He points to examples of Big Eveel Publishing Houses telling us how electronic books are going to be the Next Big Thing. Of course, when a corporation does so, they don't want to tell you they're doing so just to make more money, so--as Katz points out--they talk about paradigm shifts, "listening to the customer," and attracting all those mythical geeks that just don't like books.
Of course, the real (well ok, paranoid but easily imaginable) reasons for doing so are less rosy. Large corporations, as Katz points out, are not generally fond of paradigm shifts and increased openness. Instead, it's not difficult to see a movement toward e-books as a DMCA-approved, license-agreement-protected model where resale or fair use of "your" book is restricted, and where publishers can milk the format by offering routine "new editions" or introducing something like a per-view micropayment. Never mind the increased ability to track people's buying habits or "increasing value" by putting banner ads at the top and bottom of your nice little e-book.
Remember the electronic-textbooks story from a little while back? It's not difficult to see execs lusting after a similar model where popular fiction is concerned.
Ultimately, we may not need a "paradigm shift" anyway. Gibson is given as an example of how the existing model can shift to accommodate customers' wants without an artifically-imposed media model. People don't necessarily want to use e-books for all or even most of their reading needs, and it's presumptive to say that existing methods of publishing can't adapt to the public's new tastes--especially since the ultimate source of written material isn't corporate manufacture but individual writers, often writing to "scratch an itch" rather than in expectation of a big payback (at least where fiction and popular nonfiction are concerned).
In my opinion--and I don't think the article contradicts this--electronic-style publishing may have its uses. But the existing genres of novels, nonfiction, reference books, etc. will probably not wholly merge with it--instead, any new technology will probably develop its own genres. That's the way it's historically been, despite people's expectations otherwise--movies are more than theater-on-film; television is different than radio-with-pictures; and the Web isn't just magazine articles with hyperlinks.
Clear enough for you? This Katz article was a bit unstructured--well, in the freshmen-comp sense that it doesn't have a neat little topic sentence and summary paragraph to spoon-feed you its thesis--but readily understandable if you're willing to put more than fifteen seconds into it.
There's a third type of value you haven't addressed: the vlue people place in something regardless of its cost to produce or scarcity. People pay good money to attend live performances at theaters or sports events, usually getting a worse view of the performance/game than they could have had watching it _for free_ at home on the TV. They value the experience of attending enough to pay money for it. Sports franchises know this--that's why winning teams get to charge more for season tickets that weak teams. It has nothing (or very little) to do with the number of available seats or the "cost to produce" the team/game.
The recording industry is getting bitten on the ass by perceived value. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people don't think that N'sync album is worth the $17 that the industry may well have spent recording, distributing, and promoting it. Not that N'stink is suffering or anything.
Did you actually read the article? It's easy to always win arguments if you only argue against yourself. The point of the article was NOT that widespread piracy was moral or even desirable. The author's point was that corporate interests among the recording industry are using and influencing copyright law in a manner which is against the better interests of the public, and which enables them to further abuse the artists they claim to 'represent.'
Metallica wants to protect their ability to be paid for their work in creating and recording music; I don't think the author would argue against that. His point is that the recording industry is the major force preventing artists from making a living off their music--not pirates. Whether or not Napster is legal is immaterial to the article's arguments. The presence of piracy--and more importantly, the industry's response to it--only serves to illustrate the aforementioned fact.
Stop and read what you're responding to. Think about *what* the author actually wrote.
I'd say that the RTS games have spawned a new genre--the Real-Time Tactical game. Nearly all RTSes are built around grubbing for resources, spawning hundreds of units, and smacking the other guy's base/city. You can have lots of permutations on this theme--especially with different resource models and interesting units--but the gameplay is the same, from Warcraft II to Total Annihilation.
But I think games like Myth/Myth II and Shogun: Total War deserve a subgenre to themselves. The whole concept of resource mining and unit manufacturing is gone, replaced with a focus on battlefield tactics and unit conservation. Like real tactics, your limitations on troop numbers and capability forces you to concentrate on things like formation, unit cohesion, terrain, etc. The focus completely changes.
I'd argue that the Close Combat games are essentially RTTs as well, though they've become so without being an offshoot of RTSes. CC2 and CC3 are also extremely fun games; every now and then I'll "rediscover" them and end up playing a campaign all the way through again.
