[119266] in Cypherpunks
Re: Digital Contracts: "Lie in X.509, Go to Jail"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold Reinhold)
Wed Oct 20 17:17:34 1999
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Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:50:40 -0400
To: "Henry B. Hotz" <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov>, Ryan Lackey <ryan@venona.com>,
Richard Lethin <lethin@reservoir.com>, brands@xs4all.nl
From: Arnold Reinhold <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>, dcsb@ai.mit.edu,
cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, cryptography@c2.netk, mac-crypto@vmeng.com
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Reply-To: Arnold Reinhold <reinhold@world.std.com>
At 9:29 AM -0700 10/20/99, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>At 7:35 AM -0700 10/20/99, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
> >You can sell them through Amazon zStores and Amazon will accept
> >credit cards for you.
>
>I've heard they take 6 months to pay the seller though, and that's if you
>threaten them with legal action. Rumor you understand. Still, paying
>attention to customer service does not mean paying attention to supplier
>service.
>
Not so. I just made my first sale through zStores and Amazon says
"The funds should appear in your account within five banking days."
That's direct deposit to my checking account. I have also been
selling books on my web site via Amazon's associates for some time
now and I get a check from Amazon every quarter, as they promised.
In the case of zStores they are competing with eBay and the supplier
IS the customer.
Robert A. Hettinga writes:
>Fortunately, (the now-)Dr. Brands holds his copyrights, and the book
>was, apparently, only printed, not published. :-).
>So, if there were a form of bearer microcash settlement, he could
>sell the book over the web on a pay-per-pageview basis if he wanted
>to. I'm sure there are several once and future cypherpunks who, by
>then, would be in the <whatever>-to-guilder currency exchange
>business and would happily oblige.
>What this does to the publishing business is, in the above example,
>not particularly Dr. Brands' problem. :-).
Right now he can sell his printed copies through Amazon just like a
big publisher. All he needs is an ISBN number and he has that. It is
a bit of a pain in that Amazon will only take a couple of copies at a
time, but if the volume is small, who cares? Alternately, he could
list the book on zStores or eBay and agree to send .ps files to
anyone who pays $10, say. He'd probably make more money than if he
went through a publisher and no trees need die. As for
pay-per-page-view, that can't make sense for a narrow interest book
like this. How much money do you think he can make doing that?
Better to give it away for free.
>What this does to the publishing business is, in the above example,
>not particularly Dr. Brands' problem. :-).
They are in deep doo-doo with or without micropayemnts.
Arnold Reinhold
