block between the here and now and Anderson’s entreprenurial utopia. It’s become embarassingly obvious how much of a hold corporate America has over the engines of policy, and it probably won’t take much effort to spin Anderson’s vision into a dark and unpatriotic future where American manufacturing jobs are sent overseas (to those sneaky Chinese, no less!), garage makers are enemies of freedom (and probably a glass fiber’s breadth from becoming terrorists), and the people’s right to not be shafted by those who already hold all the aces is swept under the carpet so as to maintain a precarious economic status quo.

OK, so I’m overstating for effect, there… but you can see where I’m going with this, I hope. Given the staggering levels of obfuscation and deceit involved with the US healthcare reforms, I can’t see Anderson’s revolution happening without some serious back-room dealing and political psy-ops from those who stand to lose the most from it. And I doubt it will be a uniquely American problem, either; the government to which I pay my taxes is just as compromised, albeit in slightly different ways, and the richer countries of the Old World are all in the same boat.

What remains to be seen is whether Anderson’s maker revolution is an economic inevitability or an avoidable alternative. It’ll come as no surprise to most of you who read here regularly that I’d like nothing more than to see the bloated corporate behemoths of the world get their shoes wet while doing a King Canute impersonation, but only time will tell. This is one story where we can’t just skip to the last page to find out the ending; let’s just hope we don’t get squashed by the plot mechanics, eh?

Well, it’s been a lively year for changes in the publishing industry, hasn’t it? This time last year, I wrote a post titled 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? – and over here in the UK, Borders has just gone into receivership, a few days before Amazon claimed to have sold more Kindle ebooks over the holiday period than dead-tree books. The times, they are a-changin’.

I still don’t have an ebook reader myself, because I’ve not seen one that’s open enough for my tastes – I don’t want to be tied to one retailer (same reason I don’t have an iPod), and I want to be able to read multiple formats without jumping through hoops. But 2010 looks like the year that the tablet computer makes its presence felt (if Apple are going to release one, you can bet your boots that cheaper and more open devices will follow close on its heels), and that means all we need is a decent platform for reading ebooks.

Enter inventor and Singularitarian Ray Kurzweil, who has a track record of disruptive developments in an assortment of industries; his new company knfb Reading Technology (a cooperative venture with the National Federation of the Blind) is set to debut an ebook software platform called Blio at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show next week. It’s already available for free download, with versions for PC, iPhone and iPod Touch, and (according to the linked article) it trumps pretty much all of the competition on features and accessibility. Blio may well turn out to be the grenade in the ebook punchbowl… I’m hoping an Android-native version appears pretty soon.

And what of the humble magazine? Distribution and print costs are killing off all but the most tenacious print publishing niches at a ferocious rate, but there’s plenty of people trying to find a new paradigm for the format – here’s a video demo of Mag+, the result of a collaboration between a Swedish publisher and BERG, the London-based design outfit [via MetaFilter]:

Of course, you may be thinking that all these developments are attempts to saddle a horse that has already fled the stable… after all, no-one reads any more, do they? Well, actually, they do – the consumption patterns and preferred media have changed rapidly, but a recent University of California study shows that the amount of text consumed by the average American has actually tripled since 1980, and social networks like Facebook have ordinary people writing more regularly than ever before (although the quality and nature of the material they write is admittedly pretty variable).

The one thing we can probably say for certain is that people are still going to be reading in 2010, and for a long time afterwards. The challenge for writers and publishers (of fiction or otherwise) are to find the channels that work best for the material they produce, and then to find a way to leverage that channel to make it a viable business model.

Interesting times ahead, don’t you think?

Sometimes I think I should have more faith in my own mad ideas. While the UK postal strikes were in full effect earlier in the year, I was kicking around an plan for replacing the increasingly beleaguered Royal Mail with a sort of peer-to-peer localised mail delivery system, which everyone I mentioned it to told me was completely impractical. [image by piermario]

I dare say they were probably right, but it’s still somehow gratifying to see that it’s not so crazy an idea that I’m the only person to have had it – via Global Guerrillas comes a post by a fellow called Chase Saunders in which he describes a similar idea: UsExpress.

I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again.  It’s almost like Brownian motion.  Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.

[...]

If my father took 10 packages, 4 days a week, fifty weeks a year, that would be 120 x 10 x 200 = 240,000 package miles.  How much do you think it costs to pay for a UPS driver to carry and deliver 240,000 package-miles?  Even if we assume an average of 300 packages on board at all times, that’s probably at least a week’s salary, not to mention overhead and benefits.  The difference is, the UPS guy is not going to drive that route unless we pay him (and train him, and buy him a truck, etc.)  But my father is going to drive to work anyway. If the pickup and dropoff locations are close enough to his work and home, why not generate a few hundred — or a few thousand — extra dollars a year?

Sure, there are some flaws to the idea, but Saunders addresses some of the big ones. The major stumbling block would be getting past the largely unfounded institutional trust we have in national mail systems – the trust that parcels won’t be lost, and that they will get to where they’re supposed to go, on neither of which Royal Mail has a flawless record. But such a system might just fill the gap as energy costs soar toward the day that physical delivery becomes obsolete…

Continuing the increasingly ubiquitous discussion of the future of bookstores (in the wake of Borders in the UK going into receivership), two heavyweight thinkers have thrown their opinions out into the ring in the last few days. First of all, Clay Shirky, who notes that there are three basic groups of people arguing for bookstores to be rescued from what seems to be an unstoppable decline, and that it’s the one that treats bookstores as having in intrinsic community value that has the most hope of coming up with a workable model for the future:

[This] third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.

Then we get a response from Cory Doctorow, who can come at the question from multiple angles – as someone who has both frequented bookstores and been employed by them, and as someone whose creative output is sold through them. As always with Doctorow, out-of-the-box thinking comes as standard; for example, instead of seeing print-on-demand technology as a business-killer, why not look at how you can use it to add value to the bookstore experience?

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Plenty of room for one-person middle-man businesses in there, as well… maybe the publishing houses should start thinking in this direction, too. What if they outsourced the physical side of book publishing – design, layout, so on and so forth – entirely to custom designers? You’d quickly get a range of services from the utilitarian to the luxurious, and add an element of individuality to a medium that has become increasingly homogenised… [image by jayniebell]

Blue-sky thinking aside, Doctorow and Shirkey make it plain that there’s no reason bookstores have to die off… but it’s up to the people that run them (and, to some extent, those who use them, too) to make some changes in the direction of sustainability.

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!