Collecting the best in what Open Media has to offer
I saw this short film on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s blog. It looks like it was produced to help kick of the Creative Commons annual campaign, though their support site is not open as of this writing.
It is an amazingly well produced short featuring comments from many luminaries juxtaposed with examples of the kinds of creative remixing that the Creative Commons licenses have enabled and supported.
It is getting difficult to keep up with book and music releases that qualify as open content lately. Such a complaint to have, I know. I am way behind on both my reading and recommendations.
Ben Rosenbaum’s recent release of his short story collection, “The Ant King and Other Stories”, stands out, though. Ben is not unique in allowing derivative works in his license choice, but appears to being doing more than releasing the ebook for free and passively allowing works like translations. He’s started a contest explicitly to encourage remixing the work.
The details in a nutshell is he is giving readers six months to submit their works and he’ll reward his three favorites with signed and personalized hard cover editions. This sort of active engagement with an audience so far has been more common with independent musicians like Jonathan Coulton and Brad Sucks, perhaps because the idea of a remix of a song is a bit more obvious. Doing so has worked well for those artists, so hopefully it will also benefit Ben with some new and more interested readers.
I also recommend you check out the podcast of True Names, Ben’s collaboration with Cory Doctorow. I am a huge fan of this particular sub-sub-genre, stories of post-humans. Their collaboration brings a lot of unique and fun ideas to the mix, including a heavy bias towards deeply geek computer science conceits and inventive speculation on how completely virtualized humans may evolve into the far future.
Wired has a nice piece on Flat World Knowledge, a company experimenting with bringing some aspects of open content to college text books. The article provides a solid survey of the state of textbook publishing and how Flat World intends to innovate around some of the persistent complaints. I can’t help but think of the core contention of Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma which I just finished.
If consumers have such persistently unfulfilled needs or unaddressed complaints, it forms an opportunity just waiting to be exploited. The only question is how much money the incumbents can muster in their fight to veto the future. In the case of college textbooks, I suspect the answer is rather a lot. Regardless I hope Flat Knowledge achieves enough success to challenge the status quo and net some improvement for poor college students everywhere.
Michel over at the P2P Foundation, a group interested in peer production and peering models of all sorts, has some more background on Feedbooks. He contact them and they appear to have gladly given him some more information on their technology choices, features and how they’d ideally like to integrate better with the Kindle.
This is Cory’s first collection of non-fiction, gathering his best essays, speeches and white papers. I cannot understate how much Cory’s work in this vein has influenced my own views on all aspects of open media. The book looks gorgeous judging by the information on its web page.
As with all of Cory’s other works, you can download an electronic version now. The ebook is available in both plain PDF format and plain text and released under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
I strongly encourage you to buy a copy to support Cory’s work. I’ve already ordered mine and have a space reserved right next to my copy of Free Culture and the Indie Band Survival Guide.
Mur Lafferty (who also originally founded this site) is the latest but not the least in a succession of independent authors leaping the gap into the world of traditional publishing. Mur did a stunning job launching her novel as a podcast work last year. So much so that she attracted the attention of Permuted Press as they were searching for launch titles for their new imprint, Swarm Press.
She is staging her own rush on the Amazon charts in just a few days, on August 25th, to celebrate the book’s launch with Swarm. In anticipation of the book’s official launch and her attack on the charts, she has released the book as a PDF formatted electronic edition with a new short story set in the same universe.
She previously released the book a chapter at a time, with original artwork and links to audio easter eggs, as part of her enhanced feed to help promote the podcast. This new electronic edition compiles all of the original chapters into one file, along with the new content.
I chatted with Mur briefly and asked her if she’d considered Feedbooks as well which I’ve written about here previously. She was traveling but promised to look into it on her return. While the PDF is a huge reward for existing fans and an incentive to potential ones as a free edition, I think it would be a superb addition to Feedbooks for those of us who use mobile devices or dedicated ebook readers.
If you are a fan of the novel’s podcast, either of the previous ebook editions, or either of the previous print editions, help Mur by purchasing the Swarm Press edition this Monday, the 25th. If you are going to Dragon*Con, I encourage you to get the overnight shipping and take it with you. Mur has a signing session at the convention and I am sure she’d be pleased to sign any or all editions you happen to have.
If you haven’t read or listened to Playing for Keeps, check out the web site and try one of the existing, free editions now so that if you enjoy it, you’ll consider helping Mur with her rush on Amazon.
I have been trying to resist using my iPod Touch for much more than music playing as I am a recovering PDA addict. However, recently its potential for reading e-books has been revealed to me through a nice little (non-free) app, Annotater. Honestly, I installed it more so I could share e-book versions of technical books for reading on my daily ride on the local commuter rail. I will admit to experimenting with some titles on Project Gutenberg with middling success. (I devoured all of Burroughs’ Mars titles from there on my last PDA some years ago.)
I was understandably intrigued when I saw a review on Wired for another e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a free one called Stanza. It is roughly comparable, only lacking a few features that Annotater provides but possessing one that prompted me to share some thoughts.
What makes Stanza stand out is its integration with a site about which I am honestly surprised I had not heard previously, Feedbooks.
