To anyone who thinks digital content is a threat to the book-publishing market, Google wants to tell you two things: first, you're wrong; second, second, its Google Book Search product is the solution, not the problem.....
Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of technical manual publishing company O'Reilly Media, said: "We're in a period of tremendous change, and have to embrace that change. We as publishers have to become part of the new digital ecosystem that Google is working so hard to build." ...
In a speech describing his experience as a profitable author who has always distributed his books for free online under a Creative Commons licence, in addition to selling them in bookstores and online marketplaces, [Cory] Doctorow said: "No matter how you look at it, free e-books make commercial sense."
Fellow tech-savvy author and blogger Seth Godin, another speaker at the event, echoed Doctorow's opinion that making content available for free online and letting it spread virally is ultimately helpful to authors. "By putting something into the grapevine and having the word spread, people are going to respond and pay you with something really valuable: their attention," said Godin.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2007 10:11:00 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.
