Cory Doctorow is fighting back against Amazon's Audible
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One of the premiums is, for people who donate $10000 or more, an opportunity to commission another story set in this universe based on a mutually agreed writing prompt.
He's offering 5 of those, and 3 have been claimed. That's brilliant.
Think what a windfall that could be for some writers. This is the first time I've noticed anyone trying this model. It's easy to imagine that it could work well for some creators (not necessarily only writers) with a small but ardent and growing fan base.
I have a feeling that conversation goes something like:
"Yeah, that's interesting and all, but I was thinking something more along the lines of a plucky tech whizkid sticking it to a surveillance state infiltrated by megacorporations. Maybe with some early 90s tech? Do we have an agreement?"
Caveat emptor? Unless you really feel like giving him a big stack of money, which I guess is alright.
I mean, that's the ‘Little Brother’ dilogy, perhaps with the exception of megacorporations.
On the same hand, being Cory Doctorow’s boss would be stupid. The whole point of paying him ought to be to do his thing, not yours.
On the other hand anyone who spends $10,000 on a story should already know that. Or maybe Cory Doctorow will tell the payer.
Not all fanfic is bad. Particularly atmospheric stuff, normal people can do quite nicely.
It’s pretty common for crowdfunded video games to have anything from naming side-characters to working with writers for a complete quest line or NPC. This seems to simply introduce it to books.
Audiobook interpreters like Игорь Князев or Александр Клюквин are household names to Russian speakers. Can any English speaker remember the name of the interpreter of their favourite audiobook? Only when it's the author himself, I guess. And only because of the abysmal quality.
There were once radio plays, but with the demise of radio, audio plays barely exist nowadays in English while they still strive in Russian.
This largely due to the difference in markets. English-speaking market is dominated by corporations and is severely policed.
Russian-speaking market is grassroots, uncensored and abundant in small producers / new names.
P.S. Aside from the hard-to-find recordings from 1960..1990ies, French audiobooks are even worse.
Scott Brick being the most well known, probably, although there are several others.
We refer to him by name, it's not "Hey, you wanna pick up where we left off in Chamber of Secrets?", it's "Grab a snack and let's enjoy some Jim Dale, shall we?"
Loads of audiobooks of bestsellers in English are narrated by big-name actors. Often ones who also do a lot of theatre and bring that dramatic flair to their readings. Look at the Chronicles of Narnia, for instance: its narrators are Kenneth Branagh, Alex Jennings, Michael York, Lynn Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Northam and Patrick Stewart, all known from stage and screen for their powerful voices.
Tim Gerard Reynolds and Moira Quirk have done really good work and I'm more likely to buy books that have their names attached. Some other commenters have mentioned other favorite narrator's of mine as well, so yes, this English speaker can.
Also narrators in the West are often voice actors by trade, or just actors of theatre and film doing voice work on the side. E.g. Steven Fry's narration of the ‘Harry Potter’ novels is gorgeous, Tim Curry's of ‘A Series Of Unfortunate Events’ is also very good, Jeremy Irons' voice and demeanor is a perfect fit for Nabokov's mood and writerly lyricism in ‘Lolita’.
Generally, I went through quite a bunch of unknown-to-me narrators, and had few qualms—whereas in Russian it's a gamble whether a reading will be tolerable. ‘Grassroots’ narrators sometimes have quirks that they apparently consider charming, but in practice are off-putting. Or narrators break into stereotypical kitschy voices, especially with old-time material like Dostoevsky: e.g. for orthodox priest characters. Or the production is just crappy.
Notably, best narrators in Russian seem to be either professionals hired by proper publishers, or straight up actors. Namely, Mikhail Gorevoy, Alexey Bagdasarov, Evgeny Ternovsky (Михаил Горевой, Алексей Багдасаров, Евгений Терновский). And for example, the magnificent many-voices narration of ‘The Good Soldier Švejk’ by Bagdasarov, Alexey Kortnev and others. Vladimir Samoilov's reading of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ is incredibly good and touching on a whole different level, and he seems to be an old-time Soviet actor. Klukvin is also a treat to the ear, but again when the production quality is there, like with ‘Master and Margarita’.
