A Federated Media For Podcasting

John Battelle’s Federated Media is a medium sized company which aggregates the eyeballs of several of the worlds most popular blogs (including the highly influential and chaotic Boing Boing), and sells them to advertisers.

Result – blog authors can finance their writing and the growth of their sites, while advertisers get a single point of content to help them target and run campaigns. There’s an instant firewall around editorial decisions – as advertisers have no direct input into blog content; and sites can choose to accept only advertising that accords with their perspective (and *puke* branding). Advertisers get an instant audience (Boing Boing alone gets 3 million uniques a month), cheap.

Why does this not yet exist for podcasting?

While individual podcasts garner listeners at most in the hundreds of thousands (although there are perhaps a few that crest a million uniques) together they represent an growing, economically solvent and highly educated audience. An audience, in the US alone, of over 18 million listeners!

There are organisations like Adam Curry’s ‘Mevio‘ (formerly Podshow Network). These guys throw automated adds into hundreds of small – medium casts, and provide a revenue stream; claiming exclusive rights to content for contract duration in return.

What I’m suggesting here by contrast, is a limited service that would work with top 20 or 100 (independent) podcasts only- dealing with advertisers directly in geographically specific markets (this is how itunes distinguishes its podcast rankings, which largely dictate downloads); and allowing podcast hosts to craft their own discursive in-show adverts, in their own voice – as Leo Laporte does in his enormously popular This Week in Tech podcast. This way, advertisers get known quantity shows with large, established audiences and (internally) consistent content and presentation. While at the same time growing indies can fund production costs and the development of their creative enterprise- via a personal relationship with a single company, who are ‘on their side’. The reality of ‘new media’ is that (especially in audio production, but increasingly in video) a small group working with a tiny budget can create compelling, high production quality content. What they cannot do, is replicate the services of a sales force. Nor should they try, as direct advertiser / editor contact, almost inevitably results in watered down, less appealing creative work (or ‘content’, for you marketdoids).

Marketing on Demand for Authors

Small publishers and independently published authors are increasingly switching to Print On Demand (POD) services for short run (in the low thousands), academic and older titles (slow but steady sellers). Companies like Lightening Source provide a dirt-cheap ‘just in time’ printing facility, with constant improvements in the quality of the finished book. Additionally such POD services facilitate ISBN numbers (which allow bookstores to order and stock a title) and work closely with Amazon to ensure books are available to purchase (and more importantly deliver quickly) online.

These companies also remove the distribution headache, delivering directly to the public and retail, without the necessity of publishers direct involvement. Such services are not perfect. The finished product may not always rival a traditionally printed book (and of course the design is still reliant on the talent of the publisher / author side artist). More importantly POD cannot replace the direct relationships between publisher and retail chain / indie bookshop, which dictate placement of the book at retail, how long a title is stocked, and whether it is for sale at brick and mortar stores at all. Accepting that, they can be an important tool for small publishers who wish to take a risk on a book they could not otherwise have published, or authors who have a pre-existing audience they can sell to directly. I’m thinking of the Wil Wheatons and Amanda Palmers of this world- actors, musicians, and fine artists who maintain a direct relationship with their fan communities, either through blogging, podcasting, convention appearances or what have you. Personalities who may obtain much greater targeted sales dealing with their audiences directly. Here’s an interesting quote from the Wheaton interview linked in the last sentence, on his experiences with his book ‘Dancing Barefoot’..

The publisher insisted on marketing it in a way that did nothing to expand the audience I was already able to reach on my own, and basically blew me off when I repeatedly begged them to change course. I hired a PR firm at great expense, and they did pretty much the same thing. I vowed that I would never again go the “traditional” route with my future books.

So POD is great, but what’s this business that’s missing?

What’s missing is a marketing firm specially tailored to the needs of micropublishers. A company that knows the net, understands how to build an audience, AND can work with traditional media outlets to arrange interviews, reading tours, store promotions and television, radio and new media advertising. This is the one facet of traditional publishing that has not been replicated as a paid service.

With the suicide of the music industry, musicians are abandoning record labels to deal directly with, and sell directly to, their audiences. Probably the two best known examples are Radiohead’s In Rainbows release, and the Nine Inch Nails record Ghosts, which were both released directly online using donation, and fremium models respectively. Both records sold extremely well (in Radiohead’s case, better than their previous three albums).

What’s less well known outside the industry, is that artists are turning to next generation promotion companies like Live Nation, to handle the other important aspects of getting music out there- promotion and touring. These are services that an artist (beyond a certain popularity) cannot themselves handle without a label or label replacement. More importantly, as the perceived value of music recordings drops to zero (as will inevitably happen with books, Kindle or no Kindle), such tours provide the revenue stream that musicians need to keep creating.

Where is the equivalent in publishing? Where are the television and radio adverts for books? Where is the radio talk channel devoted to the enormously popular audio book genre? Who is organising paid and highly publicised public readings? Who is organising and promoting book tours for a set fee or a percentage of profits? Answer- no one. This is a service that could work at a variety of levels, from festival main stage readings by Chuck Palahniuk, to book promotions of unknown but compelling new fiction and non-fiction authors.

Two businesses that should exist, but don’t. Yet.

Display of ‘vintage’ science fiction titles in Chapters window

Arthur C. Clark once called science fiction “The only genuinely mind expanding drug”, proof positive that he hadn’t tried any of the others. And yet, there’s something to this flippant quote. SF is the literary genre, next to the romantic novel, most often demeaned; despite this, it is perhaps the genre which has most influenced our recent history – inspiring technological and social change as varied as mass transit systems, space travel, and urban promiscuity.

Science Fiction is a kind of architecture of the mind, laying out possibilities sometimes loosely and grandly, sometimes explicitly and with the greatest conservatism – for technology to engineer. There’s another quote I like about the genre, this one by Frederik Pohl- “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” This cuts to the experimental nature of writing about the future, and the knack great authors have had of deriving subtly correct predictions about complex chaotic systems.

Today, the pace of change has outstripped the possibility, and perhaps even the desirability, of accurately predicting the future. The death of positivism, the dissolution of main stream culture in favour of a neutered commercialisation of the counter-culture, a near universal alienation from the corrupt pragmatism of politics; these things don’t lend themselves to the problem solving, manifest destiny of John W. Campbell’s lauded ‘Golden Age’. Science fiction has had to change – bifurcating into the utopianism of the post singularity genre, worlds in which all of our insurmountable problems disappear in the radical compression of technological advancement enabled by post human intelligences; and the experiential literary speculative fictions of Philip K. Dick’s paranoic simulcra, JG Ballards reconstructions of a reality erased by virtualities, and Bruce Sterling’s subjective political dystopias.

Science Fiction rests at an interesting cross roads. It’s deep unfashionability is contradicted and intertwined with the its cultural influence. This Summer every major ‘tent pole’ release is a Sci-Fi movie: although few of these films have much in common with the intellectually freewheeling, ‘sensawonda’ produced by written SF, the thought provoking kick that Clark eluded to. High fashion, dulled to irrelevance by hipster ‘makers’ and neoludite artists, seems poised to adopt Steam Punk whole sale. The art world, for decades addicted to the shocking and shallowly theoretical delights of conceptualism, has been shaken awake by Low Brow / Pop Surrealism – figurative painting and sculpture born of the weirdo SF aesthetic of underground comix and the Ballardeque machine love of the Hot Rod subculture.

Back in literary science fiction land, the magazines – paying authors tiny, near worthless fractions of their former story rates [in the introduction to Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection 'Bagombo Snuff Box' - that's the one where he laid out his infamous 8 Rules of writing - the author notes that after WW2, he earned more selling his first three stories than in a year working at GE] – have devolved into endless repetitions of succouring libertarian space opera (Asimovs), or abandoned SF wholesale in favour of fusions of low Fantasy and Horror (New Weird, Bizarro).

There are stirrings of hope for the commercial life of the genre. Podcasts have become paying markets and built new audiences for short form SF (Steve Eley’s Escape pod being the most prominent). Blogs which collate the flash fiction of young authors, provide the exposure and the experience once obtainable via the magazines. As for the direction of the genre, and the possibility of original work being done, only the future can tell.

