Re: GG and Napster and MP3

["Anne M. Marble" <amarble@sff.net>]

From: Elmer Elevator <bobmer@JAVANET.COM>

> omigawd ... i wondered where this went ... i posted it just to mary jo
> by mistake.

Don't you hate when posts do that?!

> Woo Woo what a great controversy! Thanks, Mary Jo!
>
> Let me see if I can get this half-right from memory ... F. Scott
> Fitzgerald said an artist is someone who can carry two diametrically
> opposite ideas in his head without going crazy.

I'm a writer, so that must be why I keep getting different results on the
World's Smallest Political Quiz. I'm just going to give up and call myself
a "Centrist."

To keep this on the GG topic, that reminds me of the way I've heard GG's
political views discussed by people who knew him. One moment, he said one
thing, but the next moment, he seemed to be arguing something on the other
side of the spectrum. Then again, some have argued that the left/right
spectrum is too simplistic. I read an article about this by Jerry Pournelle
last night. I was stunned, because I was agreeing with Dr. Pournelle.
That's OK, tomorrow I'll cancel that out by agreeing with Ralph Nader or L.
Neil Smith or something.

> Idea 1. I make my living from Intellectual Property and rely on the
> world to respect it in order to make my living from it.

I don't make my living from it yet, but I hope to eventually.

<brag>Well, OK, I did sell one article to "Writer's Digest" magazine this
year. </brag>

This reminds me of the discussion (well, combination discussion and
flamewar) about copyright going on over at the rec.arts.sf.written
newsgroup right now. Someone posted a copy of the novel "Dune" on the
newsgroup to make a point. He also posted messages predicting the "end of
copyright" -- but he didn't suggest any way the writers would get paid for
their work in the future. Naturally, this ended up creating lots of flaming
and misunderstanding about copyright. Not to mention mini-flamewars about
Free Agent, .PDF files, Baen Books, and Jim Baen's politics. I felt like
taking the garden hose to some of those list members. (Hosing off the
excess testosterone, don't you know?)

> Idea 2. I discovered .mp3's and, not long ago, Napster, and I think
> they're wonderful. Before I logged on, I suspected Napster would be
> nothing but the ghastliest cacaphony of rap, tekno, Britney Spears, The
> Carpenters, Lilith Faire, ABBA and whiney-teen music (?), but the first
> time I typed "Glenn Gould" on Napster, I was astonished at the huge
> number of selections that spewed back. (Not to mention Caruso, Weill,
> Teresa Stratas, all my classical favorites, that avant-garde loony Harry
> Partch, and wonderful treats from the ancient past like the comedy duo
> of Jonathan & Darlene Edwards doing to "I Am Woman" what should have
> been done at its birth.)

I checked Napster out of curiousity, and also because someone else was
curious, so that gave me the impetus to check it out. I was surprised when
I found 100 Glenn Gould songs right away. There may have been more out
there -- I think 100 hits is the maximum it will find. Anyway, I didn't
download anything. (For one thing, I have a 56k modem!) Still, being able
to download a song as a preview might encourage me to buy the whole album.
There are some GG recordings I don't own, and being able to listen to them
might encourage me to <gasp> buy them. I hope more companies figure that
out.

I did download a Mireille Mathieu song for my father. He wasn't interested
in Napster until The Courts told him that Napster was Wrong. That day, he
asked me to download the software and install it for him. I'm sure a lot of
other users ignored Napster until it ended up in the news. This reminds me
of people who protest a movie because the murderer is an
Antidisestablishmentarian Presbyterian Libertarian Rotarian, and thus an
unfair portrayal of Antidisestablishmentarian Presbyterian Libertarian
Rotarians. People often flock to the movie _because_ of the controversy.

> I think it's a magnificent achievement that 1904 Caruso recordings,
> shouted into a mechanical sound collecting horn to scratch a wiggle on a
> wax cylinder, are now being preserved for cyberspace and the future in a
> format that can never warp or degrade. Regardless of what his Estate may
> think, everything I know about Gould's obsession with any technology
> that did good things for music tells me he would have been thrilled with
> .mp3's and Napster.

After all, Glenn Gould came from an era when you could go into a record
store and ask to preview a record before buying it!

The record stores now sell CDs (though I still call 'em record stores). CDs
are much less vunerable than records. Yet most stores won't let you preview
it. In the Borders the other day, I overheard a staff member say that they
would let customers preview a CD only if they had three or more copies on
the shelf! In other words, I wouldn't be allowed to preview most of the
classical selections, except the Big Hits such as the Three Tenors. Heck,
I'm the type who prefers The Three Counttenors and No Tenors Allowed, plus
the Greatest Hits of Men at Work. I'm lucky to find one copy, let alone
three. (Didn't find any Oberlins at all!)

