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Readercon 19: Friday
I didn't go to the con on Thursday. The logistics of making an hour-long trip each way (~10m walk, ~20m subway, ~30m bus outbound, and all that in reverse on the way back) didn't make much sense for a couple hours of panels unless they were absolutely mustn't-miss topics, and they didn't seem like they were that compelling.
Friday, though, I took the day off work so I could get to all the interesting panels on Friday. A bit of transit screwage (a disabled train turned the ~20m subway into more like a ~50m subway) meant that I missed the 0920 #350 bus and had to wait for the 1020. That at least got me to the hotel slightly before 1100, letting me get my badge and make it to the panel (towing my rollaboard, since I hadn't had time to check it at the front desk).
The 1100 panel was "Science Fiction as a Mirror for Reality". While I have certainly not refrained from nitpicking Robert J. Sawyer's work, I still like a lot of it, and in person he's a very dynamic speaker. He's working with the CBC on a pilot for a web videocast (or similar) about the topic, and did a fairly good job getting the panel and audience to kick around some ideas. (At least until the discussion wandered into the swamp of "why isn't more SF referring to the 9/11 attacks?". Nobody else mentioned Joe Haldeman's "Giza", and I was hoping the discussion would get back on track, so I didn't want to feed it....)
A quick lunch run, then the 1300 "What’s it All About, Skiffy?". Like the 1100, this was a "main speaker/panel discussion" format; in this case, it was Graham Sleight talking about the history of recent SF/F/H (where "recent" = "in the last 20 years", which by way of making me feel old, all takes place after I started going to cons). This was amusing but hard to summarize. Key points included some very amusing names for subgenres, which I will not spoil here.[1]
I then took care of various bits of stuff that needed to be taken care of: hotel check-in, a run over to the Bur(b)lington Mall since I'd forgotten to pack a swimsuit, a first pass through the Book Shop (Dealer's Room), etc.
1600: "If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What’s Piracy?"
Like I was gonna miss that topic. Unlike some e-book panels, this one came without the seemingly-obligatory Crusty Old "Series of Tubes" Person who figures that e-books are nothing but piracy-enablers, or the making of pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, or whatever. (The originator of that particular phrase did get his name into the panel description, though.) I managed to get some fairly complete notes on this panel, too. (Short summary: lots of good points, many of which were made by James Patrick Kelly as the leader-moderator, but not so many as to make it a "Mr. Incredible and Pals" situation.)
The starting panelists (Gordon Van Gelder was running late, and hadn't arrived when the panel started) had some interest in and/or were already doing some free electronic distribution. Jeffrey Carver is looking at it as a way to get the long-out-of-print earlier books in his series available before the fourth one hits shelves; Cat Rambo is the chair of the SFWA Copyright Committee, which given the antics of the previous chair puts her in an interesting position; James Patrick Kelly described himself as being in the "Doctorow camp", and has been doing podcasts of his stories; Graham Sleight noted that nobody gets rich doing SF criticism anyway, so wider exposure is more important than lost revenue.
Rambo said that she felt "getting your name out there" was a definite advantage, but that the author should have control over what's made available. [ckd: I agree, but "should" and "will" are very disjoint in this case.] Carver pointed out that there's no DRM on paper books, and many pirated electronic texts are just scanned in and OCRed. Kelly mused on whether pirated e-texts of out of print books were actually ads for the later books in a series.
Carver made the point that getting older books online is harder than doing so with the new ones (presumably because you don't have a nice electronic copy to work from); the question is whether you make the newest one available online free as well. Sleight said that authors (and/or publishers) may find the new "online free" model "scary and weird".
Kelly went over a bit of the history: he thinks Cory Doctorow may have been the first author to put the free online edition up at the same time as the print book hit shelves. Before that, though, the Baen Free Library [ckd: and the "teaser chapters" Baen also did/does] served as a "first hit free" sales hook. Baen will now also sell you an "e-ARC" so you can get a book before the pub date, which gets the more fervent fans. He then asked whether the model would generalize, or if it only worked within the early adopter segment? Sleight thought that SF on the whole was an early adopter segment, and that there was still no good book reader (including the Kindle). Kelly noted that online is the new best way to do audiobooks; if the reader technology improves enough, the paper book will go away and kill the "free e-book, for-pay paper version" model.
I then lose attributions in my notes; I think this may have been the start of the audience Q&A, or maybe just more Kelly. The "limited attention/time" question was raised; if the reader only has a few hours a week to read, will free stuff fill that time and prevent buying for-pay content? How does the release system work? Is Creative Commons the right approach?
ETA: Graham Sleight: "Copyright notices are like a velvet rope; they'll only stop the people willing to be stopped." [ckd: and most DRM schemes are similarly only penalizing the honest]
Carver feels that the iTunes Store has demonstrated that if the price and ease of buying are good enough, people will pay instead of pirating. [ckd: I agree, and just wish more older out-of-print music were available there.] Sleight countered that the middlemen are getting squeezed out, but musicians can do well if they're smart [ckd: I think by having exclusive "fan" deals, touring, T shirts, etc].
