Andrew Albanese, Rip My Book, Please, Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2009. Interview with Chris Anderson, author of the forthcoming Free: The Future of a Radical Price. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
... [Q:] The concept of free as a price still seems so counterintuitive to publishers and other content producers.
That's what I love. I'm in San Francisco, the center of dot-com. Twitter is across the street, Google is down the block, all around me there are people that are like “free, um, duh. Is there anything left to be said?” My kids can't believe I actually wrote a whole book about free. Then you go to other places, and people are like, impossible! There is no such thing as a free lunch! The fact that you can have intelligent people who find the concept either self-evident or completely wrong is the sweet spot of the book. In that tension is all the misunderstanding, change and structural, institutional, industrial revolution that is worth writing about.
[Q:] You observe that products that are born free have an easier road than those that transition to free. What does that portend for today's publishers?
The problem with the price/value equation is that once you establish a relationship, it's hard to change it. It's hard to raise prices and get people to change their impression of value, and hard to lower prices and not get some sense of devaluation. So what you have to do is create a new product. New products are born with a blank slate in terms of price and value. No one thinks less of Google because it is free. ...
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.
