E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (summer reading list txt) 📖

People pay for content if the free

information available to them is either (a) insufficient or

(b) overwhelming. People will buy a book if the author’s Web

site provides only a few tantalizing excerpts. But they are

equally likely to buy the book if its entire full text content

is available online and overwhelms them. Packaged and indexed

information carries a premium over the same information in

bulk. Consumer willingness to pay for content seems to decline

if the amount of content provided falls between these two

extremes. They feel sated and the need to acquire further

information vanishes. Additionally, free content must really

be free. People resent having to pay for free content, even if

the currency is their personal data.

(5) Frills and bonuses. There seems to be a weak, albeit

positive link between willingness to pay for content and

“members only” or “buyers only” frills, free add-ons, bonuses,

and free maintenance. Free subscriptions, discount vouchers

for additional products, volume discounts, add-on, or

“piggyback” products - all seem to encourage sales.

Qualitative free content is often perceived by consumers to be

a BONUS - hence its enhancing effect on sales.

(6) Credibility. The credibility and positive track record of

both content creator and vendor are crucial factors. This is

where testimonials and reviews come in. But their effect is

particularly strong if the potential consumer finds himself in

agreement with them. In other words, the motivating effect of

a testimonial or a review is amplified when the customer can

actually browse the content and form his or her own opinion.

Free content encourages a latent dialog between the potential

consumer and actual consumers (through their reviews and

testimonials).

(7) Money back warranties or guarantees. These are really

forms of free content. The consumer is safe in the knowledge

that he can always return the already consumed content and get

his money back. In other words, it is the consumer who decides

whether to transform the content from free to paid by not

exercising the money back guarantee.

(8) Relative pricing. Information available on the Web is

assumed to be inherently inferior and consumers expect pricing

to reflect this “fact”. Free content is perceived to be even

more shoddy. The coupling of free (“cheap”, “gimcrack”)

content with paid content serves to enhance the RELATIVE VALUE

of the paid content (and the price people are willing to pay

for it). It is like pairing a medium height person with a

midget - the former would look taller by comparison.

(9) Price rigidity. Free content reduces the price elasticity

of paid content. Normally, the cheaper the content - the more

it sells. But the availability of free content alters this

simple function. Paid content cannot be too cheap or it will

come to resemble the free alternative (“shoddy”, “dubious”).

But free content is also a substitute (however partial and

imperfect) to paid content. Thus, paid content cannot be

priced too high - or people will prefer the free alternative.

Free content, in other words, limits both the downside and the

upside of the price of paid content.

There are many other factors which determine the interaction

of free and paid content. Culture plays an important role as

do the law and technology. But as long as the field is not

subject to a research agenda the best we can do is observe,

collate - and guess.

This article is, of course, free content…:o))

 

Copyright Law and Free Online Scholarship

An Interview with Peter Suber

By: Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

 

The battle between owners of content and its users extends to

all corners of the publishing world. Following a brief period

of enthusing about “synergies”, most media companies, content

aggregators, content providers - movie and recording studios,

publishers, news organizations - came to view the digitization

of content as a threat rather than an opportunity. In an

effort to protect their intellectual property rights,

publishing and recording corporations have fostered the

radicalization of copyright law (mainly in the DMCA - the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act). They have also retarded the

fair use of copyrighted material and the rights and

traditional privileges enjoyed by content users. This was

achieved mainly by incorporating “rights management” or “asset

management” technologies into readers of digital records (such

as e-books). These technologies prevented users from copying

the files they purchased, from converting them to audio, from

lending them to others (as they would a print book), and from

reading them on more than one device.

 

Consider, for instance, scholarly publishing. It is in the

throes of a protracted crisis.

 

The price of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals has skyrocketed

in the last three decades, often way out of the limited means

of libraries, universities, individual scientists and

scholars. A “scholarly divide” has opened between the haves

(the negligible minority of academic institutions with rich

endowments and well-heeled corporations) and the haves not

(all the others). Paradoxically, due to rising costs, access

to authoritative and authenticated knowledge has declined as

the number of professional journals has proliferated. This is

not to mention the long (and often crucial) delays in

publishing research results and the shoddy work of many under-paid and over-worked peer reviewers.

 

The Internet was suppose to change all that. Originally, a

computer network for the exchange of (restricted and open)

research results among scientists and academics in

participating institutions - it was supposed to provide

instant publishing, instant access, and instant gratification.

It has delivered only partially. Preprints of academic papers

are often placed online by their eager authors and subjected

to peer scrutiny. But this haphazard publishing cottage

industry did nothing to dethrone the print incumbents and

their avaricious pricing.

 

Peter Suber has both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D. He is a

professor of philosophy at Earlham College, where he also

teaches law and computer science. This qualifies him uniquely

to tackle the issue of free online scholarship, which cannot

be divorced from the legal intricacies of copyright law. In

the last 11 months, he has been writing and publishing the

weekly the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter.

