There are two series of books which I know of which revolve around extremely powerful creature benevolent towards humanity. They are not omnipotent, and far from perfectly good (in fact ready to commit genocide of non-humans for little reason), but they are able, and wish to keep humans completely safe and comfortable. The creatures are Isaac Asimov’s robots and Larry Niven’s protectors.

In both cases they decide to allow humanity to live and develop without their constant presence and intervention — although both decide to intervene subtly without revealing themselves too openly. Sounds familiar?

They do this because human beings need to be able to develop. In Asimov’s books human world’s that use robots gradually die as their culture fails. Niven’s protectors decide that humans do not want or need to be cosseted.

The result is immense suffering, but no one reading either series could say that they would prefer to live in a world in which they were looked after by robots or protectors.

I will not go into the details (those who want them can read the books), but looking at the problem this way can make the argument that we need to live with our choices and their consequences more comprehensible.

The last week was mostly dominated by short stories. I carried on with Poe, but am a long way from finishing his complete works.

As before, looking for free books has read me to read things I would otherwise have missed—this time a whole genre. I have always said that, with very few exceptions, I disliked crime fiction apart from that by a handful of authors (Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, and, more recently, Christie). I have now found a lot more that I like.

One was a book from which I have previously read two short stories in anthologies. The Golden Slipper : and other problems for Violet Strange.

The next was an excellent anthology The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English. I skipped some of the stories I have already, read, but it is a substantial anthology so that was not much of a loss. I discovered some authors I did not know (such as Egerton Castle: which I was amazed to discover was not a place).

The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English was less to my taste, but it did start of with a hugely enjoyable Dickens story I have not read before, The Haunted House.

So that draws my experiment to an end. I have enjoyed it, and have read a lot that I would otherwise not have read. I can find new free books to read faster than I can complete them, and more video than I have time to watch. I am left with a backlog of downloaded but unread and unwatched books and video, which it would have been very good to be able to write up.

I am no longer bound by the conditions of the experiment, but I have no doubt that free will continue to dominate my reading and watching: its convenient, cheap, and there is no reason to look for paid except when there something I particularly want. There is no longer a need to, for example, brose bookshops looking for books to buy.

Imagine how outraged people would be if Microsoft altered Windows to only run software purchased through MS. Now imagine that they went further than tried to take charge for every thing that was read, watched, or listened to on every Windows PC?

This is exactly what Apple have been doing with iPhone’s and iPods. Software can only be installed through Apple’s own “App store”.

Now Apple have prevented ebook reader apps (i.e. software) like those from Amazon and Kobo from directing users to buying ebooks from those companies websites: all purchases that apps promote (or made through apps) must be made through apple.

Apple have done what I asked you to imagine Microsoft doing. With both Apple and Microsoft planning app stores for their PC operating systems (i.e. MacOS and Windows), we are likely to see this spread. It is unlikely that the app stores will initially be the only way to install software, but once the mechanism is in place, it is likely to get locked in.

Its worth pointing out that Linux has had the benefit of app stores (sans payment mechanisms) for a decade, but without the vendor control. Apples innovation consisted of doing what Linux does, in a technically inferior and less flexible way (no dependency handling), but integrating the payment mechanism.

It is not just an operating system that can give you this basis for making suppliers of stuff for your platform pay. What Apple is doing to Amazon, is exactly what Amazon is positioning itself to do to authors and publishers. Amazon already takes a substantial proportion of the retail price of an ebook (30% of what is left after deducting a distribution charge), a huge amount for essentially listing the book on a website and handling a payment. This is more than the author typically gets for doing the hard work. As the Kindle’s market position goes stronger they will be in a position to increase this if they wish.

Facebook now requires game developers to accept Facebook credits for in-game payments. Again, this means Facebook keeps 30%, a lot more than the game developers ever had to pay normal payment processors (sounds familiar).

The common strategy is this: you build a platform, people build applications or content for your platform, and you then charge them for the privilege. They are already committed, and you control access to the users giving you a monopoly over selling to those users.

Telecoms companies attempts to charge websites that their customers use (ending what is called “net neutrality”) is a similar strategy. You own the customers and charge for access. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that they are not charging businesses that want to receive phone calls from their customers).

