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Re: re virtual library

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glen ep ropella

Re: re virtual library

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But
my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)

peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:

> At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder
> where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new
> books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I
> am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would
> be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and
> maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks
> require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the
> universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes
> and students covering costs anyway.
> So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Pamela McCorduck

Re: re virtual library

It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable.

On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But
my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)

peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:
At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder
where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new
books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I
am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would
be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and
maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks
require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the
universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes
and students covering costs anyway.
So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

	Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Grant Holland

Re: re virtual library

Why can't we dominate the whole book publishing industry by implementing the books that we write as ebooks (format undefined) and giving them away for free?

After all, books are "software". They aren't programming, but they are software. So why can't we implement an open source model for our books.

Of course, we might have to give up making any money on authorship (or so it appears). But the publishing companies are taking that away from us anyway. And, if we are accusing the publishers of greed, then we should be willing to step up and shed ours too. At least this could put authors on at least the same power footing as publishers. Perhaps this could lead to a takeover of the publishing industry by an open source movement - and the disruption could produce some emergent phenomenon that is unforeseen at this point.

Obviously, this is naive and I'm just dreaming... but what else is our alias for anyway! O:-)

Another wrinkle to an open source play is a reflection of what has happened in the software world. Institutional customers (corporations, companies, schools) do NOT want a free version of software, for a number of reasons. (They want, support, guarantees, etc.) Thus, the free versions of open source software end up playing the role of going to individuals, some of whom are "recommenders" to their institutional bosses, but the institutions end up paying for a priced version. Thus, open source ends up "driving adoption" for paid versions, to institutions, while individuals end up with free stuff. These dynamics end up satisfying almost all stakeholder.

...Something to think about.

Grant

On 4/20/12 12:13 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable.
On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But
my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)

peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:

At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder

where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new

books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I

am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would

be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and

maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks

require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the

universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes

and students covering costs anyway.

So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: re virtual library

In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck

I think the problem is speculation in intellectual property, ie looking at the potential windfall from owning a monopoly on a popular meme versus the horatio-alger story of the hard work of authors and publishers being fairly rewarded.

The base issue is that all the ways you can use ownership of money to make more money are not equally acceptable. I read a discussion about how speculation in insurance policies became illegal. You can't buy insurance policies against hazards that you don't personally face, because when it was allowed speculators would distort and destroy the insurance market by buying portfolios of policies with a certainty that some would pay off. They weren't participating honestly in an insurance market which shares risk among those who face the risk, they were simply siphoning off resources for their own profit. It's not an acceptable way to play with your money.

The big media companies are similarly motivated. They have no real interest in the promotion of cultural, technical, or intellectual progress, they simply bet on a portfolio of products in anticipation of some being enormously profitable. They are not lobbying for fair rewards to the authors and producers, they are lobbying to maximize the payoff of their wagers. So, why is it acceptable for gamblers in intellectual properties to siphon off resources for their own profit?

Copyrights and patents were established to promote cultural, technical, and intellectual progress. Profits siphoned off by speculators do none of that.

-- rec --

2012/4/20 Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]>

It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable.
On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But
my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)

peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:
At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder
where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new

books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I
am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would

be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and
maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks

require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the
universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes

and students covering costs anyway.
So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, <a href="tel:971-222-9095" value="+19712229095" target="_blank">971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Joe Spinden

Re: re virtual library

In reply to this post by Grant Holland

My thought was that there could be an intermediate ground that might be more profitable for the authors and less expensive for the consumers.

Amazon built a tremendous business by eliminating store fronts.

So, I was thinking of what parts of the print publishers' current functions could be taken over by strictly electronic publishers. That could be an interesting alternate business model.

Joe

On 4/20/12 1:42 PM, Grant Holland wrote:

Why can't we dominate the whole book publishing industry by implementing the books that we write as ebooks (format undefined) and giving them away for free?

After all, books are "software". They aren't programming, but they are software. So why can't we implement an open source model for our books.

