Scheherazade would plotz

I’ve just returned from the Online News Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, and my head is crammed full of new technology.

Any fantasy I’ve entertained about going off the grid has now been dashed. A pile of remarkable tools exist to track the preferences and whereabouts of we humans. A Google Map looks quaint by comparison.

The only hope we have for privacy is to live a life of such dullness that no one will look for us.

What interests me most about this rise in tech-tools that track movement and behavior is how resolutely we want to ignore them. A piece in yesterday’s New York Times pondered the rise of book piracy, a trend that is closely following the Napsterizing of music not so long ago.

A Swiss site called RapidShare is singled out in the NYT piece by author and business prof Randall Stross. RapidShare offers offshore accounts where users keep all types of files safe. As it turns out, it is also the equivalent of a big, big pirate ship that sails through bookstores. Nothing stops me from loading an e-book onto the site, then sending the URL to friends so they can download the book free of charge.

A few months ago my reaction to this news story would be undiluted indignation. Thieves! Sleazeballs! While I still hate the idea of any writer or other artist getting fleeced, the conference on online journalism and a provocative book I read recently have made me sharply aware that the rules have changed. The cash-per-comma publishing model is on the way out, and the sooner we face that fact, the better.

“Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson is a thoroughly fascinating book on the crumbling of old business models. Anderson is overly glib in the way of most futurists, but he still does a great job of explaining how products like Google’s “free” web searching service make money. The days are over when available shelf space dictated the size of your inventory and a large number of paying customers absorbed the costs of the few who didn’t pay. The limitless real estate of the web has turned the rules of the marketplace upside down.

I’ll wager that as I type this someone is developing software that tracks what we’re reading–in real time–and can shut off the e-book right as things get exciting. With a name like PlotKiller 2.0, it will ensure that readers pay writers their due.

Does Romeo die? What happens to that big white whale? Does the Da Vinci Code ever make sense? You’ll need to hit that PayPal button to find out.

(The photo accompanying this post was taken by travel writer Davia Larson somewhere in Spain. Why doesn’t America have punctuation zones?)