I'm on record saying that I felt like people were being whiney when the started complaining about the separate and jack price maneuver Netflix pulled a while back. I'd been happy with the service, which at the end of the day provided easy access to a DVD library I'd never have been able to tap otherwise, at a reasonable price. They even dropped the price on me once. I got streaming for a long while for free, and seriously - when you're given something new to try out for free, who doesn't understand that this is an introductory offer?
Now I'm trying to figure out the next move, a mass email from CEO Reed Hastings (connected to a slightly longer blog post that invites all and sundry to Facebook back at it which, yeah, go fuck the devil in hell Reed Hastings) which is a sterling classic of that beloved genre "the corporation is sincerely sorry it inadvertently (and through no fault of its own) hurt your feelings while doing what honestly is just the best for everyone involved".
I was going to gloss over this but man I've got to take just a moment and note what's wrong with this sort of bullshit. First off, when you start a communication out with something like "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation", the mind-space I am instantly transported to is a family meeting called by the liberal and enlightened and yet still somehow traditionally patriarchal Dad in one of the more serious episodes of an 80s-90s era sit com. An "Eight is Enough," "Family Ties," "Cosby Show" kind of touchy feely moment is imminent. I am an adult, a customer, a professional in my own right, okay? You want to communicate with me about the business we conduct by mutual consent, be a fucking professional.
Second, you did not hurt my feelings because you are not a person. I understand that Reed Hastings is a person but he is not a person I have any personal relationship with. Businesses do not hurt my feelings. I engage in commerce with them and the outcome is satisfaction, indifference, or me being pissed off. When you piss me off you can make one of two choices, you can apologize for screwing up and correct your error or you can say well, this is the way it is and if you don't like it you know where the door is. Communications like this one profess to be doing the former while actually delivering the latter. Do you think I'm stupid? Yeah that is actually a rhetorical question.
The only nut of any substance in this letter is that they are concretely dividing the businesses into the DVD mailing business, which they are renaming Qwikster, and the Streaming business, which is staying Netflix. I have to honestly consider the possibility that they chose a deliberately terrible name as a method of obfuscating discussion about what the real underlying business strategy at work is. One is left otherwise with the conclusion that nobody on the branding team bothered to notice, for example, the existing Qwikster account on Twitter, for example, or thought about the various phonetic associations with the name, such as the erstwhile identity of some transient facet of the Amway empire, or the mascot of a distinctly low-rent-tending powdered milk flavoring product...
All of which could distract a person from asking, what exactly is the benefit of this to me again? Because it seems like the only practical impact on me is going to be having to deal with twice as many websites and twice as many bills. The added video game upgrade might actually be something I want but I'd have to wait and see what the cost will be. The way my entertainment dollar is stretched right now, chances are it will be too high.
The explanation that the businesses are being separated because it is too difficult to keep them integrated seems pretty suspect, in fact. It's a straight loser for the customer, added complexity with no added functionality (that couldn't have been added to the service as it stands), and honestly, how much harder could it have been to separate the businesses internally while maintaining one name, one point for billing, and one point of entry on the internet (and for that matter, transacting the tiny bit of information relevant between the businesses, i.e. past viewing and rating information)?
A believable explanation (and I am very far from original in this suggestion) is that the DVD business is boring, and stagnant: it has gained more or less maximum market share, its price margins are mired in the physical realities of packaging and mailing - it is basically running a direct mail business, the kind of place that sends you that Valu-Pak of coupons that you throw into recycling without even opening it, which is, like, a very uncool business for a hep only barely fifty movin' and shakin' entrepreneur type to be in charge of. They are prepping it to sell, in a nutshell, to someone who will maybe maintain it in some semblance of its current form, or maybe steadily convert it into the ugly mail-order cousin of Redbox, where you can get your new releases mailed to you 2-3 weeks after the fact, and that weird little indie documentary you wanted? Yeah since the last copy of that broke in transit that is on backorder. ETA? Can't really say, no way to tell. Not the service you signed up for? No, it's not is it, it's QWIKSTER!
Of course the irony of all this is that I'm entirely ready to go all-streaming, I've got a fat ethernet pipe AND a robust wifi network in my damn basement, both connected to the teevee by various appliances. The fact that data disks are being driven around town and hand carried from the street to my home is literally offensive to my intellect. None of which (and none of the above corporate blather) addresses the tiny problem that Netflix's streaming selection is still just terrible.
Who knows, in other words, the enterprise is obviously in the grips of corporate aspiration which bears little resemblance to what customers want. I'm waiting to see how much of a pain in the ass dual account maintenance is, and what the details on that video game add-on are, and of course what goes down with the DVD-by-mail side. I'm rapidly going to lose my patience with Netflix streaming if they do not start beefing up their selection pronto. And I'm wondering if there's a very sincere email from Jeff Bezos in my future, letting me know that Amazon will be spinning off its physical item delivery business, for, you know, really everyone's good... maybe into an exciting new business we'll call, hmm, "Dumpster"?
Monday, September 19, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Speaking of Media Empires
If I could wave the magic wand I would be able to make a modest income (say that of a middle manager at a reasonably successful non-profit) engaging in my endless tinkering with text and sound and image (the last of these has received very short shrift in my digital presentation but it
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
Thursday, September 08, 2011
eBooks and the moat of legacy media
I have a moderate collection of books. Too many, it seems, as I find myself adding another shelving unit to the fray and going through yet another cull of the detritus trying to get down to a collection that will actually fit on the shelves. Most of the obvious chaff was ejected in several prior purges and now it's getting down to battling with my ingrained proclivities... the mid-twentieth-century how to manuals that call to me from the shelves of friends of public library bookstores, that I almost never open, the works of great literature I generally fervently avoid but apparently feel add some sort of intellectual weight to my stacks, and most of all the indifferent mass-market paperback bindings of so-called "classic" works of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. Which is what got me thinking about Dune.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
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