More Kelly: "no good answers yet" to the how-to-make-money question. The donation model works somewhat, if he puts reminders in his podcast.
Somewhere around here Gordon Van Gelder arrived. Kelly asked him what stopped him from posting F&SF online; his response was that he thinks it's a bad idea, "giving it away isn't making money."
JPK: is Strange Horizons competing with F&SF? GVG: "I don't know." Feels that facts about the situation are hard to come up with; is concerned that free online magazines "teach readers they don't have to pay". "Information wants to be free, but entertainment is not information." [ckd: I'm not a big fan of "IWTBF", since it's a massive oversimplification; "duplicatable content will be duplicated" sounds pretty stupid, though.]
Someone in the audience noted that many webcomics have a model that combines donations, T shirts, and other sources of revenue, but that this really depends on a steady flow of new content. Kelly said that trying to do his podcast once a week nearly ruined his marriage.
1700: "A Tale of Two Disciplines"
Interesting, but I didn't take many notes. Some snippets: "Why stop at two?" (Vandana Singh); "I went into SF instead of science because the latter had too much specialization" (Robert J. Sawyer); "Science is really numbers. The ultimate synthesis is numbers, through words, into mental images." (Geoff Ryman).
A book shop run, then an attempt at 1900's "Economics as the S in SF"; the room was too warm, so I left after only a few minutes.
2000: Elizabeth Bear's kaffeeklatsch.
2200: The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award goes to Stanley G. Weinbaum. There is much applause. Barry Malzberg gives an uplifting and cheerful speech. (OK, I made that last part up.) This is followed by the Meet the Pros(e) party, during which I managed to get photographed by SFRevu's Ernest Lilley, said photo later winding up heading Liz Gorinsky's Readercon report over on Tor.com.
[1] ETA: by kind permission of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grahamsleight, his description of the subgenre names from his still-in-progress work:
Friday, though, I took the day off work so I could get to all the interesting panels on Friday. A bit of transit screwage (a disabled train turned the ~20m subway into more like a ~50m subway) meant that I missed the 0920 #350 bus and had to wait for the 1020. That at least got me to the hotel slightly before 1100, letting me get my badge and make it to the panel (towing my rollaboard, since I hadn't had time to check it at the front desk).
The 1100 panel was "Science Fiction as a Mirror for Reality". While I have certainly not refrained from nitpicking Robert J. Sawyer's work, I still like a lot of it, and in person he's a very dynamic speaker. He's working with the CBC on a pilot for a web videocast (or similar) about the topic, and did a fairly good job getting the panel and audience to kick around some ideas. (At least until the discussion wandered into the swamp of "why isn't more SF referring to the 9/11 attacks?". Nobody else mentioned Joe Haldeman's "Giza", and I was hoping the discussion would get back on track, so I didn't want to feed it....)
A quick lunch run, then the 1300 "What’s it All About, Skiffy?". Like the 1100, this was a "main speaker/panel discussion" format; in this case, it was Graham Sleight talking about the history of recent SF/F/H (where "recent" = "in the last 20 years", which by way of making me feel old, all takes place after I started going to cons). This was amusing but hard to summarize. Key points included some very amusing names for subgenres, which I will not spoil here.[1]
I then took care of various bits of stuff that needed to be taken care of: hotel check-in, a run over to the Bur(b)lington Mall since I'd forgotten to pack a swimsuit, a first pass through the Book Shop (Dealer's Room), etc.
1600: "If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What’s Piracy?"
Like I was gonna miss that topic. Unlike some e-book panels, this one came without the seemingly-obligatory Crusty Old "Series of Tubes" Person who figures that e-books are nothing but piracy-enablers, or the making of pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, or whatever. (The originator of that particular phrase did get his name into the panel description, though.) I managed to get some fairly complete notes on this panel, too. (Short summary: lots of good points, many of which were made by James Patrick Kelly as the leader-moderator, but not so many as to make it a "Mr. Incredible and Pals" situation.)
The starting panelists (Gordon Van Gelder was running late, and hadn't arrived when the panel started) had some interest in and/or were already doing some free electronic distribution. Jeffrey Carver is looking at it as a way to get the long-out-of-print earlier books in his series available before the fourth one hits shelves; Cat Rambo is the chair of the SFWA Copyright Committee, which given the antics of the previous chair puts her in an interesting position; James Patrick Kelly described himself as being in the "Doctorow camp", and has been doing podcasts of his stories; Graham Sleight noted that nobody gets rich doing SF criticism anyway, so wider exposure is more important than lost revenue.
Rambo said that she felt "getting your name out there" was a definite advantage, but that the author should have control over what's made available. [ckd: I agree, but "should" and "will" are very disjoint in this case.] Carver pointed out that there's no DRM on paper books, and many pirated electronic texts are just scanned in and OCRed. Kelly mused on whether pirated e-texts of out of print books were actually ads for the later books in a series.
