Liam Fox says contract to expand Chinook fleet to 60 shows government is bringing ‘reality’ to the defence budget The Ministry of Defence is to buy 14 Chinook transport helicopters at a cost of £1bn, the defence secretary has announced. The contract, which will increase the number of Chinooks operated by the RAF to 60, will also include development and support costs for five years. In a speech at RAF Odiham in Hampshire, where the British Chinook fleet is based, Liam Fox said the deal showed that the government was bringing “reality” to the defence budget, enabling it to provide real equipment. In last October’s defence review the number of Chinooks the government planned to order was reduced to 12, half the number proposed in 2009. “We have brought reality to the defence budget and can start signing contracts that will deliver real equipment,” Fox said. The coalition has cut the defence budget by 8% as part of the attempt to slash the deficit, but Fox attacked the previous administration. He said: “The previous government promised more Chinooks, but never ordered them and never had the money for them. “It was just an aspiration. These additional helicopters will significantly enhance our existing heavy lift helicopter capability. This fleet will support our frontline troops in current and future operations for decades to come.” There have been persistent complaints by the RAF of shortages of helicopters and spare parts during the Afghanistan operation. Three years ago it was reported that only 17 were fit for active service of the-then fleet of 40 . The deal means that the RAF will continue to have the largest Chinook fleet in Europe. The heavy duty helicopters, used in Afghanistan for transporting troops and equipment, are manufactured by the US company Boeing. The first of the new batch of helicopters, which can carry up to 40 people or 10 tonnes of cargo, should be ready to enter service in 2014, with the full complement coming on stream two years later. That means they are unlikely to play any part in operations in Afghanistan. They have proved their worth in military conflicts over many years, from the Vietnam war onwards – the helicopters were first developed in the early 1960s. But they have also been involved in a number of disasters, including an incident in Afghanistan earlier this month when one containing 30 US troops was apparently brought down by ground fire. The RAF has used its Chinook fleet in all overseas conflicts since the 1970s, including the Falklands, Bosnia and Iraq as well as in Northern Ireland. Two were lost two years ago in Afghanistan, one of them being shot down by the Taliban. A Chinook was also at the centre of one of Britain’s greatest security disasters in modern times when a helicopter carrying high-ranking security and intelligence officers from Northern Ireland to a conference in Scotland crashed on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. Defence policy Liam Fox Ministry of Defence Military Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Liam Fox says contract to expand Chinook fleet to 60 shows government is bringing ‘reality’ to the defence budget The Ministry of Defence is to buy 14 Chinook transport helicopters at a cost of £1bn, the defence secretary has announced. The contract, which will increase the number of Chinooks operated by the RAF to 60, will also include development and support costs for five years. In a speech at RAF Odiham in Hampshire, where the British Chinook fleet is based, Liam Fox said the deal showed that the government was bringing “reality” to the defence budget, enabling it to provide real equipment. In last October’s defence review the number of Chinooks the government planned to order was reduced to 12, half the number proposed in 2009. “We have brought reality to the defence budget and can start signing contracts that will deliver real equipment,” Fox said. The coalition has cut the defence budget by 8% as part of the attempt to slash the deficit, but Fox attacked the previous administration. He said: “The previous government promised more Chinooks, but never ordered them and never had the money for them. “It was just an aspiration. These additional helicopters will significantly enhance our existing heavy lift helicopter capability. This fleet will support our frontline troops in current and future operations for decades to come.” There have been persistent complaints by the RAF of shortages of helicopters and spare parts during the Afghanistan operation. Three years ago it was reported that only 17 were fit for active service of the-then fleet of 40 . The deal means that the RAF will continue to have the largest Chinook fleet in Europe. The heavy duty helicopters, used in Afghanistan for transporting troops and equipment, are manufactured by the US company Boeing. The first of the new batch of helicopters, which can carry up to 40 people or 10 tonnes of cargo, should be ready to enter service in 2014, with the full complement coming on stream two years later. That means they are unlikely to play any part in operations in Afghanistan. They have proved their worth in military conflicts over many years, from the Vietnam war onwards – the helicopters were first developed in the early 1960s. But they have also been involved in a number of disasters, including an incident in Afghanistan earlier this month when one containing 30 US troops was apparently brought down by ground fire. The RAF has used its Chinook fleet in all overseas conflicts since the 1970s, including the Falklands, Bosnia and Iraq as well as in Northern Ireland. Two were lost two years ago in Afghanistan, one of them being shot down by the Taliban. A Chinook was also at the centre of one of Britain’s greatest security disasters in modern times when a helicopter carrying high-ranking security and intelligence officers from Northern Ireland to a conference in Scotland crashed on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. Defence policy Liam Fox Ministry of Defence Military Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …‘It’s game over, Gaddafi’: Tripoli’s citizens see violent birth of a new Libya
August 22, 2011 No Comment
Most residents of the Libyan capital welcomed the rebels, but some had mixed feelings. And where was Gaddafi? For a brief few hours on Monday, Tripoli’s Green Square was a tranquil place. A rebel flag hung above the old Ottoman palace. A few curious locals emerged to take a look around. What they saw was a mess: the windows of the Saleem coffee shop had been blown in; a mangled truck lay next to a municipal pleasure park with palm trees and a pond. One Tripoli resident, Tariq Hussain, 32, said Gaddafi loyalists had fired at the square for four hours on Sunday. At midnight their bombardment stopped. After that people had flooded into the area – quickly renamed Martyrs’ Square – to celebrate the arrival of rebels from the Libyan capital’s western suburbs and the apparent end of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Hussain admitted to ambivalence about the rebels’ victory. “I’m afraid of them, to be honest,” he said. Others, however, were jubilant. “Forty-two years too much. It’s game over, Gaddafi,” Abdul Mohammad said, as a group of teenagers stomped on a green Gaddafi baseball hat. “There’s no person here supporting Gaddafi,” Nasar al-Fahdi, a translator, explained. “It was just about fear. When someone says you have to support him, and he has a whole army behind him, what can you say?” But a waiter also admitted he had mixed feelings. Surveying the destruction, he said: “There’s not going to be much money around here.” Certainly, most Tripoli residents welcomed the arrival of the rebels, who swept in riding a noisy cavalcade of pick-ups. But some did not. Gaddafi’s loyalists were putting up resistance. By late afternoon what had begun in the morning with isolated pockets of fire had morphed into a full-scale battle, as Tripoli echoed with the rattle of anti-artillery guns and the wumpf of mortars. From high buildings on the seafront – offering a spectacular view of Tripoli’s port and languid corniche – the rebels drilled fire on the old city. There didn’t seem to be any answer. The roads – a few hours earlier home to a tentative light traffic – rapidly cleared. Gaddafi may have disappeared, his long, strange leadership slipping into the realm of history. But his fanatical followers fought on. In areas liberated by the rebels, the mood was euphoric. Locals stood on street corners, flashing V-signs as opposition militia from towns across Libya swept past. Women cheered and whooped from upper storeys; by the afternoon mosques were broadcasting polite requests not to fire in the air but to conserve ammunition instead. Nobody listened. From checkpoints hastily set up, fighters continuously let off a festive pop-pop. In the district of Gurji, householders were sitting on the pavement, smiling and still evidently stunned by the events of the previous 12 hours. “We are with Cameron and Sarkozy 100%,” Walid Margani, a 45-year-old school inspector, offered spontaneously, in comments that will no doubt delight Downing Street. “They helped us in having a new life. For 42 years we’ve had no rights.” Margani was wearing an Umbro England football shirt. The shirt had a Nationwide logo. He was wearing it, he said, to express his thanks to the Nato coalition and its jets, without which Gaddafi would still be in power. But where was Gaddafi? The rumour in Tripoli