Yesterday I wrote about ebooks and whether offering them boosts sales of print books.  Today, as luck would have it, I saw in my Chronicle email that textbook piracy is becoming more common on college campuses through websites like Textbook Torrents and Scribd.  What surprises me is the audacity of some people who set up sites like TT whose sole purpose is to illegally trade textbooks.  By no means should publishers or authors condone such activity.  On the other hand, I can understand why some college students would do such a thing: textbook prices are outrageous.  And, when you sell them back to the bookstore you get 1/10th of what you paid for it.  That’s just a pet peeve of mine and like I said, it (pirating textbooks) isn’t something that people should be doing.

According to one author whose edited book is on the TT website, “I don’t feel deep anger.  It probably has economic impact on me, but I can’t say I feel desperate about this.”  The publishers, according to the article, are affected by illegal trading more than the authors.

What then are publishers and authors to do?  I think they’ve already started to work on such websites by requesting individual files be taken down and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are some lawsuits soon.  I don’t know enough about the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act but I would assume that it would be employed in such a case.  And along those same lines I wonder if it needs to be revistited in order to make corrections because of the change in technology.  Again, I don’t know anything about it, it’s just a thought.

This interesting question raised by David Pogue asks whether an electronic version of a book will boost sales of print versions of books.  I don’t really know since I don’t have a book, electronic or otherwise, to sell.  I kind of think the selling of books is similar to musicians who want to sell their music.  When you’re first starting out, I think it makes sense to either sell things really cheap and hope that the volume of material that you can sell via CD or through an online retailer is profitable OR to give away a track or maybe even a whole CD for free to get your music out there.  Then, one would hope that if your material is good enough you will get a following so that you can start charging or charging more for said material.

Pogue says this though:

Many of you pointed out experiments by Cory Doctorow and Baen.com. They have each experimented with giving away free electronic copies of their books — and both claim to have seen spikes in their print-edition sales as a result.

That’s no proof that I’d see the same effect, though, for two reasons.

First, there’s the “small band/big band” argument: unknown bands, like little-known authors and publishers, love free electronic online distribution, because it exposes them to new potential fans.

But established, brand-name bands see file swapping as eating into their CD sales. Similarly, established book brands might legitimately worry that free PDF downloads will eat into book sales.

There’s a big difference in the type of book, too. The Doctorow and Baen.com experiments involve science-fiction novels — and there’s no particular reason you’d want to read those on a computer screen. So a free PDF copy might well convince you to buy the print edition.

He is right, I think, that reading a PDF of an entire book on your computer is not worth your while so if you really want to read it you’re either going to go out and buy the book or get it from your library.  But with the advent of the Kindle and eReader from Sony I think that there are going to be more and more people who will want that medium and will be reading PDF versions of books.

Pogue is obviously skeptical of the idea that ebooks boost print sales will be offering paid for (not free) versions of his books.  It will be interesting to see his results.  But, as he said, maybe even mentioning it on his blog will skew results.  I wonder if what should really take place is something along the line of releasing a print version and electronic version that is hard for lay people to pirate) for the first few years and try making money off of a book that way.  After a certain period of time (3-5 years for stuff like the technology books that Pogue publishes, longer for other materials) you should then give your book away for free.  I don’t have any statistics to make me believe one thing or the other but I think it makes sense that the majority of a books sales take place in the first few years.  After that it probably drops off significantly.  So, why not give it away for free?  I don’t know why Lawrence Lessig gives his books away for free…well I kind of do since he’s a Creative Commons proponent, but I think he’s on the right track.

If I see the results of Pogue’s non-scientific study, I’ll be sure to post them.  In the meantime, what do you think?  Has what I proposed struck a nerve?  Do you have a good idea on how to deal with electronic publishing?

I have a backlog of things to read and comment on and maybe I’ll get to some of them this weekend.  All I can really say right now is that moving to a new place is very stressful.  Today is the first day that I’ve had internet and it’s amazing how addicted you become to RSS feeds, email, etc.  I start my new job on Monday so that’s a good thing and I’m looking forward to the new challenges presented by this position. In the meantime, go out and enjoy the summer weather this weekend.  I know I will.

I thought this piece in the New York Times was particularly interesting because it talks about how Twitter and Wikipedia scooped the traditional news outlets in reporting Tim Russert’s untimely death.  Scooped may not be the right word in this sort of instance because NBC wanted to wait an appropriate amount of time to inform Russert’s family.  I agree with them that that is probably the right thing to do.  But, with the advent of the internet, always connected people who Twitter, text, and update Wikipedia, who has the right to break news?  I’m not saying I agree with a person posting something like that on the net before family has been notified but what sort of place do these web 2.0 technologies play in the news business and how should or shouldn’t they be held to the same standards as traditional media outlets who wait for NBC to talk to the family and also “break” the news on their own stations?  It’s definitely a tricky situation and one that I don’t have a good answer for.  I found this passage particularly interesting:

On Wikipedia, Mr. Russert’s page was updated at 3:01 p.m. — adding the date of death and turning present-tense verbs into the past tense almost 40 minutes before the NBC announcement. The entry was particularly influential since many journalists had heard of Mr. Russert’s becoming stricken, but did not know the outcome. If some turned to Wikipedia to refresh themselves about Mr. Russert, they found an article that seemed to confirm what many had been hearing.

It’s funny (not ha ha funny) how even in the NY Times article, they acknowledge the use of Wikipedia as a source of information.  I know that many will disagree with this but people really do regard it authoritatively, for better or worse.  But the thing that really interests me about this is how something like Wikipedia and microblogger Twitter broke the news before anyone else.  They really are changing how we get information and we can stomp our feet and complain about it or do something about it.   Not to mention they are changing the way information is disseminated.

