Today in @thebookseller - the UK's trade magazine for the bookselling industry - I published "Inaudible," in which I unpack my reason for foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars by refusing to allow Audible to put DRM on my audiobooks.

thebookseller.com/blogs/inaudibl…

1/
DRM isn't hard to break (just google "break audible drm" if you don't believe me!) but it IS a felony to traffick in tools that break DRM. That means that the DRM that Amazon forces on creators and publishers in the name of "protecting" them does nothing of the sort.

2/
But it DOES lock their works to Amazon's platform...forever.

Labor economists talk about "chickenization" in markets where there is a "monopsony" - that is, where a single seller controls access to the market.

3/
The phrase comes from the US poultry industry, where three monopolistic companies have divided up the country so that (nominally independent) chicken farmers have only one processor who'll buy their birds.

4/
Big Chicken uses this advantage to squeeze suppliers: chicken farmers are told what kind of coop to build, which chicks to buy, what feed to use, which medicines to dose, even when the lights go on and off.

5/
Some farmers are unwitting subjects in experiments - Purdue might decide to test the effect of a different feeding regime and order a farmer to apply it.

6/
When this is done, the farmer sells their birds to the monopolist, who unilaterally names a price: the monopolists use their extensive data-gathering to titrate the money-drip so farmers have just enough to continue for another year, but not enough to get ahead.

7/
Farmers who complain - especially to regulators and lawmakers - are shut out of the market...permanently. One farmer went into the coop-maintenance business and the meat packers told suppliers that if they hired him, they'd be blackballed, too.

8/
It's no wonder that farmers are one of the worst-off groups in the US for "deaths of despair" (suicide and overdose).

Amazon's use of DRM is a key component in its campaign to chickenize publishing, of course.

9/
But it's not just publishers and writers who suffer here - readers get a raw deal from DRM, too.

Recall that in 2009, Amazon remotely deleted purchased copies of 1984 from readers' Kindles, due to a complaint from the Orwell estate (you can't make this up!)

10/
In 2019, Microsoft decided to get out of the ebook business and "deactivated" every book they'd ever sold, rendering them unreadable.

Both companies offered refunds, but come on.

11/
From my editorial: "I was a bookseller for years and once I sold you a book, it was yours. Nothing - not a claim from the useless professional descendants of a long-dead writer nor the callous indifference of tech execs in a Redmond boardroom...

12/
"...could compel me to come over to your house and take the books back. And if I did, it would not be okay, not even (and I can't stress this enough) if I gave you your money back."

13/
Bookselling and books are older than DRM (hell, they're older than copyright!). Publishers, booksellers and readers have a (literally) ancient compact. The idea that tech monopolists get to wave a lawyer's pen and declare it null and void is, frankly, bullshit.

14/
It's unacceptable. So I don't accept it. And that's why I produced my own audiobook and am selling it direct, first through the Kickstarter campaign for presales, and then through all the retailers EXCEPT Audible.

15/
Today, "Audible exclusive" means "a book you can only get on Audible." I want to sell so many audiobooks that publishers see a viable path to boycotting Audible, too, so that "Audible exclusive" means "for sale everywhere EXCEPT Audible."

16/
I'm well on the way! My Kickstarter is about to hit the $100K mark after 48 hours. You can help me demonstrate the viability of an anti-monopoly way of doing audiobooks by backing it (and if you already have, THANK YOU!)

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

eof/

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More from @doctorow

12 Sep
Don't let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) "education reform" work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.

1/
Microsoft's illegal conduct was so blatant, persistent and obviously wicked that it prompted serious enforcement action from the DoJ's antitrust division, which Reagan neutered and which every president since has whittled down even further.

2/
The most notorious moment in that last-of-its-kind enforcement action was the multi-day, video-recorded deposition of Bill Gates himself, in which he conducted himself so badly that the video went analog-viral, airing on newscasts and being passed hand-to-hand on VHS.

3/
Read 22 tweets
11 Sep
Today in "Cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion" news, Amazon has released a landlord edition of its Alexa surveillance speaker that can be forced upon tenants.

gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/amazon…

1/ Image
Here's Amazon's pitch: Landlord Alexa "makes it easy for property managers to set up and manage Alexa-powered smart home experiences throughout their buildings."

Satire is dead. Poe's Law rules all.

2/
Landlord Alexa incorporates special commands that "let their residents pay rent, submit maintenance requests, and manage other things."

It also lets landlords "drop in" (Alexaspeak for "trigger the mic and camera") in their tenants' homes.

3/
Read 7 tweets
11 Sep
More than 200k Americans have died of covid - about 70 9/11s, with no end in sight. Indeed, things are getting worse, as the US enters a "Pandemic Spiral," as @edyong209 writes in @TheAtlantic. Yong identifies 9 factors driving the spiral:

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

1/
I. Serial Monogamy of Solutions: we only pay attention to one thing at a time: isolating, masks, plasma. Some of that is driven by Trump's short attention span and addiction to distraction tactics, but it's also science's methodological isolation of one variable at a time.

2/
We especially struggle with "necessary but insufficient." Masks aren't effective - on their own. Neither is distancing. Neither is ventilation. All three? Pretty good, actually.

3/
Read 16 tweets
11 Sep
In 1903, Russian antisemites published a pamphlet called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to reveal a secret Jewish cabal that secretly controlled the world's governments, using its leaders as puppets.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Proto…

1/
This power allowed them to kidnap Christian babies and use their blood in secret, mystical rituals. The Protocols were wildly popular, and prompted endless rounds of vicious, bloody, genocidal pogroms.

2/
Henry "No Jews or Dogs Allowed" Ford and Charles "Lucky" Lindbergh LOVED the Protocols and paid to have them translated into English and distributed across America. They also founded a group dedicated to protecting Hitler from "American aggression" called "AMERICA FIRST."

3/
Read 7 tweets
10 Sep
One of the wisest things anyone's ever said to me about predictive policing tools - algorithms that purport predict where crime will occur - is that they don't predict crime, but they predict the police, who will obey the algorithm's directives (thanks, @vm_wylbur!)

1/
Normally that means that predictive policing tools send cops to poor and brown neighborhoods to stop-and-frisk and traffic-stop people, but sometimes it's a little more personal than that.

2/
In Pasco County, Florida, Sheriff Chris Nocco's algorithm generated a list of 1,000 people "it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts."

projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/…

3/
Read 13 tweets
10 Sep
In response to the June #BLM uprising, the NY state legislature revoked Bill 50a, which shielded police misconduct records from public scrutiny.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/dig…

1/
A police union lawsuit blocked the publication of these long-secret records, but it came AFTER @Propublica had assembled a searchable database of those dirty secrets, and they escaped the injunction:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/…

2/
Thanks to that fast action, we are now seeing inside the sordid, violent, corrupt world of the multibillion-dollar private paramilitary that is the NYPD.

3/
Read 9 tweets

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