MOG v. Napster v. Rdio v. Rhapsody

Owning music is so 20th century.

Subscription music is renting music by the month.  If you are a casual music listener subscription music isn’t for you.  If you are addicted to music, subscription music lets you listen to most of the new albums that come out each week for a very low monthly fee.  Every music friend that I’ve talked into subscribing to music has said, “This is fantastic, I wished I had discovered it sooner.”  Most music fans don’t like the concept of renting music – but that’s how they feel before they try it.  After they subscribe they worry that concept will fail and heaven forbid, they have to go back to the old way of buying music.

Imagine being given a whole music store for your birthday, and not some dinky music section like you see in Target, but a music store as big as a Macy’s, with hundreds of thousands of albums.  What songs do you play first?  That’s what it’s like to subscribe to a music streaming service.  You’ve got millions of songs, so how to you live with so many?  First, you have to pick which subscription music company you want to join.

Picking a Service

There’s at least six subscription music services now in the U.S., with more on the way.  I’ve picked four to review.  I’ve been a subscriber to Rhapsody for years, but I’ve joined MOG, Napster and Rdio to make comparisons for this review, and to consider which service I want to go with in the future.  All these services offer free trials, but the subscription rates are so cheap it doesn’t hurt to try them out for a month or two.

Check out their web pages and look at these intro videos.

Price

Here’s the thing, if you’re a music lover you’ll want to share music with your friends, and you will more than likely want to subscribe to the same subscription music service as your buds because of the social functions.  So the very first feature to consider is price – can everyone afford it.

There are two modes of listening, either at the computer, or on a mobile device.  Bizarrely, these companies charge more if you listen on a carry around device with a tinny sound rather than a big computer you can connect to stereo speakers and blast away your songs in all their sonic glory.

Most people will want the iPhone/Android option, but if you’re poor or cheap, try the computer only option to just test the waters.  And don’t think you have to listen at your computer.  You can run a wire from your laptop to your stereo system, or you can get a digital media server that bypasses the computer and acts like another component in your stereo cabinet.

You listen to the same songs, so why do they charge more for hearing it on a phone?  That’s just weird.  I hope the price difference goes away.

Streaming to the computer can include hooking it up to stereo systems, and digital media centers like Roku and Sonos boxes.  However, MOG and Napster  lets you use a Roku/Sonos with the $4.99 plan, but Rdio requires subscribing to their $9.99 plan, as does Rhapsody for Sonos, but then it doesn’t offer a $4.99 plan.

$4.99/mo
computer		 $9.99/mo
computer + 1 mobile		 $14.99/mo
computer + 3 mobile
  • MOG
  • Rdio
  • Napster
  • MOG
  • Rdio
  • Napster
  • Rhapsody
  • Rhapsody

Napster does off deep discounts if pay by the year, which brings down the monthly cost to $4.17 for computers and $8.00 a month for computers and 1 mobile.  I think a fairer pricing would be per login, no matter which device you used.  Since I seldom listen on my iPod touch, I’m actually over-paying for Rhapsody, so I’m thinking of stepping down to a $4.99 plan at another service – except that the next consideration is number of songs in the library.

By the way, you can only be logged in from one location.  If you’re married, Rhapsody’s family plan is worth considering.

Size of Library

The next big consideration is the size of the library.  All these services say they have 10-11 million songs, but they don’t seem to have the same exact 10-11 million songs.  Apple claims to have 18 million songs in its library of music for sale. No service streams The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or a handful of other artists that refuse to make license deals, but for the most part, anything new you see on sale each week is available.  I have found Rhapsody has the most, but that’s perceptual.  I tend to think over time all the services end up signing agreements with all the same labels and music distributors, so as the concept of subscription music catches on this won’t be an issue.  I don’t have trouble finding music to play, I have trouble organizing which of those millions of songs I do want to play.  But for right now, Rhapsody get the A for having the most.

Playlists

I think MOG is the clear winner when it comes to creating play lists.  Look at this:

Rdio comes in second for playlist creation ease of use.  You can create a playlist right on the playlist page with a search box that allows you to click on the return list to add a song to the list, but the MOG way of creating playlists is just better.  You can even play a song from the search results to verify you’ve got the right version.

Napster and Rhapsody creates playlists in a roundabout way.  You find the song, and then click on a button to add it to a playlist.  In other words, you have to be on the album page or on playlist to add the song.  That requires a lot of paging around to build a new list.  MOG gets the gold star here, and Rdio gets a silver.

