Tag: technology

Mailvox: Kindle Unlimited

Will Best wonders if I’ve changed my mind:

I was interested if VD has changed his opinion on Kindle Unlimited since his July post? The NYT via drudge seemed to put it in a pretty negative light, and its concern as it relates to distorting story length does seem legitimate.

Well, I suppose I should find out what my opinion was back in July, as I don’t rightly recall the details. Let’s see, I wrote:

  • My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers.
  • Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it.
  • It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates.
  • It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers.  

Now let’s compare it to the New York Times story:

  • It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. 
  • The author H.M. Ward says she left Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program after two months when her income dropped 75 percent.
  • “Your rabid romance reader who was buying $100 worth of books a week and
    funneling $5,200 into Amazon per year is now generating less than $120 a
    year,” she said. 
  • Amazon
    usually gives self-published writers 70 percent of what a book earns,
    which means a novel selling for $4.99 yields $3.50…. But
    Kindle Unlimited is less generous, paying a fluctuating amount. In
    July, the fee for a digital “borrow” was $1.80. It fell to $1.33 in
    October before rebounding slightly to $1.39 in November.

It appears I was correct about the first three points and wrong about the last one. I wasn’t aware of the relevant math, but it is entirely clear that $120 < $5,200 and $1.33 < $3.50. The math doesn’t work for the writer. I don’t see how the math works for Amazon either.

I have to confess that Kindle Unlimited hasn’t really been on my radar because Castalia House withdrew nearly all of our books from the Kindle Select program in order to be able to sell them from the Castalia House store. We never considered Kindle Unlimited at all. So, besides that initial post, I haven’t given it any thought. But the more I look at the math, the more I wonder if Amazon hasn’t made a serious mistake here based on the false assumption that every author has to be on Amazon. It looks to me like a classic corporate overplaying of a strong hand.

Everyone wanted to be on Amazon because that has been where they were able to earn the most money. But already, both we, and perhaps more importantly, our associates, are seeing that Castalia can sell between 10 percent and 20 percent of Amazon’s sales of a newly released book. And since the author makes more money on each Castalia sale, that’s the equivalent of up to 28 percent of the revenue derived from Amazon. The math still favored Amazon, obviously, but if one then reduces the Amazon revenue by 62 percent, suddenly the total Amazon revenue is only 35 percent more even when the unit sales are 400 percent higher. This means that with Kindle Unlimited, Amazon is rendering themselves considerably less relevant to writers, which strikes me as a counterproductive long term strategy.

So, my revised conclusion is that Kindle Unlimited is likely to prove massively unpopular among successful self-published writers, of no interest to independent publishers and their writers, and off-limits to mainstream published writers. Barring significant changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon ended up discontinuing it within two or three years. If they don’t, Kindle Unlimited will likely become a digital books ghetto filled with little more than romance, porn, and conspiracy theory written by unknown authors who can’t draw interest from independent publishers.

The only writers to whom I think it might be useful are those new writers who don’t have an audience and simply want to throw stuff out there in the hopes that one will find them. But even there, you’re probably better off going with Select than with Unlimited.

Some things never change

Now I understand why Jerry Pournelle laughed when I explained to him exactly why I’d been kicked out of SFWA:

How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET

Back in the old days, computer scientists funded by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Administration (DARPA) worried greatly about how their proto-internet, the Advanced Research Projects Administration Network (ARPANET) might appear as a frivolous gossip-fest to accountants, inspector generals, and legislators anxious to show that they were flint-eyed custodians of the public purse. Hence they strongly requested that people, especially people with guest accounts, not mention ARPANET in non-Department of Defense contexts.

And that was how in 1985 science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET:

Wed, 29 May 85 06:16:01 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA To: POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: USER-ACCOUNTS@MIT-MC.ARPA

    You used the word “ARPANET” in your June Byte column three times. You even said

    “I gave Alex the local ARPANET access number to record for the 1200-baud modem and inadvertently transposed two numbers.”

    I don’t care if Alex IS a computer–you may soon find your accounts on MC decremented by gov’t order.

Thu, 30 May 85 03:57:38 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

    thank you. if left to you I suppose I cewrtainly will find my accounts terminated. Your nice private message appreciated. seppuku follows.. maybe you ought to have me dumped off the net and be done with it? or must you work through someone else? J. E. Pournelle

Thu, 30 May 85 11:23:26 EST From: David Vinayak Wallace To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Surprise!

    Date: Wed, 29 May 85 07:04:16 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz

        Do you think I chastised jerry pournelle too much for talking about his use of the arpanet in byte?

    Yes. It’s embarrassing to send a message to someone like that when a message in OFF POURNE would have done as well!

    And now you’ve sent the message out I’ll have to go and find out why he had to mention it in the first place!

