~Maru
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Digitized Transparent Society.
(Copies to Dr. David Brin, and the Brin-L net.)
To Suzanne Fields, The Washington Times.
I read your column, On digitized written word, in the left-wing commie pinko morning Arizona Daily Star. (As opposed to the right-wing can you believe what the Democrats are trying to do now afternoon Tucson Citizen.)
The Transparent Society was a non-fiction book by David Brin, and it fits right in. It all fits. Ever since Jerry Pournelle started explaining why the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was the last one to print out how to make nitroglycerin at home. (He lived on a farm and only made a half a cup and set it in the middle of the pig's muck and used a shotgun to set it off. Lost a few pigs. Muck _everywhere_.)
The Internet will kill the middleman. Plain and simple.
Books are the first wave. Others will follow.
Back when it all started, there was a service called Bookmaster. At $32 an hour connect time, bookstores could sell and search for books from other bookstores. Then after a year or two, a new service started up, Bibliophile--or some other name. Finding books for customers. Lo and behold, they took the Bookmaster database and gave out the book listing to the end customer.
The world changed. Bookmaster put the database on the Web. Now its main purpose was in serving the customer, not the bookseller. The name changed to Alibris and as the net became faster and cheaper, they charged per book sold, and not per book listed.
Now with Amazon, there are a lot of books listed for $0.01 because they know they can ship it for $1.28 and Amazon pays them $2.26 per book and so many used bookstores can't compete with individuals who don't put a price on the time they spend wrapping books as they do it during halftime and totally miss out on whatever that black pop star did at the end of her act.
And the world changed.
Now, with the Google millions of books to be put online, I expect that the value of some used books are going to go down. I wonder if old editions of The New York Academy of Science are going to go up. They were expensive when printed, and they get a good price if somebody absolutely needs something for their research. Not after they go on the net.
Again, the world will change.
I just sold, for $500 a nearly complete set of the Decisions of the Department of the Interior. Dry, dull, court cases. Took me five years to find a customer. How's he going to feel if they all go online two years from now?
And now the world is changing so fast that it's hard to keep up.
There's a Tucson father and son book-scout team that thought that they'd like to sell books on the net. Paid $500 for the magic phone with the laser scan to read the bar codes and get the prices of used copies at Amazon. They can't find enough books now to justify the cost of the phone.
Antique stores can't find furniture fast enough to replace stock that sells. eBbay. eBbay and watching Public Television before they go to eBay.
Making a living off of knowing more about something than the average person is going to go out of style as the average person will gwydu it all.
Gwydu. That's Google what you don't understand. My one person battle to get a word into the O.E.D. I have low expectations. If it never happens it's still copasetic. Loved your reference to the Luddites. Here in Tucson, probably only one reader in a hundred will think it's a reference to Candid Camera. I've always asked myself, "If a Luddite gets a bright idea, what's going to appear over their head?"
I'm afraid that your loosely paraphrased line, 'does the onscreen Cathy cry out for Heathcliff?' will have little meaning in Tucson as neither newspaper runs either strip.
William Taylor
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"When humor becomes too esoteric, it can be like yelling 'foyer!' in a crowded
vestibule."
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