Following Users and Social Networking

There’s one feature where Rdio shines – you can follow other users, seeing what they are playing, adding to their collection, syncing to their phones.  You can play their playlists.  This is great for meeting other music lovers, or even better if you can get your real life music friends to join Rdio.  It’s like Facebook for music fans.  This is a huge selling point for Rdio.  Right now three of us at work are Rdio members.

Rdio further enhances this feature with your home page.  It shows the most played albums from your collection, or from the friends you follow, or from all of Rdio.  I can’t emphasis enough the importance of this feature.  Ever since the development of the Sony Walkman the evolution of music has been towards private listening.  I wrote a post years ago called, “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?”  The following other users counters that trend making music social again.  Sadly, only Rdio has it, and its this feature more than anything that will make me pick Rdio in the end.

I’m always looking for new music, and I love finding great songs. To me a great song is one that takes me two weeks of constant playing before I get tired of hearing it. I used to buy a lot of dud LPs and CDs trying to find those great songs. Now the most efficient method is to listen to other people’s playlists. People love to play disc jockey and create public playlists, so it’s just a matter of finding people with similar tastes, or finding playlists that already have a few songs you love and a bunch of songs you’ve never heard.

When it comes to social playlists I think Rdio is first, and MOG is second. Rhapsody and Napster aren’t in the running.

Virtual Collection

Having access to millions of songs sounds like music nirvana, but it has its drawbacks.  Unless you have a photographic memory to remember groups, albums and songs you love it’s difficult to keep up.  The solution is the Collection concept.  You tag songs and albums you like and they get listed separately as your personal library of music.  If you already have a library of music on your computer, Rdio will look at it and tag those albums for your Collection.  That’s handy for some people, but I have 1,500 CDs and I didn’t want them all in my Rdio collection.  I’ve chosen to rebuild my virtual collection by what I like now.

By combining your collection with playlists you build up a database of music you love.

Handling Music You Already Own

This is the weakest area for subscription music.  Rhapsody has a client for Windows that competes with Windows Media Player for features.  I can blend my MP3 library with Rhapsody collection in the desktop client, but this is a messy solution.  So I keep my MP3s in Windows Media Player.  My music and Rhapsody’s music.  If I can’t find it on Rhapsody I have to switch to Windows Media Player and do another search.  I don’t like this solution.  This is why I had such high hopes for Apple.  Mixing a subscription streaming music service with their Music Match cloud service could have solved this problem.

The absolute ideal would be if these services would rip your out-of-print CDs and add them to your virtual library so you never had to switch between two players to hear all your music.

So far none of the four services I’m reviewing have talked about creating a cloud library for personally owned music.  If I put my OOP CDs in the Amazon or Google cloud I’ll have just about everything I want in two places that can stream to any device.

Music goes out of print, and when it does, it disappears from these music services.  This might change in the future, but basically these services are licensing music that somebody is selling somewhere.  If the music is not for sale online or in stores, it doesn’t get license and thus not available to stream.  But not ever song for sale is licensed for use in a subscription music service.  Surprisingly, more and more are.  I think we’re evolving away from owning music.  Owning makes sense when music is on a physical medium, but it doesn’t make sense when it’s digital.

I have lots of old CDs that aren’t available for sale or on subscription services.  They are out of print, like rare books.  My solution so far is just not to play them very often.  Rhapsody is so easy to use that getting out a CD or even calling it up on Windows Media Player is a pain, so I think the cloud music storage concept is great for now.

Until all music is available for renting, some music needs to be owned.  You’ll have two systems to maintain.  Your rental library and your cloud library, or if you collect physical music, your collects of 78s, 45, LPs, CDs, cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes and 8-tracks.  And I tend to think even the people who love physical media music will want to convert their collection to the cloud to make it easier to play.

Sound Quality

Right now MOG and Rdio stream at 256 – 320 kbps.  This may or may not be higher bitrates than Rhapsody and Napster who reported 192 and 128 kbps in the past.  Getting such details is hard, and all the services are evolving.  Apple says it will use 256kbps for it’s Music Match service, so I tend to think that will become the minimum standard.  Depending on how fancy your computer speakers are, or how good your stereo system is, this music sounds very good.  It’s not as good as a CD played loud with deep concentrated listening, but it will do.