Isn't that what you pay the university/UMI for in the first place? It seems to me the (*cough* bloated) price of $150 or more you pay to the university and its publishing companies should be covering the indexing and distribution "costs." Instead, you have the universities taking that money, turning around, and taking money from Brill's for the privilege of doing what the university was supposed to do in the first place--but I guess those searchable abstract databases in the library don't constitute a "service."
So, in short, I don't see what "value" Brill's is adding to the product. They're just taking works--the distribution and indexing costs of which the authors have already paid for out-of-pocket--placing a craptastic e-business interface on them, and "reselling" them. I'd bet there's not much development of searchable databases going on at Brill's either--I'm sure UMI already has electronic records available for most of those works, that Brill's can just import into their own servers. It's akin to me putting a booth in front of a McDonalds, and selling Big Macs for two-fiddy apiece, while a runner goes in and fetches orders for me. It's probably mostly legal, but even if I spend a lot of money developing my little "value-adding interface" booth, I don't see where that entitles me to compensation for my efforts.
Don't get me wrong, I can see that this is all entirely legal; but I think it's an asinine business proposition that I hope never makes a dollar of profit. It's going to be the responsibility of market forces--in the form of people who realize there's no point paying for these theses they can get for free--to bring this site down. Ultimately, I hope this makes us pay closer attention to the business practices of universities, especially as they pertain to intellectual-property ownership.
The historical method for preventing "decay" in documents has not been, though people often thought it would be, flawless copying. Instead, the best method has been cheap, numerous copying. For instance, originally works were copied by hand. The potential for mistakes with this method is high, and so the copyists had to be extremely dedicated and careful about their tasks. But mistakes did happen, and often went unnoticed because any given copy was likely the only copy in a very wide area, and few people could afford to be knowledgeable of single works, much less cross-reference them.
With the advent of comparatively cheap printing presses, the possibility of copyist mistake was not at all lessened--witness the "sinful Bible," a run of Bibles which, among other things, contained the erroneous Commandment "thou shalt commit adultery." If you were to look at the printing press with the intent of demanding as much precision as possible from copies, then it would fail miserably--the chances of mistakes were not only increased by semi-educated printers, but exacerbated by the massive printing runs which would propogate errors.
Of course, time has shown that the opposite is true; or at least, that the above is true but unimportant. The printing press' contribution to accuracy was not through inherent precision, but in the propogation of inexpensive copies. Errors--inevitable with any human effort--are much easier to find and correct when multiple sources, print editions, and publishers are available. Works can be compared and cross-referenced not only easily, but more importantly, cheaply, due to the radical drop in cost of acquiring collections of works.
That's where digital media can contribute to accuracy--not from their (admittedly superior) capability for precision, but because they (can) reduce the cost and labor involved in copying and distribution almost to nil. Copyist accuracy is reached through the ubiquity and ease of reference of works, not through the precision of the copy method.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, I'll spell it out for you:
He points to examples of Big Eveel Publishing Houses telling us how electronic books are going to be the Next Big Thing. Of course, when a corporation does so, they don't want to tell you they're doing so just to make more money, so--as Katz points out--they talk about paradigm shifts, "listening to the customer," and attracting all those mythical geeks that just don't like books.
Of course, the real (well ok, paranoid but easily imaginable) reasons for doing so are less rosy. Large corporations, as Katz points out, are not generally fond of paradigm shifts and increased openness. Instead, it's not difficult to see a movement toward e-books as a DMCA-approved, license-agreement-protected model where resale or fair use of "your" book is restricted, and where publishers can milk the format by offering routine "new editions" or introducing something like a per-view micropayment. Never mind the increased ability to track people's buying habits or "increasing value" by putting banner ads at the top and bottom of your nice little e-book. Remember the electronic-textbooks story from a little while back? It's not difficult to see execs lusting after a similar model where popular fiction is concerned.
Ultimately, we may not need a "paradigm shift" anyway. Gibson is given as an example of how the existing model can shift to accommodate customers' wants without an artifically-imposed media model. People don't necessarily want to use e-books for all or even most of their reading needs, and it's presumptive to say that existing methods of publishing can't adapt to the public's new tastes--especially since the ultimate source of written material isn't corporate manufacture but individual writers, often writing to "scratch an itch" rather than in expectation of a big payback (at least where fiction and popular nonfiction are concerned).
