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already announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cast of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn\'t been worth anyone\'s while to capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors of these services are killed, look out. 
 
The thing is, the public doesn\'t want managed services with limited rights. We don\'t want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for \"illegal\" record albums and \"illegal\" cable TV. The demand signal won\'t go away. 
 
There\'s no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD sales are *never* going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented. 
 
Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued. 
 
(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this article)  
 
$$$$ 
 
You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen 
 
(Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) 
 
\"I don\'t like reading off a computer screen\" -- it\'s a cliché of the e-book world. It means \"I don\'t read novels off of computer screens\" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It\'s like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate. 
 
But I know what you mean. You don\'t like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I\'ve checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph. 
 
This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who\'s made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip\'s done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that\'s not to say that it\'s not an entertainment medium -- indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It\'s nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it\'s a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it\'s not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. 
 
The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel. 
 
Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers doubly so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for your attention, and just as many ways of rewarding it. 
 
There\'s a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the 
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