How Awesome...

...Was Rushkoff's "A Computer Ate My Book"? I gotta say I totally agree with everything he said here. Actually, it was really sort of a relief to read because it said a lot of things that I had sort of believed seemed logical but didn't really have the words or the full knowledge of the publishing industry to articulate. And actually, as Rushkoff does, I've usually thought about the possiblities of change with publishing concerning the internet and other newer technologies in comparison to what's been going on the last ten years or so with the music industry. It's actually only been fairly recently that I've even considered the effects of technology on book sales, pretty much when I first heard of the Kindle, which was really only maybe a year ago or so.

But, looking at the music industy I've always thought jerks like Metallica were just being, well jerks. It seems so backwards to think that these new inovations can't be used to writers and musicians and all sorts of artists' advantage. Metallica hasn't been able to hold their sales with more recent releases. But look at bands that looked at the internet as an avenue for new possibilites in advertising and distributing, Phish, Radiohead, King Crimson...

Actually, let me use Crimson as an example. They were dicked around for years by GE Records (the old, standard model that's supposed to work) and were ripped of a bunch of their copywrites and rights to do certain side projects or perform on other people's records or to even have choices in their album artwork, and man, it goes way beyond even this, but I won't get into it. Needless to say, they got screwed.

So Robert Fripp, head of the band, in the late 90's, after years of legal battles, creates Discipline Global Mobile and makes all of Crimson's albums available, remastered and the way he always wanted them to be. But he doesn't stop there. He makes everything he's ever been involved with (which is a ton of records) available online at the DGM website. Even stuff that has gone out of print on the original labels, he at least makes available as lossless Flac downloads, complete with album artwork.

Now this is what I'm talking about--using the internet to get the work out there and continue to make money. Later, he opened up an additional store offering "bootlegs" of hundreds of performances he's been involved with, all downloadable as either Flacs for 12.99 or mp3 for 9.99. So not only is he beating the boots (which, for a band like Crimson, there're a lot), but he's making use of the internet so he doesn't even need to spend the money on physical production. And people are willing to pay it because most of these "bootlegs" are full performances, so, if you were to burn them, 2 discs worth of material. And where are you gonna be able to buy two CD's worth of material for 9 bucks? In addition to this, he has a page that's a store for all sorts of hard copy CD's of similar genre artists (things like prog bands and 70's bands, so like, he'll sell Pink Floyd or Yes albums) plus contemporary things he just likes. So he (or DGM) works as a distributor for those albums as additional income.

Okay, I know that sounds like a huge tangent, but what I'm saying is, Rushkoff is right--it can work. And like he says, it's new technology, so it may take a while to test out what it can or can't do, so there may be some failures. But shit, people are still to this day testing out the possibilities of what books can do as a medium (look at McSweeney's fancy dancy beautifully thematically designed books). And they're not gauranteed success either. But like Rushkoff says, it's the choices of HUMAN BEINGS that sometimes make them fail. So it's also the responsiblity of the human beings to figure out the ways to make the technology work for them.