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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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beinactasinthought · 2 years

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#signal boost #reading a small portion of an ebook and then returning it isn’t the issue #reading the whole book and then getting a refund is morally/ethically wrong #discourage this behavior #if you want to rent you can get a library card for dirt cheap #…or you can even do the Kindle Unlimited Plan (that allows check out of books within the program) for an annual fee #buying and returning an ebook read in its entirety is messed up #writing #author #authors #creative writing #Amazon

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writerthreads · 1 year

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HOW TO PROTECT YOUR SELF-PUBLISHED WORK

1. Read through the terms of your publication

@ kayespivey (tumblr) got into details about this. As an author, you need to protect your work and make sure that you know what rights you’re giving to your publisher. @ kayespivey mentioned looking at the publishing company’s Copyright policy to check for any red flags like “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free”, etc. If you agreed to that, I guarantee that your book would no longer be yours.

Instead, what you should look for, if you’re in North America, “First North American Serial Rights”, which gives you the right to be the “first publisher of your work one time”. It varies depending on which country you’re in.

2. Copyright your book

The process takes about 6-13 months. You’re supposed to already be protected by copyright laws the moment your write your book, but… eh. From a quick Google search, this seems pretty straightforward in the USA, by going on the U.S. Copyright Office website, going under “Literary Works” (of course, you’ll have to fill in a bunch of forms). Overall, it depends on your residing country, but protect your work!

The Berne Convention is an international copywrite agreement that removes the need to apply for domestic copyright in 164 countries, but this doesn’t apply to the US. If you’re living in one of those 164 countries, lucky you!

There’s a couple of terms you’ll need to know when applying for copyright. I found a website that does a thorough job of explaining the process, which I’ll post on our story, and will be in a highlight.

3. Know your worth

When you’re going through options for publishing companies, check the royalty fees, and how much you’re going to get paid for every copy of the book you sell, or whichever method the publishing company prefers. Evaluate your options!

4. Choose where you want to publish

u/alyssa_wilde on Reddit was happy with their Kindle Unlimited program with Amazon, which pays authors monthly based on the number of pages read. I’ve heard about extremely low royalties from Amazon so Kindle Unlimited could be a better choice. Other options, like Kobo, Apple Books, Barns and Noble, are also reliable choices.

u/alyssa_wilde did an incredibly detailed post about self publishing (particularly for the romance genre) on Reddit, I’ll link it onto the story and make it into a highlight… it’s worth looking at.

———

So this wasn’t a post on how to edit your manuscript for self-publishing, but hopefully it clarified some scary things about your rights as an author. As always, if you think you’ve got some pointers that would help others, feel free to comment!

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stjohnstarling · 8 months

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Vindication of my predications of what the flood of AI generated books would do to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program

#Original post

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nanowrimo · 1 year

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5 Steps to Get Your Novel Ready to Self-Publish

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Kindle Direct Publishing, a 2022 NaNo sponsor, helps you self-publish eBooks and paperbacks for free. Today, author Denise Grover Swank shares some tips to help you get your novel ready to publish:

Congrats on completing NaNoWriMo! I completed my first book with NaNoWriMo in 2009, and was thrilled when I’d finished, but I wasn’t ready to hit publish just yet!

1. Have someone else read your novel.

Every book needs revising and editing. Trust me, I’ve written over seventy books at this point and still need to revise books.

You’ll either need to find a developmental editor or alpha readers. Alpha readers—well-read readers and/or other authors—are great for writers on a budget and are usually free. You can find them in writers’ groups or your friends who are readers. Just be careful if you’re using friends and family: they’re going to be biased. (Unless they’re my aunt who read my paranormal thriller and told me I should write children’s books.)

2. Invest in copy editing.

You’ve revised and edited your book, now what? Copy editing is where you may want to invest if you can. Copy editors look at your book line by line and correct grammatical mistakes. Please, please, please don’t try to do this yourself. You’ve read you book countless times and will miss things. Trust me. I know. (If you need a proofreader, here’s where your friends who can spot a typo a mile away come in handy.)

3. Get a good cover.

Let’s talk covers! Study the market and find out what’s selling in your genre, then find a cover designer who fits the trends. You can spend anywhere from $100 to $1000 or more, but you can get by on the lower end. Just don’t try to make one yourself unless you’re really good at graphic design.