Carver made the point that getting older books online is harder than doing so with the new ones (presumably because you don't have a nice electronic copy to work from); the question is whether you make the newest one available online free as well. Sleight said that authors (and/or publishers) may find the new "online free" model "scary and weird".
Kelly went over a bit of the history: he thinks Cory Doctorow may have been the first author to put the free online edition up at the same time as the print book hit shelves. Before that, though, the Baen Free Library [ckd: and the "teaser chapters" Baen also did/does] served as a "first hit free" sales hook. Baen will now also sell you an "e-ARC" so you can get a book before the pub date, which gets the more fervent fans. He then asked whether the model would generalize, or if it only worked within the early adopter segment? Sleight thought that SF on the whole was an early adopter segment, and that there was still no good book reader (including the Kindle). Kelly noted that online is the new best way to do audiobooks; if the reader technology improves enough, the paper book will go away and kill the "free e-book, for-pay paper version" model.
I then lose attributions in my notes; I think this may have been the start of the audience Q&A, or maybe just more Kelly. The "limited attention/time" question was raised; if the reader only has a few hours a week to read, will free stuff fill that time and prevent buying for-pay content? How does the release system work? Is Creative Commons the right approach?
ETA: Graham Sleight: "Copyright notices are like a velvet rope; they'll only stop the people willing to be stopped." [ckd: and most DRM schemes are similarly only penalizing the honest]
Carver feels that the iTunes Store has demonstrated that if the price and ease of buying are good enough, people will pay instead of pirating. [ckd: I agree, and just wish more older out-of-print music were available there.] Sleight countered that the middlemen are getting squeezed out, but musicians can do well if they're smart [ckd: I think by having exclusive "fan" deals, touring, T shirts, etc].
More Kelly: "no good answers yet" to the how-to-make-money question. The donation model works somewhat, if he puts reminders in his podcast.
Somewhere around here Gordon Van Gelder arrived. Kelly asked him what stopped him from posting F&SF online; his response was that he thinks it's a bad idea, "giving it away isn't making money."
JPK: is Strange Horizons competing with F&SF? GVG: "I don't know." Feels that facts about the situation are hard to come up with; is concerned that free online magazines "teach readers they don't have to pay". "Information wants to be free, but entertainment is not information." [ckd: I'm not a big fan of "IWTBF", since it's a massive oversimplification; "duplicatable content will be duplicated" sounds pretty stupid, though.]
Someone in the audience noted that many webcomics have a model that combines donations, T shirts, and other sources of revenue, but that this really depends on a steady flow of new content. Kelly said that trying to do his podcast once a week nearly ruined his marriage.
1700: "A Tale of Two Disciplines"
Interesting, but I didn't take many notes. Some snippets: "Why stop at two?" (Vandana Singh); "I went into SF instead of science because the latter had too much specialization" (Robert J. Sawyer); "Science is really numbers. The ultimate synthesis is numbers, through words, into mental images." (Geoff Ryman).
A book shop run, then an attempt at 1900's "Economics as the S in SF"; the room was too warm, so I left after only a few minutes.
2000: Elizabeth Bear's kaffeeklatsch.
2200: The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award goes to Stanley G. Weinbaum. There is much applause. Barry Malzberg gives an uplifting and cheerful speech. (OK, I made that last part up.) This is followed by the Meet the Pros(e) party, during which I managed to get photographed by SFRevu's Ernest Lilley, said photo later winding up heading Liz Gorinsky's Readercon report over on Tor.com.
[1] ETA: by kind permission of
grahamsleight, his description of the subgenre names from his still-in-progress work:So my own approach to movements is to say that, for the moment, I’m going to brush aside all the specific labels I mentioned just now (slipstream, interstitial, et al) and replace them with two – and two only – of my own invention. The first set of genre-blending work I want to talk about is that which involves mixing tropes and approaches within the field of the fantastic. I want to name this cluster of work in a way that’s value-free and that has no connection with actual worth or content – something that’s just a name rather than a description – so, entirely flippantly, I’m going to [label these works with] the name Dave. [...] The second of my two labels is for works which exist in some sense on the border between the fantastic and the mimetic. Equally flippantly, I’m going to label these works with the name Roger.I encourage anyone who gets a chance to hear him talk about this to do so.
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Sorry about that, although for a discussion on the topic of SF being a mirror for reality, it is kinda relevant...
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Oh, spoil away...
Copyright notices are like a velvet rope; they'll only stop the people willing to be stopped.
My memory is that this was me.
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This is where I shamefacedly admit that I don't have them in my notes, and can't remember them well enough to repeat them properly.
My memory is that this was me.
Corrected; thanks! I was so concerned about getting down the comment that I didn't manage the attribution, hence the "probably" tag. (At least it wasn't as bad as the time I managed to confuse Glenn Grant and Greer Gilman after some badly-thought-out use of initials for attributions in my notes.)
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Oh yes indeed.