Tag Archives: economics

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Author decides to copy Radiohead’s business model

Here’s an experiment to keep a close eye on, if you’re curious about new business models for publishing books in the digital age. Publishers Faber and historian Ben Wilson are taking a page from Radiohead’s playbook and releasing Wilson’s latest book in digital form on a pay-what-you-like basis:

Wilson’s examination of the value and meaning of liberty will be available to download on 27 April, six weeks before it is published on paper at £14.99, with readers given the freedom to set their own price, or even download it for free.

It’s a strategy Wilson, whose two previous books were published conventionally by Faber as hardbacks, admits is “a gamble”. When he first heard about the “frightening idea of giving the book away”, his reaction was surprise. “I’ve published before,” he explains, “and you have that excitement of a book in physical form, so that’s what you expect”. But after a while “it clicked together so well with what I wanted to do with the book – the campaigning edge – that it made a lot of sense.”

It’s good to see that Wilson and Faber haven’t made the usual mistake with the Radiohead experiment, in that they’re plainly seeing it as being a publicity play as opposed to the main income stream. However, I think it fair to say that Wilson isn’t quite a household name like Radiohead (hence there’s nowhere near the same level of expectation around the launch) and that the books business is still very different to the music business (although they’re getting closer), so while the model is similar we’d all be foolish to expect a similar pattern of results.

But it’s very interesting to see Faber taking this step, not just grappling with the new technology of ebooks as a format but with the new economics of electronic media, where free is – for better or for worse – the best way of getting your product into people’s minds (and memory sticks). It also makes Harpercollins’ claims about ebook pricing look even more ropey… [via GalleyCat]

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The depression as a stress-test for nation-states

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Does the financial implosion mean the end of the road for nation-states as we know them? John ‘Global Guerillas’ Robb seems to think it might be, as they’re now caught between two increasingly powerful forces:

1. A dominant, turbulent, and uncontrollable global super-network, that is pressuring/weakening/buffeting nation-states from above.
2. Super-empowered individuals/groups rising up from below that are ready to pounce on or exploit any demonstration of nation-state weakness.

As Robb points out, many of the responses to the situation thus far have been based in the same sort of political thinking that dominated the early 20th Century, and suggests that decentralisation is more likely to be a successful tactic:

… decentralization that both improves resilience and accelerates (parallelizes) innovation offers a greater chance of success.   Nation-states that ease the process of decentralization will likely have both the easiest transition to the new fluid environment and the best long term prospects (wealth creation).

In other words, nation-states are most likely to survive by becoming less like nation-states; whether those massive institutions will be able to let go of the reins that easily remains to be seen.

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From prison ship to labour camp – interstitial employment, coming to a port near you

prison-ship labour campThere’s been a labour dispute here in the UK regarding European companies shipping in workers from their native nations rather than hiring locally for UK-based contracts; given the current state of the economy, it’s caused a fair amount of angry words and governmental filibustering on all sides. [image via Financial Times]

Subtopia looks beyond the obvious headlines, however, and examines the former prison-ships being used to house the immigrant workers – partly to keep them safe from angry locals, but perhaps also subliminally as a reminder of their menial economic status:

While UK laborers bark about equal opportunity and contract fairness (and perhaps spew some racist vitriol in the process) there is the greater undercurrent of geo-economic exploitation here bobbing spaces of injustice on the surface. Particularly eerie to me in this picture is the spatial intermixing of incarceration and migrant labor, and how architecturally speaking the surplus of global capital’s industrial bodies are rounded up at sea inside the old remains of an overcrowded penal system, once oceanic jails now filled with a new kind of transient inmate, a new kind of quasi-prison labor force.

The bulk shipping of cheap outsourced labour isn’t nice for the local population, but what the mainstream media here in the UK is skipping over is how desperate the immigrants must be for work that they’ll put up with such deeply unpleasant conditions. This is the nasty underbelly of corporate globalism at work, and I expect we’ll see a lot more of it as the economic power of nation-states declines and the corporations move into their place.

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More bartering business

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barter at a car boot saleIf you think your local economy’s in a mess, just be thankful you’re not living in Russia, where it appears that big corporations are turning to barter trade in a desperate attempt to keep business moving:

So far, economists doubt that barter will grow to the level it reached in the 1990s. Earlier in the transition to a market economy, industrialists still had little monetary stake in their businesses but were dependent on the prestige that went with executive positions, said Andrei Yakovlev of the Higher School of Economics here. They had little incentive to cut costs, and barter deals kept them going for five years, he said.

Now, business owners and managers “are really trying to reduce costs and reduce inefficiency,” Mr. Yakovlev said. Interest in barter, he said, is more likely to come from regional governments, which have the most to lose from high unemployment.

Local government moving towards barter is a little scary… but then a bit of decentralisation might not be a terrible thing if it means that, in the long run, the system becomes more resilient to global clusterfucks like the subprime collapse.

Meanwhile, there are other comparatively recent examples of communities surviving without the assistance of banks – the Irish bank strike of the early seventies, for example. And the sheer amount of coverage being given to alternative currencies and financial systems in places where economics is not traditionally the foremost subject of interest speaks volumes for the overnight erosion of trust in banking as we know it. [image by shawnchin]

What will we build in its place as we move into John Robb’s global guerilla century?

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Screw optimism – this is a global guerilla century

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guerillas on the marchJohn Robb isn’t going to give you the news you want to hear. Nope, sorry – the Depression scenario has already emerged fully, and the results are not going to be pretty as we transition into a new politico-economical era in its wake:

A global depression, in and of itself, isn’t the end of the world. However, it can set in motion unexpected events (black swans) — as in how the last depression catalyzed WW2. The revisionist effort to this economic collapse isn’t likely to be a surge in ideology or nationalism. Instead, we can expect an organic realignment as small groups of people form new primary loyalties (either to violent manufactured tribes or resilient communities), slot themselves into open source movements, and challenge a wheezing group of incumbent nation-states. This is a global guerrilla century.

So, not exactly a rosy outlook… and a poke in the eye for the Positive Manifesto school of sf, perhaps. That said, there’s plenty of starting points in Robb’s material for the more dystopian-leaning writer to tackle! [image by Keith Bacongco]

But what do you think – is Robb looking at a worst-case scenario and seeing Mad Max re-runs, or is he being generous with the possibilities of civilisational collapse?