All the services downgrade the bitrate to 64-128kbps for mobile devices, but some of them allow users to request the full bitrate.

I think quality is pretty much a wash for comparing the four services.  And I expect that music quality will improve over time too, but you won’t have to buy all your favorite albums again.

Mobile  Device Use

Here’s another features that’s quickly becoming a wash as each service updates their apps for iOS and Android devices, and even Blackberry phones.  You can stream or download albums to play offline.  At first these companies provided a subset of features for their mobile users, but that’s changed.  Now you can pretty much play what you want limited by the restrictions of your data plan.  I find it better to download playlists to my device for songs I like to regularly play, and to stream albums I want to try out.

All these services have features in their apps that let you download while connected with WiFi, and play offline to avoid data plan expenses.

I find it damn annoying that these services charge double to listen on a smartphone.  A smartphone is just another computer.

Rhapsody and Napster do support some MP3 players, so that’s  a plus for them.

Streaming Media Player Support

Sonos, the Cadillac of household streaming digital media supports all four of these services.  Roku, the Chevy of such services does offer MOG and Rdio, and I hope they offer the other two in the future.  MOG has also made plans to integrated into TVs, Blu-ray players and cars.  What this will mean is your HDTV, which people often connect to good sound systems, will become a streaming music player.  This beats the crap out of Apple TV as a music player.  Just imagine a TV with MOG and Netflix, what a combo that will be!

I have a DIY home theater PC hooked up to my HD TV and stereo, so I can stream music from all four services, but I’m tempted to get a Roku to simplify my movie and music streaming.  Sony is setting up a streaming service for all its devices called Qriocity, so if you have a Sony TV, Playstation or PSP, they might be worth considering.

MOG lets you play through the Roku at the $4.99 subscription price, but Rdio requires the $9.99 sub.  But when you think you get nearly all new music for $9.99 a month, that’s a fantastic deal.

Rhapsody made early deals with MP3 players and phone companies to integrate it’s services, but it’s obvious that the TV, smartphone, tablet and computer are the standard devices people use every day, so as streaming music/video becomes better and common, we’ll probably see DVD/Blu-Ray players disappear, as well as dedicated MP3 players, so streaming music services need to target TVs/Computers/Tablets/Smartphones.  This might also signal the end of streaming boxes like Roku and Sonos.  So when you buy your next TV make sure it’s Internet ready with lots of streaming services.

[Update:  I’ve since tested MOG with a Roku, and a friend has tested Rdio with one too, and our consensus is the Roku is not a good music player.  If you have a Roku and want to play a playlist or try out an album its okay, but we would never use a Roku for a primary interface to a subscription music service.]

Web Interface

As TVs and smartphone apps take over streaming video and music functions, people will probably play less music from the computer, but that’s a shame, because the web designers are getting better and better at presenting music graphically.  Rdio and the new beta of Rhapsody have beautiful web interfaces for hunting finding, playing, sharing and studying music.

A good web interface also determines how easy it is to play music at work or home while you are sitting a computer, which is where I listen to 99% of my music.

The new Rhapsody beta interface and Rdio let you stay in one window, but Napster and MOG want to break out into a second player window.  Rdio and Rhapsody have desktop clients, but Rdio’s desktop client is mainly a little breakout window like MOG and Napster uses.

But Rdio beats Rhapsody when it comes to social networking.  Each have tabs on the album page, but Rhapsody only has Tracks and Similar Albums.  Rdio has Album, Reviews, Collections, Listeners, Playlists.  Those last three tabs let me find other people who also love the album, which will possibly lead to finding new songs to like.

Rdio also lets me know that Blonde on Blonde has been playing 11,431 times by other members.  I love statistics, so that makes another reason to be partial to Rdio.

In terms of finding albums the trend seems to towards showing ever larger photos of the album covers, which is nice to look at, but if you’re looking at an artist with lots of albums, it makes it hard to find a particular one.

In terms of the web design I give Rhapsody the prize for finding albums, but Rdio the gold ring for social networking.

Time Travel

I love time lines.  I’d love to be able to put in a month and year and hear the songs and albums that came out during that time.  Or give a date range, or year, or year and season.  Napster does not do that exactly, but it does offer Billboard Charts.  For the Billboard 200 Albums you can go back to any season until 1966, for the Hot 100 Tracks to any season back to 1955.  That’s pretty cool.  Napster is my least favorite service, but this one feature makes me want to keep it.