Ultimately this is about controlling customers. You lock the customers into your platform. The software industry has long done this, but limited its exploitation of it to selling upgrades. Now, this control can be exploited in many ways. You have a group of customer to whom you are a gatekeeper: its like owning all the shops in town, but without the pesky attention from competition authorities that doing that would attract.

Nothing much new regarding films and video: the one film I watched was Four Eyed Monsters, which was a disappointment. Despite god reviews, and a good start, the premise of the film quickly got tedious and the characters silly and pretentious.

As for books, I enjoyed some nice light reading in F Anstey’s The Brass Bottle. I know so little about books from further back than a few decades, unless they are major works of literature. This experiment has, once again, taught me that there is a lot out there that I do not know about.

I have also read two stories from a complete (I think!) works of Poe.

I have also started reading The Wealth of Nations. This is also going to be a test of whether, as I feel is likely, hefty books are easier to read in electronic form. It is not a book I expect to complete in the next week, but I will blog further on it as I read through it (and I will be reading other books in parallel).

The most notable books were those I did not read: George Gissing’s New Grub Street had an unremitting quiet desperation in all its characters that was simply too much for me to enjoy. The Rainbow started off well, but, like all of DH Lawrene’s novels, I could not complete it. Lawrence can right powerfully, but he does go on, and on, and on.

At least they were free downloads so I had not wasted any money on them!

JM Barrie’s (as in Peter Pan) The Admirable Crichton was familiar, and I suspect I have read it a long time ago.

William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and A Kings Lesson are as much political manifestos as stories, but, like Chesterton, Morris manages to make this enjoyable, and his depictions of people and places are beautiful.

I went back to some SF with Philip K Dick’s The Variable Man. This is not out of copyright in most countries, but is in the US. It is fun, makes an outwardly ordinary man its hero, and has an element of critique of a society drifting towards discouraging mental agility.

I discovered a great many interesting films, but only had time to watch The Lionshare, which is a superb film: original, touching, funny and full of energy.

Given that film making is supposed to be expensive, I am amazed at how many free films there are that are at least as good as their big budget Hollywood peers.

One of the reviews of it realised that my rules for this experiment neglect one important point. What about cases where piracy is encouraged by the copyright holders of the creators of a work? This is the case with the very interesting looking Ink. Not only have they said they “embrace the piracy”, but they even have a donate button on their website so that those who enjoyed a pirated copy can contribute financially.

Anyway, even though I have not watched, as the reviews are good, and their attitude is good, here is their trailer:

I have returned to one of my favourite authors of this experiment, in fact simply one of my favourite authors. I read two more books by G. K. Chesterton: The Ball and the Cross and Manalive.

Both have everything one expects from Chesterton: humour and charm while dealing with serious issues. The more I read Chesterton, the more amazed I am by his writing. He is patriotic without being jingoistic, presents a view of history that sees freedom as having been subverted by the rich in a way that is readable and enjoyable, and combines fantastic plots and behaviour with likeable, and often believable, characters.

If I could choose to be able to write like any one writer, I would choose Chesterton.

I also finished the book of American short stories I mentioned in my last post. It was amusing, but a little disappointing as the humour and style did not vary as much as I expected of a broad anthology. I also found the background of a racially divided society, and the taking for granted of gross racism, became more annoying as I read more. One cannot, of course, expect modern standards in this respect from old books, but these, as a collection, had too much for me.

I did read another collection of American short stories that I did enjoy a great deal. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Philosophers. There is not much to say, except that if you have not read his short stories, they are more fun than his novels (his novels are good, but not exactly light hearted).

The only books I read completely were Genellan: Planetfall by Scott Geir (yet more SF) and Chesterton’s A Short History of England. I did spend a lot of time reading software documentation, which is free, but not really of interest in the current context!

I also dipped into two books, both of which I want to read later, but which I do not really feel inclined to read now. They are Walden and an anthology called The Best American Humorous Short Stories. I have not read enough of the former to comment on it. The latter is promising, not just as an enjoyable book, but because many of the stories are by authors I have not heard of, or who I only associated with a different type of writing (Poe funny!).

A Short History of England is the first non-fiction I have finished as part of this experiment. The latter chapters make too many references to WW1 and are clearly influenced by being written at that time — something that Chesterton’s closing comments show he was clearly aware of.

