Go Google! Good riddance to most publishers and to most academic institutions as well....Here’s the rub: as short-run [book-printing] technology improved, it became possible to produce at a reasonable product one at a time, i.e. print-on-demand. So in addition to there being little incentive for publisher to vet the quality of a book or to help improve it, there is little incentive to put it out-of-print. There are publishers who specialize in buying up backlist from other publishers and making the books available print-on-demand. Professional books of this sort are sold, often for more than $100, to the occasional desperate person or library. Book contracts are tradable commodities. Most authors have about as much say about what happens to their books as chickens have say about their eggs. Too many authors are stuck with their books in backlist limbo. They are not marketed, not readily available; and the author does not have the right to revise the book and take it elsewhere. They would be thrilled to have their books on Google. Most authors make very little money from their books. They want to get their ideas out there. It [is] a cliché worth repeating that the web has the potential to allow the greatest expansion in knowledge dissemination ever. Just as priests lost their ability to be the gatekeepers of knowledge with the invention of the book, publishers have lost their ability with the invention of the web. Publishers, with important exceptions, have also lost any moral authority to be arbiters or gatekeepers. Many academic and other small presses will publish nearly anything. Many big presses treat books as a generic marketable commodity with no defining characteristics. Coke or Pepsi? Will it sell? How do we sell it? “You can’t believe it because it’s in a book,” is truer now more than ever. Now it’s up to the people, or do I mean the consumer, to determine what is worth reading. To help make that determination, new forms of authority and expertise are arising on the web. Let’s not stand in the way.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/19/2005 09:00:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
