• There is a big problem with ebooks. Once all the books in the world have been digitised, there will only be one book. No author, no revenue, except for those who find ways to exploit the power of cut and paste. There will be no reason to write a book again.

    Books take time and consideration. Those doing the work need recompense – even if it is only praise and acclaim. There is nothing for the ego in the mashup world of the big ebook.

    Look what has happened to music. Because it is so ubiquitous, recorded music has little value anymore. At least musicians have the option of going on tour and making money from live audiences.

    You could argue that that is how authors get paid already. Very few make any money from selling books. They live by talking and teaching others how to write books, thus putting themselves further out of business. Technology has not only made books freely available on Amazon, it has both pushed the price down and allowed myriads of middle men to come in and chip away at the profit, making it less and less viable to be an author.

    Already we have mash up books written by anonymous committees in anonymous “creative” production houses, promoted with marketing budgets that individual authors would never get spent on their books. This is marketing, not authorship. It’ll be a sad day when that is all that is available – fodder for stupid humans that will have allowed it to happen to them – Soma.

    I guess there are a few authors who manage a life on the road, with large audiences all buying signed copies of the book as a souvenir of the gig to put in their collections- not as a book to be read. This is what musicians do now, but an author needs down time for contemplation. If that is taken out of the equation, then all that is produced is pulp. More pulp for the big mashup book in the clouds.

    Of course I should declare self-interest in this problem. Will I be able to make any money from my chosen career in a few years time. Something tells me I won’t and that I’d better start looking for new revenue streams.

    When I was young, you needed to be a god to even think about starting a band. I had a high opinion of myself! But it was hard to do. There were no mentors, we had to work it out ourselves. Now you can get kitted out at Lidl, learn from the best teachers on youtube and make yourself sound perfect with recording software. The result? Modern music all sounds the same, all overproduced and lacking soul. No wonder all the kids are happily listening to music of my generation. We would have poked our eyes out rather than listen to Doris Day! Music is over. It’s just there and anyone can do it. I don’t see anyone doing anything interesting lyrically these days. Lyrics are a nuisance – they require thought and practice and hard work. Much better to toss off a few lines of greeting card pulp.

    Authorship by its very nature, requires time spent thinking, formulating ideas and arguments. It takes a human brain to do this. Machines can churn out stuff that looks like text (humans can do this too!), but you wouldn’t want to read it. The net has to find a way for the individual to be allowed to make money from their ideas and their humanity otherwise the machines win by default, without ever becoming intelligent themselves.

  • you are not a gadget I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, at the moment.

    Lanier is one of the original geeky gurus of the net. He’s taking stock and having a think about where we are going in this book, which he calls a manifesto. I haven’t got to the manifesto part yet, but his musings are most thought provoking.

    I got in on the net quite early, building my first website in early 1997. Most people thought I was silly, self-indulgent or plain wasting my time. everybody told mw I was crazy when I told them they would all be emailing and video conferencing, shopping and banking online. “You won’t catch me doing that!” they all told me.

    They were exciting times. If you weren’t there, you’ll never understand. The net was growing in dog years, the speed of change was incredible, keeping up with it was like being on drugs. Every day was a bright, new dawn as new possibilities opened up. I think my family worried about me for a while! I never did make a million – not many did – but the intellectual pursuit was worth it in itself.

    But now it’s been corporatised. Just like the record companies collared the music industry, Facebook, Google et al have collared the net for their own ends. Does it matter? Maybe not now. These are pretty good guys – at the moment. But for how long?

    Everyday Google and Facebook colonise our lives, not just affecting our society, they are becoming our society. We think we are the customers of these giant corporations, but we are not. We are the product. The advertisers are the customers! It takes a moment to get your head around that one. We do a deal with Facebook and Google – Give us these amazing tools and we will give you gigabits of high-level information about us and our lives, so that you can sell to us stuff we never knew we needed.

    Lanier argues that we are becoming conditioned by the providers. We are being turned into homogenised purchasing units – infinitely targetable by the advertisers. A good number of people now think Facebook is email – that is how they communicate.

    Facebook is a boring, corporate, homogenised environment. It always looks the same and you are not in control. Remember last week how your front page changed? Did you have any say in that? Slowly, in tiny baby steps, they are grinding down their users so that they don’t notice innovations anymore and accept things into their lives that, if introduced in on fell swoop, would get them out on the streets protesting.

    Facebook is there to make money for itself and for advertisers and for no other reason. The same with Google. They call themselves the good guys, but so did the Nazis. Google, in the hands of a dictator, could be the end of civilisation.

    Lanier wants to celebrate humanity, and that is what we do not do in this brave new Web2.0. We homogenise and we anonymise. Yes, you can be who you like on the net, but what does that do to the real you? What does that do to real interaction between human beings. When you make a comment on the net and sign yourself, anonymous12547, what does that say about you? You are worthless and your comment is worthless, it may as well have been posted by a robot making up a stream of words that seem to make sense if read in the right order.

    What happened to all those whacky personal websites? They all became corporatised. We are told what a website should look like and so they now all look the same.

    I’m with Lanier, let’s bring a bit of humanity back to the web. It is a tool, not our god.

  • We had a day out shopping in Cardiff today. I saw the pair of shoes in John Lewis and thought they were a pefect example of form over function. They are not exactly perfect for playing basketball in!

    The Daffodil hat was in the window of a shop selling everything Welsh. I imagine there must be rows of human daffodils that turn up to rugby games at the Millenium Stadium.

    I took a short cut through a little garden park in the centre and was almost bowled over by the scent from a tree that I think might be a witch hazel.

    On the way home, we were preceded by a fabulous rainbow that danced across the road in front of us. I can’t remember when I last saw such a bright one.