Publishers–not just readers–would benefit handsomely from a TeleRead-style approach with an emphasis on integration of e-books into K-12 and public libraries. For years we’ve been saying this. And if one extrapolates from some details in a First Monday article headlined Is Copyright Necessary?, the case would seem stronger than ever. Terrence A. Maxwell writes:
…current efforts to strengthen copy control over information products in order to keep prices at a level similar to predigital periods is not necessarily the best policy direction. As indicated in Table 4, artificial efforts to maintain or increase prices in mature markets leads to less choice in books, lower publisher profits, and overproduction of information products. In contrast, an aggressive policy of market expansion, both internally and externally, would be far more beneficial to all concerned. To the degree this policy could include the expansion of educational and information access opportunities and support both at home and abroad, it might meet with little resistance.
Maxwell goes on to say that “if American publishers attempt to expand their markets overseas through overwhelming domestic information markets in smaller and less developed countries, they are likely to meet resistance from countries attempting to protect fledging publishing industries and native cultures.” However, as we see it, mightn’t this issue be addressed through local partnerships and nurturing of local writers, as opposed to trying to dominate local culture with American best-sellers? The same concept, of course, would apply to European, Japanese, Australian or other publishers interested in markets in the developing world. Application of the long tail approach could go a long way.
The abstract
The Maxwell paper actually covers many topics in the context of legal and business models. Here’s the abstract: “Copyright is a legal mechanism for promotion of useful knowledge. However, it is not the only means society could use to encourage information dissemination, and several alternative models have been suggested over the last 200 years. This article provides the results of a dynamic simulation of the publishing industry in the United States from 1800 to 2100, and tests the impact of different protection schemes on the development of authorship, the publishing industry, and reader access. It closes with a discussion of intellectual property information policy decisions that can be currently made, and their likely impacts on domestic and international copyright protection.”
Related: The TeleRead chapter in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, ASIS, 1996). TeleRead, of course, is an evolving proposal and has changed somewhat since the MIT Press publication.
(Via Copyfight.)