was that he was hiding somewhere near the Algerian border – or had already crossed it. In a defiant audio broadcast Gaddafi had denounced his enemies – who began their uprising against him on 17 February – as “rats”. “He’s the rat,” Margani said. “We have not seen him on the TV for more than four months. He’s been hiding like a rat underground.” What should happen to him now? “We don’t want to hear his name any more. We want him to be judged and to disappear,” Ahmed Zidan, 45, said. It seems unlikely that Libya’s toppled leader will get this magnanimous treatment, should the rebels catch up with him. Over at the Mahgrab luxury village – an elite compound for expatriate workers – excited opposition fighters were interrogating two terrified prisoners from Chad. The rebels accused the pair of being snipers for Gaddafi. The men were made to kneel, glazed with fear. The first said he was called Mohamad Sala, the second Zane Al-Badine Ali. They were slapped, questioned, as a dozen rebel militia gathered round, one firing a silver handgun into the air. Gaddafi may indeed have hired the men as snipers – much of his army is comprised of mercenaries from African countries. Or they may simply have been employed to tend the compound’s lush gardens. The rebels told us to leave. The prisoners’ fate was unclear. Earlier in the morning, pro-Gaddafi gunmen had taken position at the eastern end of Gagaresh Street, opening fire at any vehicles that came too close. By the afternoon the street was calmer. Most private houses, though, were shut up, their inhabitants too frightened or too uncertain to venture out. There were no shops open. Nor was there any petrol. In the afternoon, electricity that had worked intermittently during this crisis went out. One local, Mohamad Ali Bara, said he was out collecting spent bullets as souvenirs for his nephew in the US. Bara admitted he was a former Libyan ambassador to Kuwait and Switzerland, notching up 37 years in Gaddafi’s diplomatic corps. “I knew him personally. He has a very cruel heart. Up until 1975 he was very good. After that he was like Hitler.” What changed? “Many things. His tribal mentality. He got his family around him. He started appointing ignorant people to be ambassadors.” Bara said there was no mystery why he had managed to stay in power for so long. “Gaddafi is very clever. He could keep Libya under his grip with a lot of security. Salaries are very low. But security people got a lot of benefits.” Bara said he retired from the foreign service in 2007, and had always expected the regime to be swept away by violent revolution. He finished: “I hope now that everybody likes to have real democracy.” This may take some time. Outside Tripoli, the rebels have control over most of Libya, following a spectacular push over the last 10 days from the west, south and east. Only three ago they were bogged down in the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital, and the scene of a week-long battle; now they are masters of Tripoli’s looping flyovers and its Mediterranean seaside restaurants. They were cruising around downtown commercial districts on Monday; they have the stock market. But before they can establish a new post-Gaddafi state they need to reach some kind of accord with the Gaddafi loyalists who were still fighting on Monday evening. At 5pm the rattle of heavy guns could be heard across the city, reverberating across the port in stately intervals. The regime may be finished but not everybody had absorbed this message. But it is only a matter of time. Teenage spraypainters were hard at work , covering the city’s walls with graffiti proclaiming the victory of the “February 17″ revolution. Clutching a black spray can in his hand, Rade, 22, put it like this: “It’s simple. We’ve won.” Libya Muammar Gaddafi Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Africa Luke Harding guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …‘It’s game over, Gaddafi’: Tripoli’s citizens see violent birth of a new Libya
August 22, 2011 No CommentMost residents of the Libyan capital welcomed the rebels, but some had mixed feelings. And where was Gaddafi? For a brief few hours on Monday, Tripoli’s Green Square was a tranquil place. A rebel flag hung above the old Ottoman palace. A few curious locals emerged to take a look around. What they saw was a mess: the windows of the Saleem coffee shop had been blown in; a mangled truck lay next to a municipal pleasure park with palm trees and a pond. One Tripoli resident, Tariq Hussain, 32, said Gaddafi loyalists had fired at the square for four hours on Sunday. At midnight their bombardment stopped. After that people had flooded into the area – quickly renamed Martyrs’ Square – to celebrate the arrival of rebels from the Libyan capital’s western suburbs and the apparent end of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Hussain admitted to ambivalence about the rebels’ victory. “I’m afraid of them, to be honest,” he said. Others, however, were jubilant. “Forty-two years too much. It’s game over, Gaddafi,” Abdul Mohammad said, as a group of teenagers stomped on a green Gaddafi baseball hat. “There’s no person here supporting Gaddafi,” Nasar al-Fahdi, a translator, explained. “It was just about fear. When someone says you have to support him, and he has a whole army behind him, what can you say?” But a waiter also admitted he had mixed feelings. Surveying the destruction, he said: “There’s not going to be much money around here.” Certainly, most Tripoli residents welcomed the arrival of the rebels, who swept in riding a noisy cavalcade of pick-ups. But some did not. Gaddafi’s loyalists were putting up resistance. By late afternoon what had begun in the morning with isolated pockets of fire had morphed into a full-scale battle, as Tripoli echoed with the rattle of anti-artillery guns and the wumpf of mortars. From high buildings on the seafront – offering a spectacular view of Tripoli’s port and languid corniche – the rebels drilled fire on the old city. There didn’t seem to be any answer. The roads – a few hours earlier home to a tentative light traffic – rapidly cleared. Gaddafi may have disappeared, his long, strange leadership slipping into the realm of history. But his fanatical followers fought on. In areas liberated by the rebels, the mood was euphoric. Locals stood on street corners, flashing V-signs as opposition militia from towns across Libya swept past. Women cheered and whooped from upper storeys; by the afternoon mosques were broadcasting polite requests not to fire in the air but to conserve ammunition instead. Nobody listened. From checkpoints hastily set up, fighters continuously let off a festive pop-pop. In the district of Gurji, householders were sitting on the pavement, smiling and still evidently stunned by the events of the previous 12 hours. “We are with Cameron and Sarkozy 100%,” Walid Margani, a 45-year-old school inspector, offered spontaneously, in comments that will no doubt delight Downing Street. “They helped us in having a new life. For 42 years we’ve had no rights.” Margani was wearing an Umbro England football shirt. The shirt had a Nationwide logo. He was wearing it, he said, to express his thanks to the Nato coalition and its jets, without which Gaddafi would still be in power. But where was Gaddafi? The rumour in Tripoli was that he was hiding somewhere near the Algerian border – or had already crossed it. In a defiant audio broadcast Gaddafi had denounced his enemies – who began their uprising against him on 17 February – as “rats”. “He’s the rat,” Margani said. “We have not seen him on the TV for more than four months. He’s been hiding like a rat underground.” What should happen to him now? “We don’t want to hear his name any more. We want him to be judged and to disappear,” Ahmed Zidan, 45, said. It seems unlikely that Libya’s toppled leader will get this magnanimous treatment, should the rebels catch up with him. Over at the Mahgrab luxury village – an elite compound for expatriate workers – excited opposition fighters were interrogating two terrified prisoners from Chad. The rebels accused the pair of being snipers for Gaddafi. The men were made to kneel, glazed with fear. The first said he was called Mohamad Sala, the second Zane Al-Badine Ali. They were slapped, questioned, as a dozen rebel militia gathered round, one firing a silver handgun into the air. Gaddafi may indeed have hired the men as snipers – much of his army is comprised of mercenaries from African countries. Or they may simply have been employed to tend the compound’s lush gardens. The rebels told us to leave. The prisoners’ fate was unclear. Earlier in the morning, pro-Gaddafi gunmen had taken position at the eastern end of Gagaresh Street, opening fire at any vehicles that came too close. By the afternoon the street was calmer. Most private houses, though, were shut up, their inhabitants too frightened or too uncertain to venture out. There were no shops open. Nor was there any petrol. In the afternoon, electricity that had worked intermittently during this crisis went out. One local, Mohamad Ali Bara, said he was out collecting spent bullets as souvenirs for his nephew in the US. Bara admitted he was a former Libyan ambassador to Kuwait and Switzerland, notching up 37 years in Gaddafi’s diplomatic corps. “I knew him personally. He has a very cruel heart. Up until 1975 he was very good. After that he was like Hitler.” What changed? “Many things. His tribal