On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Joseph Spinden <j...@qri.us> 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 <o...@backspaces.net> Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM Subject: Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog To: Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> 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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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
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