Re: copyright expriation as a spur to creativity

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, Timothy Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
>
> An editorial by Nora Rawlinson in Publishers Weekly, 245(41),
> p. 11, October 5, 1998, discusses the success of trade
> publishers in marketing the Starr Report. Ms. Rawlinson
> noted that the book sales did well, notwithstanding
> competition from the web and from newspapers:
>
> It ... seems, at least for now, that traditional
> publishers have the edge. We haven't seen guys
> with desktop publishing systems running off
> copies of the report and hawking them on
> streetcorners. There's quite a bit more to
> publishing than just printing and binding,
> even where the manuscript arrives fully edited
> and in digital form; a firmly established
> distribution system is still critical.
>
> Ms. Rawlinson goes on to mention that this state of affairs
> might change in the future. She cites the Tattered Cover Bookstore
> of Denver, Colorado, which is planning to install in on-demand
> printer which will produce paperback books. I think that she's
> exaggerating the threat to the established publishers. One
> machine which can manufacture books on demand creates competition
> only in the town where the machine is. The machine owner will
> still need "a firmly established distribution system" if he wants
> to compete farther afield.

You are probably right unless the cost of the machine and the digital masters comes way down. NTIS and UMI have produced one-at-a-time books from microforms for decades, selling them by mail order. Their "commercial" success has not been spectacular.

There should be no threat to publishers, who collect royalties and share them with authors.

> Ms. Rawlinson concludes by noting that "we've... gained evidence
> that books and the Web may enjoy a mutually beneficial future
> together." Haven't those who know the web well been predicting
> such a mutually beneficial relationship for some years now ?

My wish is for every author to enjoy the advance financial support and the prepublication publicity provided for Starr.

The copyright question is whether royalties from the publication would have recovered $50 million invested in the Starr Report. Other rape and romance authors work for far less and consider themselves lucky.

Albert Henderson
Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com> Received on Mon Feb 22 1999 - 21:18:32 GMT