A notable counterexample is Marshall Rosenberg's reading of his own ‘Nonviolent Communication’—regardless of the book's merit, his gentle and melancholy speech is a welcome break from the ‘in your face’ attitude tiring out my ears.
This sounds magnificent, and definitely the way I want to listen to Asimov.
McKeever apparently was no small name too: “was an actor, narrator, and recording artist. He narrated hundreds of books. For more than 15 years, he contributed monthly to Braille Monitor, the leading publication of the National Federation of the Blind, and became known as the “voice of the blind.”
Fry's reading was good, but he's got nothing on either of them. It was also inconsistent. There's even a passage in book three where he appears to give Hagrid Hermione's voice. On top of that the voices he gave to women in general, were too shrill for my liking.
In terms of "celebrity" narrators (other than those named Wil Whedon)... I enjoy James Marsters (Spike from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer")'s work on the Dresden Files series. I would listen to pretty much any book those two performed.
It's a shame he won't be around to finish narrating the series. Then again, at the rate George R. R. Martin is going, neither will he be around to finish writing them.
Still, even in his advanced age by that point he was better than John Lee, in my opinion.
In books 4 and 5, his voices for established characters, like Arya and Tyrion also went off the rails pretty frequently.
I can, but that's probably because I partially rely on audiobooks (in addition to eBooks with text-to-speech) because of blindness.
> There were once radio plays, but with the demise of radio, audio plays barely exist nowadays in English
Agreed that unfortunately, the amount of radio plays being produced has dramatically decreased (excuse the pun). But I mostly notice this in English speaking nations other than the United Kingdom like Canada and the US. In the UK, radio drama is still very much alive, with the BBC and third parties like Big Finish producing a ton of great content.
Anne Hathaway for Wizard of Oz, David Tennant for How to Train Your Dragon, James Marsters for Dresden Files are all _amazing_.
Rob Inglis for Lord of the Rings
I'll take the bait of your disdainquiry though. Richard Poe's reading of "Blood Meridian" is a masterpiece.
The BBC Radio iPlayer app I use almost daily is full of radio plays. It’s definitely a British thing.
There are also excellent cast based readings, like Cory Doctorow's last novel Walkaway (which had among other people Amanda Palmer in it).
There are also some excellent cast based reading Audible. American Gods comes to mind.
I can't really say it's my favourite audiobook series, but the one I seem to be listening to relentlessly is Winnie the Pooh. The version I have is narrated by Dame Judi Dench, and the characters read by well known actors such as Stephen Fry, Geoffrey Palmer and Sandi Toksvig.
the style is that of a light novel, so much more adapt to narration and internal monologues and even leitmotifs for supporting cast voices
ffmpeg -activation_bytes <your magic bytes> -i inputfile.aax -vn -c:a copy output.m4a
What's more, Audible won't allow you to sell your audiobooks through their store unless you allow them to wrap your books in their DRM, which cannot be removed without committing a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Every audiobook you buy from Audible is locked to Amazon's platform...forever. They can revoke access to the book (they've done this with Kindle ebooks, starting with -- I shit you not -- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four... You can't make this stuff up!).
He could live in a country without those pesky US laws or be posting from international waters.
In the UK it's only a criminal offence if it's done as part of business, or you do it so much you prejudicially affect the rights holders. This is why eg people who buy a DVD player can change it to region free mode (they're not committing a criminal offence) but the shop who sells the player to you can't tell you how to do it (they would be committing a criminal offence).
Read "F2296 Devices designed to circumvent copy-protection" and "F4296ZA Circumvention of technological measures", and contrast those with "296ZBDevices and services designed to circumvent technological measures".
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crossh...
I've actually never read Cory Doctorow's books (yet!), so I'm obviously not the people he imagines as the prime market for this in any case.
Whilst dressed up in the language of principle it is, in economic terms, just another creative whose reputation provides for a "pre-sold" market he is able to exploit for greater personal profit.
Pretty standard: Louis CK was the first mover in comedy on this; pop artists are following.
The "basic internet" works extremely well as a dumb & free distribution channel if you don't need to build an audience.