Of course, we might have to give up making any money on authorship (or so it appears). But the publishing companies are taking that away from us anyway. And, if we are accusing the publishers of greed, then we should be willing to step up and shed ours too. At least this could put authors on at least the same power footing as publishers. Perhaps this could lead to a takeover of the publishing industry by an open source movement - and the disruption could produce some emergent phenomenon that is unforeseen at this point.

Obviously, this is naive and I'm just dreaming... but what else is our alias for anyway! O:-)

Another wrinkle to an open source play is a reflection of what has happened in the software world. Institutional customers (corporations, companies, schools) do NOT want a free version of software, for a number of reasons. (They want, support, guarantees, etc.) Thus, the free versions of open source software end up playing the role of going to individuals, some of whom are "recommenders" to their institutional bosses, but the institutions end up paying for a priced version. Thus, open source ends up "driving adoption" for paid versions, to institutions, while individuals end up with free stuff. These dynamics end up satisfying almost all stakeholder.

...Something to think about.

Grant

On 4/20/12 12:13 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable.
On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing. And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example. The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale. Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe. But
my prediction is the opposite. Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains. Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one. Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books. But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest. There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)

peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:

At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder

where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new

books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I

am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would

be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and

maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks

require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the

universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes

and students covering costs anyway.

So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
-- 

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

  -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913.

Owen Densmore

Re: re virtual library

Administrator

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Joseph Spinden <[hidden email]> wrote:

My thought was that there could be an intermediate ground that might be more profitable for the authors and less expensive for the consumers.

Amazon built a tremendous business by eliminating store fronts.

So, I was thinking of what parts of the print publishers' current functions could be taken over by strictly electronic publishers. That could be an interesting alternate business model.

Joe

I like the idea of removing the middle man .. i.e. treating publishers as a service providing editing, review, formatting and so on, but moving the books themselves to a "co-op" in the cloud.

With textbooks, there is also the publisher-school system middle man. Could this be removed as well?

I can't tell what role Apple is trying to have in textbooks. Are they publishers? Interface to the school systems? Do they remove a middle man or simply replace one with a new one?

Pamela: some of your books come in Kindle versions. Do you have any insights about whether or not digital books work out well for the authors? Has it hurt, for example, via piracy?

-- Owen

Slightly off-topic: in the science and math journals, there is a serious effort to move away from the huge publishers, especially Elsevier and its very large number of journals they've quietly acquired over the last decade or two. This is succeeding, even to the point of peer reviews being managed by the coop, not the publisher.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM
Subject: Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog
To: Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Timothy Gowers the Fields medalist mathematician has a recent post on Elsevier and a growing movement to boycott their use

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

This includes not submitting to the VERY MANY math journals owned by Elsevier:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P11.cws_home/mathjournals

.. or reviewing submissions

One previous successful act against Elsevier was extraction of the Journal of Topology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)

On 10 August 2006, after months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price policy of library subscriptions, the entire editorial board of the journal handed in their resignation, with effect from 31 December 2006. Subsequently, two more issues appeared in 2007 with papers that had been accepted before the resignation of the editors. In early January the former editors instructed Elsevier to remove their names from the website of the journal, but Elsevier refused to comply, justifying their decision by saying that the editorial board should remain on the journal until all of the papers accepted during its tenure had been published.

In 2007 the former editors announced the launch of the Journal of Topology, run under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society at a significantly lower price.

Its interesting that Timothy also refers to SOPA/PIPA and took part in the wikipedia led protest. (I just found out that wordpress made a plugin that folks all could use for that and future protests. Impressive!)

I'd really like more of us to be careful about our papers and demand they be open. Its not exactly black/white, but certainly the papers have to be publicly available, whatever else the publisher's rights may be.

I'd like your opinions, which are quite likely more informed than mine.

-- Owen

Joe Spinden

Re: re virtual library

In order for the sort of system I am considering to work, there would still be a need for intermediaries to edit and review, format, et cetera, to ensure a high quality finished product.

I see no reason not to also have individuals/firms specializing in marketing etextbooks, even for specific markets such as high schools, medical schools, et cetera. I doubt you could get school adoption without direct sales contact. I suspect the school adoption process is an arduous one. On the other hand, you would have a guaranteed number of sales. I think you would want to work with someone that was experienced in marketing textbooks to your market already.