It is a great corrective to the contemporary tendency to think of the 19th and 20th centuries as a time of growing liberty, by pointing out the loss of medieval liberties that preceeded it (in passing I might add that we ignore many losses of liberty because we are accustomed to them). I do not have the knowledge of history to judge how accurate his picture of medieval life is, but it is certainly true that many movements for liberty and equality have been crushed, even that times that seemed promising: the Peasants Revolt, the Levellers and the Chartists, and, no doubt, many more that are much less well known because they failed. Chesterton makes many telling points, such as the inability of Mary to reverse her father’s dissolution of the monastaries: she was allowed to persecute the poor, but not to make the rich return what they had stolen. She, fatally to her aims, could restore the worst of Catholic England, but not its best.

I may return later to the politics of Chesterton, and the correctness of his history, but in the context of this series of posts what matters is that an out of copyright work of popular history retains the power to inform and to challenge. Its ideas remain controversial and relevant.

I started Thackeray’s Book of Snobs, but simply did not get it. I suspect the humour has dated. I tried his Men’s Wives. It has a nice balance of humour and tragedy (not exactly tragedy in the first story which has a happy ending, but a depiction of distress).

I continued reading SF with Andre Norton’s Star Soldiers, the two parts of which were originally published as separate books. When I started the second part I realised that I had read it before, and I was not that keep to re-read it (the first book is far better), I stopped there.

That brings me to one great advantage of free books: if you decide you do not like a book part way through (which has happened several times), you have not wasted any money!

I have also dipped into some non-fiction. I found a translation of part of St Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis, which Calibredid a reasonable job of converting to epub format. The book it self is not of great interest, but it disproves the misconception, shared by creationists and atheists, that creationism was the norm for Christians until the last few centuries.

I have also dipped into more non-fiction, but I will not say more until I have read more of it. One thing I wish to see is whether large and heavy books are easier to read as ebooks.

Looking for music gave me a pleasant surprise. I had expected good free music to be mostly classical. For example, I have the BBC free downloads of Beethoven’s symphonies. Sorry no link as they are no longer available. There is also unlikely to be any more free music from the BBC: the recorded music companies were upset by the competition, and, as the regulators think corporate profits are more important than utility maximisation for society as a while, it has been firmly stopped.

What I found was that Jamendo has a wide range of fairly good music. There is now an awful lot on the site, so the way to find the good stuff is by listening to their “radio” streams and looking for play lists you like.

I enjoyed some Jazz and electronic music.

Not a bad two days, and I still feel I have not even scratched the surface of what is available.

The only book for the day was Ventus by Karl Schroeder, which I read at Richard Beddard’s suggestion. It is a very difficult to describe this book, or pin down exactly why I liked it. It contrasts two very different human societies (a clash of civilisations writ large), and deals with super-intelligent artificial intelligences, but keeps the story and key characters on a human scale.

Rather to my surprise I found two really enjoyable funny videos: one a short documentary, and the other a reasonably long film.

The documentary was Crazy Golf, following the British Team in the 2005 World Mini Golf Championship, as the struggle to avoid coming last. It is only 25 minutes long.

There is a faint air of ludicrousness about the idea of international competition in crazy golf/mini golf, especially as some players obviously take it very seriously. Of course this is not fair. What other than custom makes this sport any more ludicrous than any other?

The film (only 51 minutes long) is Ginger and Snow, a Russian film showing a day in the life of a student. It is in Russian with English sub-titles.

It is hard to understand the plot, or character’s motivations, or, in general, understand what is going on. Despite it feeling somewhat bizarre, the comedy works and the film as a whole is absorbing.

It is beautifully shot in black and white, and this does add to the enjoyment.

At the end of the first week of this experiment, I no longer fear that there will be any problem in finding enough to read and watch to keep me going: there is enough out there for years, if not a lifetime. The problem is now whether I can cover a sufficient sample in just a month.

The book was Baen’s Free Short Stories 2011, continuing my burst of SF. It is just five spec fic (SF and fantasy) short stories of various types and quality.

An OK read, but nothing special.

I continued to look for free films, and started looking at http://archive.org/. There is a lot there, but it will take me a while to find what I like.

I found a few more books to download, and in general I thing it is all working out well. I have not yet had any great urge to break the rules I set my self, I am reading more, and watching more than usual — as I still have work to do and children to bring up I have been sleeping a bit less than usual. I have also not been doing anything to kill time, because I always have more books I want to read conveniently on by tablet.