Excellent post about intellectual property and why certain leviathans of the publishing industry are light years behind others in terms of the way they think about copyright.
I’ve been wondering just why it is that people who write software are more likely to embrace the open source mentality than people who write ‘text’ books. When you get a marriage of the two, things seem to work beautifully. Witness a lovely publishing model, in which books are provided via a multitude of different channels – open source, subscription-based searchable databases, print-on-demand. It reminds me of the way the music industry is fragmenting into a variety of different business models (to its benefit). David Byrne breaks it down into six potential routes to market in a fascinating analysis here.
Perhaps its simply a cultural difference. The music and software industries are younger and therefore less ‘set’ than traditional print publishing with its established models and centuries-long history. In other words publishers still cling to the long lunch, rather than embracing The Long Tail.
For my part, I’ve been pondering the failings of the publishing industry for several years now, without really achieving a clear view of the problem; never mind a solution. In order to be a successful publisher today you need to understand not only the print publishing industry but also online distribution channels, new technology such as the dreaded Kindle, whole tranches of complex IP law across a variety of jurisdictions, social networking as a marketing tool, print on demand, digital piracy and a whole host of other things I’ve probably never even heard of. It’s an awful lot to get your head around when all you want to do is publish decent books for a reasonable profit.
Why bookworms should date geeks
Software publishers have to be more agile because things change so rapidly in that world (whether actual software or books that attempt to document it). It isn’t clear to me why book publishers in general would be so quick to discard their existing revenue structures. It’s not as if a Harry Potter blockbuster has any obvious reason to go out of date – just out of fashion. I think it will be a while before people are convinced to give up the convenience and utility of a dead tree book for something new and not actually improved when you try to use it.
Seems to me that Intellectual Property is a creature of law not of technology and that is really the crucial issue here.
A look at the life-cycle of the web then TV show `Sanctuary’ and their attempts to come up with a new revenue model that ended up back where they tried to escape from is interesting. Amanda Tapping in an interview said, `We were probably 5 years ahead of our time.’ I doubt that, unless it’s in the `tomorrow never comes’ sense, but we shall see.
As for why I released stuff – free – under the GPL that took me a fair few man hours to write… it was simply because I can. I was writing for myself anyway and, though making it accessible to others did require a bit of extra work, there was the possibility that giving it away makes it come back improved. (That didn’t happen but it did have the useful side effect of making me raise my game.)