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Again, I think you all for the solidarity from all of us at the MIA. My own thoughts on this. As I noted, the MIA is *for* publishers getting a return on their publishing efforts to pay for the original costs of whatever it is they are publishing. We praised L&W (and IP/Progress) for stating this initiative back in 1972 or so (first volume came out I think in 1975). We continue to praise them. But the works of M/E are not, with all due respect, the works of Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein. The former play a very power political/historical role almost without comparison. They do, ethically, belong to everyone. And we are for them, L&W recovering all their costs. I can only assume they likely did this decades ago, at least for the volumes in question. MR had us remove Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?". The reason...was quaint...it was the first article they ran for their very first edition back in the 1950s. They felt very attached to it. Of course we complied. They have subsequently granted us permission for other works we asked for. And this is true for other publishers as well: sometimes yes, sometimes no. L&W in their statement alludes to a potential revenue stream selling to the Academy. I'm not so sure Mark L is correct they are going to make a lot of money. As most universities already have access to the printed version for all 50 Volumes (either in stock or through inter-library loans) paying for and getting a lot of money for a server based digital version (I assume it's a server based one), at best brings them to the rather rude form of this like the Haithi Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org/) which runs one of the worlds largest digital libraries. It's almost impossible to download full documents from them, you have to become a "member", but only if you are from a big name institution or academic and so on. Otherwise you get truncated screen-viewing only versions. This is what, I can only assume, L&W means when they say this will still allow for a 'public viewing' of the MECW. I think this is a bad business model and they got some bad advice. Among the advice is that somehow allowing the first 1/5 of the MECW to be on the MIA is going to prompt them, to use their words, "commit institutional suicide". We hope L&W will see clarity in this down the road. We've developed a good relationship with International Publishers where they are even asking us to digitize and put on the web some documents on Black Liberation in the U.S. (and no they haven't given us permission to use their version of the MECW). We do, as archivists, take the long road. David PS...has any one found any defense of the actions of L&W on the Internet? Anywhere? Just curious. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