mentality. He got his family around him. He started appointing ignorant people to be ambassadors.” Bara said there was no mystery why he had managed to stay in power for so long. “Gaddafi is very clever. He could keep Libya under his grip with a lot of security. Salaries are very low. But security people got a lot of benefits.” Bara said he retired from the foreign service in 2007, and had always expected the regime to be swept away by violent revolution. He finished: “I hope now that everybody likes to have real democracy.” This may take some time. Outside Tripoli, the rebels have control over most of Libya, following a spectacular push over the last 10 days from the west, south and east. Only three ago they were bogged down in the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital, and the scene of a week-long battle; now they are masters of Tripoli’s looping flyovers and its Mediterranean seaside restaurants. They were cruising around downtown commercial districts on Monday; they have the stock market. But before they can establish a new post-Gaddafi state they need to reach some kind of accord with the Gaddafi loyalists who were still fighting on Monday evening. At 5pm the rattle of heavy guns could be heard across the city, reverberating across the port in stately intervals. The regime may be finished but not everybody had absorbed this message. But it is only a matter of time. Teenage spraypainters were hard at work , covering the city’s walls with graffiti proclaiming the victory of the “February 17″ revolution. Clutching a black spray can in his hand, Rade, 22, put it like this: “It’s simple. We’ve won.” Libya Muammar Gaddafi Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Africa Luke Harding guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Cavuto Uses Cherry-Picked IRS Stats Showing There are Fewer Rich People in the U.S. as Excuse Not to Raise Their Taxes
August 22, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media If Jon Stewart and his staff need more material for segments like the one he did this week — slamming Fox for attacking Warren Buffett for saying the rich should pay more in taxes and attacking the poor as a bunch of freeloaders who just want to suck off the government teet and for daring to have things like refrigerators and air conditioning — you need not look any further than their “business block” that airs on Fox “News” every Saturday morning. Here’s how Cavuto opened up the segment in the clip above: CAVUTO: Sock it to the rich! But what if I told you there aren’t as many rich folks to sock? Oh my god! We can’t have that now can we? Naturally that means we can never raise taxes on anyone that’s still in those upper income brackets. Cavuto goes on to quote some statistics from the IRS showing that there were 13% fewer people earning $200,000 and above from 2007-2009 and 55% less making $10 million and above during that same period and tells Ben Stein that that’s not a good trend. Ben Stein was actually the voice of reason here with his response to Cavuto and pointing out that that doesn’t mean there still aren’t plenty of rich people around and it wouldn’t kill them to pay more in taxes. Cavuto responds by asking him if he thinks those making over $200.000 are rich and out there buying jet airplanes. Stein got a pretty good shot in on Cavuto by telling him, no, he was talking about people like him, who have incomes of $10 million a year or more. Cavuto and his panel end up spending the rest of the segment pretending that the poor don’t pay any taxes because many of them don’t pay federal income tax and having another pity party for the rich if anyone like Warren Buffett dares to say they should pay higher taxes. UPDATE: And surprise, surprise, it appears those stats are cherry-picked to suit their new meme over at the Wall Street Journal and now Fox “News.” Here’s more from Media Matters breaking that down — “Millionaires Go Missing?” WSJ And Fox Cherry-Pick Stats To Claim Number Of Millionaires Shrinking . (Post title updated as well.)
Continue reading …
At the Edinburgh international book festival this weekend, Ewan Morrison set out his bleak vision of a publishing industry in terminal decline. Here’s a shortened version of his argument Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of “the writer” as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist. Generation Y and the End of Paper First of all I’d like to clear up the question: “The end of Books?” This is misleading as it seems purely technical – a question of the paper mill versus the hard drive. Of course the paper book will survive, you may say; it will reinvent itself as it did before. Haven’t future projections been wrong in the past? Didn’t they say Penguin paperbacks would destroy the print industry in 1939? That the printing press would overthrow Catholicism after 1440? That home videos would destroy cinema? On the paper front, depending on whom you listen to, statistics vary wildy. Barnes and Noble claims it now sells three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined . Amazon claims it has crossed the tipping point and sells 242 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks , while Richard Sarnoff, CEO of Bertelsmann, admits that the future of the paper book is tied to the consumption habits of a generation: the baby boomers . Generation Y-ers (the children of the boomers) already consume 78% of their news digitally, for free, and books will follow suit. Interpreting Sarnoff’s calculations, the paper book has a generation left. But let’s leave the survival of the paper book alone, and ask the more important question: Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era? And let’s also leave alone the question: why should authors live by their work? Let’s abandon the romantic myth that writers must survive in the garret, and look at the facts. Most notable writers in the history of books were paid a living wage: they include Dostoevksy, Dickens and Shakespeare. In the last 50 years the system of publishers’ advances has supported writers such as Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, JM Coetzee, Joan Didion, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Philp Roth, Anita Shreve, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and John Fowles. Authors do not live on royalties alone. To ask whether International Man Booker prizewinner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart. And this is what is happening now. The Retreat of Advances With the era of digital publishing and digital distribution, the age of author advances is coming to an end. Without advances from publishers, authors depend upon future sales; they sink themselves into debt on the chance of a future hit. But as mainstream publishers struggle to compete with digital competitors, they are moving increasingly towards maximising short-term profits, betting on the already-established, and away from nurturing talent. The Bookseller claimed in 2009 that “Publishers are cutting author advances by as much as 80% in the UK” . A popular catchphrase among agents, when discussing advances, meanwhile, is “10K is the new 50K”. And as one literary editor recently put it: “The days of publishing an author, as opposed to publishing a book, seem to be over.” Publishers are focusing on the short term and are dropping midlist writers. Midlisters – neither bestsellers nor first-timers – were formerly the Research and Development department of publishers in the 20th century. It was within the midlist that future award-winners and bestsellers were hot-housed (Don Delillo, for example, was supported as a midlist author over the six underperforming books that preceded his Pulitzer-nominated, multi-award winning novel, Underworld . In reaction to the removal of their living wage, many writers have decided to abandon the mainstream entirely: they’ve come to believe that publishers and their distribution systems are out of date; that too many middle-men (distributors, booksellers) have been living off their work. When authors either self e-publish or do deals through agents that to go straight to digital they embrace a philosophy of the digital market called the long tail . Living in the Long Tail Fig.1. A Long Tail Graph The long tail is best described by business adviser, futurologist, guru and editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson , in his book The Long Tail, or Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. An alternative tagline for the book is How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In simple terms, the long tail derives its name from graphs of sales against number of products. Whereas throughout the 20th century publishers concentrated on selling only a few heavily promoted “hits” or “bestsellers” in bulk, digital shopping has meant that what was originally a tail-off in sales, has now become increasingly profitable. Rather than selling, say, 13m copies of one Harry Potter book, a long tail provider can make the same profits by selling 13m different “obscure”, “failed’” and “niche” books. The long tail is Amazon and iTunes , Netflix , LoveFilm and eBay . It is, arguably, between 40% to 60% of the market, which was hidden and/or simply unavailable before the advent of online shopping. As more consumers come online and chose to select content for themselves, the long tail gets longer. It also starts to demolish the old mainstream system of pre-selection, mass marketing