I'm not saying Cory is insincere, but I am unconvinced his sincerity would hold were he a budding author. On the surface at least, it just reads like yet another artist hamstrung by their distributor whose reputation has superseded their need.
If one were to be even more cynical, as Cory himself admits, you could see the whole anti-amazon complaint as a mere marketing tactic. It is, in any case, /why/ this has succeeded and why we are talking about it.
Umm... Cory has been doing this sort of thing (such as releasing his novels as gratis+libre ebooks in multiple formats) from the very beginning (2003), eg.:
https://craphound.com/down/download/
You can find them freely (and legally) distributed by various 3rd parties:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826
There's two relevant strategies to an audience/market here: "open source" (/esteem/reputation) and "taste-maker"/brand/distributor.
The free-to-read reputation-led strategy does not earn you anything in the early phase -- so you have to have a job elsewhere. But you build esteem/reputation more easily: more readers. If you do that well, you reap the rewards later by by-passing the taste-maker channels.
This requires early-career funding from elsewhere. If you cannot get that funding you need to rely on distributors to earn anything at all.
/Therefore/ I wonder whether this reputation-led anti-tastemaker ethos really is just selecting for wealth (of one kind or another).
If so, yes Cory isn't a mere opportunist, sure. But his position seems to presuppose early-career privileges others do not have: in this sense he was never a "budding author" as I meantt it.
My point was that as a person starting out /and relying on distributors for income/ you cannot really have this view.
Fortunately, Cory Doctorow is an esteemed author that has enough avid fans who would buy his content even though it's not on Amazon.
Of course I'm always happy when there's more competition :)
What don't you like about Audible's player? And what player do you use instead?
I'm very curious to know what the original ending of little brother was. Sad to say it's sold out, and even if it weren't, I don't have 1k to find out. I hope we can all find out eventually.
> The first draft of Little Brother had a VERY different ending. No one except my editor and my agent have even seen it. I will hand-copy it for you in my atrocious handwriting and mail it to you to use as you see fit.
Is he just picking his battles one by one? Or is somehow the Amazon ebook DRM acceptable whereas the audio isn't?
(Genuinely curious...)
Is there a good place to buy audiobooks as simple MP3s?
Google Play also offers downloads but it tends to be more expensive, assuming you're making use of Libro and Downpour's credit system.
The situation is similar, though slightly better on downpour.com. At least they say "digital download". But not what you can download after you buy. They mention mp3s on their FAQ page. So it might be worth a try. But I would feel more comfortable if I really knew what I buy before I buy.
Downpour lets you choose between an .m4b (an Apple format using aac audio, basically an mp4) and .mp3's.
Both websites say explicitly in the FAQ that all downloads are DRM-Free, although libro.fm makes a bigger deal out of it. If there's a screenshot or something that would make you feel more comfortable about what you're getting, let me know...
But honestly, Audible is how I listen to audiobooks. If it's not there, I'm not going to buy it. I've pretty much transitioned all of my casual, entertainment reading to audio (still using physical/digital for more technical reading).
It is absolutely frictionless and cheaper than competing services.
All my titles are available on all my devices, and progress syncs perfectly.
As a consumer, it is far far easier and more convenient than having to manually download mp3s off a shared drive or something, never mind the issue of how you sync progress.
It doesn't abuse me. It makes my life net better than it was before I used it.
This is a really important point for you - many people value what they practically get from a service - not abstract concepts of freedom.
What I care about is getting to listen to the book. I don't care about your DRM problems. I don't care about file formats. I care about the words that the author wrote going into my head. That's what I came for. If they give me that I'm a happy customer.
Looking at the reviews for the book on Audible, I'm not seeing anyone complaining about a shortened recording.
That sounds like a sample of the book.
The only reason I can think of for why an ereader wouldn't at least support importing from an open standard is so Amazon can make sure that you'll never buy books from anyone else.
FWIW, it bothers me, but largely for pragmatic reasons: Unless I routinely delete the automatically converted .mobi files, the size of my ebook library would more than double (.epub files are somewhat smaller than .mobi).