4. Get the formatting right.

You’re almost ready to publish, but first you need to format your eBook and print book—You can do this by using the free templates available on Kindle Direct Publishing, you can pay someone to do it, or there are several programs less than $200 that will do this for you.

5. Now you’re ready!

There are multiple places to publish, but KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is super easy to use! Be sure to claim your books on Amazon Author Central, create an author page, then ask readers to follow you. Amazon will let your readers know about preorders and releases. Kindle Unlimited is great for newer authors who are still finding an audience, and readers in KU are more willing to take a chance on new-to-them authors. And finally, use the gifting option on your product page for giveaways on social media. Readers who love your book will tell their friends—never underestimate word of mouth marketing!

New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author Denise Grover Swank lives in Kansas City, Missouri. You can find out more about Denise at www.denisegroverswank.com.

Top photo by Nong V on Unsplash.

#nanowrimo #writing #publishing #self-publishing #now what #by nano sponsor #kdp #kindle direct publishing #denise grover swank

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riverstories7 · 3 months

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Reverie & Rancour Now Available!

Thanks to all of you who have inquired about R&R becoming an ebook. I'm pleased to say that it's now available for pre-order on Amazon. The book will be released on 31 January, and at that time it will also be included in the Kindle Unlimited program.

#pride and prejudice #jane austen #elizabeth bennet #fitzwilliam darcy #elizabeth and darcy #Pride and prejudice variation #fanfiction #fanfic #reverie and rancour #ebook #kindle books #kindle unlimited

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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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Hi friend, I wonder if you or one of your followers would have any advice to offer on a writing issue. I’ve always been interested in writing but internalised young that it was something to be ashamed of, so I haven’t done much. I got back into writing fanfic a few years ago and have written a few things since then, but the longest was only about 14,000 words.

I’ve also been thinking about an original fiction story during this time, and I come back to it periodically. I’ve got a few chapters, scraps of scenes, a verrrrry basic outline of the plot, and pages of notes and half-ideas and questions etc etc. Every time I go back to it, it feels really big and hard and intimidating and I run away pretty quickly. And of course there’s the perpetual ‘you think you can write a book?’ self-criticism.

I don’t think I’m being too naively optimistic in the ‘oh, I could totally write a book’ kind of way. I know that it’s hard for most people and it’s a skill and you develop the same way you do in any other job. I guess I’m just. Hoping for some guidance that will stop me feeling quite so much like I’m drowning whenever I think about it. Something to help me keep going to the point that I’ve written the damn thing, even if it’s terrible and gets put in a deep dark hole on completion and never sees daylight again. Even practical advice on the step by step process. I’ve tried using scrivener, for example, but i’m on an iPad and it feels really unintuitive to me (and I’m worried I’m misplacing work).

Thanks in advance <3

First, read more Kindle Unlimited erotica, and not the well-reviewed stuff. Those will quickly disabuse anyone of the idea that all published authors know how to run spellcheck, never mind know how to write.

Second, I think Scrivener is extremely useful, but mostly in the computer version for fancy export settings. It's a program with a massive learning curve, and most of its really great features are things you use after the first full draft is written or even after revisions.

Third, writing is mostly about managing emotions and time in order to have stamina.

Gosh... this one is hard to lick. I had the same problems, and I'm still figuring out how to put into words all the techniques I learned for my Patreon blog.

Set timers and work in chunks without worrying about word count, then look at your word count later to convince your brain you've made progress. Convincing your brain you're succeeding and that it's therefore worth continuing is a lot of it.

For me, having a very detailed and complete outline of the whole thing before I start writing helps me be efficient and know how far through I am.

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nofearageplay · 3 months

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New Book out Today! Diaper Discipline at the ABDL Academy Book 2: Sadie's Spanking

What if there was a university where hundreds of promising young women pursued a degree in regression studies with the hopes of being an AB/DL Caregiver?

What if there you were a student who attended this school, and were subjected to a 24/7 diaper discipline lifestyle for these nannies-to-be to practice on?

What if, for the second time, you could visit The AB/DL Academy, an AB/DL series by author Elizabeth Chambers?

Return to school and meet Sadie, a biology student who’s enrolled in the regression studies program, and who struggles to understand how important regular discipline is for adult babies. She’s going to have to learn her nannies know what’s best for her, and might just show everyone how much she loves her diapers after a hard spanking in discipline class.

