Tuesday News: Charging readers to comment, Patreon done with VAT, authors and social media, and Melanie’s Marvelous Measles

JanetPublishing NewsAmazon / commenting / crowdfunding / EU / fan-fiction / fandoms / Literary fiction / Patreon / paywall / reviews / social media / trolling / VAT13 Comments

Join the Conversation on Tablet – Although I think this is a disastrous move, I’m really curious to see how Tablet Magazine’s decision to charge its readers to comment will play out. That’s right – for a mere $2 a day, $18 a month, and $180 a year, you can buy the right to comment on Tablet’s site, all in the name of civil discourse. Because trolls aren’t going to pay to troll? I think they’re underestimating the dedication some trolls have to trolling. And if you can’t afford to comment, you don’t have anything important to say?

But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, sometimes allowing destructive—and, often, anonymous—individuals to drag it down with invective (and worse). Instead of shutting off comments altogether (as some outlets are starting to do), we are going to try something else: Ask those of you who’d like to comment on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. The donation rates are small because we are not looking to make money, but instead to try to create a standard of engagement likely to turn off many, if not most, of the worst offenders. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place. –Tablet Magazine

Patreon to Europe on #VATMOSS: “Not our problem, mate.” – So I haven’t been following this issue with Patreon and VAT, but apparently Patreon has indicated that it’s passing the work involved in collecting VAT on to its users, both those who solicit funding from European donors and those who donate. Specifically, “People who use Patreon as creators to share digital output within the EU will be personally responsible for calculating and processing VATMOSS taxes for each and every patron.” This will affect those who use Patreon for the creation of comics, music, ebooks, videos, and other digital content and subscriptions. It used to be that VAT was calculated based on the location of the seller, but as of January 1st, assessment shifted to the location of the customer. VAT is already causing a great deal of confusion among authors who self-publish on Amazon and sell in Europe, and it’s become incredibly unpopular very quickly. Here’s a pretty good explanation of the changes that occurred at the beginning of the year that have led to the current mess. 

Patreon is, to the best of of my knowledge, the first major platform provider outside the EU to use VATMOSS as leverage to call time on Europe. They have not barred European creators and patrons from using the service, of course; they don’t have to. By stating that they have no responsibility for complying with or enforcing European law, they pass the full burden on to those directly affected by it. It’s a bold and necessary move, and one which may raise eyebrows at the EU. Those eyebrows frankly need to be raised. But as with everything in VATMOSS, this geopolitical chess game takes out the pawns first. –Idea15

What Is an @uthor? – Although the prose style of this piece is a little too densely academic, and some members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) are a few years out of date, some of the issues raised here are pretty interesting. Specially, the author, University of Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum, looks at how literary criticism (and fan culture, for that matter) may be changing now that authors are using social media and actively engaging in interpretive exchanges about their own work. Kirschenbaum uses William Gibson as an example, looking at the way “authority” is exercised by the author when he or she is a living presence in the discussions around his or her work. This piece really made me wish Derrida were still alive, because I think he would have been fascinated by and deeply engaged in discussions about Twitter and social media as it’s developed over the past decade.

But there is also a new kind of archive taking shape. Today you cannot write seriously about contemporary literature without taking into account myriad channels and venues for online exchange. That in and of itself may seem uncontroversial, but I submit we have not yet fully grasped all of the ramifications. We might start by examining the extent to which social media and writers’ online presences or platforms are reinscribing the authority of authorship. The mere profusion of images of the celebrity author visually cohabitating the same embodied space as us, the abundance of first-person audio/visual documentation, the pressure on authors to self-mediate and self-promote their work through their individual online identities, and the impact of the kind of online interactions described above (those Woody Allenesque “wobbles”) have all changed the nature of authorial presence. Authorship, in short, has become a kind of media, algorithmically tractable and traceable and disseminated and distributed across the same networks and infrastructure carrying other kinds of previously differentiated cultural production. –The Los Angeles Review of Books

Melanie’s Marvelous Measles – I saw this book mentioned on NPR, I think, given the current discussions about measles and vaccines, but I didn’t realize it was so, uh, heavily reviewed on Amazon. Just don’t read any of these reviews with a beverage anywhere near your computer. –Amazon

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet