Highlights from This Week’s Comments in the Kitchen
Highlights from this week’s reader comments, pointing the way to dialog you might have otherwise missed. Also, let me know if you like this as a weekly feature.
How Not to Negotiate for Digital Rights
Jonathan Galassi misses the boat when he tries to argue with authors on moral grounds. Appeal to their pocketbooks.
The End of Kirkus Reviews: Gloom, Doom, and Sunshine
Kirkus Reviews is doomed. But for all the losses of old ways of discovering books, new ones keep cropping up. The future is bright for book publishing.
Fighting Fire with Fire — The Only Remaining Option?
The shift to the Systems Age is happening so fast and completely that publishers are left with only one option — fight fire with fire. Will they? Can they? Some examples show the way.
Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
Despite predictions and analyses to the contrary, STM publishing hasn’t been disrupted yet. Perhaps there’s more here than meets the eye . . .
Do Medical Editors Discriminate Against Poor Authors?
Do medical editors have different quality standards based on the author’s geographic location?
Churn in the Book Space: Rational & Irrational Behavior Among Book Publishers
Two fiction publishers decide to delay release of their e-books, further marginalizing their books. Meanwhile, an STM book publisher gets it right.
Academia and STM Publishing Have Gone Electronic
How much more data will it take before everyone gets it?
The Scholars’ Catalog Project
A new initiative for a unifying online catalog of resources is underway. Can it provide a substrate for future innovation?
When Less Is More: The Upside of Paywalls and Delisting from Google
Rupert Murdoch’s recent moves have challenged the widely held notion that Google and the traffic it generates are essential to a successful web publishing business. Is it better to have lots of freeloading readers or a much smaller group of paying customers? Could the rumored search engine subsidies help support struggling scholarly publishing activities?
What Happens When We Misplace the Credentialing Keys?
Self-publishing initiatives in consumer publishing a falling under harsh criticism. Why aren’t similar endeavors in the purportedly more disciplined area of scholarly publishing experiencing the same?
How Many Books Dance on the Head of an e-Pin?
Can the model used in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records be extended to embrace e-works? Or should it be trimmed instead?
The e-Book Revolution — If At First You Don’t Succeed . . .
E-books are changing the world of publishing, but rather than creating something new, too much emphasis is being put on re-hashing failures of the past. The changing market doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, and the rise of new forms may not spell the death of the book as we know it.
Publishing in the Google Ecosystem
Complaints against Google miss the point — it’s the Google Era, and publishers who work well with this major upstart have plenty to look forward to.
Breaking the Chain of Inquiry — When Journals and Journalists Fall Short
When an author conceals information, and a blog branded with a respectable newspaper plays along, it doesn’t engender confidence in the new information space.