Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Sep 13, 2020 24 tweets 5 min read Read on X
There's an EXCELLENT piece up on @FastCompany by Steven Melendez about my Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell audibooks of my next novel, as a way to demonstrate the viability of publishing audio without caving to Audible/Amazon's mandatory DRM policy.

fastcompany.com/90549199/why-t…

1/
Melendez does great work laying out the case for refusing DRM, and the risks to publishers and writers in allowing Amazon to lock their works to its platform (it's a felony to remove DRM or provide the tools to do so, even if you own the copyright to the DRM-locked work!).

2/
Reading his piece, it strikes me that I could do a better job for laying out my theory of change here - how preordering the audiobook could actually lead to a fairer world where power shifts away from Amazon (owners of Audible) to the creators of audiobooks.

3/
Obviously most authors couldn't do what I'm doing. I've been publishing books since 2000, more than 20 of 'em, with several NYT bestsellers. This particular book is the sequel to two MASSIVE bestsellers with huge, dedicated followings.

4/
Publishing lives and dies on this kind of book. One of the major reason that publishers publish "midlist" books and first novels is in the hopes that they'll "break out" and become perennial bestsellers that subsidize the next round of risky bets on midlist and first books.

5/
So while this isn't a typical kind of book, it's an important one.

So let's say this does really well in audio, selling, say, 10,000 copies. That works out really well for me, as I'm the publisher for this one, because I keep 95% of that (Kickstarter gets 5%).

6/
By contrast, if my publisher sold this with Audible, they'd get 70% (Amazon takes 30%), and then I'd get 25% of that (17.5% of the gross). That means I earn 542% of what my take would be with a publisher/Audible on these sales.

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

7/
So my profit on 10,000 self-published, Kickstarted audiobooks is roughly equivalent to 54,200 commercial books sold through Audible. I had to pay to produce the audiobook and put in a hard month's work on promoting the KS, but that still a great upside.

8/
So that's one way things could change. Frontlist writers could demand to retain their audio rights in publisher negotiations and do what I did. It's hard work, and only a minority of writers are situated to do it, but it would make sense for some of 'em.

9/
And that would definitely make a dent in Amazon's business: they're a hit-driven biz, too. If a big chunk of major books were "Audible exclusive" (that is, sold everywhere EXCEPT Audible), they'd feel the pinch, first in lost revenues and then in lost subscribers.

10/
After all, once the presale campaign is over, this book will be for sale everywhere EXCEPT Audible: libro.fm, downpour.com, even Google Play. All of those stores have stock and plans that are basically identical to Audible.

11/
And if they amass sizeable collections of exclusive-of-Audible bestsellers, there will be good reasons for customers to defect to them from Audible.

12/
But what about the publishers? Well, maybe they won't release their frontlist authors' audiobook rights - but if they can make MUCH more money by working WITH authors to presell their audiobooks, AND weaken Amazon's stranglehold over their business...why wouldn't they?

13/
In this scenario, authors and publishers do (better-than-retail) revenue shares for a crowdfunded, DRM-free presale campaign, again diverting the bestselling titles from Amazon/Audible, once again driving support for retail alternatives to Amazon.

14/
One advantage I haven't mentioned yet: shifting away from Audible is GREAT news for libraries, since neither Audible originals, nor Kindle originals, are available AT ALL for library purchase. Imagine a publisher BOYCOTTING LIBRARIES!

15/
And here's the theory-of-change part: realistically, not selling through Amazon means that a lot of readers and listeners won't encounter your work - even if you make more money overall, this is not ideal.

16/
My end-game is for Amazon to make good on the promise it made in 2008 when it bought Audible: to drop its DRM (or at least make it optional!). That way, readers who buy their audiobooks from Amazon can change retailers without abandoning their expensive audiobooks.

17/
That alone won't end Amazon's dominance (we'll need meaningful antitrust enforcement for that), but without that step, competition doesn't have a hope in hell.

18/
We MUST end the situation where every dollar spent on our books at Audible is a dollar our readers will have to throw away to switch to a rival.

We can do that, and we don't need every writer to be in a position to refuse Audible to make it happen.

19/
We just need to starve them of the books from their most popular authors - and happily, those authors stand the best chance of making MORE money by doing crowdfunders for pre-sales.

20/
If bestsellers like me do this, we'll make more money AND we'll make the world better for ALL authors.

And one more bonus: I'm using the crowdfunder to presell ebooks (and sell ebooks for the previous two volumes - 4,000 ebooks in five days (and counting).

21/
I'm the retailer for these ebooks, so I get 30% off the top, send the remaining 70% to my publisher, and they send me 25% of that back as a royalty: that means I get 47.5% of the gross on these.

22/
And they're ebooks that are sold without enriching Amazon.

That's my fiendish plan - my plan to be the pebble that starts the avalanche that moves the mountain.

23/
You can help! A $15 pre-order for the audiobook (list price $25!) will help to change the world:

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

I look forward to selling the first-ever DRM-free Audible book.

(thank you for attending my TED Talk!)

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Sep 8
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1/ An organ grinder with a monkey. The organ grinder's head has been replaced with a Gilded Age caricature of a sneering millionaire. The monkey's head has been replaced with the head of a miserable child coal miner. The background is a blurred, halftoned view of a vast square in Beijing with a giant official building in the background, and a Chinese flag on a flagpole. On the organ is a blurred portrait of John Philip Sousa.
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This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

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Sep 6
Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.

1/ An old-timey carny barker, waving a cane and shouting. He is standing in front of a vintage photo of the NYSE trading floor.
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2/
But it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

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Aug 20
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

1/ Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse avatar's head atop the body of a figure from a earth 20th century editorial cartoon; the figure wears a suit, holds a long fork, and stares into the eyepiece of a microscope. The microscope is attached to a sinister scientific apparatus. The microscope is trained on a tiny human figure, limned in red, who shouts through a megaphone back up into the microscope's lens. The background is a 1980s NASA oil painting of the red, rocky surface of Venus.
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pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/bil…

2/
After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?



3/theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 40 tweets
Aug 18
When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:



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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

2/
Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard.

3/
Read 30 tweets
Aug 16
When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

1/ A vintage photo of two men in front of a slot machine. The men's heads have been replaced by the heads of hooded figures wearing Guy Fawkes mask. The image is sepia toned: the only color is the pay-line of the slot-machine, which is showing three glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The slot machine has a sign over the rotor-window that displays the Openai logo and wordmark.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en  --  Frank Schwichtenberg (modified...
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jac…

2/
Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...

3/
Read 27 tweets
Aug 13
It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:



1/ archive.is/20250812192203…A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/13/the…

2/
This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.



3/crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/lib…
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