Category: Ideology

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This is Our Official Reaction to the National Emergency Library

Recently the Archive organization opened up the front-end library restrictions. This happened for a lot of reasons, mainly because the actual libraries were shut down due to the Coronavirus.

This sparked a huge debate about publishing rights and all that crap.

It’s all just noise. It’s just rights holders nagging about people having access to information. The archive states that they offer ebook versions of scanned paper books. They have a right to do that in order to preserve information. Bit rot is real. Digital obsolescence is real. Information is getting lost already, we’ve lost computer code, recordings, video games, so much stuff, and if we don’t take steps to preserve what we make it will all be gone in an instant.

Nothing is backwards compatible. Google books is preserving a massive library of information and has been attacked for the same reason. It’s not cutting into your sales, and it’s not cutting into our sales. In fact, the Archive is an actual credible library, meaning they pay their dues and we, as rights holders, receive royalties for that. They simply opened up the restrictions and many people can borrow the ebook at a single time.

When I found out about it, I actually reached out and asked the Archive how I could preserve my own stories. I thought it’d be an automated process, just give them permission or something. They gave me access to upload, it’s not that hard, but the process was very time-consuming and I have better things to do with my life than struggle with library uploads. All my stories are already available through all of the worldwide and official library systems already, and those that are not will be in there soon. I don’t have time to upload to yet another system, one that can pull my stories from their existing partners.

I think it was Quentin Tarantino who said that when you store a movie in any format, you have to put a VCR or an equivalent player in the box with it. He famously almost lost one of his early films due to an obsolete storage format, and some fan from around the world found out about it and sent him the player so he could watch it again and record it into something else.

Not everyone will have that chance. Not all creators are famous, and not all are still alive. Things like the Disney Vault, DRM (which is crap), and other platform-specific restrictions will end up in huge loss of data. Not all of it is useful, but not all of it is worthless at the same time. You never know what will become influential in the future.

And the digital age will be known as the time that we lost so much of our world’s culture.

George Saoulidis

Athens, 2020.

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Here’s What Data We Collect About You, and What We Do Not

Cracked labs

Long story short, Europe has a new law regarding personal data. You can read about its long-term impact on this Wired article.

But in simple terms, it means two things:

  • We have to explain what we do with the data we collect.
  • And we have to give people the right to be forgotten.

Now, we walk a fine line here. We’re constantly in a catch-22. On one hand, we do use all these products from the large corporations, like the Amazon platform, gmail delivery, Google Analytics. They are tools that open up immense possibilities and can make a small business rival larger ones.

But on the other hand, they do not respect your privacy. And we know that. Now, under the GDPR, these same corporations like Facebook and Google need to abide by these laws for their European customers.

You may not be located in the EU, but it doesn’t matter. These are laws and rights that should be enforced globally, and we plan to adhere to them.

So, here it is:

  • With the email data we collect, we simply use them to provide you best with our new products on the shop that you use. For example, if you’re a Kobo shopper, you’ll get an extra email telling you about some sale going on that might interest you. The mailing service does track opens and clicks per email. That’s all. We don’t have your name, we don’t have your buying habits, we don’t even know if you went through with buying the thing.
  • The mailing service we use is called Mailerlite. It’s located in the EU so all GDPR laws are followed by them as well. The service tracks opens, locations, click activity of every email subscriber. Your right-to-be-forgotten is valued and you can use it directly with them.
  • With the customer data on our shop, we simply use them to complete the transaction, which is delivering you the digital files of the products you purchased. For now the purchase asks for too much personal information, we will soon limit that to the bare essentials. Our Checkout process now asks for just the email and username.
  • The right-to-be-forgotten can be used at any time, you can simply email us at mythographystudios@gmail.com and request to be purged from all databases.
  • We do not use DRM so your habits cannot be tracked by us or the corporations that we are partnered with.
  • This website uses cookies that can see whether you’re a repeat visitor or not.
  • This website uses Google Analytics that can anonymously track a lot of data about you, even things like screen resolution and operating system. There’s no real way to turn this off and we just use the service to see from which country people come from. (Update April 2018. GA has complied to GDPR and has offered a tool with which we can delete all stored data about a user.)
  • The outgoing affiliate links to stores such as Amazon contain a 7-day tracking cookie that does track your buying habits and gives all your customer information to Amazon. We have no access to that data. You can avoid that by browsing on the store by yourself through a search of your own and locating the product.
  • The payment gateway Paypal does not send your personal data or credit card details to us when you complete a purchase through the store. That said, they do track everything you do themselves and you should contact them if you want to know more.
  • The Facebook Oauth login is there for ease of use. It connects a user and allows him/her to login with us. The connection doesn’t transfer personal details to us from your Facebook profile. But Facebook tracks all such activity, so again, take it up with them.