For the longest of times, I’ve been promising my girlfriend a recommended reading list to bone up on Science Fictiony goodness. I grew up reading SF almost exclusively, and though my palate has now tempered, and I’m far from an expert in the genre, I remain smugly opinionated about matters Science Fictional.

What self respective geek can TIVo the Battle Star finale, without first having first explored the genres literary routes? What Watchmench can argue the finer details of squid replacement, without a thorough steeping in the pulps? I kid, a little. In any case, the wee lady was keen that I make her a list, and being far too bumptious an individual to construct such a bibliography without sharing it with the world, I present ‘The Great Big SF Reading List’, being an incomplete and arbitrary list of titles considered to be of exceptional worth or peculiar interest.

The list does not purport to provide a canon, but rather one perspective. The collated preferences of a life well wasted. Heinlein, Silverberg or Scott Card are notable by their absence. There’s little enough representation from the 90′s and beyond- no Ted Chiang, Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Rudy Rucker nor Bruce Sterling; more recent authors, some of whose short story work I’ve greatly enjoyed.

It is an introductory list, deliberately incomplete, heterogeneous. A list that tries to distil a taste of the golden age, new wave, cyberpunk and post singularity genres. It leans toward softer ‘social science’ SF, but doesn’t negate the hardest of scientific speculation. This is a list of slivers. Slivers of that diverse, obtuse and gloriously indefinable thing called Science Fiction. A list that hopelessly fails, and is delicious just the same.

The Books

Intervention, Saga of the Exiles (The Many Coloured Land, The Golden Torc, The Non-Born King, The Adversary), Galactic Milieu Trilogy (Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, Magnificat) – Julian May

Dune (first of a series, but fine on it’s own) – Frank Herbert
Rama, Rendezvous with Rama (Rama 2) – Arthur C. Clark
Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick

Foundation Series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundations Edge, Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation + Friends of Foundation) – Isaac Asimov

The Xeelee Sequence (Raft, Timelike infinity, Flux, Ring) – Stephen Baxter
Dangerous Visions (ed Harlan Ellison)
Earth Sea Trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore) – Ursula K. Le Guin
Forty Thousand in Gehenna, Downbelow Station – CJ Cherryh (tomes, wonderful tomes but tomes)
The Earth Book of Stormgate – Poul Anderson
Neuromancer – William Gibson
More than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
Space Chantey – RA Lafferty
The Dark is Rising Sequence (Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; Silver on the Tree) – Susan Cooper
The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Short Stories (any collection) – HG Wells
Short Stories (any collection) – Larry Niven
Orbitsville, One Million Tomorrows, The Ceres Solution – Bob Shaw
The Stainless Steel Rat – Harry Harrison
Norstrilia, The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
Slaughterhouse 5, Cats Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
The Drowned World, Crash – JG Ballard
Hothouse, Dracula Unbound - Brian Aldiss
Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) – Kim Stanley Robinson
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Orynx and Crake, The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood
Virtual Mode - Piers Anthony
1984 – George Orwell
Times Fool – Glyn Maxwell
Lanark - Alasdair Grey
Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany
The Star Rover - Jack London
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts) – Douglas Adams
Graphic Novels – Y The Last Man, Preacher, Transmetropolitan
Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk

Addendum (Items added on further consideration)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – Cory Doctorow
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect – Roger Williams

That’s my brief list. Here’s another more substantial.

An article by Mike Elgan in Computer World Magazine, laying the boot into e-books, has sparked a surprisingly intelligent discussion on Digg. According to Elgan, e-books are bound to fail because..

1. They aren’t cheaper – both the hardware and content are more expensive
2. Content is available on other platforms (e.g.: PC)
3. People love paper books

Throughout his article Elgan conflates the e-book format and electronic book devices, in a way that confuses the issue of uptake. Perhaps the reason he fails to differentiate between medium and it’s media, is that there are so many kinds of things that can be described as a e-book. Wikipedia for example, lists twenty five e-book formats, including both document types and readers.

Elgan’s article might have been written twenty ago, about digital music..

