Re: re: Interesting navigati

DB (DB.PRESSBKS@press.uchicago.edu)
Sat, 17 Dec 1994 10:20 CST

Mike Ellsworth wrote:
>It's all over but the shouting for the old paradigm, which was based on
conserving >a scarce resource (paper and its delivery)

That's a far cry from the paradigm. The scarce resource is not paper and a
delivery mechanism, the scarce resource is intellectual property. 90% of
the value of a publishing company is the copyrights it controls. That's
the whole game right there. And traditional publishing is not going to
disappear until there are mechanisms in a networked environment to
compensate the long hours of labor that go into the creation of
intellectual property. Would you argue that Microsoft's demise is imminent
due to the existence of freeware and shareware? It's the same issue.

>Take a look at the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, easily as good, and
><arguably better, than half of the half-baked Internet books in your local
bookstore. >And it's free.

And it's also for sale in your local bookstore under the title "Everybody's
Guide to the Internet." Why? See above.

>The online revolution puts power in the hands of the people. They now
(that's NOW) have a choice. >They now can choose from a myriad of
gatekeepers, or go right to the source in many instances (viz >White House
press releases, government laws, EDGAR, etc.). In many cases, the
publisher no longer >has complete control of the information source, so
you'll have to learn a new way to add value besides >being a gatekeeper and
a sifter.

No publisher has ever had control of these government information sources
you cite. That stuff has always been free. Much of what is available on
the net is public domain material. These sorts of examples have very
little to do with most publishing. The issue for publishers is how to make
the work of authors economically viable -- to spend days, weeks, month,
years investigating news, or writing novels or poems, or doing research.

> You've got kids out there putting their spin on the news, filtering and
winnowing, and adding their >perspective. For fun. The same is true for
other types of content -- there's a lot of amateurs out there to >compete
against.

Exactly. How do we prevent all intellectual work in the future from being
the work of amateurs? How do we prevent the inevitable demise of
paper-based publishing from also being the demise of professional authors?

Dean Blobaum
The University of Chicago Press
dblobaum@press.uchicago.edu
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