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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Kickstarting the audiobook of The Lost Cause, my novel of environmental hope

Tonight (October 2), I'm in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The Lost Cause is my next novel. It's about the climate emergency. It's hopeful. Library Journal called it "a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak." As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

That's a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: "How is it that I have another book out in 2023?" Because this is my third book this year. Short answer: I write when I'm anxious, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. Nine!

Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.

The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves "the first generation in a century that doesn't fear the future."

I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff's edge and all the one-percent has to say is, "Well, it's too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don't worry, we'll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge":

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is total. The company's Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn't want it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

I wrote a whole-ass book about this and it came out less than a month ago; it's called The Internet Con and it lays out an audacious plan to halt the internet's enshittification and throw it into reverse:

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

The tldr is this: when an audiobook is wrapped in Amazon's DRM, only Amazon can legally remove it. That means that every book I sell you on Audible is a book you have to throw away if you ever break up with Amazon, and Amazon can use the fact that it's hold you hostage to screw me – and every other author – over.

As I said last time this came up:

Fuck that sideways.

With a brick.

My books are sold without DRM, so you can play them in any app and do anything copyright permits, and that means Amazon won't carry them, and that means my publishers don't want to pay to produce them, and that means I produce them myself, and then I make the (significant) costs back by selling them on Kickstarter.

And you know what? It works. Readers don't want DRM. I mean, duh. No one woke up this morning and said, "Dammit, why won't someone sell me a product that lets me do less with my books?" I sell boatloads" of books through these crowdfunding campaigns. I sold so many copies of my last book, *The Internet Con, that they sold out the initial print run in two weeks (don't worry, they held back stock for my upcoming events).

But beyond that, I think there's another reason my readers keep coming back, even though I wrote a genuinely stupid number of books while working through lockdown anxiety while the wildfires raged and ashes sifted down out of the sky and settled on my laptop as I lay in my backyard hammock, pounding my keyboard.

(I went through two keyboards during lockdown. Thankfully, I bought a user-serviceable laptop from Framework and fixed it myself both times, in a matter of minutes. No, no one pays me to mention this, but hot damn is it cool.)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

The reason readers come back to my books is that they're full of hope. In the same way that writing lets me feel like I'm not a passenger in life, but rather, someone with a say in my destination, the books that I write are full of practical ways and dramatic scenes in which other people seize the means of computation, the reins of power or their own destinies.

The protagonist of The Lost Cause is Brooks Palazzo, a high-school senior in Burbank whose parents were part of the original cohort of volunteers who kicked off the global transformation, and left him an orphan when they succumbed to one of the zoonotic plagues that arise every time another habitat is destroyed.

Brooks grew up knowing what his life would be: the work of repair and care, which millions of young people are doing. Relocating entire cities off endangered coastlines and floodplains, or out of fire-zones. Fighting floods and fires. Caring for tens of millions of refugees for whom the change came too late.

But with every revolution comes a counter-revolution. The losers of a just war don't dig holes, climb inside and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Two groups of reactionaries – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and seething white nationalist militias – have formed an alliance.

They've already gotten their champion into the White House. Next up: dismantling every cause for hope Brooks and his friends have, and bringing back the fear.

That's the setup for a novel about solidarity, care, library socialism, and snatching victory from defeat's jaws. Writing it help keep me sane during the lockdown, and when it came time to record the audiobook, I spent a lot of time thinking about who could read it. I've had some great narrators: Wil Wheaton, @neil-gaiman, Amber Benson, Bronson Pinchot, and more.

I record my audiobooks with Skyboat Media, a brilliant studio near my place in LA. Back in August, I spent a week in their recording booth – "The Tardis" – doing something I'd never tried before: I recorded a whole audiobook, with directorial supervision: The Internet Con:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992826/DEA0CE12/purchase

When it was done, the director – audiobook legend Gabrielle de Cuir – sat me down and said, "Look, I've never said this to an author before, but I think you should read The Lost Cause. I don't direct anyone anymore except for Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton, but I would direct you on this one."