That’s all up to the point of writing this post, we’ll update it with others as they come up.

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I Give You Permission To Have a Black Achilles In Your Story

If the script doesn’t contain at least one BBC joke, I’ll be sorely disappointed for a perfectly wasted opportunity.

Here’s something that should put your mind at ease:

I, George Saoulidis, give you permission to have a black/asian/latinx/whatever Achilles in your story. I also retroactively give you permission to have any possible combination of skin colour/sexuality/hero name from the Greek epics.

How the fuck can I possibly give permission for something like that, you might ask?

Exactly.

That’s my point. The same way that it’s nobody’s business to give you permission to do something like this, nobody can stop you from doing it either.

The Greek epics do not belong to me, you, or any other Greek in the world. They belong to everybody. So much so that the words “public domain” are too puny to describe them. They’re infused into our culture, shaped the very pathways in our brains. They have inspired endless creators for literal millennia (pause and let that sink in for a moment.)

So, do you want to take a popular myth and make it your own? Are you inspired by Odysseus or Achilles or Zeus and want to see yourself in their shoes, and you also happen to not be white and male? Do you want to cosplay as them, write about them, make films and games and VR experiences about them? Do you want to create and have found inspiration in the most influential and badass mythology of all time?

By all means, go for it.

That won’t mean that I’ll like your story. It won’t mean I’ll spend money on your story. If it objectively sucks, I’ll happily tear you a new one. Or worse, I’ll just ignore it. But if the story is good, if your vision is great, if your interpretation is modern and touches the souls of those around you, then go for it.

Nobody’s stopping you. Not me. Certainly not Homer.

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This Year The Nobel Goes To Science Fiction

Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel prize in literature this year, and we’re ecstatic.

Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Why?

Well, the reason is that some people think that genre fiction is somehow less than literary, as if the injection of a fantastical or a technological element somehow lessens the impact of a perfect story.

Here’s the article about his Nobel:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/05/kazuo-ishiguro-wins-the-nobel-prize-in-literature

And here’s Ishiguro’s opinions about transhumanism:

https://futurism.com/kazuo-ishiguro-soon-we-will-be-able-to-create-humans-who-are-superior-to-other-humans/

Ishiguro, like Heinlein before him with Stranger In A Strange Land, has proven that you can talk about love, you can talk about science fiction, you can talk about mortality and make it shine.

Start reading Ishiguro’s books and see for yourself.

What I really like about him is a tidbit of a belief that I have injected into my own stories, this quote below:

Like the saying goes, history is written by the victors. But history is rewritten every day, in every tiny event, in any major revelation. Steve Jobs was said to ignore facts that didn’t match his beliefs.

And people, when they tell themselves that something happened a certain way, they alter reality for themselves. Because it’s impossible to be truly objective, you can only be subjective and hope for the best.

The God Complex Universe is a warped version of events, a splintered timeline branching out from 2009, in which people have told themselves how certain events happened and have affected the future.

And when a powerful billionaire tells himself that something happened a certain way, everybody bends to his will eventually.

As for Kazuo Ishiguro, we can state for certain that he did it by himself, he won the Nobel prize fair and square. No Muses were dispatched.

Honest.