‘Companies like Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi and Fujitsu have devoted millions of dollars over the past couple of decades developing what they hope will be a device that replaces the..’ [Record player]
‘The hardware costs hundreds of dollars’ [CD Player]
‘everyone already has alternatives’ [Vinal, Tape, 8 Track]
‘do people want to “curl up” with a battery-operated..’ [iPod]

For a new format or device to succeed, what matters is not how much people like an existing product, but how much they would enjoy an alternative with greater function. Currently e-book readers (like all digital display technologies), are in their infancy. We know this because their development is occurring so rapidly. The best digital display available in 1987 was a 16 inch VGA CRT, boasting 256 colors at a 320×200 pixel resolution. Twenty years later, digital images can be displayed on a variety of output media from 63 inch flat screen HDTV’s at 1920 × 1080 pixel resolution, in 281 trillion colors; to high contrast, monochromatic 800*600 e-ink ‘powerless displays’.

We each carry a variety of devices capable of displaying digital books; from laptops, to MP3 players, to mobile phones. Digital displays are becoming ever more versatile, ubiquitous and cheap, with increasing contrast, fidelity and resolution. Fujitsu have recently announced the first prosumer colour e-ink display. So why haven’t e-books already taken off?

Existing efforts are crippled by Digital Restrictions Malware, and available in a bewildering variety of incompatible proprietary formats, from Adobe, Sony, Microsoft, Mobipocket, eReader and others. Publishers fear they will experience the same growth in copyright infringement that the record industry claims has negatively effected sales. It may already be too late. In the absence of reasonably priced, DRM free alternatives, consumers are turning to unlicensed downloads, just as happened with music and film. A quick search of isoHunt, a top bittorrent index, for the term ‘DVD’ returns over 26,000 active downloads. A similar search for ‘Book’, returns over 4,000.

A great majority of these files are posted without their authors consent, but some publishers and authors are embracing digital distribution. Blogger and award winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, has distributed all his novels online for free; releasing digital versions simultaneously with their paper equivalents. A few publishers, like Baen Books, have adapted to the new marketplace, making available older content for free, and selling reasonably priced, DRM free, multi-format e-books, with subscription options. Initiatives like Project Gutenberg, seek to make digital copies of public domain books universally available. Whether publishers eventually embrace consumer friendly formats, or continue to ignore them, digital e-book content will continue to grow in availability.

With e-book readers, the costs of adoption are still high, as dedicated devices or high resolution PDA’s still cost hundreds of euro. Similarly, while common devices like iPod’s can technically display e-books, such uses often require a degree of technical knowledge, and force users to struggle with unfriendly user interfaces. This should soon change, as devices like Apple’s iPhone usher in a new generation of high resolution, high contrast digital display devices. While Apple seems likely to restrict the iPhone’s use, their competitors will be more than happy to capitalise on more open platforms, whilst learning from Apple’s user interface innovations.

Digital books provide a variety of predictable advantages, as well as many which will not emerge until they become more evolved. Right now groups like The Institute for the future of the book, are hard at work ‘inventing new forms of discourse for the network age’, and their efforts provide an insight into just some of the potential benefits of e-books..

1. Collaborative writing / revision / comment / annotation
2. Effectively free wireless distribution
3. Smaller form factor – potentially infinite books in one networked device
4. Environmentally friendly
5. Text search
6. Updateable
7. Rapid universal publication
8. Dynamic user interfaces
9. Flexibility of format
10. Interactivity

Whether e-book’s are ultimately consumed on laptops, dedicated palmtop devices with flexible screens, enhanced newsprint, heads up displays, or by all these and other means, is impossible to predict. Right now paper books are far more durable, resilient, and user friendly than any of their alternatives; but as an analogue medium, their development is slow and expensive. E-book’s by contrast, benefit fully from the brakeneck pace of accelerating technological change, and offer so many potential advantages in cost, portability and capability that their adoption is all but inevitable. Witness the publication and consumption of scientific articles, which though nominally tied to peer reviewed magazines, increasingly occurs initially online – increasing the speed, penetration, and availability of research.

Digital consumption will affect the format of books, as it has already affected the format of articles published on the web. There will always be a market for traditional ‘dead tree’ editions; but ‘the book’ will likely morph and splinter into a variety of forms, and the nature of authorship will change with it. This is as an evolution of discourse as significant the creation of written language, or the invention of the printing press. It’s an exciting time to be a reader, and an even more exciting time to be a writer.