Unfortunately, Napster does irritating things with these lists, like substituting re-recordings, live cuts, or Karaoke versions, for when they don’t have rights to a song.  That sucks.  I would prefer they just gray the song out and add OOP (out-of-print) by the title.  That would be an interesting feature in itself because we’d know how many hit songs have gone out of print.  I’d rather not hear Karaoke Beatles because the band has been buttholes about licensing their music.

Now I know this is a tremendous wish to ask for, but I wished the photos showed the covers of the original single sleeve or album sleeve.  These streaming music services could be great resources for collecting music.

Everything In Print

There’s no technical reason for not offering every album ever published.  It’s all about legal issues, copyright, marketing issues, etc.  But as more people start listening to subscription music it will cause music not in the system to be forgotten, especially as older music fans die off.  If streaming music services offered everything that’s ever been published then that would be the Paradise of Music, but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Last Call for Albums Going Out of Print

Right now when an album goes out of print it just disappears and any reference to a song in a playlist gets grayed out.  What I wished is for these services to give a last call notice before this happens and let us decide if we want to buy the CD or MP3 album, and move that to a cloud music site for lifetime storage.  Again, another reason for music subscription services to offer cloud music storage – the synergy would be so great.

Artist Bibliography Listing

In addition to a album cover listing, I wished we had a bibliographic view that listed all the artist’s work in a list without photos in year order, with links to albums that the service has, and grayed out for out of print albums.  I’d especially like to have original release date and product number.  When an album is rerelease I’d want it relisted with a new product number and date.  I’d want this feature to provide all the information that the most rabid music collector would use.

Original Reviews

Now this might be another pie-in-the-sky wish, but it would be fantastic if these services could provide reviews from periodicals of the time the music original came out.  I have the complete Rolling Stone on DVD, so I don’t see why MOG, Napster, Rdio and Rhapsody couldn’t license rights to link to related material from all the music magazines of the times.  Or at least replicate Wikipedia entries.

Other Reading

I have found several good articles comparing these various services.

JWH – 6/16/11

Are Galactic Empires the New Middle Earth?

I used to think science fiction was all about the future, but I’m not so sure anymore.  Speculating about the future is what got me addicted to science fiction, but that was back in the 1960s when the future was all shiny.  I think the future has tarnished over the years and science fiction has reinvented itself many times over with new fictional destinations.  Rereading old science fiction has shown me that science fiction wasn’t all about the future in the past either.  Science fiction is a never never land for adults.  Settings for science fiction don’t always have to be the future, they can be any time, place or dimension, just as long as it’s not here and now.  And like Dorothy’s visit to Oz, it’s all about learning our heart’s desire.

I recently read The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov, a rather enjoyable standalone novel that didn’t involve robots or psychohistory, but was set in a galactic empire like his Foundation stories.  More than anything it reminded me of the Star Wars universe and I wondered if George Lucas had been a big Asimov fan growing up.  There are lots of galactic empires in science fiction,  and readers seem to love the kind that has the political structure of medieval or renaissance Europe overlaid on a vast structure of many-world interstellar space.  Are we seeking the future, or the past?

We’re reading two galactic empire novels in the Classic Science Fiction book club this month, The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven/Pournelle and Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld, and both of them have an aristocracy.  So does Dune, and oh yeah, Star Wars.  What is it with monarchies and emperors ruling the galaxy in the future?  Is good old fashioned democracy just too boring?  Why do readers want social orders and class structures of the past in their stories of the future?

Readers love big sprawling fantasy novels, with heroic men, beautiful women, fantastic creatures, magical powers, swords and horseback riding.  J. R. R. Tolkien defined that archetype with his books about Middle Earth.  No one believed his fairyland existed.  When I was growing up the difference between science fiction and fantasy was science fiction was supposed to be speculation about potentially real futures – that SF authors were extrapolating about days to come.  But I think that’s no longer true, I think stories of galactic empires are the new fantasy archetype for modern times – that galactic empires have become the new Middle Earth.

the-currents-of-space-asimov

Is science fiction really about the future?  When it comes to galactic empires I don’t think so.

