I was just having lunch with my uncle, who self-published a book on pre-WW1 submarine construction in the North Pacific region of the USA (Seattle etc.). He shared about his dealings with Amazon, but more generally with publishers witnessing the digital revolution. I did his website:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060505050706/beneaththesurface.biz/front.html For those who don't know, Amazon now has a huge printing press and any book that goes out of copyright is fair game to mass produce and sell as new i.e. hot off the press, on demand with your order (no need to build inventory, the hardcopy is custom generated, and in such a way as to still make a profit at $10 a pop -- most traditional publishers can't compete at these prices). I come from the software world, where open source licenses flourished because software defines working machines, and people are always wanting to add bells and whistles. With other authored works, such as novels, it's not the same situation, as you do *not* necessarily want other authors interleaving their thoughts and characters in your work of art. That'd be defacement, like spray-painting a Picasso with Marvin the Martian (criminal -- though you could do it on a digital copy). I know the Oz books underwent a transition, but the new author didn't rewrite any of the original Frank Baum stuff did he? Likewise the Disney characters progress through generations of artist, but it's not like you wanna go back and "deface" the originals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books (re Oz as the prototypical Open Source world) In software, it's maybe a little different. We have version control, so might keep the old stuff around indefinitely, but few are interested in reading it. The most-in-demand stuff is usually cutting edge, sporting the latest new features. Engineer-artists of software actually expect (aim, hope) to have their work included in derivative works. That's the intention. You write hoping your stuff will be absorbed, as your currency in the software meritocracy is your reputation as an author. You want your name associated with your "text" but it's not like you expect royalty payments. More, you expect to be granted the privileges (such as deferential respect) of royalty by your peers and the lay public, as it's clear in the accounts that you're a person of merit (or a "jolly good fellow" as they said in Queen Victoria's era). Academia is already like this. It's not how much you sold out for, so much as how much of your academic integrity remains after X presumably profitable publications. Edwin Black (the historian) comes to mind, as a successful academic who nevertheless insists on telling it as he finds it, upsetting a lot of carefully guarded apple carts in the process. His books continue to sell because he's still a trusted source of scholarship by enough accounts to keep him in the game as a bestselling author. Publishing is essentially free via the Internet, but then distribution matters. How will the right people hear of your work? Twitter? There's always the "visibility problem" of gaining a following, what some might call "marketing" though in academia there's a somewhat cynical attitude towards either "selling oneself" or "self promotion" although I'd say ethics have changed, and now some professors engage in "self branding", creating such personalities as Dr. Ruth, and Dr. Chuck (a Python guy, whom I've worked with) also even Dr. Phil (the guy Britney made a fool of). Anyway, what's interesting to me is to see more academic professorial types (vs code wrangler geeks) grapple with the challenges of the loaves and the fishes, i.e. the miracle technology makes makes possible, of spreading of communications extremely efficient at almost no marginal cost per copy. So what business models are based on artificially creating scarcity where their needn't be any? Those are the ones most worried about what to do next, and I empathize. Putting a floor form of tenure under the meritocracy, a safety net, would make it all more like Finland (of Finlandia fame). A geek encampment, known for great code, might compensate all its people with room and board, kitchen access, wifi, days for fishing and goofing off, and yet not all of them have a commit bit on every project (some are not committing code at all, such as when busy learning new languages), some of which projects may have quite low bus numbers indeed (using the geek shop talk, sorry if it sounds opaque **). On the other hand, many resources remain scarce. Not every science fiction writer is as good as every other. Not everyone is as good a writer, period. Same in software. Same in the visual arts. They say the most productive coders are freakishly more productive, by orders of magnitude. What's that about? I'm just pointing out that good (sometimes technical, sometimes professional) writing is not always easy to come by. Creating scarcity artificially (where it's technologically unnecessary) is different from simply accepting the fact of only so much gold and silver in "them thar hills" (noting in passing that many precious metals are recycled, not mined anew). Kirby ** "bus number" is the number of people that'd need to be hit by the proverbial bus before a project would seem pretty much unintelligible to the other geeks, i.e. there'd be no one left to pass the torch. "Low bus numbers" mean only a few people understand and work with a given project or code repository. On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you. I think that it is important that we work on these issues > together as cordially as possible. Big publishers don't particularly like > OER either as my editor reminded me just this morning...I don't want to be > caught in the middle but I have been a mediator many times in my > life...perhaps there is a place for such skills here. 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