and limited shelf space for “bestsellers”. Amazon is a successful long-tail industry: it has forced publishers into selling their books at 60% discount and driven bookshops out of business. As the long tail grows, the mainstream mass market shrinks and becomes more conservative. The long tail has created this effect in all of the other industries that have gone digital. Myths of the Long Tail The recent enthusiasm for the long-tail market does, however, obscure a very basic economic fact: very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the long tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year. This is not an accident, but part of a trend endemic to the digital world. As Chris Anderson said in his book Free: Why $0.00 is the future of business: ” Every industry that becomes Digital will eventually become free.” The reason why a living wage for writers is essential is that every industry that has become digital has seen a dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings for those who create “content”. Writing has already begun its slide towards becoming something produced and consumed for free. In the Free Revolution, why should anyone pay for content? The following are facts about the financial downturn in the digital industries: (1) Home videos Originally the industry started off with consumers having to buy expensive equipment (VHS, LaserDisc etc) – which were superseded by DVD, then by online video streaming. Over and above the possibility of ripping pirate videos ( according to a 2010 study by OVN, 69% of the population do this already ), the price of watching a feature film or TV show is now trending towards zero. Sites like Netflix and LoveFilm have thousands of films available to watch entirely for free or with subscriber packages for a few pounds a month. In 2005 alone, the Motion Picture Association of America announced that the movie industry lost $6.1bn to piracy (75% higher than they expected). (2) Music A statistical study on Information is Beautiful shows that for a musician to earn the minimum wage in the US, per month, he or she would have to sell either 143 self-pressed CDs, 1,161 retail album CDs or 4,053,110 plays on Spotify (with a 0.0016 percent royalty. In an article in Society of Authors journal The Author , Martin Hodkinson states that “Hundreds of people have ‘downed their tools’ in the music business, through no choice of their own. The total income of the industry dropped by 25% between 1999 and 2008 and is expected to fall by 75% by 2013.” (3) Porn According to the LA Times “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined from 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply” . One top porn star, Savannah Stern, has cited that, on par with most of her colleagues, her earnings fell in 2010, from $150K a year to $50K. As Bill Asher, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, states: “We always said that once the internet took off, we’d be OK … It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.” (4) Computer games Japan’s Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association claims that game piracy on handheld systems has cost the international videogame industry more than $41bn over the past half-decade. (5) Newspapers Across the board in March 2010, every national UK paper fell in circulation by between 6% and 27% . News International lost half of its value in Q1 of 2009. As newspapers lay off staff to cut costs, they confront the fact that newspaper readership is tied to an ageing demographic. A recent business story claimed that “printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a new Kindle.” (6) Photography Staff photographers at newspapers have been laid off over the last five years. Picture desks now use amateur online photo archives instead of commissioning new images and get pictures for a fraction of previous costs or entirely for free. (7) Telecommunications In the 1980s, the price of a call to India from the UK was £2 a minute. Now, with fibre-optic cable, it is 4p. With Skype it’s absolutely free. As concerns handsets, generally, within two years of manufacture a phone’s price tends towards zero. New packages give free phones in return for small monthly payments. This impacts all other digital industries as new smart phones lower their costs on the promise of access to a world of increasingly free digital content. (8) The internet Many of the largest growth industries in the last decade provide an entirely free service to the consumer: Google, Yahoo, YouTube. These have facilitated other sites made by consumers for consumers, for free: the blogosphere, open source, social networks, Wikipedia. All of these, to quote Anderson, are “produced by entirely free labour, consumed with no expectation of payment or monetary exchange”. As he says, “‘Free’ is the gift of silicon valley to the world”. The Free revolution – So who’s selling what to whom? Before we go back to books, let’s look at what all this means. For all its digital-friendly rhetoric and the co-option of “radical” jargon, surely the people at Google, Yahoo and YouTube aren’t working for free. These companies are making a profit big enough to place them on the Fortune 500 . So if the future of digital media is “free”, where does the money come from? While providers such as Yahoo and Google provide free content, at the same time, on every screen, they sell advertising space. The culture (books, films and music) that you find for free on the sites, is not the product, it has no monetary value. The real product Yahoo and Google are selling is something less tangible – it is you. Your profile and that of millions of other consumers are being sold to advertisers. Your hits and clicks make them money. These digital providers are not in any way concerned with or interested in content, or what used to be called “culture”. To them culture is merely generic content; it is a free service that is provided in the selling of customers to advertisers. Ideally for service providers, the customers will even provide the culture themselves, for free. And this is what we do when we write blogs, or free ebooks or upload films of ourselves, at no cost. Forecasts predict that within 10 to 15 years the largest “publishers” in the world will be Google, Amazon and Apple. In May 2010, Google announced plans to compete with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple by launching its own online ebook store , which requires no e-reader and no fees. In August of the same year, Google annonunced its intention to scan all known books (130m) by the end of the decade. All of which would be available for free or for a minuscule one-off payment to authors of around $60 per book. Google is still caught up in legal wrangles, but this change is coming. Piracy and competitive discounting – the race to the bottom Back again to books. In all of the cases above, digital industries have been pushed towards zero price by two factors: (1) mass piracy and (2) the consumer demand for massive discounts. Book piracy has only just begun but it is now very simple to break through the DRM protection systems set up by publishers and to illegally download books in less than 60 seconds. The shift to piracy moves imperceptibly in the mind of the consumer, as Adrian Hon, founder of a leading games company outlined in the Telegraph . It starts in this way: consumers download electronic copies of books that they already own for convenience sake (an activity that the New York times claims is ethical). This introduces people to ebook torrents. Then they start downloading classics: “Tolkien and CS Lewis are both dead, so why should I feel bad about pirating their books?” And since they have enough memory on their e-reader to store 3,500 books and the e-reader came with four preloaded free classics to start with, what difference will it make? Then, says Hon, “you’ll have people downloading ebooks not available in their country yet. Then it’ll be people downloading entire collections, just because it’s quicker. Then they’ll start wondering why they should buy any ebooks at all, when they cost so much.” In every digital industry the attempt to combat piracy has led to a massive reduction in cover price: the slippery slope towards free digital content. Will digital books be any different from jpegs, quicktimes and mp3s? What makes them so, other than a desire by the currently dominant generation to preserve what they have known – a trend that will be outgrown when that generation passes? The Long Term against the Long Tail Is there an alternative to this catastrophe? If so, it cannot lie where Chris Anderson recommends, in having what he terms “freemium viewing” – locked or extra content for subscribers (a system devised for newspapers and computer games). What would this mean for the book? An extra chapter? An author’s commentary? The final sentence if you pay more? An alternative could lie in authors writing apps and blogs, on both of which, the author would get paid per 10,000 or so hits, by advertisers. Or it could lie in crowd funding – with innovations such as publishing house ‘Unbound’ . You have enough readers, they pay a dollar or a pound, and en masse they see you through the duration required to write the book, that you then give then for free. The trend of consumers demanding ever more for ever less is not restricted to culture. It’s a phenomenon well documented by writers such as Zygmunt Bauman and Naomi Klein : the “race to the bottom”, in which competing corporations cut their prices in the bid to put all other competitors out of business. Can books be written in sweatshops? Well, books might not be manufactured in China and Korea but the long tail is the sweatshop of the future, and it will contain millions of would-be-writers who will labour under the delusion that they can be successful in the way writers were before, in the age of the mainstream and the paper book. There is no simple solution. All that is clear is that for authors and publishers to abandon each other only accelerates the race towards free content. Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to “go it alone” in the long tail. In return, publishing houses must take the risk on the long term; supporting writers over years and books, it is only then that books of the standard we have seen in the last half-century can continue to come into being. This is something that publishers are well aware of, but still seem powerless to do anything about. As Sarnoff CEO of Bertelsmann has said , “… as things switch to digital there is the danger that a lot of value can leak out of the industry, and that our authors, our artists won’t have enough revenues there to pay for their best work and that we won’t have enough revenue to pay for our own infrastructure.” If the connection between publishers and writers splits completely, if they fail to support and defend each other, then both will separately be subjected to the markets’ demand for totally free content, and both shall have very short lives in the long tail. The writer will become an entrepreneur with a short shelf life, in a world without publishers or even shelves. But ultimately, any strategy conceived now is just playing for time as the slide towards a totally free digital culture accelerates. How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour. The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries: quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers. I ask you to take the long view, to look a generation beyond where we are now, and to express concern for the future of the book. I ask you to vote that the end of “the book” as written by professional writers, is imminent; and not to be placated with short-term projections and enthusiasms intended to reduce fear in a confused market. I ask you to leave this place troubled, and to ask yourself and as many others as you can, what you can do if you truly value the work of the people formerly known as writers. Edinburgh International Book Festival Edinburgh festival Festivals Publishing Ebooks Amazon.com Internet E-commerce Ewan Morrison guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Whether it’s films on fridges or Cannes in a van, site-specific screenings are proving a summer hit. Here, the mavericks behind the magic tell us how to get in on the show Pop-up cinema is having a moment. This month we’ve seen classic sports flicks projected on a mountain of discarded fridges , as well as fossil fuel-free film , (try saying that with a mouth full of popcorn), a picture house squeezed into a canal boat , another wedged inside a transit van, and not one but two cinemas sprouting from the disused space under motorways. Pop-up cinema is becoming as Augusty as Parisians bogging off for a month in the sun. So why not have a go yourself? This handy 10-step guide, comprised of top tips from the people driving the movement, will show you how. Step 1. Create your I-wish-I’d-thought-of-that concept “Context is really important,” say Lindsey Scannapieco and Mat Triebner of Scout Limited. Their pop-up project, Films On Fridges , “was inspired by ‘fridge mountain’, a 20ft-high pile of discarded fridges that once occupied the Olympic site. We wanted to resurrect this industrial icon and turn it into a cinema celebrating the area’s industrial heritage, current creative energy and Olympic future.” Meanwhile, Paloma Stelitz of Assemble says : “We got our idea for Cineroleum [a disused petrol station turned cinema] after reading an article in the Independent called ‘Farewell to the Forecourts’ that highlighted the profusion of disused automobile infrastructure in our cities.” Still stuck for an idea? Hit the pub. “I was holding short-film nights at the 100 Club and a few other places. After a few drinks at a wedding me and my mate Si decided we should take these short films to the world’s biggest film festival: Cannes. In a Van. The name basically nailed it for us,” says Andy Greenhouse, director of Cannes in a Van . Jim Dummett, of the Lost Picture Show , a replica of a classical picture house enclosed in a festival-ready tent, agrees. “It’s one of those projects that began with a drunken conversation in the pub – ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if we could build the ultimate festival cinema tent?’ – and somehow, almost accidentally, it became a reality.” Step 2. Pick a venue that will engage your audience (and make their friends jealous) “Cinema can and does happen anywhere,” says Stelitz, who is also behind Hackney’s Folly for a Flyover , a cinema sitting beneath the busy lanes of the A12. “Ultimately you don’t need all the associated paraphernalia, just a projector. A face of a building can be as good as a screen.” Fabien Riggall, creative director of Future Cinema and Secret Cinema , says: “We select venues based on the film and what environment will fully immerse the audience in the experience we’re creating. We want people to feel like they’re stepping into the film. So, it could be anything, anywhere, at any time. For example, Battle of Algiers at the Old Vic tunnels underneath Waterloo station, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at Old Princess Louise hospital or Ghostbusters at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. Secret Cinema began with the idea that cinema could be like when you went to the movies as a child. We bring the excitement, suspense and intrigue back by creating wholly immersive worlds to stretch the audience’s imagination, and by keeping the film and location a secret until the event date.” Step 3. Make your pop-up stand out with a spot of careful programming Floating Cinema is a narrow boat turned 12-seater cinema currently traversing the waterways that run in and out of the Olympic site. Curator Emma Underhill says: “Our programme links to the places we visit. We’ve shown Fantastic Mr Fox outside 3 Mills Studios and invited the animators to bring puppets from the film. Other times we’ve shown shorts by local artists and films related to waterways.” Meanwhile, Lost Picture Show project director Jim Dummett says: “Our programme is a compressed history of film, but not just the part that gets written about in Sight & Sound. Great cinema is not just the preserve of the great auteurs such as Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, but should also include films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and even Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – all of which are classics in their own way. We do our best to mix the two, the great art and the trips down into cinema’s dirty underbelly.” Step 4. Get a licence. It’s not as hard as it sounds “Licensing is a bit of a minefield,” says Dummett. “For major studio stuff, it’s generally straightforward. MPLC (Motion Picture Licensing Corporation) or Filmbank most often hold the [distribution] rights. But it’s often not clear who owns the rights for a particular film and you often have to go round the houses before you find the right company. For more obscure films, this search can involve multiple dead ends, people who are slow to respond, and sometimes you never find an answer at all. Start by looking at the distributor listed on the DVD box and go from there. The BFI are also a good starting point for advice. But whatever you do, don’t advertise your screening until you know you have the rights.” This process is being made easier by innovative film distributors such as Dogwoof . Dogwoof distribute social-issue films and documentaries such as The Age of Stupid , GasLand and The Interrupters . They offer licences to non-traditional screenings through their website popupcinema.net . “Usually non-traditional cinemas have to wait a long time before they can screen a film,” says Dogwoof’s Oli Harbottle. “We wanted to close that gap and give people the opportunity to screen in their community. The audience is king. They should get a film when, where and how they want it.” As the scheme evolves, Dogwoof plan to help people source projectors and screens, too. If you’re screening artists or archive footage, “it’s important to give those people proper credit, whether that’s acknowledgment or payment,” says Floating Cinema’s Emma Underhill. Step 5. Do your bit for independent film-makers “Pop-up cinemas have a role to play in supporting independent film-makers,” says Underhill. “You are able to be more experimental with the programming because you don’t have to fill a lot of seats or sell a lot of tickets. You can give people a platform.” Portobello Pop-up , a cinema carved into the walls of the Westway carriageway on Portobello Road, is also doing its bit for indies. Artist and film-maker James Static says: “We want to be part of a wider movement that offers an alternative, grassroots distribution channel to struggling film-makers. It’s difficult to get a small, personal film distributed when you’re competing against Avatar.” Step 