Asimov eventually attempted to tie his science fiction series into one epic view of the future, and even suggested a reading order you can find here.   The Currents of Space is a fun read, but it made me think about how science fiction is evolving.  As a kid discovering science fiction back in the 1960s I’d sometimes discover books that seemed quaint and very out of date, but still fun to read, like the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian series, and the epic space opera of E. E. “Doc” Smith.  The ideas in them were obviously superseded by science of the day, yet they were fun stories, just unbelievable.  That sort of puts the kibosh on calling those stories science fiction in my mind.  Does time and the march of knowledge turn all science fiction into fantasy?

Even the Heinlein I was reading in the 1960s, that was written in the 1950s, like Red Planet and Stranger in a Strange Land, that featured an ancient Martian civilization, had been converted to fantasy by the Mariner spacecraft photos.  This revelation was sad because I had wished for a Martian civilization, or at least some kind of life on Mars.  I was reading science fiction believing it was foretelling the future of mankind, and all too often it was wrong.

At 13 I assumed interplanetary travel would unfold in my lifetime and I would die knowing that interstellar travel would arrive in the 22nd century.  That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now.  Yet modern science fiction is full of galactic civilizations.  Has science fiction become Oz books for adults?  Is science fiction just another kind of magical fairy land to visit with our minds?

I have grave doubts that galactic empires will ever be possible – but they are a powerful meme.  What’s so appealing about galactic empires?  The deep, spiritual response to Star Trek and Star Wars suggests almost a Jungian desire for elements of the galactic empire.  Could it be that it’s not about the potential realism of future manned exploration of the galaxy, but tuning into desires for certain kinds of experiences?

  • Speed of travel.  Most galactic empire stories involve trips between stars taking days and weeks, which would be comparable to ocean travel back in the old days.  If we ever travel between the stars it’s going to take years or even centuries.  However, in most galactic empire stories people travel between the stars at the speed of old sailing ships.  I think weeks on a boat (starship) is romantic to people.
  • Effort.  Most stories involve spaceships requiring no more maintenance than our cars or speedboats.  We seldom see stories with even the hint of maintenance like we see for commercial aircraft, and never for something like we see for navy vessels.  In Star Trek, the Enterprise was far easier to maintain than a Gulfstream jet.  I can’t think of any interstellar transportation system in science fiction that even approaches the support structure of the space shuttles, or even the Russian rockets.  But the technology of these interplanetary ships seem no more complicated than old sailing ships.  What we really want are ships about the complexity of pirate ships.
  • Cost.  NASA can only be funded by the federal government, but in galactic empire novels, space travel seems no more costly than commercial ships in Victorian England.  The Millennium Falcon looked no more costly than an ancient ketch from the Bahamas.
  • Weapons.  Galactic empire novels tend to have very high tech weapons, but whenever the story can, it will bring back the sword.  Light sabers are high tech swords.  Often on primitive worlds in galactic empires, people travel by horse, or something akin to one.  You get the feeling that deep down many readers would love a world where dueling is both honorable and accepted.
  • Mysticism and Magic.  You’d think that science would be the only system for understanding reality in the future, and religion and magic would be long forgotten.  But again, how often have you read a galactic empire series were metaphysical powers come into play?    Readers love humans that have powers and talents.  These may come from tech enhancements, or ESP, or some mystical mumbo-jumbo like The Force.
  • Diversity.  You got to say this for galactic empire stories, we seem to want tremendous diversity in the human body.   Just read some of Samuel R. Delany’s early books like Empire Star, Nova or The Einstein Intersection, which are set in galactic empires, and think about the body types in Tolkien.
  • Gender Roles.  The 1974 Mote in God’s Eye is downright paternalistic about women, whereas thirty years later, in Risen Empire, women are liberated to be combat soldiers.  However, I think in the future where mankind has spread across the galaxy, readers still prefer strong men and beautiful women, and maybe even damsels in distress.
  • Fantastic creatures.  Are aliens really any different from the fantastic creatures we find in fantasy fiction?

Why are our science fictional futures so much like our real histories?  Asimov said he patterned the Foundation series on Roman history.  I felt The Mote in God’s Eye was patterned on the British Empire.  I often feel military science fiction is inspired by American grunts of WWII.  I thought Dune riffed on Arab and Australian aborigine  cultures.  And many people have compared space opera with westerns.