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In Honor of Stanislav Petrov, the Man Who Single-Handedly Saved the World From Nuclear War

You might not have known his actions until only yesterday when the media picked up the story, but he has been a legend all my life. He has been dead since May but unfortunately we only learned about it yesterday.

Petrov didn’t blindly follow orders. Petrov used his brain. Be like Petrov.

Stanislav Petrov was the officer in place back in 1983, during the Cold War. He had an early-warning system in front of him, cutting edge at the time, and a button.

Alarms blared in his face, the system showed that an attack was coming at his beloved motherland. He had no reason to disbelieve the system.

He had orders, specific ones: If the alarm blares, press the button.

Retaliate.

Start a nuclear war.

For some reason, it didn’t make sense. The data was clearly there, there were nuclear missiles incoming and he had seconds to decide.

It just didn’t sit well with his gut.

So he didn’t press the button.

Disregarding his orders, disobeying his superiors, he risked becoming a traitor to his country because he felt that THIS WAS STUPID.

So he let the minutes pass.

And the missiles did not hit.

The man’s story is as simple as it is important. I have always been inspired by his actions that day. Imagine what would have happened if another man had been assigned that day. Imagine if the incredibly stupid status of Mutually Assured Destruction had taken place.

Imagine the world we would be living in right now, if saner heads hadn’t prevailed.

Yes, we would be alive. Contrary to what movies portray, it’s not easy to wipe out humanity. We’re like cockroaches in that regard. But what kind of life would it be? With half the world contaminated by radiation, with mutated stillborns and deadly fruit and meat?

Imagine that for a moment. Thank Petrov for the pretty little world you live in right now.

I’ve always had his story in the back of my mind. That monumental decision, that button. Sure, the button probably had a cap on and a keycard and some convoluted security protocols with calling the superiors, but the truth was that the assigned officer had the authorization to press it and fire the nuclear missiles. And being the science fiction writer that I am, I of course always wondered what the worst case scenario might be.

So I wrote it down. The series of ‘Press Any Key’ are zany scenarios of people who foolishly did press the button and faced the consequences.

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REBLOG: We created our gods, and we can control them

This article first appeared in Standard Examiner. Reblogged here because it’s so brilliant.

By E. KENT WINWARD, special to the Standard-Examiner

“Once upon a time”… we told stories, stories that explained our world, how it works, and taught us how to behave and not behave. The ancient Greeks told stories about their gods. The almighty Zeus hurled thunderbolts, while Hera chased Zeus around, trying to catch him in the act of wooing a nymph or two. Athena protected warriors in battle, while Ares incited them.

Aphrodite, goddess of love, wreaked havoc with human lives, just as love continues to do today. Mercury was the gods’ “runner,” while Apollo drove his chariot across the sky until dusk. Schools wisely teach Greek mythology to adolescents, because the Greek gods usually end up acting like a Mount Olympus high school.

Zeus, Athena and other ancient Greek gods and deities on a building at the National University of Athens, Greece. Image by: Dimitrios.

Teaching Greek mythology is also a fantastic way to get smartphone-wielding teenagers to question how human beings could be so gullible: “Did those old Greeks really believe some cranky guy in the clouds was hurling thunderbolts, or a chariot drove the sun through its rotation?” But even as we ridicule the old beliefs, we love listening to the stories because they entertain us and carry an essence of truth within the obvious fictions. Lightning strikes are capricious. The sun’s rotation seems like a benevolent force: life-giving, light-giving, and reliable. We think about how silly those toga-wearing ancients’ beliefs were, and yet we continue to build our human societies around fictional narratives, even today.

My job as an attorney is not that far removed from being the Oracle of Delphi. I interpret the fictional story of “the law” and enlighten those who come with a query. The law is a story we have collectively created as a society. We believe in the story enough that we enforce the story with our collective force, but the fact remains that it’s a story we’ve made up and written down. The law is a story that serves a purpose — it makes sure we’re all on the same page.

