Related Faves from eric

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    5
    0 starseric | Shared With: Everyone - Jan 11 2008 | books, literature, public domain, copyright, publishing, thepugetnews

    This seems like a handy service. You can select a Public Domain book from the Internet Archive or Google Books and have it printed by Lulu for you.

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    4
    5 starseric | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 12 2007 | books, publishing, free, DRM, piracy, thepugetnews

    A great essay on why piracy is not harming legitimate sales of books but DRM is...

    Quoted: Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

    Quoted: 1) The products they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

    Quoted: 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

    Quoted: 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

    Quoted: Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

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    1
    0 starseric | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 12 2007 | software, free, publishing, Tim O'Reilly, thepugetnews
    Nature Debates: Information wants to be valuable

    An older post from Tim O'Reilly on the lifecycle from self-publisher to aggregate publisher. An interesting exploration of the transition from "free" to "not free" and the balancing act the transition requires.

    Quoted: What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go away, but that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must serve the values of both authors and readers. If they try to enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices that are too high or otherwise violate the norms of their target community, they will encourage that community to self-organize, or new competitors will emerge who are better attuned to the values of the community.