Thu, 30 May 85 18:44:42 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA To: POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: GUMBY@MIT-MC.ARPA

    Date: Thu, 30 May 85 03:57:38 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

        thank you. if left to you I suppose I cewrtainly will find my accounts terminated. Your nice private message appreciated. seppuku follows.. maybe you ought to have me dumped off the net and be done with it? or must you work through someone else? J. E. Pournelle

    USER-A is the mailing list created explicitly for dealing with these sorts of issues. It is the appropriate forum for discussion. There are eight people on user-a. You probably know better than I do, but last I heard about 100,000 times as many people read BYTE. Thus, the issue of privacy is the last one you should raise.

    I don’t particularly want to force you into ritual disembowelment; rather, I’m interested — and I’m not the only one — in why you find it necessary to flaunt your use of the arpanet. The more attention you (and other people) draw to non-blow-em-up use of the arpanet the more likely some Proxmire type is to start inquiring into its operations.

Fri, 31 May 85 01:11:16 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA To: KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: GUMBY@MIT-MC.ARPA

    I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone.

31 MAY 1985 0225 EST From: GSB at MIT-MC.ARPA (Glenn S. Burke) To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

    i guess i haven’t been paying enough attention to realize that he knew there was any heckling going on at all. I’m almost tempted to let him take his marbles and floppy disks and go home.

Fri, 31 May 85 09:39 EDT From: Kent M Pitman To: CStacy at MIT-MC.ARPA cc: Klotz at MIT-MC.ARPA, KMP at SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA, Gumby at MIT-MC.ARPA

    Subject: Pourne Date: Fri, 31 May 85 01:11:16 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA To: KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA

        I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone.

    Personally, I’d just turn off his account. It’s not like it’s the first time, and he not only flaunts his use of our machines but stabs us in the back with grumblings about why he doesn’t like this or that program of ours when he gets a chance. (Am thinking particularly of an article he wrote which condemned Lisp for reasons amounting to little more than his ignorance, but which cited Teach-Lisp in a not-friendly light… The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I’d rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old…)

Date: Fri, 31 May 85 11:02:27 EST From: John G. Aspinall To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA, GSB at MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: just think of it…

        MIT Maximum Confusion PDP-10 MC ITS.1488. PWORD.2632. TTY 57 16. Lusers, Fair Share = 86%

        :login pourne

        That account has been temporarily turned off.

        Reason: Think of it as evolution in action.

        Any questions may be directed to USER-ACCOUNTS

    I don’t know whether you guys have read Niven and Pournelle’s Oathof_Fealty_, but “Think of it as evolution in action.” is their thinly disguised rallying cry for do-it-yourself social Darwinism. It would be so, so sweet to shove it back in his face.

Isn’t it fascinating how the petty control freaks always make matters worse for themselves because they can’t bear the thought of not throwing their insignificant weight around? I mean, if you truly want to avoid drawing attention to yourself, perhaps you might want to consider not going out of your way to annoy one of the most important tech columnists in the world, no matter how irritating you might find his politics. It’s also informative to see how they think of an organization or a technology over which they have influence as somehow belonging to them.

That’s why you must always KEEP THE RABBITS OUT. They absolutely live for the bureaucracy and the thrill that bureaucratic control gives them. And once they have sufficient influence and know you’re a not-rabbit, they will be looking to kick you out at the earliest opportunity. As both the ARPANET and SFWA examples show, they will utilize any excuse, however flimsy, even when it isn’t an actual violation of any organizational rule.

In any event, neither lefty comp-sci nerds nor a stroke could keep Dr. Pournelle off the Internet for long.

Monday Dec. 25, I had a stroke.   I think my head is all right, and I am recovering.  Alas I used to be a touch typist and I am now learning to be a two finger typist.  At present I am a one finger typist.  Call it 1.1 finger, but after today’s therapy , maybe 1.2; I am learning. I just made the Spock sign.

Here is to hoping Jerry makes a full recovery in short order, and enjoy more years confusing and confounding the anklebiters.

The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He’s got his first reco up and it’s a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’re not on Recommend yet, or if you’re on it but haven’t really started using it yet, I’d encourage you to give it a go. They haven’t even officially “come to America” yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don’t know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They’ve now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they’ll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They’re also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we’re only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that’s merely an indicator, it’s not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you’ve got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today’s gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don’t even know they’re ignorant:

Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

The customer is not always right

Or desired. This is an interesting technological development in customer relations:

Travelers are often asked to review their hotel, restaurant and car service. But increasingly, it goes both ways.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, for example, rate their passengers from one to five stars at the end of each ride. If a rider receives three stars or fewer, the driver and passenger will not be paired up again. And at OpenTable, the restaurant booking system, customers are banned if they do not show for a reservation too many times.

These are among the ways that sophisticated rating systems can turn on the customer, identifying the best and worst among them.

