Re: Re: Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book"

on 10/31/03 10:16 AM, John R. Levine at johnl[_at_]iecc.com wrote:
>
> Sadly, my imagination is greatly constrained by my experience. My
> publisher (IDG Books, later Hungry Minds) had an elaborate business
> plan based around dynamic online content, which led to their running
> out of money, coming within a hair's breadth of liquidation, and
> having the assets bought by Wiley, a publisher that specializes in
> boring old paper books and makes money at it.

I am shortly going to be trying a new approach. A strong focus of my work is on social, legal, ethical issues related to use of the Internet in schools. I spent a very long time working on a very extensive book for educators addressing a comprehensive approach to deal with these issues in schools. My timing stinks. Educators are trying to deal with budget deficits and the No Child Left Behind and are quite comfortable believing they have solved all Internet problems with filtering software. I also tried to be my own publisher and I am really not good at this.

So all of my work is sitting in a box. I do know that university faculty and professional development folks are beginning to try to address these issues. And districts do continue to grapple with policies. So I am in the process of putting all of the material online. I am including the following announcement:

These documents are distributed as ³honortext.²

The purpose of the ³honortext² approach is to allow for the wide dissemination of information, while providing financial support for continued policy research and dissemination. The following are the ³honor text² guidelines:

€ If you are a student or other researcher and are using one copy of this material for personal research, you are not requested to provide compensation.

€ If you have established a web site or web page listing information resources for educators, you may freely link to this site or any individual document on this site and are not requested to provide compensation.

€ If you are a faculty member, professional development coordinator, or the like and have assigned material on this site as readings for your students (whether provided in hard copy or linked to as an online component of course resources), you are requested to provide compensation for such use. The standard rate for the reproduction of copyrighted materials for courses is $.10/page/student. If you are using substantial sections, please make contact to arrange for discounts.

€ If you are a school or a district and have used these materials for planning and/or policy development, you are requested to provide compensation in a manner that reflects the perceived value.

€ For all other uses or further information, please e-mail us at ...

Have no idea if this will work, but it is better than having all of my work sit in boxes. This approach did work in the mid-90s when I published my first legal analysis of K-12 AUPs. Wish me luck.

Nancy

Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Responsible Netizen Institute (soon to be Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use) Received on Sat Nov 01 2003 - 02:51:20 GMT