The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established
The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.
I saw this last week and was struck by two things, firstly most if not ALL of these models are not NEW in any sense, simply old models applied well to new circumstances. They use OLD models to take advantage of disruptions in the current system.
The second point is that the barrier to successfully employing any of these “new” models is technological rather than conceptual. Do you have the technology to harvest data for resale? Do you have the know how to build an in-app purchase system? Do you have the capacity to bundle products and sell at the right price when sufficient folks come on board? Do you have the technology to stream content to subscribers and monitor their usage?
On a general point this technological issue is made clearer when you consider that publishers are currently employing some of these models but in what might be considered old school ways. Subscription, group buying, partnership, you could even argue in some ways (at least some authors would), micro-payments!
Eoin
Posted by Eoin Purcell | Jan 10, 2011, 6:04 amNote this recent counterpoint to the inclusion of Spotify here, and the hopes for a US launch anytime soon:
Posted by David Crotty | Jan 10, 2011, 12:53 pmYou may recall that my talk at the Charleston Conference, which will appear as an article in Against the Grain, discussed two of these models, Quirky.com and Kickstarter, in the context of “crowdfunding” for scholarly books.
Posted by Sandy Thatcher | Jan 10, 2011, 1:31 pmThis presentation is amazing. Simply mind blowing. From a creative perpective, it’s not that these will all succeed … but the churn of ideas paired with transparency is illuminating! Barrier breakdown.
Posted by Alix Vance | Jan 10, 2011, 5:42 pm