I was immensely flattered – and very nervous. Reading The Internet Con was one thing – the book is built around the speeches I've been giving for 20 years and I knew I could sell those lines – but The Lost Cause is a novel, with a whole cast of characters. Could I do it?

Reader, I did it. I just listened to the proofs last week and:

It.

Came.

Out.

Great.

The Lost Cause goes on sale on November 14th, and I'll be selling this audiobook I made everywhere audiobooks are sold – except for the stores that require DRM, nonconsensually shackling readers and writers to their platforms. So you'll be able to get it on Libro.fm, downpour.com, even Google Play – but not Audible, Apple Books, or Audiobooks.com.

But in addition to those worthy retailers, I will be sending out thousands – and thousands! – of audiobook to my Kickstarter backers on the on-sale date, either as a folder of DRM-free MP3s, or as a download code for Libro.fm, to make things easy for people who don't want to have to figure out how to sideload an audiobook into a standalone app.

And, of course, the mobile duopoly have made this kind of sideloading exponentially harder over the past decade, though far be it from me to connect this with their policy of charging 30% commissions on everything sold through an app, a commission they don't receive if you get your files on the web and load 'em yourself:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

As with my previous Kickstarters, I'm also selling ebooks and hardcovers – signed or unsigned, and this time I've found a great partner to fulfill EU orders from within the EU, so backers won't have to pay VAT and customs charges. The wonderful Otherland – who have hosted me on my last two trips to Berlin – are going to manage that shipping for me:

https://www.otherland-berlin.de/en/home.html

Kim Stanley Robinson read the book and said, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this." That's just about the perfect quote, because the book is a ride. It's not just a kumbaya tale of a better world that is possible: it's a post-cyberpunk novel of high-tech guerrilla and meme warfare, climate tech and bad climate tech, wildcat prefab urban infill, and far-right militamen who adapt to a ban on assault-rifles by switching to super-soakers full of hydrochloric acid.

It's a book about struggle, hope in the darkness, and a way through this rotten moment. It's a book that dares to imagine that things might get worse but also better. This is a curious emotional melange, but it's one that I'm increasingly feeling these days.

Like, Amazon, that giant bully, whose blockade on DRM-free audiobooks cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through university (according to my agent)? The incredible Lina Khan brought a long-overdue antitrust case against Amazon while her rockstar DoJ counterpart, Jonathan Kanter, is dragging Google through the courts.

The EU is taking on Apple, and French cops are kicking down Nvidia's doors and grabbing their files, looking to build another antitrust case for monopolizing GPUs. The writers won their strike and Joe Biden walked the picket-line with the UAW, the first president in history to join striking workers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Solar is now our cheapest energy source, which is wild, because if we could only capture 0.4% of the solar energy that makes it through the atmosphere, we could give everyone alive the same energy budget as Canadians (who have American lifestyles but higher heating bills). As Deb Chachra writes in her forthcoming How Infrastructure Works (my review pending): we get a fresh supply of energy every time the sun rises and we only get new materials when a comet survives atmospheric entry, but we treat energy as scarce and throw away our materials after a single use:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We have shot past many of our planetary boundaries and there are waves of climate crises in our future, but they don't have to be climate disasters. That's up to us – it'll depend on whether we come together to save ourselves and each other, or tear ourselves apart.

The Lost Cause dares to imagine what it might be like if we do the former. We don't live in a post-enshittification world yet, but we could. With these indie audiobooks, I've found a way to treat the terminal enshittification of the Amazon monopoly as damage and route around it. I hope you'll back the Kickstarter, fight enshittification, inject some hope into your reading, and enjoy a kickass adventure novel in the process:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-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/2023/10/02/the-lost-cause/#the-first-generation-that-doesnt-fear-the-future

#pluralistic #audiobooks #the lost cause #crowdfunding #kickstarter #spoken word #climate #climate emergency #monopoly #drm #amazon #audible #skyboat #science fiction #hope not optimism

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arthurdrakoni · 10 months

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Flatland is an underrated classic that imagines life in a 2-D world. This is my review.