In my opinion--and I don't think the article contradicts this--electronic-style publishing may have its uses. But the existing genres of novels, nonfiction, reference books, etc. will probably not wholly merge with it--instead, any new technology will probably develop its own genres. That's the way it's historically been, despite people's expectations otherwise--movies are more than theater-on-film; television is different than radio-with-pictures; and the Web isn't just magazine articles with hyperlinks.
Clear enough for you? This Katz article was a bit unstructured--well, in the freshmen-comp sense that it doesn't have a neat little topic sentence and summary paragraph to spoon-feed you its thesis--but readily understandable if you're willing to put more than fifteen seconds into it.
The recording industry is getting bitten on the ass by perceived value. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people don't think that N'sync album is worth the $17 that the industry may well have spent recording, distributing, and promoting it. Not that N'stink is suffering or anything.
Metallica wants to protect their ability to be paid for their work in creating and recording music; I don't think the author would argue against that. His point is that the recording industry is the major force preventing artists from making a living off their music--not pirates. Whether or not Napster is legal is immaterial to the article's arguments. The presence of piracy--and more importantly, the industry's response to it--only serves to illustrate the aforementioned fact.
Stop and read what you're responding to. Think about *what* the author actually wrote.
I'd argue that the Close Combat games are essentially RTTs as well, though they've become so without being an offshoot of RTSes. CC2 and CC3 are also extremely fun games; every now and then I'll "rediscover" them and end up playing a campaign all the way through again.
So, in short, I don't see what "value" Brill's is adding to the product. They're just taking works--the distribution and indexing costs of which the authors have already paid for out-of-pocket--placing a craptastic e-business interface on them, and "reselling" them. I'd bet there's not much development of searchable databases going on at Brill's either--I'm sure UMI already has electronic records available for most of those works, that Brill's can just import into their own servers. It's akin to me putting a booth in front of a McDonalds, and selling Big Macs for two-fiddy apiece, while a runner goes in and fetches orders for me. It's probably mostly legal, but even if I spend a lot of money developing my little "value-adding interface" booth, I don't see where that entitles me to compensation for my efforts.
Don't get me wrong, I can see that this is all entirely legal; but I think it's an asinine business proposition that I hope never makes a dollar of profit. It's going to be the responsibility of market forces--in the form of people who realize there's no point paying for these theses they can get for free--to bring this site down. Ultimately, I hope this makes us pay closer attention to the business practices of universities, especially as they pertain to intellectual-property ownership.
The historical method for preventing "decay" in documents has not been, though people often thought it would be, flawless copying. Instead, the best method has been cheap, numerous copying. For instance, originally works were copied by hand. The potential for mistakes with this method is high, and so the copyists had to be extremely dedicated and careful about their tasks. But mistakes did happen, and often went unnoticed because any given copy was likely the only copy in a very wide area, and few people could afford to be knowledgeable of single works, much less cross-reference them.
With the advent of comparatively cheap printing presses, the possibility of copyist mistake was not at all lessened--witness the "sinful Bible," a run of Bibles which, among other things, contained the erroneous Commandment "thou shalt commit adultery." If you were to look at the printing press with the intent of demanding as much precision as possible from copies, then it would fail miserably--the chances of mistakes were not only increased by semi-educated printers, but exacerbated by the massive printing runs which would propogate errors.
Of course, time has shown that the opposite is true; or at least, that the above is true but unimportant. The printing press' contribution to accuracy was not through inherent precision, but in the propogation of inexpensive copies. Errors--inevitable with any human effort--are much easier to find and correct when multiple sources, print editions, and publishers are available. Works can be compared and cross-referenced not only easily, but more importantly, cheaply, due to the radical drop in cost of acquiring collections of works.
That's where digital media can contribute to accuracy--not from their (admittedly superior) capability for precision, but because they (can) reduce the cost and labor involved in copying and distribution almost to nil. Copyist accuracy is reached through the ubiquity and ease of reference of works, not through the precision of the copy method.