I wonder how long it will take for this to go ideological. After all, if we know one thing about SJWs, they politicize absolutely everything and they aren’t shy about cutting off their nose to spite their face. It won’t surprise me if we see customers being banned from various establishments and services because their patronage is unwanted due to politics. Which is, of course, an unprotected right, or at least it is until Christians start using it as an effective proxy to deny services to those whose behavior they believe to be abomination.

I’ve lost one job and three book contracts due to corporate correctness to date. Which I always enjoy pointing out to those who claim bakers have to bake cakes they do not wish to bake and permit bed-and-breakfast guests they do not wish to have. As always, the SJWs seek to establish laws that only bite in one direction.

Of course, the costs of corporate correctness can be blessings in disguise. I’d much rather be publishing books through Castalia House than have published Media Whores and The Red Hand of Government with Thomas Nelson and A Throne of Bones with Lion Hudson.

Bubblicious

They’re partying like it’s 1999:

Many of the “users” on social media sites aren’t real people at all – they’re celebrity staff tweeting on behalf of their employer, or PRs promoting a company, or even fake accounts for people that don’t exist at all. In fact, half of all Twitter accounts created in 2013 have already been deleted.

These fake accounts are often created by unscrupulous firms that will beef up your follower count in return for cold hard cash. “Twitter is in the centre of public interest and politicians or companies are often ranked by number of followers or re-tweets or the like – so, there is a whole “web optimisation” industry offering services to make you look better on Twitter – everybody can buy 10,000 followers for $5,” Pfeffer said.

Emphasis added. I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks thanks to GamerGate, and while it’s a useful tool, its utility is strictly limited. I’m a little surprised Google hasn’t launched a competitor yet, but the problem with Twitter is the same as it is with all self-expression platforms: most people simply don’t have all that much to say.

We all know why the stock market bubble exists; all that Fed money has to go somewhere. But an economy based on the value of companies making it possible to pass very short virtual texts around strikes me as one of the few things dumber than simply making leaves legal tender.

A misguided manifesto

Nearly 20 years ago, the national media was abuzz with the publication of the Unabomber’s manifesto. The editors at the St. Paul Pioneer Press wanted someone to read and analyze it, but the task proved to be beyond the ability of its columnists and journalists. Then the Technology Editor had the bright idea of having their twenty-something games columnist have a look at it, thereby resulting in the only time my name appeared on the Pioneer Press Op/Ed page.

I found this when I was digging through some of my old game review columns that I’ve been gradually scanning and putting up at Recommend. I thought perhaps it might be of interest to the sort of hardcore readers who will swing by today as well as those who used to read my WND column to see how my thought processes have been fairly consistent over the years.

Unabomber misses how technology aids freedom
St. Paul Pioneer Press
October 4, 1995

While the Washington Post’s publication of the Unabomber’s treatise, “Industrial Society and its Future,” has attracted much attention and commentary, it is unfortunate that most of the discussion has revolved around the question of publication rather than the manifesto itself.

The publication issue is not only of little interest to anyone outside the newsrooms, but also will resolve itself soon, as Unabomber imitators will either begin to crawl out from under their rocks, or they will not.

But the treatise is not worthy of attention so much for the macabre means through which it reached the mainstream media as for the concepts it contains. The Unabomber’s discussion of modern leftist psychology is not only thought-provoking but insightful, while his indictment of the evils brought about by industrial society carry more weight than the critiques put forth by latter-day Marxists. Nevertheless, when it comes to the issue of technology and human freedom, the Unabomber goes astray.

The manifesto traces many of the psycho-social problems of modern society to the Industrial Revolution. Since technology has made it unnecessary or impossible for humans to support themselves independently, it prevents them from exercising the natural Power Process of goal setting and attainment. (The “Power Process” is a concept that psychologists say is necessary for human mental health. The “Power Process” is the natural need of humans to exert some degree of control over their own destiny.) This inability to exercise the Power Process leads inevitably to the loss of dignity and human autonomy. The central point of the treatise thus revolves around the inherent conflict between technological development and individual freedom.

The Unabomber sees the seductive nature of technology as a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. While each new technology appears desirable by itself, the totality of societal-technological advance slowly envelops us, whether we actively choose to accept it or not. As we become dependent on the new technologies, government steps in and regulates access to them, removing even limited opportunity to exercise the Power Process and eventually resulting in the reduction of human beings to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.

What this theory ignores is that technology is a double-edged sword. Far from being the inevitable tool of government repression, technology has historically shown itself to be a primary force in providing freedom and power to the people. The monopolistic power of the medieval Catholic Church could not have been broken without the printing press, just as the omnipresent television cameras recently helped Boris Yeltsin and the infant Russian democracy movement survive the last reaction of the Soviet hardliners.