You’ll get a lot of answers when you ask when speculative fiction was born. Some will tell you that it began with Hugo Gernsback and the pulps. Others will say that it goes as far back as mythology and folklore. Personally, I go with those who say that it began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though I don’t discount earlier works such as Gulliver’s Travels or The Tempest. I say all of this because I’m taking us back to the 19th Century for today’s review. We’re going to review the classic novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott.

Imagine, if you will, a sheet of paper that is infinitely large and stretching to all sides. Now imagine that on this sheet of paper there are a series of geometric shapes, but instead of staying in place these shapes move about and have complex social lives. Welcome to Flatland, a world of only two dimensions. There is width and length, but there is no height or depth.

The book follows A. Square who is…well, he’s literally a two-dimensional square. He acts as our guide to the realm of Flatland and relates to use the ways of his countrymen and their doings. There are two main events that serve to completely change A. Square’s world view. The first is his contact with Lineland, a world of only one dimension, and the second is meeting a figure known as Lord Sphere. Lord Sphere claims to come from a strange world of three dimensions called Spaceland.

The book goes into great detail about how life works in a world with only two dimensions. For example, it is customary to meet someone by feeling them in order to determine their shape. It’s also considered polite to give directions to the way north when meeting a traveler on the road. Societal rank and job are determined by the number of sides that one has, with circles being at the top of things. Each successive generation gains an additional side, except for the low ranking isosceles triangles, though there are exceptions. Women, being incredibly sharp and pointy lines, have restrictions placed on them so that they can avoid constantly killing people by accident. We also learn much of the history of Flatland, such as why colors have been banned by the upper classes. There is some pretty great world building in this novel.

That having been said the fact the citizens of Flatland are all living geometric shapes does limit the amount of exploration that can go into their biology and physics. A. Square does hint at future explanations, but he decides that it will take up too much time and bore the reader. Or to put it another way, if you wonder how they eat and breathe and other science facts…well, I’m sure you all know the words to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song. You’ll also notice that Flatland society bares more than a passing resemblance to the society of Victorian Britain. This is intentional, as Abbott intended for Flatland to be just as much a satire as a compelling story. For example, the class system of Flatland is rather absurd when given further scrutiny, but Abbott was making about about how the British class system was absurd and ultimately rather arbitrary.

Since it was written in 1884 Flatland has long since fallen into the Public Domain. As such, many other writer have tried their hand at tackling the subject matter Flatland is built upon. Usually they will focus on one particular aspect while ignoring the others. Admittedly I haven’t read any of these books, but of the ones I’ve heard of thanks to TV Tropes I’d say Planiverse sounds the most promising. It attempts to look at how biology, chemistry, physics and culture would function in a realistic 2-D world.

Have you read Flatland? If so, what did you think?

Link to the full review on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2017/02/book-review-flatland-by-edwin-abbot.html?m=1

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gaymarisa · 9 months

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i love lecture recordings, i genuinely love listening to these like podcasts. this is entertainment to me, fun, learning in a way that does not bore me!

the moment they give me a single 10 page article though it takes me 5 business weeks to read it

#why are all audiobooks fiction or pop science at best. i want to listen to my textbooks #molecular biology of the cell 4th edition audiobook when. fundamentals of pharmaceutical chemistry audiobook WHEN

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tinynavajoreads · 6 months

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Currently Listening: The Martian by Andy Weir, narrated by R.C. Bray

This is my absolute favourite audiobook, and one I turn back to time after time when I need an audiobook to listen to. I love the characterization of Mark Watney, and I love how R.C. Bray brings him to life. Whenever I need a chuckle, this book does it!

What's an audiobook you keep coming back to? Why?

#the martian #andy weir #audiobook #r.c. bray #science fiction #a lot of true science though #booklr #book talk #listening is reading #currently listening

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revginapond · 11 months

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I've started reading my second book, Unity, on my podcast Tales from Flat Space.