6. Be interactive The Cycle-in Cinema is like a 1950s drive-in but without the cars. It’s powered by its audience, who are encouraged to ride their bikes to the event, then hook them up to the generators and power the performance, tuning into the soundtrack on FM radios or mobile phones. Adam Walker, a member of the Magnificent Revolution collective behind Cycle-in Cinema, says: “We’ve always been environmentally minded. People get a chance to be part of the performance and produce an event that is more sustainable and engaging than a trip to a multiplex.” Step 8. Serve some awesome snacks “Cinema is about the experience. Great popcorn is part of that,” says Tom Callard of Love da Popcorn , official popcorn providers to Secret Cinema. “A new wave of cinema deserves a new type of popcorn. We were tired of the sugary, mass-manufactured cardboardy crap you get served in cinemas and supermarkets, and we thought we could do better. So we experimented, developed some interesting flavours, like white chocolate, and sea salt and pepper. We try and make everything we do a performance. We set up interesting stalls and we dress up. Our advice is ‘don’t scrimp’. People are very discerning and will see where you’re cutting corners. Get the best food you possibly can, and make sure people leave smiling, not thinking they should have gone down to their local cinema.” Step 9. Don’t aim for perfection. Embrace disaster Cannes in a Van’s Andy Greenhouse says: “On our first outing we only took one boat battery so it didn’t last very long. We would lift up the bonnet, connect the jump leads and run the engine, chugging fumes right into our audience, who sit behind the van, watching the screen within. Thankfully we don’t need to do that any more. “The van was towed one year, which was a nightmare, but after a trip to the pound we got her back and even tried to screen some films late that night. Then there was the exhaust falling off, me driving around the day before saying in my best French accent: ‘ Mon échappement est trés mal! ‘ Needless to say, nobody fixed it and we had to drive back with a booming, stinking engine under our feet.” All this can be part of the charm. Cycle-in Cinema’s Adam Walker says: “All our screenings seem to straddle success and failure. I think that’s what makes it such a relief when the screen finally flickers to life. We’re used to everything being perfect and punctual all the time, but that disconnects us from what’s really going on behind the scenes. Life isn’t perfect, neither is pedal power.” Step 10. Have a dream Even the tiniest pop-up can aim big. Greenhouse says: “The ultimate goal, I suppose, is for one of the [short] films to get noticed via the Van, and then when the director has directed their debut feature, they premiere it back where it all began, out of a tired old Ford Transit. This is perhaps the plot of a film in my head, but you can always dream.” And finally, remember, a bit of rain never hurt anybody. “Expect rain. It’s part of the fun,” advises Love da Popcorn’s Tom Callard. “Last summer the Ford Summer Cinema series we worked on was beset by a series of unfortunate incidents. In Birmingham we had torrential rain and a string of brave Brummies who sat getting soaked. In Scotland, predictably, it was the windiest day of the year and the screen spent the entire movie flexing and bending in on itself. It made for a rather surreal and grotesque viewing of Grease, with Danny’s huge face wobbling about for two hours.” • Floating Cinema runs until 18 September 2011. • The Lost Picture Show pops up 26-28 August at the Shambala festival . • Future Cinema is screening Lost Boys and Top Gun at California Classics on 3 and 4 September 2011. Summer holidays London Ruth Jamieson guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …At the Edinburgh international book festival this weekend, Ewan Morrison set out his bleak vision of a publishing industry in terminal decline. Here’s a shortened version of his argument Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of “the writer” as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist. Generation Y and the End of Paper First of all I’d like to clear up the question: “The end of Books?” This is misleading as it seems purely technical – a question of the paper mill versus the hard drive. Of course the paper book will survive, you may say; it will reinvent itself as it did before. Haven’t future projections been wrong in the past? Didn’t they say Penguin paperbacks would destroy the print industry in 1939? That the printing press would overthrow Catholicism after 1440? That home videos would destroy cinema? On the paper front, depending on whom you listen to, statistics vary wildy. Barnes and Noble claims it now sells three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined . Amazon claims it has crossed the tipping point and sells 242 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks , while Richard Sarnoff, CEO of Bertelsmann, admits that the future of the paper book is tied to the consumption habits of a generation: the baby boomers . Generation Y-ers (the children of the boomers) already consume 78% of their news digitally, for free, and books will follow suit. Interpreting Sarnoff’s calculations, the paper book has a generation left. But let’s leave the survival of the paper book alone, and ask the more important question: Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era? And let’s also leave alone the question: why should authors live by their work? Let’s abandon the romantic myth that writers must survive in the garret, and look at the facts. Most notable writers in the history of books were paid a living wage: they include Dostoevksy, Dickens and Shakespeare. In the last 50 years the system of publishers’ advances has supported writers such as Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, JM Coetzee, Joan Didion, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Philp Roth, Anita Shreve, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and John Fowles. Authors do not live on royalties alone. To ask whether International Man Booker prizewinner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart. And this is what is happening now. The Retreat of Advances With the era of digital publishing and digital distribution, the age of author advances is coming to an end. Without advances from publishers, authors depend upon future sales; they sink themselves into debt on the chance of a future hit. But as mainstream publishers struggle to compete with digital competitors, they are moving increasingly towards maximising short-term profits, betting on the already-established, and away from nurturing talent. The Bookseller claimed in 2009 that “Publishers are cutting author advances by as much as 80% in the UK” . A popular catchphrase among agents, when discussing advances, meanwhile, is “10K is the new 50K”. And as one literary editor recently put it: “The days of publishing an author, as opposed to publishing a book, seem to be over.” Publishers are focusing on the short term and are dropping midlist writers. Midlisters – neither bestsellers nor first-timers – were formerly the Research and Development department of publishers in the 20th century. It was within the midlist that future award-winners and bestsellers were hot-housed (Don Delillo, for example, was supported as a midlist author over the six underperforming books that preceded his Pulitzer-nominated, multi-award winning novel, Underworld . In reaction to the removal of their living wage, many writers have decided to abandon the mainstream entirely: they’ve come to believe that publishers and their distribution systems are out of date; that too many middle-men (distributors, booksellers) have been living off their work. When authors either self e-publish or do deals through agents that to go straight to digital they embrace a philosophy of the digital market called the long tail . Living in the Long Tail Fig.1. A Long Tail Graph The long tail is best described by business adviser, futurologist, guru and editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson , in his book The Long Tail, or Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. An alternative tagline for the book is How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. In simple terms, the long tail derives its name from graphs of sales against number of products. Whereas throughout the 20th century publishers concentrated on selling only a few heavily promoted “hits” or “bestsellers” in bulk, digital shopping has meant that what was originally a tail-off in sales, has now become increasingly profitable. Rather than selling, say, 13m copies of one Harry Potter book, a long tail provider can make the same profits by selling 13m different “obscure”, “failed’” and “niche” books. The long tail is Amazon and iTunes , Netflix , LoveFilm and eBay . It is, arguably, between 40% to 60% of the market, which was hidden and/or simply unavailable before the advent of online shopping. As more consumers come online and chose to select content for themselves, the long tail gets longer. It also starts to demolish the old mainstream system of pre-selection, mass marketing and limited shelf space for “bestsellers”. Amazon is a successful long-tail industry: it has forced publishers into selling their books at 60% discount and driven bookshops out of business. As the long tail grows, the mainstream mass market shrinks and becomes