The practical difference between regularly syncing and backing up a multi-Gigabyte library and one that has twice as many files and is >2x larger is pretty significant.
And since I'm not keeping the .mobi files around, the conversion has to be done again every time I copy the book to my Kindle (for example, to re-read it), and the extra delay, particularly when transferring several ebooks, is rather annoying.
Of all companies, I think Audible treats its customers well.
Regarding Doctorow, afaik he took the Audible-avoiding course years ago, negotiating with his publisher that the audiobooks are to not have DRM. I went through his books in 2018, so the story must be at least that old.
Aren't all stores a 'walled garden'? They decide what they want to sell. Curation. Seems completely reasonable to me?
> Instead, Doctorow is selling the recorded version of the book through a Kickstarter campaign, and it will also be available through non-Amazon vendors like Google’s Play store and libro.fm
So there's multiple competing options he can already use? What on earth is the problem here?
I'd call them "gardens". I'd called them "walled" if they use DRM and force you to consume it in their garden.
Like a restaurant without a takeaway service? How evil.
In the UK restaurants don’t do this so your surety is misplaced.
> When you "buy" a book you should be able to read it whenever you want forever and not rely on the company you bought it from not going out of business.
That’s what you care about. What I care about is most convenient access now. Why is your priority the true one and mine a result of abuse?
Lack of DRM is most convenient. (Unless corporate abuse has made it impossible to use [whichever format is most convenient] without applying DRM, obviously.)
Since, you know, DRM is there to actively prevent you from doing something, so comparing it with just passively not offering a service is more than a little dishonest.
If I agree to that, and it's worth it to me... what's your problem with that?
I don’t think this is true. In fact I people are listening to more books than before and spending more on them than before. Audible are injecting oxygen into the room!
> In 2020, Deloitte predicts, the global audiobook market will grow by 25 percent to US$3.5 billion.
That’s what we should really care about - books read. And money spent is great as well.
People here forget what books are for - reading. They aren’t supposed to be vehicles for copyright activism.
Edit0: BTW, no one has forgotten what books are for. It is Audible with its restrictions that has made reading (or listening) into a hindrance. Are you able to accept that this is my experience/opinion?
I can readily accept your opinion.
But when I say 'I'm happy with the tradeoffs and the book world is far better with Audible without and it's a fine consensual business relationship' then everyone tries to remove my agency and that I could only say such a thing under abuse.
Audiobooks used to be astronomically expensive, hard to buy, hard to use. Thanks to Audible I'm reading more than ever. There's a minor trade-off of DRM which isn't really even a theoretical problem for me or I think the vast vast majority of people, but people forget all that and call them 'abusive'. I think it's nasty and unreasonable.
> I don’t think this is true. In fact I people are listening to more books than before
Are you deliberately misinterpreting what the parent poster wrote? It sucks the oxygen away from other bookstores. Hence the "Eventually alternatives die". That people spend money on Audible is not a counter-argument.
> That’s what we should really care about - books read. [..] People here forget what books are for - reading. They aren’t supposed to be vehicles for copyright activism.
Are you really, really unable to see the danger in relinquishing control over your devices and media?
Devices I get, but I don't really understand it for media. What I really want is Netflix for Audiobooks. I'm not ever going to listen to them again. I've also never really understood why people buy DVDs. I mean, I understand the fact folks want to watch a movie more than once, but that seems so odd to me, you already know the story ... there is no novelty anymore. I buy books, but only if there are references, or classics that I'd like my children to be exposed to as some point. I see no need to buy copies of the pulp sci-fi I read too much of, kindle copies are fine.
Audible+ that just launched comes close, but the catalogue is weak for new titles. Libby/Overdrive comes close, but rarely have want I want within a timeframe I'd like.
I'm willing to pay for convenience, of an ephemeral entertainment experience. Sure, I know some folks want to pay to reread, relisten, or rewatch their favorites, and doing so without DRM would be nice.
But as long as the data is accessible in some form, it doesn't seem a fundamental issue. Non-resource based monopolies are only sustainable if they keep their customers happy. There is plenty of money to be made with alternatives if they find a way to either suck to cost too much and longer term copyright expires. That is the real answer, copyright should be shrunk to something like 25 years, ignoring the author's life, and be transferable to their estate.
