Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On Thu, Aug 03, 2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote:
>
> But I have been puzzling over a similar problem and have not
> yet received a satisfactory answer. Few print publishers want
> to publish on paper a work unless they can secure the rights to
> it. For example, O'Reilly and Associates did print a Linux
> manual that was under the GPL, but another publisher simply
> copied it and sold it at a reduced price. It was no longer
> ecoonomical for ORA to distribute it unless at a loss considering
> printing costs.
>
> However, this situation does not occur in online publishing,
> where the costs approximate zero. Thus a GPL or public domain
> work can be easily published online.

Well, the costs *approximate* zero, but they still aren't quite zero. If one tolerates banner ads (but who wants to see ads for cheap Zip drives in the middle of Hamlet), then you could recoup that tiny incremental cost.

> The problem comes when the author wants to give the book away
> online but also wants to make it available in print.

There still is a cost in printing and distributing the physical copies. Any person who "copies" the electronic version and makes it available in print is going to have to bear those expenses along with the original author and therefore there will be a minimum "price" at which the physical copy will be sold. Are you asking about the situation where an author wants to give away a book online an *make a profit* on the book in print?

> I think we need a new arrangement for that. Copyright no
> longer is appropriate, I think, in such a case.
>
> I have considered making the online version appropriate for
> online reading, but then "forking the source" so the print
> book is a derivative work that is sufficiently improved so
> it can deserve a new copyright. But it is difficult to do this.
> I even asked ORA but they haven't been able to help.
>
> Anybody have new ideas on this subject?

It seems like you'd have to add significant editorial or other value outside the text of the book itself. West publishing does this by adding keynotes (little summaries of law) at the beginning of each page. They do NOT add value (IMHO) (in a Feist-compatible manner) by assigning page numbers to blocks of text.

Perhaps you could sell "support" (if the book were technical) if a person buys a physical copy of the book. Buy a physical copy and you get a support session with a real person in email. For non-technical books, perhaps you could give other "prizes" to people who buy the physical book -- special access to online chats with the author, private email lists for book owners only, etc. Early access to future versions or editions of the work, or later works by the same author.

Then there are a whole list of more mundane editorial features you could add to the print version like cross indexing of concepts, editorial content from third parties, cliff-notes-style summaries, etc. These all cost money to produce of course, but might get an enthusiast to buy a physical copy over just using the print version.

Are these the sort of thing you are thinking about?

     -Gabe

Gabe Wachob
<gwachob[_at_]wachob.com> Received on Fri Aug 04 2000 - 16:03:15 GMT