The practical scientific prospect of human galactic empires is next to nil.  Or about the same as Middle Earth being real.  So aren’t many epic science stories really just another kind of fantasy epic?  What does that say about reader psychology?  If galactic empires are a kind of mental comfort food, a romantic setting for our deepest desires, what does that say about what we really wish life was like?  Do we all have genetic programming to go on quests?  Would we like to bring back the class system with aristocrats and peasants?  Just look at fantasy based computer games where players get to design their characters and how they are typed and categorized – not very egalitarian.  Isn’t there a lot of overlap between fantasy games and sci-fi games?  How different is a fantasy warrior from a futuristic mech warrior?  And don’t people prefer a princess over an ordinary girl both in fantasy and the future?  And how do we analyze something like The Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin?

Despite the success of science fiction in popular culture we’s stopped believing in the shiny future we wanted in the 1950s.  Our new fantasy/SF worlds have become Baroque hodgepodges of past and future.  Readers for the most part don’t enjoy dystopian visions of the future, nor do they like gleaming promises that are closer to utopias.   They seem to love down and dirty complexities where good and evil still battle it out – doesn’t Tolkien show a lineage with John Milton?  Doesn’t Star Wars reveal DNA from Sir Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas and Rudyard Kipling?

Personally, I used to believe in galactic empires like Christians and Muslims believe in heaven, but now I’m completely skeptical of them ever existing.  However, they make for a delicious fictional destination.  As and I get older I’ve come to appreciate the comforts of cherished fantasies.

JWH – 6/9/11 – Table of Contents

Philip K. Dick–The Penultimate Truth

At the online book club Classic Science Fiction, we had a series of posts discussing whether or not a book should stand alone or if it helped readers to know about the writer and why they wrote their fiction to fully appreciate the story.  Most of the members wanted books to be completely self-contained and did not want to know about the author.  If fact, many readers worried if tales about the writer were slanderous or gossip it might unfairly color their appreciation of the story.  They were responding to my comments about Radio Free Albemuth and how I judge Philip K. Dick to be crazy.  My response was that certain writers like PKD, Proust, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Wolfe and other autobiographical novelists almost demand knowledge of the writers to fully appreciate their work.

Let me say upfront that if you are reading just for entertainment, books have to be standalone and self-contained.  No knowledge of the author or literary history should be required.  And I do read for entertainment, but for me it’s the foundation to the house, and the real architectural design to be admired is what fiction says about reality.  I’m just not interested in one dimensional fiction.  The novelists I love the most are natural philosophers and reporters.  Now that doesn’t mean I want pontification in fiction – no, fiction is about catharsis, not messages.  To me the best philosophical stories are those where the author is invisible behind the scenes, and their characters, setting and conflicts presents the reader with a deeply emotional experience, whether tragic or comic.

I used to think that only Dick’s last novels were about his personal experiences, but after watching Philip K. Dick-The Penultimate Truth  I now think different, and realize he was always autobiographical to some degree.  Philip K. Dick is very close to Jack Kerouac in that their novels are spiritual journeys that try to make sense of their troubled souls.  Although this documentary about PKD is framed with a cheesy X-Files setup of two FBI like agents brainstorming from boxes of evidence about who Philip K. Dick was, it’s actually a perfect metaphor for Dick’s life.  FBI agents were watching PKD, and he was obsessed with being watched.  You can view this documentary online at YouTube, or get it from Netflix, or follow the link to Amazon above and buy it.  I highly recommend this film.

Here’s the first of nine parts on YouTube:

The documentary gathers three of Dick’s five wives (Kleo Mini, Anne Dick, Tessa Dick), many of his girlfriends, and several of his closest friends (Ray Nelson, Tim Powers and K. W. Jeter) to talk about him while the agents pin photos on a wall as if they were trying to solve a crime.  Some people like to think that PKD actually experienced mystical events and they are unexplained revelations of truth, but I don’t.

All through the documentary they show clips from a speech Dick gave in Metz, France in 1977, that to me is conclusive evidence that Dick was crazy.  He essentially confesses his madness in front of the audience.  His girlfriend that was with him at the conference, Joan Simpson, said the speech was quite horrible and she wished she could have been anywhere else.  She said the French audience was kind to him, but she felt they had been greatly disappointed too, because they expected his wild stories to be creative rather personal visions that Dick confessed to believe.

Now I’m not saying we should write off PKD as a man lost in madness.  As K. W. Jeter says about The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, that Phil provides a critical self-portrait and realizes before he dies that he had been crazy, and as Jeter would like to think, he didn’t die insane, and had finally accepted this reality.