The story of the law is fictional, but as with all fiction, many things are true. We have endowed our fictional legal story with godlike powers, and the law has responded in kind by giving us our very own pantheon of new and powerful gods. Instead of requesting answers from Apollo at Delphi, we consult the Oracle via our search bar, and the great god Google answers us. In the real world of concrete, tangible things, how is Google different from Apollo? “Is this mole cancerous? The Oracle told me it could be.”

We believe in our new gods so much, we allow them to sue and be sued in courts of law. The smartphone gods, Apple and Samsung, duke it out for supremacy, intellectual property, and credit from the masses, and humanity is divided into groups of believers. Are you an ardent follower of the one true Apple, or are you an Android heretic?

Have you heard the new commandment from the great god, Amazon? “True believers of Amazon shall buy Prime. Appeal at your desktop altar, or petition your prayer phone. Pay your indulgence, and with free two-day shipping, ye shall receive.” (Just a quick side note: in naming the company, Bezos even opted for a reference to a collection of powerful female Greek demigods, including the modernized comic book goddess, Wonder Woman.)

And like the Greeks, we have countless demigods running around, incorporated into our modern language and commerce, and we often don’t bother to rename them. The god Nike brings promises of victory; Ajax wasn’t a god, but a mighty warrior. The Trojans had a mighty wall that kept out the swarms, at least until the wall was covertly circumvented. And open Pandora’s box and along with musical wonders, you will almost certainly find unwanted ads.

Trademarks, intellectual property and corporations are all legal fictions. For that matter, the Constitution itself is the ultimate fiction: an agreed-upon set of rules that finds its strength in our collective commitment to believe in its underlying truths. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and many more, are our new pantheon, and they remain just as fictional as any Greek god. Humanity created these powerful forces from nothing more than words in a law book, stories, and a collective belief in the stories. If we look at the almost miraculous gifts from our corporate gods, we believe they were created with intelligent design — our intelligent design.

But we need to remember that, just like the ancient Greeks, we created these gods to serve specific functions, and we have the ability to tell them how to behave through our collective story (our laws), including what powers we endow them with, as well as their limitations and weaknesses.

If we don’t like how our stories are ending, especially because of the behavior of our gods, we must rewrite the story so that our “once upon a time” ends with us living “happily ever after.”

E. Kent Winward is an Ogden attorney. Twitter: @KentWinward.

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Summer Of 2016 Is The Time We Went Full Cyberpunk

People said this picture summed up the events of this week perfectly.

agazeuswnzaiynvrxrzi
It would be funny if it wasn’t so bad.

I say it marked an entire era.

The pure irony behind it is staggering. This is:

  1. A grainy, smartphone shot
  2. Uploaded on Twitter (A massive equalizing communication tool)
  3. Of someone playing an augmented reality game (Pokemon Go)
  4. In front of a line of riot police
  5. Because a person was killed by the police while a woman streamed the whole thing on Facebook Live
  6. And because a police drone was deliberately used to blow up and kill another alleged offender during a standoff.

I mean, if someone had written that story in a novel somewhere, they’d have called it far-fetched. And this is real, it’s happening now.

Notice I didn’t say “a black man” on point 5. I said a person. Because that person was killed in front of a woman and a small child, and that just shouldn’t happen. But the dialogue on this is enormous, I don’t want to touch on that.

Yes, this photo is a chapter-break in our history. We have a full-scale dystopia posing as utopia, civil rights violated, technology both liberating and influencing ourselves, our minds, our decisions.

I worked a bit on a couple of news channels, and have a unique perspective on what things mass media want to show or not. I can’t actually write examples, but trust me on this: The media shows what it wants to. But you already knew that, deep down.

Also, with technologies like Live-U (multi carrier video broadcast from a mobile unit through any and all available cellphone companies) and Youtube, and Twitter and every person carrying a computer in his pocket, media has become more instantaneous. If the shot is there, the news channels will want it. A news crew carries top-of-the-line equipment worth easily 60-70 thousand euros, but if a kid on his iPhone got a better shot of the news-story, the news channel will broadcast the latter. Doesn’t matter if it’s shaky, doesn’t matter if it’s grainy, dark, out of focus. It will play, because it is valuable as news.

