CrunchyTech: The Latest from Boing Boing

Monday, September 21, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

Star Wars considered as an environmental feel-good movie
Monstrous art
Library in necklace form
We don't pay for "content," we pay for "form"

Star Wars considered as an environmental feel-good movie

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 11:15 PM PDT

In "What If Star Wars Was Made By Environmentalists?" the movie is reimagined as "Star Non-Violent Resistance" and eco-tourism is used to establish independence from the empire; Vader is forced to file environmental impact statements on planetary destruction, etc. Funny!

What If Star Wars Was Made By Environmentalists?

Monstrous art

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 11:11 PM PDT

Kristian Hammerstad's gallery of haunted and monster art has me shivering with delight.

Kristian Hammerstad (via Street Anatomy)

Library in necklace form

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 11:09 PM PDT

Etsy seller TheBlackSpotBooks sells a library in necklace form -- a collection of 11 miniature blank-books bound in scrap and antique leather. I love the idea, though I'd love it more if the books had tiny little printing, the text of great public domain works.

Library of antique and scrap leather books for the neck - eleven miniature books (via Neatorama)

We don't pay for "content," we pay for "form"

Posted: 20 Sep 2009 11:03 PM PDT

In Paul Graham's provocative "Post-Medium Publishing," he argues that we've rarely paid for "content," but rather for "form" -- that's why a good hardcover costs the same as a bad one, and both are more expensive than paperbacks. As the newspaper and CD forms lose currency, their publishers argue that what we've been buying all along is the "content" and demand that we "continue" to pay for it online.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.

I think he goes off the rails in the next graf, where he talks about how writers can self-publish merely by uploading files; this commits the same error that he's upset about: confusing "publishing" and "printing."

I also wonder if St McLuhan might not object here, with something about the form being the content.

Post-Medium Publishing (via /.)