 

Apart from writing the FOS Newsletter, Suber is working to

realize FOS on several fronts. He is a consultant to the Open

Society Institute on FOS issues. He is the general editor of

the Web’s foremost philosophy search engine Hippias and co-editor of Noesis, both available online free of charge. He

serves on the Committee on Philosophy and Computers of the

American Philosophical Association. He is on the board of

governors of the International Consortium for the Advancement

of Academic Publishing. With Tony Beavers, He is working on

software to collect, index, and search the literature at

distributed online journal sites and text archives.

 

Q: In “Revolt of the Poor”, I wrote: “If the rights to

intellectual property were not defined and enforced,

commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks

associated with publishing books, recording records, and

preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people

will have suffered because they will have found no way to make

their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the

public which pays the price of piracy.” Is there any proven

connection between the enforcement (or even the existence) of

intellectual property rights - and the preponderance of

creativity and/or of media entrepreneurship (publishing,

etc.)?

 

A: I don’t have the relevant expertise to answer for music,

software, general literature, or even scholarly books. But

for scholarly journal articles (the main focus of the FOS

movement), there seems to be very little or no connection

between copyright and the productivity and creativity of

authors. I say this for two reasons. First, scholarly

authors tend to transfer copyright in their articles to the

journals that publish them. (Most scholars don’t realize that

they could probably negotiate a different arrangement, but

that’s another issue.) For most journal articles, then,

copyright protects publishers, not authors. But this hasn’t

stopped scholars from writing journal articles. Second,

authors of scholarly journal articles are not paid for them,

whether they transfer copyright or not. Authors consent to

this practice and willingly submit their articles to journals

that don’t pay for submissions. Scholarly authors are paid by

their institutions, not by readers, which frees them from the

market in deciding what to write. They are rewarded by making

a contribution to knowledge and advancing their own careers,

not by cash. Hence, the “unauthorized copying” prohibited by

copyright law doesn’t deprive these authors of money, but only

readers. Copyright law (at least when used in the traditional

way to restrict access to paying customers) gets in the way.

Widespread copying with or without permission would give

authors of journal articles more readers and more impact,

without depriving them of any revenue. But copyright law

generally prohibits this kind of copying. Even though this

limit on free distribution is contrary to their interests, it

clearly hasn’t deterred authors from writing more articles.

 

Having said that, let me add that the FOS movement doesn’t

need to abolish or even reform copyright law. If authors of

scholarly journal articles retain the copyright to their

articles (transferring only, say, the right of first print

publication, and perhaps some other rights), then authors can

consent to widespread copying and finally let copyright

advance their interests rather than those of publishers. In

particular, authors could consent to put their writings on the

internet without any financial, legal, or technical barriers

to access. This is what the FOS movement is trying to

achieve, and it can all happen within the boundaries of

existing copyright law.

 

Q: Could you describe the crisis in scholarly publishing?

 

A: The main problem is that the prices of journals (both print

and online journals) have risen faster than inflation and

faster than library budgets for three decades. Libraries cope

by canceling subscriptions, or by taking from their book

budgets to enlarge their serials (journal) budgets, or both.

One result is that even researchers at the wealthiest

institutions do not have access to all the journals they need

for their research. Or, from the other end of the author-reader relationship, authors of journal articles cannot reach

all the readers who would benefit from the results of their

research. When research is slowed and obstructed in this way,

so are all the benefits of research, such as new medicines.

 

Another way to put the underlying economic problem is that the

huge savings that can be achieved by publishing to the

internet haven’t yet done anything to bring down the costs of

scholarly journals. One reason is that most journals still

have print editions whose costs are unaffected by the internet

revolution. Another reason is that the online editions of

most journals use expensive software to permit access to

paying subscribers and block access to everyone else. The

internet is only a revolutionary medium of nearly costless

dissemination for those who don’t manage subscription lists

and don’t try to distinguish between authorized and

unauthorized readers.

 

There are other dimensions to the scholarly publishing

crisis. One is that journal publishers (like software

publishers) are moving beyond copyright law to licensing

contracts give them even more protection. Publishers don’t

let libraries “buy” or “own” copies of electronic journals,

but only “license” them. As a result, libraries aren’t

assured that they have long-term access rights to these

journals, they have diminished rights to lend their copies,

and their patrons have diminished fair-use rights. They are

getting much less and paying much more.

 

If there were no alternative, that would be one thing. But

there is an alternative to the near monopoly concentration in

the scholarly publishing industry. There is an alternative to

harsh licensing contracts. And above all, the internet gives

us an alternative method of dissemination that widens

distribution and lowers cost at the same time. Even if there

were no crisis, the opportunity afforded by the internet would

be too beautiful to ignore.