B) when was the last time you went to a restaurant that wouldn't let you box whatever was left of your meal?
C) you're arguing elsewhere that Audible is actually awesome because it makes your life better by allowing you to do things like manage your entire library in one place that syncs to all of your devices. How can you understand that benefit, but simultaneously not understand the practical lock-in effect of Amazon forcing you to abandon every audiobook you ever purchased just because you switched to a new service?
The restaurant analogy is terrible. It's more like imagining that your JC Penny clothes could only be worn with other JC Penny clothes, and if you ever wanted to shop at Target you'd need to have two wardrobes, one for each store, or you'd be committing a felony.
I'm going to step out and say that yes, that kind of behavior is anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and to the extent that an amoral market can be evil, it's evil.
B) Last week. You can’t take leftovers home where I live it’s considered gross.
C) I don’t mind the lock-in because the value with it (convenience, price) makes it worthwhile.
People here can’t accept I value convenience over abstract rights.
"This restaurant serves spoiled eggs."
"But I don't eat eggs, so that doesn't matter."
> I value convenience over abstract rights.
They're not abstract rights, Amazon in the real world has taken over pretty much the entire audiobook market and used their market dominance to force publishers and writers to bend to increasingly unfair terms. The lock-in isn't abstract, I've talked to people in the real world who are interested in getting other readers but feel like they can't because they'd lose their existing library. Real people are being prevented from moving services in the real world.
You might not care about those rights, and you might not care about how they influence how the market you participate in evolves over time and what innovations from that market you get to access. But even if you don't care about that stuff, all of it is real and has real consequences. To say they're abstract is an even stranger position for you to take:
"This restaurant serves spoiled eggs."
"The eggs aren't on my plate, so they're entirely theoretical."
> You can’t take leftovers home where I live it’s considered gross.
Minor sidenote, but you're missing out. One of the best parts of eating out is that you have some leftovers for supper that night and don't need to cook. I highly recommend it if you've never tried it before.
Also consider: it may be culturally unacceptable to carry leftovers home, but would you be arrested if you tried to? Would it be a federal offense?
Amazon seems to have gained its dominance by making them cheaper to the point where people can really afford them as an alternative to hard/paperbacks.
For all the hatred of amazon in this thread, I suspect the audiobook market would be a fraction of what it is now without them or someone who looks exactly like them.
Amazon itself got popular by offering good prices and product selections. That doesn't mean modern concerns about how they treat their workers/drivers should be dismissed, it doesn't mean current concerns about how they screen for imposter sellers and group projects together aren't valid. It doesn't mean that their usage of 3rd-party seller data to push their own product development isn't anticompetitive.
Even still, I doubt you'd see as much hatred of amazon in this thread if it wasn't for their DRM, lack of Linux/OS support, and some of their more arduous publisher terms (not allowing publishers to sell without DRM, forcing exclusives, etc). I don't think that stuff has anything to do with growing the market. I don't think taking away user rights is an essential part of offering cheaper prices, and I especially don't think that having cheap prices somehow excuses their other anticompetitive behavior.
Should we stop criticizing Spotify's co-opting of the podcast movement just because they popularized music streaming and managed to get musicians to accept much worse terms for payouts? Should we stop criticizing Netflix's push for DRM standards on the web just because they started out with a great DVD rental service?
So research library rules, but retail-ownership pricing.
And to be clear, there are numerous ways short of Amazon going under that could result in a reader/listener no longer having access to their content. Say your phone provider stops allowing the Audible app on your phone, you can no longer use your content.
To many, once a book is purchased, they should be able to enjoy it the way they want and DRM either prevents that or threatens to prevent that for your entire library. You can expect that as a user you'll have little to no recourse should that happen.
There is also the discontent that DRM isn't necessarily being used to ensure payment, but being used to gouge the buyers. Less so than it was, but a lot of ebooks were costing more than their physical counterparts because there was no used/library channel for competition.