more conservative. The long tail has created this effect in all of the other industries that have gone digital. Myths of the Long Tail The recent enthusiasm for the long-tail market does, however, obscure a very basic economic fact: very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the long tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year. This is not an accident, but part of a trend endemic to the digital world. As Chris Anderson said in his book Free: Why $0.00 is the future of business: ” Every industry that becomes Digital will eventually become free.” The reason why a living wage for writers is essential is that every industry that has become digital has seen a dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings for those who create “content”. Writing has already begun its slide towards becoming something produced and consumed for free. In the Free Revolution, why should anyone pay for content? The following are facts about the financial downturn in the digital industries: (1) Home videos Originally the industry started off with consumers having to buy expensive equipment (VHS, LaserDisc etc) – which were superseded by DVD, then by online video streaming. Over and above the possibility of ripping pirate videos ( according to a 2010 study by OVN, 69% of the population do this already ), the price of watching a feature film or TV show is now trending towards zero. Sites like Netflix and LoveFilm have thousands of films available to watch entirely for free or with subscriber packages for a few pounds a month. In 2005 alone, the Motion Picture Association of America announced that the movie industry lost $6.1bn to piracy (75% higher than they expected). (2) Music A statistical study on Information is Beautiful shows that for a musician to earn the minimum wage in the US, per month, he or she would have to sell either 143 self-pressed CDs, 1,161 retail album CDs or 4,053,110 plays on Spotify (with a 0.0016 percent royalty. In an article in Society of Authors journal The Author , Martin Hodkinson states that “Hundreds of people have ‘downed their tools’ in the music business, through no choice of their own. The total income of the industry dropped by 25% between 1999 and 2008 and is expected to fall by 75% by 2013.” (3) Porn According to the LA Times “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined from 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply” . One top porn star, Savannah Stern, has cited that, on par with most of her colleagues, her earnings fell in 2010, from $150K a year to $50K. As Bill Asher, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, states: “We always said that once the internet took off, we’d be OK … It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.” (4) Computer games Japan’s Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association claims that game piracy on handheld systems has cost the international videogame industry more than $41bn over the past half-decade. (5) Newspapers Across the board in March 2010, every national UK paper fell in circulation by between 6% and 27% . News International lost half of its value in Q1 of 2009. As newspapers lay off staff to cut costs, they confront the fact that newspaper readership is tied to an ageing demographic. A recent business story claimed that “printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a new Kindle.” (6) Photography Staff photographers at newspapers have been laid off over the last five years. Picture desks now use amateur online photo archives instead of commissioning new images and get pictures for a fraction of previous costs or entirely for free. (7) Telecommunications In the 1980s, the price of a call to India from the UK was £2 a minute. Now, with fibre-optic cable, it is 4p. With Skype it’s absolutely free. As concerns handsets, generally, within two years of manufacture a phone’s price tends towards zero. New packages give free phones in return for small monthly payments. This impacts all other digital industries as new smart phones lower their costs on the promise of access to a world of increasingly free digital content. (8) The internet Many of the largest growth industries in the last decade provide an entirely free service to the consumer: Google, Yahoo, YouTube. These have facilitated other sites made by consumers for consumers, for free: the blogosphere, open source, social networks, Wikipedia. All of these, to quote Anderson, are “produced by entirely free labour, consumed with no expectation of payment or monetary exchange”. As he says, “‘Free’ is the gift of silicon valley to the world”. The Free revolution – So who’s selling what to whom? Before we go back to books, let’s look at what all this means. For all its digital-friendly rhetoric and the co-option of “radical” jargon, surely the people at Google, Yahoo and YouTube aren’t working for free. These companies are making a profit big enough to place them on the Fortune 500 . So if the future of digital media is “free”, where does the money come from? While providers such as Yahoo and Google provide free content, at the same time, on every screen, they sell advertising space. The culture (books, films and music) that you find for free on the sites, is not the product, it has no monetary value. The real product Yahoo and Google are selling is something less tangible – it is you. Your profile and that of millions of other consumers are being sold to advertisers. Your hits and clicks make them money. These digital providers are not in any way concerned with or interested in content, or what used to be called “culture”. To them culture is merely generic content; it is a free service that is provided in the selling of customers to advertisers. Ideally for service providers, the customers will even provide the culture themselves, for free. And this is what we do when we write blogs, or free ebooks or upload films of ourselves, at no cost. Forecasts predict that within 10 to 15 years the largest “publishers” in the world will be Google, Amazon and Apple. In May 2010, Google announced plans to compete with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple by launching its own online ebook store , which requires no e-reader and no fees. In August of the same year, Google annonunced its intention to scan all known books (130m) by the end of the decade. All of which would be available for free or for a minuscule one-off payment to authors of around $60 per book. Google is still caught up in legal wrangles, but this change is coming. Piracy and competitive discounting – the race to the bottom Back again to books. In all of the cases above, digital industries have been pushed towards zero price by two factors: (1) mass piracy and (2) the consumer demand for massive discounts. Book piracy has only just begun but it is now very simple to break through the DRM protection systems set up by publishers and to illegally download books in less than 60 seconds. The shift to piracy moves imperceptibly in the mind of the consumer, as Adrian Hon, founder of a leading games company outlined in the Telegraph . It starts in this way: consumers download electronic copies of books that they already own for convenience sake (an activity that the New York times claims is ethical). This introduces people to ebook torrents. Then they start downloading classics: “Tolkien and CS Lewis are both dead, so why should I feel bad about pirating their books?” And since they have enough memory on their e-reader to store 3,500 books and the e-reader came with four preloaded free classics to start with, what difference will it make? Then, says Hon, “you’ll have people downloading ebooks not available in their country yet. Then it’ll be people downloading entire collections, just because it’s quicker. Then they’ll start wondering why they should buy any ebooks at all, when they cost so much.” In every digital industry the attempt to combat piracy has led to a massive reduction in cover price: the slippery slope towards free digital content. Will digital books be any different from jpegs, quicktimes and mp3s? What makes them so, other than a desire by the currently dominant generation to preserve what they have known – a trend that will be outgrown when that generation passes? The Long Term against the Long Tail Is there an alternative to this catastrophe? If so, it cannot lie where Chris Anderson recommends, in having what he terms “freemium viewing” – locked or extra content for subscribers (a system devised for newspapers and computer games). What would this mean for the book? An extra chapter? An author’s commentary? The final sentence if you pay more? An alternative could lie in authors writing apps and blogs, on both of which, the author would get paid per 10,000 or so hits, by advertisers. Or it could lie in crowd funding – with innovations such as publishing house ‘Unbound’ . You have enough readers, they pay a dollar or a pound, and en masse they see you through the duration required to write the book, that you then give then for free. The trend of consumers demanding ever more for ever less is not restricted to culture. It’s a phenomenon well documented by writers such as Zygmunt Bauman and Naomi Klein : the “race to the bottom”, in which competing corporations cut their prices in the bid to put all other competitors out of business. Can books be written in sweatshops? Well, books might not be manufactured in China and Korea but the long tail is the sweatshop of the future, and it will contain millions of would-be-writers who will labour under the delusion that they can be successful in the way writers were before, in the age of the mainstream and the paper book. There is no simple solution. All that is clear is that for authors and publishers to abandon each other only accelerates the race towards free content. Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to “go it alone” in the long tail. In return, publishing houses must take the risk on the long term; supporting writers over years and books, it is only then that books of the standard we have seen in the last half-century can continue to come into being. This is something that publishers are well aware of, but still seem powerless to do anything about. As Sarnoff CEO of Bertelsmann has said , “… as things switch to digital there is the danger that a lot of value can leak out of the industry, and that our authors, our artists won’t have enough revenues there to pay for their best work and that we won’t have enough revenue to pay for our own infrastructure.” If the connection between publishers and writers splits completely, if they fail to support and defend each other, then both will separately be subjected to the markets’ demand for totally free content, and both shall have very short lives in the long tail. The writer will become an entrepreneur with a short shelf life, in a world without publishers or even shelves. But ultimately, any strategy conceived now is just playing for time as the slide towards a totally free digital culture accelerates. How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour. The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries: quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers. I ask you to take the long view, to look a generation beyond where we are now, and to express concern for the future of the book. I ask you to vote that the end of “the book” as written by professional writers, is imminent; and not to be placated with short-term projections and enthusiasms intended to reduce fear in a confused market. I ask you to leave this place troubled, and to ask yourself and as many others as you can, what you can do if you truly value the work of the people formerly known as writers. Edinburgh International Book Festival Edinburgh festival Festivals Publishing Ebooks Amazon.com Internet E-commerce Ewan Morrison guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Amnesty International says eight-year jail sentences for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal make a ‘mockery of justice’ The conviction of two Americans held in Iran for spying and illegally crossing the border has been condemned by a human rights group. Amnesty International said the eight-year jail sentences for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29, made a “mockery of justice” and were designed to be used as “a bargaining chip to allow Iran to obtain unspecified concessions from the US government”. A court sentenced the two men to three years each for illegally entering Iran and further five years each for espionage, it emerged over the weekend. “The conduct of this trial has quite simply made a mockery of justice. There does not appear to be any substance to the allegations that Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal are spies,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East director. He described the trial as “deeply flawed” and said there was no evidence known to have been presented to suggest the pair were conducting espionage in Iran. “They have already spent over two years waiting for justice. The Iranian authorities should take act now and release these two men now without further delay,” added Smart. Iranian security forces arrested Bauer and Fattal, along with their friend Sarah Shourd, in July 2009, after they walked across an unmarked border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. Their conviction came as a surprise to their families, who were expecting them to be released. Shourd, 33, who got engaged to Bauer while in jail, was released last September on health grounds and after paying $500,000 (£324,000) bail. Supporters of the three Americans say they unwittingly crossed the unmarked border while hiking but Iran accused them of spying. It is unclear whether the three were captured in Iranian territory or whether Iranian forces went into Iraq to arrest them. After their trials ended last month behind closed doors, officials from Iran’s foreign ministry signalled that the two would be freed on the eve of Ramadan. The contrast between the trial’s outcome and official promises highlights a growing rift between the judiciary, whose head is appointed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. Some analysts believe Shourd was released after an intervention from the president’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. The long sentences given to Bauer and Fattal can also be interpreted as a tit-for-tat response to the US state department’s assessment, announced last week, that Iran remained the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism. In reaction to the handling of the trial, some conservative websites sympathetic to the regime in Tehran have mentioned the case of Shahrzad Mir Gholikhan, an Iranian woman in jail in the US on charges of attempting to smuggle night-vision goggles to Iran, which suggests that Iranian officials might be pursuing her release in exchange for those of the Americans. According to Iran’s Irna state news, the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said on Sunday that Bauer and Fattal “entered the country with prior planning of spying”. The lawyer for the two men, Masoud Shafiee, told an Iranian radio station that spying charges against his clients were “baseless” and that he would lodge appeals against the sentences. Iran United States Amnesty International Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Amnesty International says eight-year jail sentences for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal make a ‘mockery of justice’ The conviction of two Americans held in Iran for spying and illegally crossing the border has been condemned by a human rights group. Amnesty International said the eight-year jail sentences for Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29, made a “mockery of justice” and were designed to be used as “a bargaining chip to allow Iran to obtain unspecified concessions from the US government”. A court sentenced the two men to three years each for illegally entering Iran and further five years each for espionage, it emerged over the weekend. “The conduct of this trial has quite simply made a mockery of justice. There does not appear to be any substance to the allegations that Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal are spies,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East director. He described the trial as “deeply flawed” and said there was no evidence known to have been presented to suggest the pair were conducting espionage in Iran. “They have already spent over two years waiting for justice. The Iranian authorities should take act now and release these two men now without further delay,” added Smart. Iranian security forces arrested Bauer and Fattal, along with their friend Sarah Shourd, in July 2009, after they walked across an unmarked border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. Their conviction came as a surprise to their families, who were expecting them to be released. Shourd, 33, who got engaged to Bauer while in jail, was released last September on health grounds and after paying $500,000 (£324,000) bail. Supporters of the three Americans say they unwittingly crossed the unmarked border while hiking but Iran accused them of spying. It is unclear whether the three were captured in Iranian territory or whether Iranian forces went into Iraq to arrest them. After their trials ended last month behind closed doors, officials from Iran’s foreign ministry signalled that the two would be freed on the eve of Ramadan. The contrast between the trial’s outcome and official promises highlights a growing rift between the judiciary, whose head is appointed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. Some analysts believe Shourd was released after an intervention from the president’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. The long sentences given to Bauer and Fattal can also be interpreted as a tit-for-tat response to the US state department’s assessment, announced last week, that Iran remained the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism. In reaction to the handling of the trial, some conservative websites sympathetic to the regime in Tehran have mentioned the case of Shahrzad Mir Gholikhan, an Iranian woman in jail in the US on charges of attempting to smuggle night-vision goggles to Iran, which suggests that Iranian officials might be pursuing her release in exchange for those of the Americans. According to Iran’s Irna state news, the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said on Sunday that Bauer and Fattal “entered the country with prior planning of spying”. The lawyer for the two men, Masoud Shafiee, told an Iranian radio station that spying charges against his clients were “baseless” and that he would lodge appeals against the sentences. Iran United States Amnesty International Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …