When people arguing the other side retreat into irony, desperate and irrelevant worst-case scenarios or a combination of the two, you’ve got to be on the right track. Here’s Scott Edelman in his column at SciFi Weekly, talking about the print/digital reading debate:

But—how can you predict the future of publishing and have nothing to say about the aftereffects of a possible nuclear war?

{snip}

Whether you think such an event might occur this decade, this century or this millennium, you should ask the next question, which is—how will we be able to read electronic stories once there’s no electricity? We won’t be able to read e-books on our computers by candlelight. A disaster of that magnitude might take us back to the basics of paper and ink. In fact, we may arrive at a time when it will be as if anything that had existed only in electronic form—such as this editorial—never existed at all.

OK, I’m pretty positive he’s doing a slightly ironic overstatement thing here. But even that is a bit lame, really - is that all a columninst and editor-in-chief of a major online magazine can come up with as the end for a piece of the rise of digital media? Bit of a red herring argument, really - it’s almost as if he wants to completely avoid having a serious opinion on the issue, which is a weird stance for an editorial column to take. 

Well, it looks like I got my wish granted, although I’m not going to attempt to claim that my own post had anything to do with it. But people are starting to talk about DRM, digital media and the future of the genre. Continue reading “The DRM debate picks up steam”

Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Online discusses the topical hot potato of copyright, in the context of a world where the electronic distribution of entertainment media is becoming increasingly commonplace; his previous piece had a similar remit. The thing that astonished me most about these two columns was this: the utter lack of public reaction to them from the online sf community.

Continue reading “Has science fiction gone future-blind?”

As the DRM wars heat up, and the rise of peer-to-peer sharing shows little sign of stopping (despite ineffective and draconian litigation against children and people who don’t even own computers), the smarter computer games companies are looking at new ways to monetise their products. Continue reading “Product placement”