Off Through Labor Day
We’re taking the last week of August off and will be back after the Labor Day holiday.
A Case for Popularization: A Review of Rockonomics
Bringing the authority of the academy to a broad audience should be second only to original research itself, especially if the research community hopes to retain or even increase the public’s support for the esoteric work that goes on behind the laboratory walls.
The Web-scale University Press
This is an essay on what it would mean to create a university press that operates at Web scale. It speculates about what such an endeavor would look like and probes some aspects of the financial model.
The Beatles Yesterday and Today: An Allegory of the Role of Paid Content
An essay on the Beatles and their business model, which emphasized paid content, now called “toll-access” content. The question is how the Beatles would have been different if they had worked in an era where content was expected to be free.
Talking to the End-User — A Publishing Paradigm
Publishers can and should explore strategies that are built around users, which is a kind of D2C marketing. However, working on a direct basis has its costs and may make us all appreciate all the efficiencies that intermediaries provide.
The Shrinking Orphan Works Problem
The orphan works problem is finite. Current practices will chip away at the number of orphans. It is unlikely that more orphans will be created in the future because it is so easy for publishers now to hold onto rights and keep books available in some form.
The Library With No Books In It
A surprising collection found at the Schroedinger Archive includes a number of works of short fiction that take scholarly communications as their subject. In it, we find a tale with many surprising reversals — “The Library With No Books In It.”
The Beatles 3000 — An Exercise in Historical Drift Based on Incomplete Records
Scottie Pippen was a Beatle? Scholars a thousand years from now might just find evidence to suggest as much.