This is an excellent documentary that expertly summarizes the life and work of Philip K. Dick in 89 minutes.  Philip K. Dick was a major explorer of reality and he ventured to some very dangerous places, but ultimately he comes back to report that we shouldn’t go where he’s been.  PKD is a teacher about what it means to explore madly divine concepts.  He is a professor of paranoia and Gnosticism.  We like to think that penultimate realities don’t exist, but Philip K. Dick traveled into them and wrote mission reports back to us.

Here’s the thing.  If you are sane and have a firm grasp of reality, those penultimate gnostic worlds don’t exist, but if you have a weak understanding of this reality they do exist, and they are very real.  It’s not that Dick’s mad ideas explain the ultimate reality because they don’t, but they do explain penultimate realities that we really don’t want to visit.  What’s sad, tragic and troublesome is the people who ask if what PKD experienced was real in our ultimate reality – those people are too close to a penultimate reality, and to them Dick’s visions explains a reality they see but we don’t.  Anyone familiar with mentally ill people will recognize many of the belief systems Dick explored.

Reading Philip K. Dick’s books are a study in madness, and not philosophy, religion or even science fiction.  They are meta-fiction, autobiographical, epistemological,  and a form of exegesis.  PKD even kept a journal he called The Exegesis.  I believe that at times Dick fully believed his visions, but at other times he questioned his sanity.  Many people read his books as science fiction and find them entertaining.  Dick was good a writing fiction.  At the entertainment level many of his books are self-contained stories that work without knowing anything about his life, but the more you know about PKD, the more you see something different about his work, and you see that he was an explorer of penultimate realities.

And when I say “penultimate reality” I’m not riffing on PKD’s titles.  I’m talking about people with gnostic mindsets.  To them, they seek the ultimate truth, or hidden knowledge.  They think they are living in a penultimate reality and are being told lies, and this reality is a sham, and the real reality is a secret being kept from them.  Such thinking has always been a part of various religious sects in world history.  PKD is a modern Gnostic.  Conservative religions don’t like to discuss this, but madmen are often the driving force of the early stages of their religions.  People with mystical instincts are attracted to seers like Philip K. Dick as a form of validation, and Dick knew this.  He was seduced by his own visions too.

Christianity rejected Gnosticism in the early centuries of the common era, but the modern faithful also believe this reality is a penultimate reality.  And this is why we should read Philip K. Dick, he’s a modern day example of a prophet, mystic, seer, writer of revelations, like those in the Bible and other holy books.  If you believe in science, this is the ultimate reality, and mystic people are crazy, now and then.  If you believe this is a penultimate reality, then Dick was a visionary, and from my perspective, you are a tortured soul like he was.  Because any believer in hidden knowledge finds this reality confusing and upsetting.

This is why I say books by Philip K. Dick aren’t just for entertainment and escapism.  You need to know as much about PKD as possible to decipher them.  Sure you can read them as far out science fiction and just consider them weird ass stories to be amusing.  But my fear is some PKD fans live in a penultimate reality, and see Dick as a mystic and that’s really scary.

For me, the real reason to read Philip K. Dick is to study the madness of metaphysical worlds and to avoid them.

JWH – 6/4/11

What Does it Cost to Read a Book? How Ebooks will Change Book Buying Habits.

With hardback and paperback sales sliding down the charts while ebook sales rising, it appears the new paperback book is the ebook.  Unlike the past, where readers had to wait months or years for the paperback edition to come out, the ebook and hardback are now published simultaneously.  This is great news for readers until you realize what has happened is the price of a paperback has been increased.  You get to read it sooner, but it costs more – but the whole point of mass market paperbacks was to read books for less.

It used to be a book would come out in hardback, say for $25.99, and then months later, a $14.99 trade edition would come out, and finally after sales for the trade edition tanked, the $7.99 mass market edition would appear.  The cost of reading a book depended on how soon you wanted to read it after first publication.  Now we’re seeing $9.99-$12.99 or more for the ebook, but we get to buy it right away.  On one hand this seems like a very fair price, because it’s such a savings off the hardback cost, but on the other hand, you get nothing but electrons for your money. 

When you buy a hardback you have something physical that will last, that’s collectable, or nice to look at on a shelf, and makes a great gift, or is wonderful to lend to your friends, or even sell.  Even if you didn’t read the book, you had something when you bought a book.

