Cory Doctorow and the "Chokepoint Capitalism" audiobook (We wrote a book that Amazon won't sell) (fwd)

Wed Aug 17 23:38:25 CEST 2022

Cory Doctorow er en kanadisk-britisk forfatter, aktivist,
foredragsholder og debattant som også reiser mye og har vært i
Norge flere ganger, bl a på bibliotek-konferanser.

Her skriver han om sin nye (lyd)bok, tilstanden i lydbokmarkedet
og andre bokmarkeder, og mulige tiltak -- inkludert hva han selv
gjør. Og hvordan og hvorfor bøkene hans hører hjemme på
biblioteket.

Thomas Gramstad

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2022 09:06:40 -0700
From: Cory Doctorow via Doctorow-L <doctorow-l at flarn.com>
Reply-To: doctorow at craphound.com
Subject: [Doctorow-L] Kickstarting the "Chokepoint Capitalism" audiobook (We
     wrote a book that Amazon won't sell)

My next book is *Chokepoint Capitalism*, co-written with the brilliant 
copyright expert Rebecca Giblin: it's an action-oriented investigation into how 
tech and entertainment monopolies have destroyed creators' livelihoods, with 
detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and get artists 
paid.

http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx

Ironically, the very phenomenon this book describes - "chokepoint capitalism" - 
is endemic to book publishing, and in audiobook publishing, it's in its 
terminal phase. There's no way to market an audiobook to a mass audience 
without getting trapped in a chokepoint, which is why we're kickstarting a 
direct-to-listener edition:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

What is "chokepoint capitalism?" It's when a multinational monopolist (or 
cartel) locks up audiences inside a system that they control, and uses that 
control to gouge artists, creating toll booths between creators and their 
audiences.

For example, take Audible: the Amazon division controls the vast majority of 
audiobook sales in the world - in some genres, they have a 90%+ market-share. 
Audible requires every seller - big publishers and self-publishers alike - to 
use their proprietary DRM as a condition of selling on the platform.

That's a huge deal. DRM is useless at preventing copyright infringement (all of 
Audible's titles can be downloaded for free from various shady corners of the 
internet), but it is *wildly effective* at locking in audiences and seizing 
power over creators. Under laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright 
Act, giving someone a tool to remove DRM is a felony, punishable by 5 years in 
prison and a $500k fine.

This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to 
Audible's platform...forever. If another company offers you a better deal for 
your creative work and you switch, your audience can't follow you to the new 
company without giving up all the audiobooks they've bought to date. That's a 
lot to ask of listeners!

Amazon knows this: as their power over creators and publishers has grown, the 
company has turned the screw on them, starting with the most powerless group, 
the independent creators who rely on Amazon's self-serve ACX system to publish 
their work.

In late 2020, a group of ACX authors discovered that Amazon had been 
systematically stealing their wages, to the tune of an estimated $100,000,000. 
The resulting Audiblegate scandal has only gotten worse since, and while the 
affected authors are fighting back, they're hamstrung by Amazon's other unfair 
practices, like forcing creators to accept binding arbitration waivers on their 
way through the chokepoint:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx

I have always had a no-DRM policy for my ebooks and audiobooks. Amazon's Kindle 
store - another wildly dominant part of the books ecosystem - has always 
allowed authors to choose whether or not to apply DRM, but in Audible - where 
Amazon had a commanding lead from the start, thanks to their anti-competitive 
acquisition of the formerly independent Audible company - it is mandatory.

Because Audible won't carry my DRM-free audiobooks, audiobook publishers won't 
pay for them. I don't blame them - being locked out of the market where 90%+ of 
audiobooks are sold is a pretty severe limitation. For a decade now, I've 
produced my own audiobooks, using amazing narrators like Wil Wheaton, Amber 
Benson and Neil Gaiman.

