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