Most people only read a book once, and if you’re buying ebooks, all you’re really getting is to read it.  An ebook will last, but if you only read a book once, it’s more like renting the book.

By the way, from now on when I mention pricing, I’m going to use Amazon’s for sale pricing and not list.

You’d think pricing would be based on what you get for your money.  The ebook would be the cheapest, then mass market paperback, then trade paperback and then hardback, because of the production costs and materials that go into creating the book.  And sometimes this happens.  For example The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is $6.35 ebook, and $7.99 mass market paperback.  But Isaac Newton by James Gleick is $11.99 ebook and $10.20 trade paperback – WTF?  Does that mean a mass market paperback only costs $1.64 to produce and the ebook costs $1.79 more than a trade paperback to create?  I don’t think so.

James Gleick’s newest book, The Information is $17.21 for the hardback and $12.99 for the ebook.   What Amazon is asking the reader, are you willing to pay $4.22 more to have a hardback copy, or would you just prefer to read it on your Kindle for $12.99. 

The list price of The Information is $29.95, which is probably what you’d pay at a brick and mortar store.  So the publisher probably thinks $12.99 is a great bargain for the reader, with $16.96 savings.  The author is probably thinking, at what price and royalty rate do I earn the most money.  The pricing of a book is a really hard math problem, isn’t it?

Me, I’m thinking something different.  I’m thinking:  What does it cost to read a book?   Once we enter into the world of ebooks, I’m essentially paying to read the book.  I don’t own anything.  I can’t sell my copy when I’m done with it.  I can’t lend it to a friend (even though they are working on that, but it’s not like owning a real book which I could lend over and over again).  I can’t put it on the shelf for others to admire my large library of great books.  I read the book, and more than likely, I’ll move it to archive on the Kindle, or even delete it so I have less cluttered interface to deal with.

You’d also think ebooks would be priced by the word, to take into account the cost of writing and editing the book, so that a 100,000 word book would cost twice as much as a 50,000 word book.  That doesn’t happen either.  Basically publishers are charging whatever they can get, and each has their own system for pricing.  With ebooks I think they are guessing what the demand will be, and if they think it’s high, they will raise the price accordingly – so a new ebook off the press might be priced $12.99.  But if they think they can sell more copies at the $9.99 price they sell it for that.  When demand goes way down, they will think about lowering the price.  That’s all understandable.

But ebooks is changing the habits of bookworms.  I’ve always bought lots of hardbacks, and never read many of them because I sit them on my shelf thinking one day I’ll find time to read them when I retire.  I’m just not going to do that with ebooks.  I’m going to buy just before I start reading.  I’m not even sure I could save an ebook for twenty years before I got around to reading it, but there’s just no pleasure in owning a bunch of books I can’t see.

And since I don’t feel “buying” an ebook is like “owning” a book, when I see the price at Amazon for the Kindle edition, I’m going to check the library first to see if there is a copy I can “borrow” because reading a book on the Kindle feels a whole lot like borrowing a library book – I’ll only see it as I read it.

Recently Amazon announced that they were selling more ebooks than hardback and paperback books combined.  I’m not sure the world is really ready for the implications of this.  Essentially bookstores, both news and used, are the side effect of bookworms, and not book collectors.  Real, hardcore book collectors are rare compared to the ordinary everyday bookworm that consumes books.  If we bookworms can get our reading electronically, what happens to the bookstore?  And once bookworms realize they are only paying to read a book, and get past the illusion of owning books, how they judge what a fair price is for a book will change.  I’m not sure if publishers are ready for this.

Finally, the move to ebooks is changing me in other ways.  When I shop for books now I realize I was fooling myself.  I’m not going to read all those books I bought.  I don’t really need my shelves of books because I’ve learned I’m a consumer of words, and not a collector of books.  Several times lately I went to buy a book and stopped myself, because I knew if I didn’t read the book right away there is little chance I’d read it at all.  I can’t plan for future reading because I read by what I’m hungry for at the moment.  This is also why I don’t buy ebooks when I see one I want to read.  That impulse is different from the impulse for picking a book to read right now.  With a Kindle, you can finish a book and download another and start reading immediately, and since finding books electronically is so easy, why not wait until it’s time to read the next book.

The future price of a book won’t be based on what the publisher thinks the book is worth, but on the price readers are willing to pay to read it next.

JWH – 5/24/11