I read these episodes live on Twitch (http://twitch.tv/worthyadvisor) on Fridays at 9 pm Central European Time (3 pm Eastern/Noon Pacific US). The podcast usually comes out a week later.

#writing #books #novel #hard scifi #lgbtqa scifi #queer #lgbtqa #neurodivergent #scifi #science fiction #podcast #reading out loud #audiobook

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taibhsearachd · 10 months

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Still absolutely distraught about my shipwreck podcast getting canceled by their producer. I love disaster podcasts and there are very few as good as Ship Hits the Fan.

Legitimately having trouble falling asleep lately (because yes I like to listen to fresh episodes of familiar podcasts to go to sleep and sometimes they have to do with disasters, don’t judge me). I might have to rotate back to listening to audiobooks of Rolling In the Deep and Into the Drowning Deep until I can once more recite them in my sleep. They’re surprisingly soothing to me, but it does help my ADHD to consume new information but in familiar voices I know I can listen back to if I fall asleep midway through, and I am OUT OF REGULAR PODCASTS THAT SERVE THAT PURPOSE ATM.

So I guess I’m going back to murder mermaids for a while. Murder mermaids love me. Murder mermaids won’t let me down.

#ship hits the fan #into the drowning deep #mira grant #podcasts #audiobooks #legit this is a request for recommendations ahout podcasts to listen to #ideally podcasts where people don’t get loud and shouty bc the goal is to fall asleep #podcasts I regularly use for this include: ship hits the fan; behind the bastards; historical blindness; the constant; the conspirators #I’m also open to recs for nonfiction audiobooks about disasters or historical crimes or just general historical events…#hell I’d love a good nonfiction book about science if you have one to recommend #it does unfortunately have to be nonfiction #love me a fiction podcast or audiobook #like I said murder mermaids are very soothing to me #and I also like to listen to tma or wtnv to fall asleep #but it has to be a story I’ve heard before #or I will get too invested and it interferes with actual sleep

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bookwyrmshoard · 5 months

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Phasers on Stun!: How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World, by Ryan Britt

Informative, entertaining, and delightful

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I found Phasers on Stun!: How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World both very informative and highly entertaining. The book covered things I already knew (for example, how Martin Luther King, Jr., told Nichelle Nichols that she had to remain on the show) , but also went into depth on things I hadn’t known (like the extent to which Nichols was instrumental in getting NASA to diversify the astronaut program, and her subsequent recruiting on NASA’s behalf.)

Like me (and my husband, Mr. Bookwyrm), Ryan Britt is a fan not only of Trek in its many iterations, but also of the ideals and underlying beliefs of Star Trek: its optimism; its vision of a future where all intelligent beings are respected and included regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or even species; and its preference for diplomatic resolution of conflicts (although Starfleet is willing to fight to defend its member planets when necessary.) Britt looks at how those ideals have been represented throughout the various series of Star Trek, from the original series (TOS) to Strange New Worlds. The shows haven’t always lived up to those ideals—it wasn’t until Discovery that a Star Trek series featured openly LGBTQIA+ characters as regulars, for instance—but from the beginning, the Enterprise crew, and by extension Starfleet and Star Trek itself, was diverse in terms of race, gender, and species. (I suspect the original Enterprise crew would have included more alien crew members if the show could have afforded them.) And while Star Trek’s example of embracing diversity is very much aligned with the liberal and Quaker values with which I was raised, TOS and ST:TNG both had a profound effect in shaping my worldview.

In telling the history of the shows and how they impacted and interacted with popular culture and real-world events, Britt includes quotes and stories from a number of Star Trek luminaries, from writers and showrunners to actors. Some of these are drawn from interviews conducted for various articles Britt (a sci-fi and pop-culture journalist) has written over the years; other interviews took place specifically for this book. The interviews and quotes give an insight into the experiences and motivations of the people who made and remade Star Trek, and continue to do so to this day.

