Whatever Google and its peers have in store for beleaguered publishers, the power of the user poses challenges that go beyond the short term risks to volume sales and web disintermediation....As we move towards Web 2.0, early Amazon–style experimentation on the readable, downloadable online book will deepen and become more interesting. Trialling books online, using reader panels to create ratings (see the US e-learning rating scheme MERLOT) and instalment-download publishing will become more common. Publishers who wish to survive in this world will move co-operatively with their peers to create standards and trading conventions. There will be consolidation, and a healthy competitive crop of low cost market entrants who owe little to the culture and values of ‘publishing’ as it is understood today. User/reader preference will prevail: at every turn in the road in network publishing it has become ever clearer that the user is more important than the supplier, and that simple fact turns business models and conventional approaches upside down.
So the mass content availability being practiced by Google, or Yahoo!, or the British Library and Microsoft, is based upon research values (in which case it is unarguably defensible) or upon an acknowledgement of an unsatisfied user demand for ease of access. If it is the former, Google and Yahoo! may not find it a huge benefit in the pursuit of their advertising business model....If however, it is the latter, then it represents a call to arms for publishers. This is not a time to reduce accessibility but to improve it. This is the time when all publisher participants should be ensuring that everything they do is online, can be ordered in a variety of formats, is subject to cross-searching and analysis, has additional authorial material available for consultation, and that these values can be subscribed to and paid for alongside the sale of printed works....But for every trail-blazer there are too many still in denial, and in these seeking legal redress where competitive inventiveness should be the order of the day.
The law will not save “publishing as we know it today”. While Google may have got its consultation wrong, and while there may be justice to the righteous complaints of those whose rights were traduced, the long term issues remain unaffected. Fiddle with copyright law as we may, the results are always geographical, not global, and always five years too late. Competition law hates copyright, and beyond the protection of content in first use, it will become more and more difficult to protect re-use.
While the battles in the foothills around Napster and Grokster were won, file transfer services like BitTorrent are still shifting five times as much content (files, videos, books, music?) across the network as the whole activity of the Web itself. Some of this is legal: much of it is not. In the book industry’s anxiety to stem the perceived Google threat, it would be disastrous if this issue distracted publishers from the bigger opportunities to create high value network publishing – or the problems that they will face if they don’t.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/30/2005 01:28:00 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.