<snip>
> And I don't have a doubt in the world that sampling an artist's music
> from Napster stimulates millions of people to go out and $BUY$ the whole
> album. How many times in a record store has an unknown artist caught our
> eye, but we decided the investment was too dear to take a dare? And then
> wondered what we might have missed. Napster brilliantly fills that "take
> a dare, it's free" gap.

Most of the polls prove this out. Of course, you never know for sure with
polls. <sigh>

A similar issue is bugging the book publishers. There are sites, chat
rooms, Freenet nodes, etc. dedicated to sharing electronic copies of books.
There is even a newsgroup called alt.binaries.e-books where you can
download free copies of books. Yes, that's books that are still in
copyright. This could be a bigger problem than Napster or .MP3 because a
book takes much less time to download, even with formatting.

This can be like buying a writer's books from a used bookstore -- only on a
grander scale. If I really like a writer's book after trying her used, I'll
try to buy that writer _new_ from then on. Yes, there is room for abuse.
Lots of it. Some of the "book pirates" are noble and well-intentioned. But
many of them are a scurvy lot, not to mention rude and nasty to writers.

Some publishers are counteracting this by putting out their books in
proprietary format. Some of them even make it impossible to copy your book
to your other computer! They also price their books exorbitantly. The
electronic versions of new hardbacks are often priced at near-hardback
prices. What do you think happens? These books end up posted on
alt.binaries.e-books. With the copy protection cracked. Often in
"Microsith" Reader format.

More than one year ago, SF publisher Baen books got ahead of the book
pirates. They have a service called Webscriptions. You sign up for that
service, and then buy the months that interested you. They package
electronic versions of their books by month. Often, one of the books will
be a hardback release. They put out all the books for an upcoming month in
increments, much like publishing a magazine serial. Before that month
arrives, you have four or five complete books. Also, the books are in open
source. You can copy them with ease. The price? Ten bucks for the month's
subscription. Yup, for ten bucks, I was able to download an Eric Flint
hardback, a Poul Anderson/Gordon Dickson Hokas omnibus, a new Leo
Frankowski book, and an omnibus about elves with race cars. For another ten
bucks, I downloaded _six_ books from the July 2000 list. Even if you don't
pay anything, you can sign up and get a free copy of David Weber's first
Honor Harrington novel. (SF fans who like C.S. Forester's Hornblower books
might want to try this guy out. <g>)

The clincher is that for the most part, pirated copies of the Webscription
books have never turned up in the pirate newsgroups or chatrooms.
(Ironically, the only exception is that a copy of the FREE David Weber book
was downloaded to alt.binaries.e-books!) In this case, the publisher makes
the e-books such a bargain that it's not worthwhile getting them from
pirated sources. Maybe the music companies could learn from this. (BTW the
URL is http://www.webscription.net.)

<snip>
> Go Napster! You rock! You rule! (You should hear what Napster users have
> to say about Metallica. If I were Metallica, I couldn't have planned a
> more certain way to make all my fans suddenly detest me.)

A similar thing happened to a romance writer in the 1980s. You have to
understand that used bookstores (USBs) are a major force in the world of
romance books. Many USBs specialize in romance novels. Many of them sell
new books as well as used, and staff members also help readers find books
they might otherwise have missed. Rebecca Brandewyne was a best-selling
author with two major ongoing series. One day, in Romantic Times magazine,
she decided to "quibble" with readers who bought her books through used
bookstores. Naturally, this led to lots of angry readers. In the USB I
haunted, her books almost stopped selling. Her two major series were never
completed because of lack of sales! While she's still selling, she's no
longer a major force.

> Technical Addendum for the Napster-Addicted: As .mp3 files are huge,
> very soon they will challenge your hard disk. Even if you remain content
> to download them at the painfully slow 56k modem speed, you'll soon be
> tempted to store them off-line. Zip drives, which many of us already
> have, are a great start, but Napster and .mp3 files have been the chief
> boost in the new popularity of CD burners/toasters (CDRW, "Read-Write"
> CDs) as the solution to off-line mass storage. With this machine, of
> course, you can make your own "mix" CDs.

Too bad I can't attach a teensy-tiny Zip drive to my PalmPilot. I started
out with 8 megs of memory, and even after I learned about Peanutpress.com,
that was fine. Then, I learned about Baen Webscriptions. Now, I don't have
enough room to download all my e-books at once! (OK, maybe I should've
bought only one month instead of two... Or maybe I should've bought one of
those Visors with the slots for expandable doo-hickeys.)

Anne M. Marble