These had sold modestly-but-well, recouping my cash outlays to fairly 
compensate the readers, directors and engineers involved, but they were still 
niche products, sold at independent outlets like Libro.fm, Downpour, and my own 
online storefront:

https://craphound.com/shop

But that all changed in 2020, with the publication of *Attack Surface*, an 
adult standalone novel set in the world of my bestselling YA series *Little 
Brother*. That time, I decided to use Kickstarter to pre-sell the audio- and 
ebooks and see if my readers would help me show other creators that we could 
stand up to Audible's bullying.

Holy shit, did it ever work. The Kickstarter for the *Attack Surface* audiobook 
turned into *the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in world 
history*, grossing over $267,000:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

Which brings me to today, and our new Kickstarter for *Chokepoint Capitalism*. 
We produced an independent audiobook, tapping the incomparable Stefan Rudnicki 
(winner of uncountable awards, narrator of 1000+ books, including Ender's Game) 
to read it.

We're preselling the audiobook ($20), ebook ($15), hardcover ($27), and bundles 
mixing and matching all three (there's also bulk discounts). There's also the 
option to buy copies that we'll donate to libraries on your behalf. We've got 
pins and stickers - and, for five lucky high-rollers, we've got a very special 
artwork called: "The Annotated Robert Bork."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

Robert Bork was the far-right extremist who convinced Ronald Reagan to 
dismantle antitrust protection in America, and then exported the idea to the 
rest of the world (Reagan tried to reward him with a Supreme Court seat, but 
Bork's had been Nixon's Solicitor General and his complicity in Nixon's crimes 
cost him the confirmation).

Bork's dangerous antitrust nonsense destroyed the world as we knew it, giving 
us the monopolies that have wrecked the climate, labor protections and 
political integrity. These monopolies have captured every sector of the economy 
- from beer and pro-wrestling to health insurance and finance:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

"The Annotated Robert Bork" is a series of five shadow-boxes containing 
two-page spreads excised from Bork's 1978 pro-monopoly manifesto *The Antitrust 
Paradox*, which we have mounted on stiff card and hand-annotated with our red 
pens. The resulting package is a marvel of museum glass and snark.

Bork's legacy is monopolistic markets in every sector of the world's economy, 
including the creative industries. *Chokepoint Capitalism* systematically 
explores how tech and entertainment giants have rigged music streaming, 
newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, TV, video streaming, and 
others, steadily eroding creators' wages even as their work generated more 
money for the monopolists' shareholders.

But just as importantly, our book proposes things we can do *right now* to 
unrig creative labor markets. Drawing on both existing, successful projects and 
promising new experiments, we set out shovel-ready ideas for creators, artists' 
groups, fans, technologists, startups, and local, regional and national 
governments.

Artists aren't in this struggle alone. As we write in the book, chokepoint 
capitalism is the final stage of high-tech capitalism, which atomizes workers 
and locks in customers and then fleeces workers as a condition of reaching 
their audiences. It's a form of exploitation that is practiced wherever 
industries concentrate, which is why creators can't succeed by rooting for Big 
Tech against Big Content or vice-versa.

It's also why creative workers should be in solidarity with *all* workers - 
squint a little at Audible's chokepoint shakedown and you'll recognize the 
silhouette of the gig economy, from Uber to Doordash to the poultry and 
meat-packing industries.

40 years of official pro-monopoly policy has brought the world to the brink of 
collapse, as monopoly profits and concentrated power allowed an ever-decreasing 
minority of the ultra-rich to extract ever-increasing fortunes from 
ever-more-precarious workers. It's a flywheel: more monopoly creates more 
profits creates more power creates more monopoly.

The solutions we propose in *Chokepoint Capitalism* are specific to creative 
labor, but they're also examples of the kinds of tactics that we can use in 
every industry, to brake the monopolists' flywheel and start a new world.

I hope you'll consider backing the Kickstarter if you can afford to - and if 
you can't, I hope you'll check out one of the copies our backers have donated 
to libraries around the world:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

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