It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable.
On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: > > I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are > collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function > of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization > brought about by information technologies. > > Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized > musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last > dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into > some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But > my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local > will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and > micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse. > Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or > $100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a > band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and > use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form > of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my > local cosmologist over a pint? > > Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX > exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested > consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in > a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services. > Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for > high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes > one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the > type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of > heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find > it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-) > > > peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM: >> At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder >> where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new >> books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I >> am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would >> be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and >> maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks >> require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the >> universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes >> and students covering costs anyway. >> So I don't get the views being expressed here. > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org "She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret." Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
