(2019-11-17) Sloan Week47 The Jaws Of The Commons

Robin Sloan: Week 47, the Jaws of the commons. For several years, I have been a devoted user of an app called Tapstack.

Tapstack has been the channel for my family’s communication over the past few years. The app doesn’t lend itself to practical information-sharing or logistical coordination; for that, use text messages. Tapstack’s strength is ambient presence.

And because there’s no threading, no history, the messages don’t carry the burden of an expected reply. Really, they are just a carrier wave for another sentiment, and that sentiment is always the same: I’m thinking of you.

I don’t know if the company has ever made a cent. There’s no advertising in the app, and they never asked their users to pay.

Tapstack announced about a month ago that it would shut down on November 15

instead of settling for a corporate messaging app as a replacement… I am, for my family and my family only, building a new one :)

Most of the tension around e-books, in every market, comes down to the strange properties of digital artifacts. In a very real sense, an e-book wants to be reproduced infinitely for free. The imposition of the metaphor of the library “copy,” which can be “held” by one person until giving it up, is basically ridiculous—a kind of kabuki theater, the ghostly grip of the physical on the virtual.

you really cannot convince me that the future of digital media is T-shirts.

There are, so far, two (2) proven models for financing and distributing media that are 100% appropriate to the digital realm while also being reasonably fair to the media’s producers.

One is advertising-supported media

And, of course, even if you’re totally comfortable with this model, it doesn’t work for e-books. Nobody wants to put an ad in your e-book.

The other proven model is more radical and more interesting: Tim Carmody’s “unlocking the commons.”

This is the model whereby some number of patrons pay for the production of some kind of digital media—it could be anything: a book, a movie, a newsletter—and the resulting artifact is then provided to them, and also to everyone else in the universe.

There is one (1) problem with “unlocking the commons,” which is that it doesn’t quite seem to work.

When other people have an incentive to Sell Your Thing—I mean publishers, of course, but also literary agencies in the U.S. and abroad that arrange translations, as well as, very importantly, bookstores—Your Thing travels further, stays in circulation longer.

a lack of commercial… fuel? A kind of inertness.

You can read Annabel Scheme, a whole dang novella (and a good one), for zero dollars. That’s not nothing!

If the media being “unlocked” is a steady stream of output, rather than a single, standalone piece of work, this mismatch is ameliorated, maybe even solved entirely.

Surely there must be ten more!!

You might have noticed that I omitted the “flat-rate streaming library” model. While it’s definitely appropriate to the digital realm, it fails my second test, because it’s not really fair—or even available—to most producers. (bundling micropayments)

There have long been dreams of a Netflix for e-books, and even some attempts. The app called Oyster was one; do you know this story? It’s incredible.

it sorta pencils out. Except. For. The romance readers.

It was the romance readers who killed it, because romance readers read a lot of romances. They read them fast. They are just… voracious.