I'd say it's 30% chance of an ebook being cheaper on Kobo, 30% chance of an ebook being cheaper on Kindle, and 40% chance of the price being the same on both. I only remember one example of an ebook being absurdly cheaper on Kindle (like $10 compared to >$20), everything else deviates by like a dollar or two one side or the other.
If it's digital, it can be copied. With audio, the analogue loophole (record the output off an aux cable, re-digitize) is trivial, and any loss of fidelity won't be noticed.
So your "if" is kind of bootless here. Audible's platform, convenience, and the desire to do the right thing and reward creators, is the "good thing", and DRM is a paranoid annoyance.
This is the world in which, if your life's work is an audio file, it can easily be duplicated millions of times. It's as conducive to the creation of new art as any such world would be.
The problem is scale: "... if you don’t sell on Audible, you sacrifice about 95% of that income. That’s a decision I’ve made, and it means that publishers are no longer willing to pay for my audiobook rights (who can blame them?). According to my agent, living my principles this way has cost me enough to have paid off my mortgage and maybe funding my retirement. I’ve tried a lot of tactics to get around Audible; selling through the indies (libro.fm, downpour.com, etc), through Google Play, and through my own shop (craphound.com/shop). I appreciate the support there but it’s a tiny fraction of what I’m giving up ..."
https://craphound.com/news/2020/09/08/my-first-ever-kickstar...
Can we rephrase that as:
> if you don’t sell in the way that 95% of customers want to buy, you sacrifice about 95% of that income
Then it seems obvious what the problem is?
> Can we rephrase that as:
> > if you don’t sell in the way that 95% of customers want to buy, you sacrifice about 95% of that income
> Then it seems obvious what the problem is?
Yes. The problem is that the distribution channel that owns 95% of the market (by most definitions a monopoly) is forcing publishers to use DRM even if they (or the authors) don't want it, locking in users to the distribution channel's platform.
Now, sometimes lock-in is a side effect of some feature or attribute that is at least ostensibly user-focused (eg. network effects: you're locked into a social network because all your friends are there, and getting your personal data out doesn't help with that), but DRM doesn't fit into that bucket. All else being equal, no user actually prefers content that they can enjoy in limited ways, for less time, on fewer of their devices, with less forward compatibility and future-proofing, etc.
During the '90s the cargo-cult argument that DRM was necessary to convince content owners worried about piracy to allow their albums/movies/books to be distributed in new digital formats and channels in the first place could still be made with a straight face, but that isn't really the case any longer.
I dont see how an established author like Cory needs a Kickstarter to finance an audiobook.
I think he can do easily on his own, and have various companies queuing outside his door to finance or publish it.
If you were an unknown author and none of the established publishers were interested I see that as a Kickstarter candidate but then raising funding would be difficult.
Cory has all sorts of means og financing and getting paid
Of course I still find myself still battling DRM for even text ebooks just to get access to the raw text itself for use with command line tools.
Understatement of the century.
> I personally like it because it doesn't have the interpretation that human readers bring to stories.
I suspect that you're in the minority for audiobook listeners. Does this mean that you don't like movies because of the interpretation that human actors, directors, videographers, and composers bring to the scripts? I don't enjoy _ever_ narrator, but there are a lot of really fantastic human narrators out there.
Pretty much everyone acknowledges the books are almost always better. Part of the reason is this, yes.
It's usually not the reason, though. People say "the book is better" because films necessarily have to remove a bunch of content in order to fit within a movie timeframe, which requires changing the narrative arc. That's an entirely unrelated issue.
He makes me want to ditch my kindle for a kobo, but the book buying experience is just not as good/workable for me along with rebuying my catalogue. Not to mention cost of hardware.
I respect that he wants his books to be available without DRM, but why not simply offer a way for audible shoppers to download a DRM free copy from another source?
He's relevant enough to make HN's front page.
I've also been following his blog (and the Boing Boing website) for years (and the Boing Boing paper zine before that).
I've never read his fiction, but his writing on technology, privacy and surveillance capitalism is eloquent, interesting, and insightful and has always been worth my time.
They tend to grow in popularity like new technologies - overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the long term.