One day we had some faulty equipment and in our frenzy, we joked about having the weather guy just live-stream through Skype.

Then we got the go ahead, and we just put him through just like that. Fingers crossed and praying the line won’t drop.

And if you don’t care what we do in tiny little Greece, here’s the same event in USA. “Twitter’s Periscope Becomes a Lifeline for Democrats After Republicans Turn Off C-SPAN.”

But it’s not just news. Our lives, what we care about, the events we like are getting online right now. Periscope and Facebook are becoming our allies (now that’s ironic) in world events. Facebook’s safety check feature worked despite Turkey’s blackout, and band Radiohead is helping fans live-stream their concerts.

There is no conclusion to this post. Read the linked articles and make up your own.

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What Is Cyberpunk Anyway?

I’ve happily stumbled upon this article on what Cyberpunk is and what will be. Which I will happily cannibalize for a few quotes on this post.

Cyberpunk does allow you to say a story of, perhaps Celebrity Singers and Biker Amazons 🙂 (credit Petri Rahkola)

It gets a bit academic, and I think the subject doesn’t need that much analysis but I like some of the points. I’ve even had a realization:

A kitsch self-parody

For all its outward cynicism, cyberpunk is often wilfully naive; conspiracies are unravelled, the lone maverick is redeemed, the lone aberration at the head of the system is taken out and all is well again. For all its gritty imagery, this dissonantly contradicts reality. Indeed it is questionable whether cyberpunk is an entirely dystopian genre. For the oligarch-villains occupying the luxury penthouses and boardrooms in which boss battles occur, this is utopia. The ubiquity of scaffolding in the genre’s platform games suggests there is even a building boom. It is a great time to be an engineer. Even for the average citizen, perhaps things aren’t that bad; there are plenty of exotic street-food outlets and sports to enjoy (you can follow the blood and chrome progress of Brutal Deluxe in the Bitmap Brothers’ 2007 Speedball series). Escape to off-world colonies, as we are told repeatedly by advertising neo-blimps, is an option for the rich and genetically sound. Some of the tyrannies are fairly relative. In X-Kaliber 2097 (1994), the reign of the warlord Raptor means “there are no more jobs to go to,” echoing the current fear that automation might render us all unemployable. “Well,” we might say, “thank god for that.” Even when the apocalypse beckons or has already happened (the release of the planet-decimating biochemical Lucifer-Alpha in 1988’s Snatcher, for example), it is survivable.

I like that. Yes, deep down cyberpunk is wish fulfillment, does have a happy ending, the corporations do lose. Vices are plentiful, humanity has far-out options for life extension and survival, heroes are cool and larger-than-life.

My kind of cyberpunk is rather light. All the tropes are there, but they are a backdrop to character and plot. Mega corporations crush people and effectively become worshiped, but we see the casual interactions and the family issues. Not the sweeping socio-economic ones, which frankly, would make a boring read.

 

Following the maxim of its baptist William Gibson that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” cyberpunk has always been a scrapyard, with pieces of what is to come scattered through the past and present. Indeed, its saving grace is that it recognizes, as other futurology often fails to, that the future will be a collage and it will be considerably older than the present.

That scrapyard is what I try to put in my own stories. A bit of Greek mythology, a bit of plausible technology, a narrative that draws you in, and some action to keep it exciting. Because, make no mistake, violence is at the cybernetic heart of cyberpunk.

 

The fear and power of plugging in and losing our humanity in the process, continually evident in cyberpunk, is again not new; we find precedents in Descartes’ Demon and Plato’s Cave. There is also a certain guilty pleasure in immersing yourself in a videogame world that warns you of the dangers of immersing yourself in videogame worlds. The early game Interphase (1989), by The Assembly Line, deftly equates virtual reality with dream-space, a crossover we will no doubt increasingly see with advances in VR, AI and augmented reality. At that time such developments seemed the stuff of dreams, but they are incrementally becoming more real. In Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs (2014), the hacking abilities of the lead character Aiden Pearce suggest that the human brain, the city and cyberspace are now interwoven networks. To accumulate great power in the latter two is to potentially wield power over the first.

