

Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, February 03, 2008

How publishers can stop betting against the internet

Kevin Kelly, Better Than Free, The Technium, January 31, 2008.  (Thanks to Gyn Moody.)  Excerpt:

The internet is a copy machine....

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order....

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied....

Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy....I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced....

Immediacy -- Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset....

Personalization....

Interpretation....

Authenticity -- You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don't need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You'll pay for authenticity....

Accessibility -- Ownership often sucks....Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our "possessions" by subscribing to them. We'll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it....Acme backs everything up, pays the creators, and delivers us our desires. We can sip it from our phones, PDAs, laptops, big screens from where-ever. The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

Embodiment...PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather....

Patronage -- It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators....

Findability -- Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention -- and most of it free -- being found is valuable.... 

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse....

Comment.  This seems very right to me.  Business models that would be defeated by free and easy copying are doomed.  Just as a warming climate selects for warm-weather adaptations, and a cooling climate selects for cool-weather adaptations, the internet selects for business models that charge for forms of value or layers of utility that cannot easily be copied.  These business models aren't just good ideas, for example, to make OA possible.  They are necessities for survival.  For publishers, self-interest should be the primary driver for OA.

Update.  Also see Jan Velterop's comments.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/02/how-publishers-can-stop-betting-against.html
legacy.earlham.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-40
76673
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:POCPPKMT2Z23BMTSD5L26KHZFL5F4EYN
<urn:uuid:acd13884-0ea8-4bd4-bab8-236f40b6ce82>
2016-09-28T10:14:12Z
159.28.1.36
sha1:4I7V2EH5TXSLBDOGJM25FG7SOY7FGHZY
<urn:uuid:0cf9c044-7d47-431e-840e-1a82007a5eaa>
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/02/how-publishers-can-stop-betting-against.html
response
<urn:uuid:f2ab9dc9-b215-4676-90c9-06c94d59b27a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-143-35-109.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf