I helped fully fund Greg Stolze’s After the Cops, a short story about radical police reform and now you get to read it for free!
Greg does an interesting thing where he writes a story, then offers to release it to the world free of charge for a certain price. He gets paid and the world gets more public content – no DRM needed.
Can’t wait to read it, dropping it into my Kobo now.
This is an awesome time to be alive. Everything keeps changing. I remember when it was common knowledge that you had to cripple the movies and games you sold to keep people from copying them.
These days, that old myth is falling apart and people are realizing that alot of that was a pricing issue. Louis C.K. took a chance on his fans and sold them 100% DRM free comedy at $5 a pop. His fans made him a million in 12 days, because he is genuine and treated them like people.
The Humble Indie Bundle was a crazy idea that you could offer fans 100% uncrippled games for windows, mac and linux – and let the fans pay whatever they want. They also let fans decide where the money goes – to the developers or to a charity! They stomped it, raising buckets of cash for the developers / the Child’s Play charity, and have gone on to release many more of these, now including Android versions as well. Sadly, Apple’s rules prevent the team from offering iPhone games.
Now Azis Ansari is offering the same deal Louis CK offered: Stream or download a 100% DRM free HD video of Aziz Ansari’s latest comedy set – for just $5.
If you own a mac and you have a Netflix account, you should check out my short howto article on watching your netflix instant movies on your Mac.