A related issue is which schools (if any) would/could adopt entirely electronic textbooks. If schools could/would not do that, there would have to be some means of producing and delivering physical books to at least some students. That does not seem to be an insurmountable problem. The key would be to get school adoption.

But I am not solely thinking about etextbooks. There could just as well be other ebooks produced without the current physical publishers. Such ebooks would also need editing and review, formatting, et cetera. That also seems quite doable. An important point here would be how to ensure copyright protection. I think it is inevitable that there would be some violations, so some form of DRM could be useful.

Regardless, it should still be possible to price ebooks significantly lower than the current situation. The current pricing of ebooks is designed by the publishers to protect their physical copy sales. If you do not have physical copy sales to protect, you are in a very different situation. As a side benefit, lower pricing would encourage compliance with respecting the copyright -- at least in some markets. (Not to mention all the trees that would be saved.)

As far as Apple goes, who knows ? The owner of the content is in a stronger position to negotiate with the publishers or others to perform editing, review, et cetera. From what little I have read about Apple's moves into epublishing, it seems Apple is moving to control ownership of the content as completely as possible.

The move away from the big publishers in the science and math journals seems to be an example of some people realizing they can use the new technology to circumvent the publishers' "blockade".

Joe

On 4/20/12 3:53 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Joseph Spinden <[hidden email]> wrote:

My thought was that there could be an intermediate ground that might be more profitable for the authors and less expensive for the consumers.

Amazon built a tremendous business by eliminating store fronts.

So, I was thinking of what parts of the print publishers' current functions could be taken over by strictly electronic publishers. That could be an interesting alternate business model.

Joe

I like the idea of removing the middle man .. i.e. treating publishers as a service providing editing, review, formatting and so on, but moving the books themselves to a "co-op" in the cloud.

With textbooks, there is also the publisher-school system middle man. Could this be removed as well?

I can't tell what role Apple is trying to have in textbooks. Are they publishers? Interface to the school systems? Do they remove a middle man or simply replace one with a new one?

Pamela: some of your books come in Kindle versions. Do you have any insights about whether or not digital books work out well for the authors? Has it hurt, for example, via piracy?

-- Owen

Slightly off-topic: in the science and math journals, there is a serious effort to move away from the huge publishers, especially Elsevier and its very large number of journals they've quietly acquired over the last decade or two. This is succeeding, even to the point of peer reviews being managed by the coop, not the publisher.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM
Subject: Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog
To: Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Timothy Gowers the Fields medalist mathematician has a recent post on Elsevier and a growing movement to boycott their use

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

This includes not submitting to the VERY MANY math journals owned by Elsevier:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P11.cws_home/mathjournals

.. or reviewing submissions

One previous successful act against Elsevier was extraction of the Journal of Topology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)

On 10 August 2006, after months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price policy of library subscriptions, the entire editorial board of the journal handed in their resignation, with effect from 31 December 2006. Subsequently, two more issues appeared in 2007 with papers that had been accepted before the resignation of the editors. In early January the former editors instructed Elsevier to remove their names from the website of the journal, but Elsevier refused to comply, justifying their decision by saying that the editorial board should remain on the journal until all of the papers accepted during its tenure had been published.

In 2007 the former editors announced the launch of the Journal of Topology, run under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society at a significantly lower price.

Its interesting that Timothy also refers to SOPA/PIPA and took part in the wikipedia led protest. (I just found out that wordpress made a plugin that folks all could use for that and future protests. Impressive!)

I'd really like more of us to be careful about our papers and demand they be open. Its not exactly black/white, but certainly the papers have to be publicly available, whatever else the publisher's rights may be.

I'd like your opinions, which are quite likely more informed than mine.

-- Owen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
-- 

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

  -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913.

Pamela McCorduck

Re: re virtual library

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

Owen, haven't sold enough via Kindle to tell. I was stunned--somebody informed me on FB--that Machines Who Think sells for thirty bucks on Kindle! That seems to me a good way of making sure none gets sold.

Pamela: some of your books come in Kindle versions. Do you have any insights about whether or not digital books work out well for the authors? Has it hurt, for example, via piracy?