Whether you grew up watching one of the Star Trek shows, came to the fandom as an adult, or simply want to understand the wide appeal of the Star Trek universe, I recommend reading or listening to Phasers on Stun! It’s a warm, loving, but not uncritical look at a pop-culture phenomenon that, at over 50 years old, is still relevant, influential, and dynamic.

#star trek #ryan britt #audiobook #audiobook review #book review #my reviews #pop culture #science fiction

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inscrutablemachine · 7 months

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A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel is now live on Audible! Do you like Space? Do you like steampunk air pirates from Saturn? Do you secretly suspect that everything we know about the universe is wrong because the Earth is infected with Math, and the actual real solar system is an awesome place with squid drawn space wagons and freedom fighters on Jupiter whose blasters make a pew-pew noise?

Rachel did not suspect these things. She got in a spaceship because there are opportunities you don't let pass you by. Now she can't go back, and she's not sure if she wants to. On Earth she babysat. On Ceres she jury rigs spaceships out of stove pipes, dowsing rods, and mysterious boxes with LED running lights.

#audiobook #A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel #science fiction #space #spaceship #spaceship repair #steampunk #kobolds #no seriously her best friend is a kobold #because Space is cool

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pendantaudio · 4 months

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THE KINGERY, a sci-fi crime dramedy, Season 13 hiatus mini-episode 1: Pallas and Cassandra's conversation has its ups and downs!

Written by Kaitlyn Kliman, directed by Jillian Morgan. Assistant director Kaitlyn Kliman.

On Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Samsung Podcasts, and more! Transcript available at pendantaudio.com.

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improbable-implosions · 8 months

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It's true! I have a podcast, called Paper Cuts! The format is something I like to call Live Audiobook, where I go live, and read a book aloud to you, the audience! I then edit that down into what goes on the podcast feed.

Also, I have the book on screen during the stream AND it's in the vod, so people have a fallback to my automated captions!

We're live friday nights, generally, and specifically, this coming Friday, The 13th, is the launch of season 3 of the podcast! It's a new era for paper cuts, we're getting author permission for modern books to get air alongside the public domain classics that got us this far! I'm so excited to show off some more recently-made favorites of mine, and hopefully make some new favorites along the way, too!

Does the thought of a long backlog of episodes sound daunting to you? Don't worry about it, each time we start a new book, the episode is the title of the book, so there's plenty of places to start! We've done some of the big "english class" hits, like Dracula, The Cask of Amontillado, or The Picture of Dorian Grey, but also some weird little hidden gems I think you'll love, like The Five Jars, The Last Man, or even some issues of Astounding Stories!

Long story short, if you like audiobooks, you'll love them live, come drop by and enjoy Paper Cuts!

That's the link for when we go live!

And there's the podcast feed! (I'm also available in your podcatcher of choice, like spotify, or iTunes, for example!)

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Kickstarting “The Bezzle” audiobook, sequel to Red Team Blues

I'm heading to Berlin! On January 29, I'll be delivering Transmediale's Marshall McLuhan Lecture, and on January 30, I'll be at Otherland Books (tickets are limited! They'll have exclusive early access to the English edition of The Bezzle and the German edition of Red Team Blues!).

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to last year's Red Team Blues, featuring Marty Hench, a hard-charging, two-fisted forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting every finance scam hatched by tech bros' feverish imaginations:

http://thebezzle.org

Marty Hench is a great character to write. His career in high-tech scambusting starts in the early 1980s with the first PCs and stretches all the way to the cryptocurrency era, the most target-rich environment for scamhunting tech has ever seen. Hench is the Zelig of tech scams, and I'm having so much fun using him to probe the seamy underbelly of the tech economy.

Enter The Bezzle, which will be published by Tor Books and Head of Zeus on Feb 20: this adventure finds Marty in the company of Scott Warms, one of the many bright technologists whose great startup was bought and destroyed by Yahoo! (yes, they really used that asinine exclamation mark). Scott is shackled to the Punctuation Factory by golden handcuffs, and he's determined to get fired without cause, so he can collect his shares and move onto the next thing.