Feedbooks was founded in June of last year and provides a simple yet powerful service. At its core, the site offers the ability to generate PDF formatted electronic books on the fly from a variety of sources for just about every e-book reader on the market. You can also build a variety of different views into your books of interest as RSS feeds. Hence the name of the site.
Feedbooks republishes titles from Project Gutenberg making them easy to search and format for whatever device you posses. They also seem to have a considerable body of CC licensed books, most notably almost all of Cory Doctorow’s works. Authors can also publish their own books through the site. I am not sure if they offer explicit licensing support to authors doing so since I don’t have a title I can publish to test it. They offer a little bit of guidance to the reader on applicable copyright for books in their catalog though I wish they’d expose CC-licensed works more clearly. They do not appear to be using the CC badges and RDF metadata which would seem to be a natural fit with the site. It is early days for Feedbooks so maybe they will add that feature at some point.
You can also create customer newspapers based on existing RSS feeds. I use Bylines on my iPod Touch but for a device that doesn’t have a decent RSS aggregator application available, this feature may be of interest. It seems similar to how the Kindle handles RSS subscription from what I have read about that device.
Feedbooks seems like a great way to consume free and often public domain or openly licensed books for those of us with portable devices and they have done a remarkable job of supporting just about every reader available. For independent authors, they also offer a venue worth considering if you are already making your works available as free PDFs. If they have or add explicit Creative Commons license support, all the better.
Matthew Wayne Selznick poses a question that I have run into once or twice before. Which is the greater freedom, using unencumbered formats that might not be supported by some devices or deal with the tarball of DRM to work with all potential devices that may be able to help consume your content?
To be clear, he is not asking whether he should push restricted content only versus open content only, which mitigates the sting of the additional DRM formats somewhat be offering them along side open formats. For an artist trying to build recognition and an audience, though, it is a question of what better serves that end. MWS is a huge open media advocate but he is still trying to share his art and perhaps benefit from doing so along the way. (Recall that when Brave Men Run launched, he published it among other ways as an electronic book with a CC developing nations license, one of the only works I’ve personally seen to do so.)
I think what it boils down to is which freedom is more important. If the freedom of the work is more important, then a conditioned license that ensures it spreads as freely as possible is the clear answer. If the freedom of the user is more important then offering the easiest formats for the user is the way to go. That means, counter intuitively, you may be faced with the possibility of publishing your work in DRM-crippled format if a large part of your potential audience has bought such.
I acknowledge that this is an odd statement but bear with me. If a user wants to remix and redistribute, then, yes, DRM of course limits that freedom. But if we are talking about freedom of access, setting aside reuse for the moment, and using the specific case MWS discusses of devices that only support DRM formats, then you are talking about a situation of zero or sum freedom. I acknowledge that the question of more or less freedom is still relevant and soon follows on that initial point. That’s not the conundrum with which this author is faced, however. Plus, per my earlier point, for re-use he is not withholding open formats and licenses at all, quite the contrary.
I am not sure with which freedom the goal of being commercially successful best aligns. It may even be orthogonal or contingent on exactly who your audience is.
Thankfully, someone already pointed out on MWS’ post in the comments that the two devices that had him in this conundrum have adequate support for PDF. With a bit of elbow grease, then, he may be able to avoid the choice between these freedoms. I still think the question is a valid, and well posed, one. I am not sure I know the final answer, or if there even is one. I am thankful to Mike Linksvayer for helping me uncover this weird paradox of freedoms when discussing the ad hoc DRM on the Zune media player.
Technorati Tags: DRM, ebooks, free
Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation contacted me recently suggesting that his research would be of interest to our readers. He specifically recommended the web casts section of the foundation’s not inconsiderable web site. He also recommends
…the companion section, Category:Podcasts…[both] are quite extensive directories of the best videos and audio lectures on the open-free, p2p-participatory, and commons-oriented paradigms, as well as on peer production, governance and property. You’ll [recognize] all the luminaries but also presentations by many lesser known advocates,
I’ve been poring through the foundation’s wiki and have done some background reading on Michel’s research and writing more generally. To clarify, when he mentions peer to peer, he is speaking of an organization model and a system of production, not just the mechanism of popular file sharing. As such, his thoughts touch on a variety of subjects, including peer produced and consumed open content, as well as governance, philosophy and much more. Interesting stuff to say the least and he seems to be undertaking the ambitious task of helping to pull together many similar but separate ideas under this general peer focused model.
An industry group, The MCP-PRS Alliance, representing primarily songwriters, publishers and composers, in conjunction with online measurement company, Big Champagne, has released a study that strongly suggests the cost of piracy is well worth the opportunities for success afforded by embracing online downloads and pay-what-you-will pricing models.
Reader Kevin Crosby sent in the story with the following comment:
An article in the Financial Times urging the music industry in particular to stop fighting piracy and start embracing the technology instead. The author suggests that the cost of stamping out piracy is the equivalent of throwing good money after bad. What if the music industry routed all the money spent on lawyers and investigators to the development of a new business model?
The study seems primarily, if not exclusively based on Radiohead’s experimental online release of their album, In Rainbows. The researchers strongly suggest, though, that this example among others lowers the bar for others looking to build new business models and experiment with their own distribution and pricing.
Technorati Tags: filesharing, p2p, radiohead