Governments and other would-be oppressors may use technology, but they are also afraid of it in the people’s hands. Witness our own government’s fear of high-level encryption software and its tawdry attempts to force the Clipper encryption chip on us. The Clipper chip would have allowed the FBI and other government agencies to read any data supposedly encrypted by the public. God forbid that we should send e-mail without the FBI being able to read it!

And the Chinese government has a tiger by the tail as it learns how difficult it is to allow free technological development and still keep the masses under control. The point is that technology can be a force for freedom as well as a weapon against it.

To prevent us from being turned into cogs in the techno-industrial machine, the Unabomber’s manifesto prescribes a return to a more natural state where our time would be spent exercising the Power Process by surviving via primitive methods, so we would no longer need to find surrogate means of exercising the Process. By “surrogate means,” he meant art, science, sports and anything not immediately related to survival. One wonders where the dignity and autonomy are to be found in the primitive life that Hobbes once characterized as nasty, brutish and short.

This regressive longing for a return to the natural state is nothing new. At the very least it echoes back 200 years to Rousseau. But human nature is very much a part of nature too, and like the Left he disdains, the Unabomber argues his way into the totalitarian corner of making choices for people in order to preserve their freedom to choose. George Orwell would have been proud.

But truly autonomous freedom, the freedom to choose and to exercise the Power Process also means the freedom to choose poorly. If Americans are working harder and longer than before, it is not because technology forces them to do so, but because many of us have decided to work more in order to pursue the larger TV, the BMW or the second home. These decisions to pursue things we do not need may well be foolish, but they are not the Unabomber’s to make. They are ours.

Day writes a Sunday technology column for the Pioneer Press.

More collateral than damage

Like it or not, the US is clearly guilty of large-scale terrorism:

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

I’m not entirely sure such indifference to collateral damage is correctly described as not meaning to harm anyone except the targeted individual. Regardless, it’s become abundantly clear there is no such thing as “targeted killing” that doesn’t involve soldiers on the ground pulling the trigger. And I suspect in less than ten years, cheap DIY drone technology will drive US politicians almost entirely underground as they become the targets of those they have so ineffectively targeted.

Unless, of course, cheap, but powerful ground-to-air laser technology renders drone technology completely useless.

Fumigating the Firefox, redux

I’m reposting this since Mozilla’s decision to place ads in Firefox has even more people moving to Pale Moon. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.

    Create a new tab.
    Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
    Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
    On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
    Close the tab.

That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. This is important, because Firefox’s only real value is in its brand, and as the number of reported Firefox users continues to fall, Google’s rationale for propping up Mozilla is reduced as well.

Mozilla slashes its own throat

If you haven’t migrated to Pale Moon yet, you’re going to want to do so soon:

The Firefox browser, lagging its well-heeled rivals, will soon be serving up an array of ads to one and all. Mozilla, the nonprofit group that develops and updates the popular Internet browser, said Thursday that it will begin placing ads where thumbnails of your frequently visited websites would normally be found when you open a new tab. While many of those thumbnails, which Firefox calls “Enhanced Tiles,” will remain as quick links to your favorite sites, some will feature sponsored logos or other promoted images.

The decision comes after a year-long experiment testing the receptivity of the ads among a small group of users.

The ads are a way for Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla to stay relevant at a time when more people are making use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome when browsing the Web. Mozilla hopes the sponsored tiles will help influence powerful advertising groups while not compromising its nonprofit values. The ads also represent a potential new revenue stream for Mozilla, which gets most of its funding from Google through a deal in which it is the default search engine.

“We see this as a meaningful contributor to Mozilla’s revenue,” Darren Herman, vice president of content services for Mozilla and the man behind the tile ads, said in an interview. “We’re using ourselves to demonstrate that it’s possible to advertise at a scale nobody else can.”

The initiative comes as Firefox continues to lose ground to its
rivals. According to Net Applications, which measures individual users’
daily Internet activity, IE is the top PC browser, with a 58 percent
share, followed by Chrome at 21 percent and Firefox at 14 percent. Mozilla
plans to ramp up the ads over time, but even once that’s in full swing,
Herman said Mozilla will tread carefully with how it places those ads…. Among the first ads shown will be anti-tobacco messages and promotions for the new Edward Snowden biopic, “Citizenfour.”

Once you go full SJW, there is no going back. It’s not going to be long before Firefox is below 10 percent. And once that happens, they may as well shut it down.

SpaceShip Two down

The right stuff returns. You have to respect the courage of the men flying private test rockets into space:

Virgin Galactic’s suborbital commercial spacecraft SpaceShipTwo has crashed during a test flight in the Mojave Desert about 95 miles north of Los Angeles, according to NBC affiliate KGET. The California Highway Patrol has confirmed that one of the two pilots aboard the vehicle is dead; and the other is in critical condition.