That's how Scott and Marty find themselves on Catalina island, the redoubt of the Wrigley family, where bison roam the hills, yachts bob in the habor and fast food is banned. Scott invites Marty on a series of luxury vacations on Catalina, which end abruptly when they discover – and implode – a hamburger-related Ponzi scheme run by a real-estate millionaire who is destroying the personal finances of the Island's working-class townies out of sheer sadism.

Scott's victory is bittersweet: sure, he blew up the Ponzi scheme, but he's also made powerful enemies – the kinds of enemies who can pull strings with the notoriously corrupt LA County Sheriff's Deputies who are the only law on Catalina, and after taking a pair of felony plea deals, Scott gets the message and never visits Catalina Island again.

That could have been the end of it, but California's three-strikes law – since rescinded – means that when Scott picks up one more felony conviction for some drugs discovered during a traffic stop, he's facing life in prison.

That's where The Bezzle really gets into gear.

At its core, The Bezzle is a novel about the "shitty technology adoption curve": the idea that our worst technological schemes are sanded smooth on the bodies of prisoners, mental patients, kids and refugees before they work their way up the privilege gradient and are inflicted on all of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

America's prisons are vicious, brutal places, and technology has only made them worse. When Scott's prison swaps out in-person visits, the prison library, and phone calls for a "free" tablet that offers all these services as janky apps that cost ten times more than they would on the outside, the cruelty finds a business model.

Working inside and outside the prison Marty Hench and Scott Warms figure out the full nature of the scam that the captive audience of prisoners are involuntary beta-testers for, and they discover a sprawling web of real-estate fraud, tech scams, and offshore finance that is extracting fortunes from the hides of America's prisoners and their families. The criminals who run that kind of enterprise aren't shy about fighting for what they've got, and they're more than happy to cut some of LA County's notorious deputy gangs in for a cut in exchange for providing some kinetic support for the project.

The Bezzle is exactly the kind of book I was hoping I'd get to write when I kicked off the Hench series – one that decodes the scam economy, from music royalties to prison videoconferencing, real estate investment trusts to Big Four accounting firm bogus audits. It's both a fast-moving, two-fisted crime novel and a masterclass on how the rich and powerful get away with both literal and figurative murder.

It's getting a big push from both my publishers and I'll be touring western Canada and the US with it. The early reviews are spectacular. But despite all of this, I had to make my own audiobook for it, which I'm pre-selling on Kickstarter:

http://thebezzle.org

Why? Because Audible – Amazon's monopoly gatekeeper to the audiobook world, with more than 90% of the market – refuses to carry my work.

Audible uses Digital Rights Management to lock every audiobook they sell to their platform. Legally, only an Audible-authorized app can decrypt and play the audiobooks they sell you. Distributing a tool that removes Audible DRM is a felony under Section 1201 of the 1998 DMCA.

That means that if you break up with Audible – delete your Audible apps – you will lose your entire audiobook library. And the fact that you're Audible's hostage makes the writers you love into their hostages, too. Writers understand that if they leave the Audible platform, their audience will have to choose between following them, or losing all their audiobooks.

That's how Audible gets away with abusing its performers and writers, up to and including the $100m Audiblegate wage-theft scandal:

https://www.audiblegate.com/

Audible can steal $100m from its writers…and the writers still continue to sell on the platform, because leaving will cost them their audience.

This is canonical enshittification: lock in users, then screw suppliers. Lots of companies abuse DRM to do this, but none can hold a candle to Amazon, who understand that the DMCA is a copyright law that protects corporations at the expense of creators.

Under DMCA 1201 commercial distribution of a "circumvention device" carries a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that if I write a book, pay to have it recorded, and then sell it to you through Audible, I am criminally prohibited from giving you the tool to take it from Audible to another platform. Even though I hold the copyright to that work, I would face a harsher sentence than you would if you simply pirated the audiobook from some darknet site. Not only that: if you shoplifted the audiobook in CD form, you'd get a lighter sentence than I, the copyright holder, would receive for giving you a tool to unlock it from Amazon's platform! Hell, if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CD, you'd get off lighter than I would. This is a scam straight out of a Marty Hench novel.