-- Owen

Slightly off-topic: in the science and math journals, there is a serious effort to move away from the huge publishers, especially Elsevier and its very large number of journals they've quietly acquired over the last decade or two. This is succeeding, even to the point of peer reviews being managed by the coop, not the publisher.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM
Subject: Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog
To: Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Timothy Gowers the Fields medalist mathematician has a recent post on Elsevier and a growing movement to boycott their use

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

This includes not submitting to the VERY MANY math journals owned by Elsevier:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P11.cws_home/mathjournals

.. or reviewing submissions

One previous successful act against Elsevier was extraction of the Journal of Topology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)

On 10 August 2006, after months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price policy of library subscriptions, the entire editorial board of the journal handed in their resignation, with effect from 31 December 2006. Subsequently, two more issues appeared in 2007 with papers that had been accepted before the resignation of the editors. In early January the former editors instructed Elsevier to remove their names from the website of the journal, but Elsevier refused to comply, justifying their decision by saying that the editorial board should remain on the journal until all of the papers accepted during its tenure had been published.

In 2007 the former editors announced the launch of the Journal of Topology, run under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society at a significantly lower price.

Its interesting that Timothy also refers to SOPA/PIPA and took part in the wikipedia led protest. (I just found out that wordpress made a plugin that folks all could use for that and future protests. Impressive!)

I'd really like more of us to be careful about our papers and demand they be open. Its not exactly black/white, but certainly the papers have to be publicly available, whatever else the publisher's rights may be.

I'd like your opinions, which are quite likely more informed than mine.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

	Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"

Edward Angel

Re: re virtual library

On Amazon my textbook sells for $85 and the Kindle edition for $80, so there are almost no Kindle sales. Hard to explain the pricing.

Although pads may change this, students prefer to have paper versions of books. One thing that at least some publishers are trying is to sell both version for slightly more than the print version. Students seem to like that they can have the electronic version when they go to class and the paper versions for when they are studying at home.

Re Amazon in general. They have the power to drive down the price of books which reduces the amount the author gets while hopefully increasing sales. However, by driving out competing book sellers it's not clear that in the long run we (authors) are going to be better off with Amazon that we are with the present publishers.

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Apr 20, 2012, at 6:17 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

Owen, haven't sold enough via Kindle to tell. I was stunned--somebody informed me on FB--that Machines Who Think sells for thirty bucks on Kindle! That seems to me a good way of making sure none gets sold.
Pamela: some of your books come in Kindle versions. Do you have any insights about whether or not digital books work out well for the authors? Has it hurt, for example, via piracy?

-- Owen

Slightly off-topic: in the science and math journals, there is a serious effort to move away from the huge publishers, especially Elsevier and its very large number of journals they've quietly acquired over the last decade or two. This is succeeding, even to the point of peer reviews being managed by the coop, not the publisher.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM
Subject: Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog
To: Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Timothy Gowers the Fields medalist mathematician has a recent post on Elsevier and a growing movement to boycott their use

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

This includes not submitting to the VERY MANY math journals owned by Elsevier:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P11.cws_home/mathjournals

.. or reviewing submissions

One previous successful act against Elsevier was extraction of the Journal of Topology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)

On 10 August 2006, after months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier about the price policy of library subscriptions, the entire editorial board of the journal handed in their resignation, with effect from 31 December 2006. Subsequently, two more issues appeared in 2007 with papers that had been accepted before the resignation of the editors. In early January the former editors instructed Elsevier to remove their names from the website of the journal, but Elsevier refused to comply, justifying their decision by saying that the editorial board should remain on the journal until all of the papers accepted during its tenure had been published.

In 2007 the former editors announced the launch of the Journal of Topology, run under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society at a significantly lower price.

Its interesting that Timothy also refers to SOPA/PIPA and took part in the wikipedia led protest. (I just found out that wordpress made a plugin that folks all could use for that and future protests. Impressive!)

I'd really like more of us to be careful about our papers and demand they be open. Its not exactly black/white, but certainly the papers have to be publicly available, whatever else the publisher's rights may be.

I'd like your opinions, which are quite likely more informed than mine.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
"She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret."

Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org