Read “Diaper Discipline at the ABDL Academy – Book 2: Sadie’s Spanking” now with your Kindle Unlimited Subscription!

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iinryer · 4 months

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i am asking for more information about ebook stuff 👀

HI! ok so preface with the note that im by no means an expert, this is just what i know from researching before the one i published

the basic process is going to be: write your thing, name your thing, write a <150 word blurb, follow the epub site’s specs to make a cover, export your story as an .epub file, upload to [epub site]… profit!

(i know the most about the kindle direct publishers but I’ve also got links to a few others for you to peruse as well)

Kindle Direct: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202187740

- revenue splits options: 35% or 70% https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210

- ability to enroll in KDP Select https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GEZBMTMYGN9EBTLG

- (Select: agree to 90 days of exclusivity to KDP in exchange for being involved in the program, which promotes your work to readers who are subscribed. readers get unlimited access to enrolled ebooks and creators get paid per page read as i understand it)

- ability to publish with Vella, releasing parts of a story in episodic format, a la webcomics or chaptered fic

Apple Books: https://authors.apple.com/support/4574-publish-book-from-web

- revenue split: 70%

Barnes & Noble Press: https://press.barnesandnoble.com/how-it-works/

- revenue split: 70%

Google Books Partner Center: https://play.google.com/books/publish/

- revenue split: 70% (two days after accepting TOS)

Rakuten’s Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/writinglife

- formatting tips https://kobowritinglife.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058975512

these are just some of the most known/used sites to put out ebooks, some of them even have print options too. each will have their own policies and programs, but as far as I’m aware, they’re all free to self-publish through! each of these links should take you to either a home page or a how-to page for the individual publishers, they’re all pretty cut and clear! some of them will take a few days to release the ebook from the review phase but the actual user-interface process after you’ve got something written is very very easy and quick.

hopefully that all makes sense 😄 godspeed!

#highly recommend 50-shades-of-gray-ing your magnum opus fics into ebooks. it’s very fun and also cool to do!#iinryer talk #mailbox #urmomsonfire

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 – and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry – fell off a cliff.

Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.

This is 2600, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:

https://www.hope.net/

Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."

The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media. Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.

A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be great. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In New York City!

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee

You can submit a talk to HOPE:

https://www.hope.net/cfp.html

You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain – I devour every issue the day it arrives):

https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals

2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

#pluralistic #2600 #hackers #magazines #publishing #kindle unlimited publishing #kindle #enshittification #monopoly #end to end #competition #events #nyc #hope #hackers on planet earth #amazon

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authoralexharvey · 1 year

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The more I think on it, the less I want to publish my books on Amazon, even though I understand it is the easiest way to publish and the best way to gain readability. People have ebooks? They could read with Kindle Unlimited. Their KDP program is deceptively alluring.

And yet. And yet.

I feel like I could not live with myself if I ended up giving my books a home on the Bezos hellsphere. I think I would rather die.

Are my books meant to die of obscurity as a result? Can it be possible to get any readers by doing anything else? Is it even feasible? Or are we so far gone that trying to distance myself from such a conglomerate will be my doom?

Idk I'm just having thoughts rn.

#alex has the floor #publishing #writeblr

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ggwweenn1 · 7 months

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So I want to clear something up about WHY exactly authors can sue OpenAI for using their works in the ChatGPT dataset.

The thing under fire is NOT the actual works that are generated by ChatGPT. As long as that work is not sold for profit, it's legally the same as if the person who generated it wrote it themselves. The users are not at fault for using the tool and can't be sued (as long as they aren't selling it) Like how AO3 can't be sued for hosting fanfiction. As long as nobody is profiting of the transformed work, it doesn't infringe on Intellectual Property.

However OpenAI IS PROFITING from the use of the intellectual property in their dataset. It is improving their tool and helping them sell their $20 premium ChatGPT subscription. They are enabling people to generate whole books using ChatGPT and list them on Kindle Unlimited for profit.

There are basically three outcomes possible for these cases.

1) Nothing happens and AI can keep stealing from authors with impunity

2) OpenAI is forced to remove copyrighted works from the dataset of their paid ChatGPT program, and make everyone using the free service sign a completely unenforceable waiver saying they will not sell anything made with the tool.

3) OpenAI is forced to remove all copyrighted work from all datasets, to prevent products generated with the tool from violating copyright should they be sold for profit.