My main issue with VR is that one. I too have been brought up with Neuromancer, and Matrix more recently (yes I said recently, shuddup), but I don’t think VR is what we thought it would become in those days. I firmly believe, that instead of diving inside the computer world, we will superimpose the digital word over the physical one. A Shared Augmented Reality, giving us information and allowing us to interact with the digital equivalent of the physical objects. In my works, I call it the veil, a shared overlay of public data. For example, when people look at you with SAR glasses or maybe someday contact lenses, they’ll see your public facebook and twitter profile, all available for interaction.

Anyway, the God Complex takes place in a cyberpunk world, with a few metaphysical elements and a lot of Greek lore. The latest work and the first published novel is “The Girl Who Twisted Fate’s Arm,” and you can find it on Amazon:

 

When the daughter of Greece’s premier singer fails to sing as expected, she finds out about a biker group of women. But will she manage to find the elusive Orosa, the bikers’ motovlogger, when all she has to go on are random street-sightings of criminal behaviour, when her family is opposed to her following this path and when her dad’s employer wants to keep her as she was for marketing purposes?

Do you want to know what’s next for the voiceless Aura? Do you wanna meet the Amazons? Then read this coming of age story in a world where fate is quite literal.

Read through the page on our site for descriptions and other places where it’s available.

 

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Who Are You?

Hello you. Yes, you. You are a Mythographer. But who are you exactly?

Raise hands all who want to change the world.
All who want to change the world, raise hands.

They say that when you write you need to envision your ideal reader. To come up with the traits that make up the perfect person for whom who are writing and who will judge, love, treasure your books and anxiously wait for more.

So I decided to come up with my ideal reader. Soon to become viewer as well, because we have some movie projects in post-production.

I will call you a Mythographer, because “ideal reader” is clunky.

Now, this is not in any way perfect and I expect things to change. But I want to give it a try at least.

First of all, you are European.

And by European I don’t necessarily mean coming from Europe, but rather having the qualities many Europeans have. You are multilingual, at least bilingual. You appreciate history and culture because you come from a country which borders people with similar powerful cultural histories. You are an inventor, you want to know how that thingamajiggy works! You are an explorer, even if your life circumstances allow it only via reading. The explorer trait stuck with me when viewing the Rosetta mission update, in which a scientist said that Europeans are explorers at heart. It’s true.

Secondly, you like science fiction.

You don’t necessarily have a science degree, but you love reading about space and lightsabers and aliens and marvelous machines. You love the characters who live in such a world daily, fighting towards a higher goal. Honestly, our myths are not that hard sci-fi (which means very plausible and with well defined scientific limitations), so it should be easy for a layman to follow most of the tech involved. But there is always a priority to make the science fiction make sense, so usually it involves real, hard sci-fi.

You have a critical mind.

You might notice that a prominent feature of our work has to do with gods. In case it’s not clear from the general “God Complex” title we have slapped all over everything, these are false gods. They think they are gods. They delude themselves, their megalomania being the driving force behind every story. And so, the theme is “Corporations get a god complex” but really, to tell a human story we must focus on humans. So, what can a man with a god complex do, when he has the power of a corporation? Think about it. Just like “1984”, this is a warning, not a manual.

You do not get hung up in genre. 

Our works are genre-hopping by default. One is a thriller for quarter-life crisis, the other is a young adult mystery, the next is an action bloody mess. They are all encompassed by the general theme of science fiction, light cyberpunk and Greek mythology. Also, something that surprises many people is that we are also doing video production. We have in store a few short movies and planning to complete a feature length movie soon. We have an idea for a comic book if we find the right artist. I know some people say, “Oh, I read only murder-mysteries” and things like that. You are not a mythographer then, sorry. Move along.

You want to change the world.

You are a creator, a maker, an artist, a writer, anything. He who does not create, only destroys. That is my personal mantra and I believe that my ideal reader will think like that as well.

You do not mind a healthy dose of  blood and sperm.

Yes, you read that correctly. Ancient Greek drama is bloody and sexy as hell. Modern classics are all filled with healthy doses of sex and violence. Everything must be in moderation. Profanity is a part of life. A character getting shot in the leg and yelling “Gosh damn it!” is unrealistic and comical. A person, when hurt, will swear. A lot. A fuck-ton. If you take out the violence and blood from a story that should have them front and centre, you end up with a downward spiral like the Die-Hard pentalogy.

You want to support the type of entertainment you love.

We don’t mind if you pirate one thing, or gather only the freebies during our many promotions. We need you at some point to say, here, I like what you are doing, take my $2.99 for the next thing. Also ideally, you need to write a quick review at anyplace you prefer. It will help greatly. Because, in the end, if you don’t support what you love, no one will. There will be no more coming of the thing you love. Every time you buy a book from us, you make the next one happen.

This is by no means exhausting, it’s just a little thought exercise. If by any change you are a mythographer but are very different from the things I write here, go ahead and prove me wrong in the comments.

If you want to join us, get on the mailing list to get your mythographer’s stamp of approval.

I Want to Be a Mythographer

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Our projects will always be DRM-free

At Mythography we create mainly digital goods, so that is a decision that is not taken lightly.

DRM does not work as advertised, and results in a poor customer experience.

Piracy is of course a big issue, but we believe that people who want to support a project will happily buy the original. We do that all the time, we buy the original copy and support the creators.

We do not advocate piracy, nor are we against digital goods protection. We have been burned by DRM as consumers many times and we do not want a single one of our customers to feel the same way. DRM creates issues even with legitimate uses, transferring your original digital goods to a new device, reading the same book on your brother’s tablet, backing up the stuff you bought on your computer to do a format, not having access to workshop UGC on Steam etc. Even being offline on a trip or during a move is troublesome.

We are not lobbying against DRM like these guys do for example in their informative site, but we like the fact that Amazon has given us the choice as publishers to implement DRM or not in our products.

We are simply saying that our choice will always be DRM-free.

If you’re looking for more publishing houses that advocate DRM-free, Baen Books is one of the biggest with the same ideology. You bought it, you own it.

2016 UPDATE. After the Nook store closing in the UK, there are people who will see content that they have paid for simply vanish. Steps are being made to ensure people get moved to another service, as described in this article, but this shows how flawed the DRM system is.

2016 UPDATE #2. We have partnered up with the amazing Streetlib team from Italy, for expanded Europe distribution. Their DRM is “soft,” just a watermark that never prohibits a user from copying his files into another of his devices. They assure us it is so and they seem to agree with us, but if anything changes we will make sure to address that.

2016 UPDATE #3. Regarding Audible. Before we get called out because of the Audible DRM, we need to explain ourselves on the audiobook issue. Audiobook production costs a few thousand, and Amazon’s ACX helps streamline that expensive process and reduce some of the costs through exclusivity. We hope the DRM it enforces on Audible products is not too damaging to the user experience. But you have to understand, that there is really no alternative to audiobook production and distribution. The only choices for now are either go with DRM and ACX, or simply not do audiobooks. We have made a decision to go with it on this particular channel, and are looking for any alternatives that might show up in the future.

2018 UPDATE #4. Streetlib has allowed even the watermark removed, so we’re going DRM-free even from that.

2018 UPDATE #5. After talking with our partners, the content provided through libraries does have DRM enabled. That allows “lending” of an ebook for a limited time, it gets disabled after the lending period is finished. That is the only way for libraries to enforce the distribution of ebooks through the system, giving out one copy per book only at the same time. Obviously this is a form of limiting DRM and it falls into the category we dislike, but it’s utilitarian.

2018 UPDATE #6. In this never-ending battle against this stupidity, Google Play books now shows our titles as DRM protected. However, our aggregator called PublishDrive assures us that it is simply a watermark, called soft-DRM.

2018 UPDATE #7. PublishDrive has removed all forms of DRM from our titles.