This is batshit. I won't allow it. My books are licensed on the condition that they must not be sold with DRM. Which means that Audible won't sell my books, which means that my publishers are thoroughly disinterested in paying thousands of dollars to produce audiobooks of my titles. A book that isn't sold in the one store than accounts for 90% of all sales is unlikely to do well.

That's where you come in. Since 2020, I've used Kickstarter to pre-sell five of my audiobooks (I wrote nine books during lockdown!). All told, I've raised over $750,000 (gross! but still!) on these crowdfunders. More than 20,000 backers have pitched in! The last two of these books – The Internet Con and The Lost Cause – were national bestsellers.

This isn't just a way for me to pay off a lot of bills and put away something for retirement – it's proof that readers care about supporting writers and don't want to be locked in by a giant monopolist that depends on its drivers pissing in bottles to make quota.

It's a powerful message about the desire for something better than Amazon. It's part of the current that is driving the FTC to haul Amazon into court for being a monopolist, and also part of the inspiration for other authors to try treating Amazon as damage and routing around it, with spectacular results:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson

And I'm doing it again. Last December, I went into Skyboat Media's studios where Gabrielle De Cuir directed @wilwheaton, who reprised his role as Marty Hench for the audiobook of The Bezzle. It came out amazing:

https://archive.org/details/bezzle-sample

Now I'm pre-selling this audiobook, as well as the ebook and hardcover for The Bezzle. I'm also offering bundles with the ebook and audiobook for Red Team Blues (naturally these are all DRM-free). You can get your books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere in the world, courtesy of Book Soup, and I've partnered with Libro.fm to deliver DRM-free audiobooks with an app for people who don't want to mess around with sideloading.

I've also got some spendy options for high rollers. There's three chances to name a character in the next Hench novel (Picks and Shovels, Feb 2025). There's also five chances to commission a Hench short story about your favorite tech scam, and get credited when the story is published.

The Kickstarter runs for the next three weeks, which should give me time to get the hardcopy books signed and shipped to arrive around the on-sale date. What's more, I've finally worked out all the post-Brexit kinks with shipping my UK publisher's books to EU backers. I'm working with Otherland Books to fulfill those EU orders, and it looks like I'm going to be able to sign a giant stack of those when I'm in Berlin later this month to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Canadian embassy:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

Red Team Blues and its sequels are some of the most fun – and informative – work I've done in my quarter-century career. I love how they blend technical explanations of the scam economy with high-intensity technothrillers. That's the the same mix as my bestselling YA series Little Brother series – but these are firmly adult novels.

The Bezzle came out great. I hope you'll give it a try – and that you'll come out to see me in late February when I hit the road with the book! Here's that Kickstarter link again:

http://thebezzle.org

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/2024/01/10/the-bezzle/#marty-hench

#pluralistic #kickstarter #audible #the bezzle #bezzles #prison tech #disciplinary technology #crowdfunding #wilw #wil wheaton #audiobooks #publishing #science fiction #marty hench #martin hench #red team blues #shitty technology adoption curve #reits

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dragontamer22 · 6 months

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Hey tumblr!!!!

