One of the absolute highlights of the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York this week was Brian O’Leary (Magellan Media), Mac Slocum (O'Reilly), and Chelsea Vaughn (Random House) presenting a panel called Challenging Notions of "Free", which presented a long-term, quantitative study of the effects of ebook piracy on book sales. There's a lot of hot air bandied about by people who argue that free ebooks generate or cannibalize sales, and it's a hard problem to study, but here at last are some good, crunchy stats and analysis to add to the argument.
The authors have generously given me permission to upload their slide-deck to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerial-ShareAlike license, and they've set up a form for anyone who wants to sign up to get the full report for free when they publish it in a few weeks.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/14/2009 12:13:00 PM.
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.