Bittorrent, a protocol which provides an excellent method of ‘appropriating’ the latest episode of Lost, sans advertisements direct from the USA, is rather unsuited to maintaining the availability of media on the long tail. A naive, non programmer’s explanation of why this is the case follows… For a file to be available to download via Bittorrent, at least one seeder must maintain availability of a complete copy, dynamically providing portions of the file to a potential downloading ‘swarm’. Additionally, for a file to be practically quick to download, pieces of it must be available from a wide range of sources (so that individual clients can trade them directly, greatly accelerating the process), and must additionally be listed on a Bittorrent tracker server, which brokers communications between clients, and between clients and seeder.

Dispersed hosting is a weakness and a strength of Bittorrent as a distribution medium. Say what you will about the printing press, it takes far longer for paper based novels to disappear completely than for their digital equivalents to become network isolated, or become unreadable due to the march of incompatibility.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about building Bittorrent (or torrent like) functionality into consumer devices, set top boxes and the like; and little awareness of the bandwidth costs that such distribution transfers to the end user.

There have been a variety of attempts to establish an open directory of Creative Commons works, but as of right now no exhaustive list exists, and existing search methodologies are ineffectual. This is not a criticism of CC per say, which I find both useful and commendable, both as a creator (almost without exception, everything on this site is made available under a creative commons license), and an ethical (sic) user, but rather of the assumption that the internet automagically provides publishing methodologies equivalent or superior to those of traditional media.

Right now, as far as I can tell, it is essentially impossible to find a (PDF) copy of Accelerando online, as far the the internet is concerned, the novel no longer exists. Similarly, the archive of episodes of Technolotics will effectively disappear forever in the ether, if I ever fail to pay a hosting bill (already rather overdue I’m afraid).

Update: After some further searching, I did manage to find a lone floating copy – download here – of Accelerando, which neatly solved my immediate problem. Astute readers will note that this doesn’t invalidate my original point. To ensure the novels continuing availability (I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume Accelerando.org’s servers have been consumed by some sort of singularity), I’m hosting the file myself. Download link, and copyright notice, after the break.

Download: Accelerando – by Charlie Stross.

This work is Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005.

This text of this novel is made available, with the kind consent of the publishers, under the terms of the Creative Commons deed, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5: You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/legalcode If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: http://www.accelerando.org/

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They’re not my favourite books, though many would make that list too. Nor are they representative of what I’ve read – I spent most of my childhood immersed in science fiction; and most of what I read these days is digital; much too, of the writing I consider influential, is in the form of song lyrics. But each book changed how I saw the world.

It’s a list as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes; there’s no Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, no Salinger or Mailer, no D.H Lawrence or Virginia Wolfe, and there’s (god forbid) no Ernest bleedin’ Hemmingway. It’s an embarrassingly cliched list, and incomplete, both due to faulty memory and the huge degree of ephemeral journal articles, reports, blog posts and news print excluded by definition. Here it is anyway..

Read the List on 43 Things.

On the Road – Jack Kerouac
The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Blank Slate – Stephen Pinker
1984 – George Orwell
Hot House – Brian Aldiss
Dracula Unbound – Brian Aldiss
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Lanark – Alasdair Grey
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
No Logo – Naomi Klein
Hegemony or Survival – Noam Chomsky
Times Fool – Glyn Maxwell
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
American Psycho – Brett Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction – Brett Easton Ellis
Money – Martin Amis
Bright Lights Big City – Jay McInerney
Dune – Frank Herbert
Sociology – Anthony Giddens
Raft – Steven Baxter
Ring – Steven Baxter
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Dangerous Visions – Harlan Ellison (ed)
Transmetropolitan – Warren Ellis
The Liar – Stephen Fry
The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
The Star Rover – Jack London
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah – Richard Bach
Collected Poems – Wilfred Owen
Collected Stories – Anton Chekov
A Coney island of the mind – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
Forty Thousand in Gehenna – CJ Cherryh
The Earth Book of Stormgate – Poul Anderson
Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud
The magicians nephew – CS Lewis
The last battle – CS Lewis

What’s on your list?