I'm asking around on social media for indie authors who have purposely uploaded their audiobooks on non-Paywalled sites (ie: youtube), to hit me up with their links. I KNOW these exist-- there are definitely authors out there other than me who are reading their own books and uploading them to youtube for folks to listen to! But I don't know how to find them! And probably so do most other people! So I'm making a list to share with the public! it'll be a cute little webpage. Yes yes I know about Libby (the library), please also support your public library, but there's plenty of ethically-sourced free indie audiobooks that MY library system doesn't have!!!! I don't care what genre it is, or what length it is! I don't care if it's only the first book in the series and the rest are paywalled (totally understand, audiobooks are expensive/time consuming). I don't care if it's in playlist form or if the entire god damn thing is one 27 hour video that your hubris convinced you to upload exactly as-is! I'm not discriminating on "quality" either because that's silly. Hell, it doesn't even have to be in English as long as you can communicate to me core information and a YouTube link (or other places). It can be poetry for all I care! The ONLY thing I will discriminate on is whether it's behind a paywall and whether there is AI-involved in the project-- ESPECIALLY the narrator! It MUST be read by a real human being! This is an honor system, and violators will be deleted and potentially blacklisted. (I specify indie mostly because I suspect it's mostly indie authors who would do this-- but I suppose you don't have to be indie!) (I'm striving to find ethically sourced ((author-endorsed/released)) free audiobooks, nothing pirated, and I'm not talking about Public Domain works-- I KNOW these exist!!!! I've seen them now and again!!! And I was a fool for not compiling a list of them!) Please share so I can help the indie audiobook world in one small way. I fucking hate Amazon with every fiber of my being and I want to support authors who have chosen to make a very hard decision.

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matociquala · 1 year

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Jenny Casey is finally getting an audiobook release, and I for one am thrilled!

If you might like some gritty eco-gothic futures starring a disabled 50ish POC woman, these are for you.

Available where-ever fine audiobooks are sold.

#jenny casey #cyberpunk #audiobook #science fiction #sciencefiction #scifibooks #scifi

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rogerclarkaudiobooks · 8 days

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"Many Worlds: Or, The Simulacra"

Authors: Rebekah Bergman, Justin C. Key, Darkly Lem, M. Darusha Wehm, Cadwell Turnbull, Josh Eure, various authors Narrators: Various, among them is Roger Clark Audiobook Release Date: May 28, 2024 Length: 5 hours, 29 minutes

Listen to a sample of Roger's contribution to this audiobook 👇

Many Worlds is a collection of stories by different authors, check the table below to see if there's an author that catches your eye. If you are interested in Roger's story in this collection, "Life at Sea" by Craig Lincoln, is the one you are looking for.

Publisher's Summary:

Many Worlds, or The Simulacra is an anthology of reality-bending stories from a one-of-a-kind collective of authors building a shared multiverse. The stories in this anthology range from quietly strange to ambitiously speculative. Humans transform into cosmic energy or sentient algae. A man wakes up in a new body in a world with continents cut out, months absent from the calendar year, and souls misplaced. Students at a high school regularly vanish without a trace. A woman descends into the depths of the ocean and encounters all-knowing creatures who may have the answers to her deepest questions. Mech-suits and parallel selves, conspiracy forums and interstellar telepaths, and a mysterious cosmic force connecting it all; the stories in this collection are revelatory and offer a breathtaking portal into worlds far more mysterious than our own. Subversive, transgressive, and utterly original, this collection compels the listener to believe in the fantastical. Many Worlds features stories by Rebekah Bergman, M. Darusha Wehm, Craig Lincoln, alongside other fascinating voices in speculative fiction. This collection is edited by Cadwell Turnbull, author of The Lesson and No Gods, No Monsters, and Josh Eure, winner of Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Award. ©2023 by respective contributors. All rights reserved. The story "Shock of Birth" was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction © 2020 by Cadwell Turnbull (P)2024 Blackstone Publishing

Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra is available from: Apple Books ✰ Audible ✰ Audiobooks.com ✰ AudiobooksNow.com ✰ AudiobookStore.com ✰ Barnes & Noble ✰ Binge Books ✰ Chirp Books ✰ Downpour ✰ Everand ✰ Google Play ✰ Hoopla ✰ Libro.fm ✰ Overdrive + Libby ✰ Rakuten Kobo ✰

TIP: If you want to find more audiobooks from Roger, you can click on the "Roger's Audiobooks" tag, or you can also check out my pinned post 😉 Happy Listening!

#roger clark #roger's audiobooks #roger clark audiobooks #many worlds or the simulacra #sci fi and fantasy #science fiction

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