Obviously #3 is the goal. That would be a landslide victory for artists and basically set precedent that could be used by visual artists and other creatives to keep their work from being used to train AI. Unfortunately I don't think it is likely, as it would kneecap (if not kill) the AI industry almost instantly and I just can't see a judge doing that.

#2 would mean a slow but sure death of the AI industry, but wouldn't actually protect authors all that much. By preventing AI from profiting off copyrighted work, the paid versions of AI tools will be notably worse than the free versions and nobody will pay for them. Eventually the lack of profitablity will mean AI companies can't afford to run the huge servers needed to power their tools, and the tools will be shut down.

#1 is what we have already seen happen to a number of smaller lawsuits targeting the use of copyright material in AI datasets, and unless people really show support for the current big lawsuit, is exactly what will happen again.

#ChatGPT #OpenAI #AI Lawsuit #Legal Explanation #Not a lawyer but I spent 300 hours last year listening to legal conferences on copyright to digitize them #Any real lawyers can feel free to correct me though #hope this clears some things up #information #ai #ai hate

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abalonetea · 6 months

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IDS85’s going to be my first foray into exploring Kindle Unlimited (or whatever the program is called) so here’s hoping it ends up being a positive experience! It should be up for pre-sale at the end of this month so you know, if you know a bookie who likes ghost stories this could be a fun gift to keep in mind!

#ids85 #i drowned in the summer of 85

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joannerockauthor · 3 months

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Kindle Unlimited readers, it's the last chance to read some of my books before they leave KU! Three books in the To the Rescue series will be out of the program on February 16th and three books from the Single in South Beach series will only be available for a few more weeks. Now is a good time to read them!

To the Rescue Series

Single in South Beach Series

#sexy romance #contemporary romance #kindle unlimited

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tarysande · 11 months

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So this is related to The Aurora Project but I realize it can also be more broad: are there places besides Amazon you can recommend for buying eBooks? My experience with eBooks up until this point has mostly been stuff I've gotten from The Gutenberg Project or Ao3. I like using the .epub format, and would prefer to continue to do so.

My issue is that I'd like to support the author the best I can but I don't have a lot of money. My library doesn't have the book yet, and I'm already planning on requesting it. But since this is more your wheelhouse, I was wondering what you would suggest for The Aurora Project, in case they don't get it in right away. I'd like to help, but yeah, don't have a lot of money.

So, one of the (many) strangleholds Amazon has over the self-publishing market is the lure of Kindle Unlimited. Basically, if you promise not to sell your ebook anywhere else, you can include it in the Kindle Unlimited program. The benefit there is that anyone who subscribes to Kindle Unlimited can read the book for "free"--and the author gets paid for every page read, rather than just the lump sum per unit of book sold. And authors don't get dinged for returns. (Which happens a distressing amount at Amazon.)

I don't know the specific math, but one of my successful self-publishing clients tells me Kindle Unlimited makes a huge financial difference for her. Which, of course, means self-pub authors stay loyal to Amazon, and Amazon keeps making money off them.

Side note: The royalties Amazon pays are much higher than those in traditional publishing. Although one must keep in mind that traditional publishers pay lower royalties to authors because they are footing the entire production/editorial/marketing/etc. bill; the self-publishing author has to pay for all those things out of pocket. Even if Amazon only makes 30% on each sale, they don't really have overhead or anything. They make 30% to host the platform through which an author distributes.

Which is all a long way of saying that, for now at least, Paul has decided to sell The Aurora Project only on Amazon. I have no idea whether libraries/bookstores are able to nab copies.

Please don't put yourself in any financial hardship over it! If he ever puts it on sale, I'll let you know. I know I'm going to encourage him to do that in the weeks before the second book comes out. :)

If you don't know about it, you might want to look into BookBub, by the way. You tell BookBub what genres you like, and it sends a daily email with links to heavily discounted books in those genres. I don't think I've ever seen a book more expensive than 2.99 or maybe the very occasional 3.99, and they are OFTEN .99/1.99/FREE. I've found so many amazing books through BookBub over the last few years--lots of authors put books on sale when they're about to release a new one. You don't need to buy from Amazon, either; BookBub always lists other retailers (Apple Books, Kobo, etc.) if the books are available there.

#self publishing #ebooks #asks and answers #oh amazon why you gotta be so amazon #bookbub is fantastic though #uh i guess it's time to work on book 3 #yikes

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