I haven’t posted much here lately because I’m on vacation….well sort of.  I’m on a vacation and in the middle of moving to a new city so I don’t have a lot of time to write.  I will pick back up when my life gets settled.

Since I am leaving CSU, this will be my last post as a blogger for the University.  I will keep blogging at this address although in the next few weeks I probably won’t post much, if anything.  I will be moving to Eau Claire, Wisconsin for a position at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.  For those of you who are regular or semi-regular readers, bookmark me or add me to your RSS reader (see video below for an explanation on RSS).

There has been a lot of hubub recently about the article “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. It was in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. The basic gist of the article is that because we’re reading so much information online, we can’t comprehend lengthy articles anymore and thus it’s making us stupid. I mentioned something similar to this this a week or so ago with my post on newstritional disorder.

In his article, Carr does a good job presenting his argument and also pointing out what he sees would be common criticisms of his thesis:

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

I couldn’t agree more. As someone who grew up in the time at which the internet took off and reading online became a normal activity, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s making us stupid. I don’t have any research to back that up but it just seems to me that we’re going through a change in how we take in information just like with the development of writing and then the printing press. Maybe it’s not the internet that has changed so much as society has changed. How many kids read for fun these days? Is it being encouraged as much as it should by parents and teachers?

Just because we’re not able to read as lengthy of a book or article as we once were, it doesn’t mean that we can’t. It might just take us longer and we might have to retrain our brain to do that. Yes, it’s true, many of us can’t sit for lengthy periods of time reading anymore. Our brains have become used to short snippits and we don’t necessarily “know” as much as we did 50 or 100 years ago. But, as I’m sure many people would suggest, being able to find that information is what we know how to do now. Google has made it easier and being able to sift through that information and make informed decisions should be a top priority of educators. That’s why information literacy is so important to librarians. We realize that times are changing and we’re trying to do something about it.

I’m not saying that there isn’t some truth to the article. But putting the blame on Google is a good attention grabber, but is a red herring in my opinion. Read the article and let me know what you think.

Below you will find the graduation message that Randy Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon recently.

Many, many people are downloading music on the Internet these days. And, because of that there are some bands like Radiohead and now Nine Inch Nails who are no longer tied to a record label. Because of that, they are releasing their albums on the net, sometimes for free or for a donation based on what someone downloading thinks it is worth. The article that I link to above from the NY Times has a lot of good information in it and some audio files in which Trent Reznor talks about what the Internet has done to the album or why being free of a label is right for him.

What I think is really cool is how Reznor is allowing people to remix his music. He has realized that that is what people are doing these days with products like Garage Band. And, I think that rather than fight copyright infringement cases, he’s getting more people interested in his music because he says to them “Take it. Have fun. Do something interesting with it and don’t feel guilty about it.” That sort of Web 2.0 philosophy on his music will hopefully get more people interested in music, whether that be his or not.

His most recent album “The Slip” was downloaded over 1 million times when it went up online for free.

“Aside from any kind of monetization of it, I’m glad to know that a million people have it on their iPods,” Mr. Reznor said. “If you paid for it, great, but I want everyone to hear it, you know? I want to blow people’s minds.”

It’s easy for someone like him to say this since he’s made his own money before as part of a record company. He’s got his own studio to record in to boot. But, it’s the idea that it’s more about the music and getting people interested in what he’s doing than making money that makes me like what he has to say.

The album before “The Slip,” “Ghosts I-IV,” was released in March 2007,

available in multiple formats, from a bargain downloadable version for $5 to standard CDs and LPs to a luxury $300 limited-edition boxed set of CDs, vinyl, DVDs and artwork. (The 2,500 copies of that set sold out immediately, for a quick gross of $750,000, and now fetch $500 on eBay.)

Not bad for someone without a label. He does say, however that he doesn’t necessarily agree with the idea that music should be free to all. “I don’t agree that it should be free, but it is free, and you can either accept it or you can put your head in the sand.” Although I am not a NIN guy, he’s got the right attitude in my opinion. I hope more people in the music business take what he has to say to heart. It’s like I said the other day about books…If people want a hard copy of the book and can also buy a digital copy, the digital book should cost significantly less than the print edition. So, unless I want a physical copy of the album for my own reasons, then by all means sell an online version for $5 (or for free for a lower quality version as was done and charge for a higher quality version) and one that you can find in the store with its CD case, artwork, etc. for $15-20. People are going to be downloading the songs illegally unless you make it attractive for them to download it legally. It’s not a panacea for that, but it’s something to think about.

For more information on music & the internet, check out First Monday’s special issue on this topic with articles like “Rip, Mix, Burn: The politics of peer to peer and copyright law” and “Giving away music to make money: Independent musicians on the Internet,” or a recent article in the same publication titled “Rearchitecting the music business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies.“

As I say above, I think a lot of what he’s saying and doing is applicable to information resources that librarians deal with - especially journals. The promotion of open access journals and materials in the library is a good thing. I’ve written about this before, but the price of these journals and some books have gone up significantly in the last few years. Too bad there isn’t a Napster, Kazaa, etc. for downloading illegal articles. I’m not advocating for such a thing, but what I am saying is that those software programs have caused a shift in the way musicians and music companies think about how they distribute their product. If there were such a problem with illegal downloading of journal articles, maybe then the stranglehold that these publishers have on libraries would lessen and prices would be more reasonable…just a thought.

Do you see the link between these two businesses as I do? What can or should be done regarding music, journals, or just information in general? Should it all be part of the Creative Commons? Should people only publish in open access journals? Should musicians publish online like Reznor and give people free reign over his intellectual property through remixes, mashups, etc.?

For this week’s installment of Friday Levity I’m going to embed a video on social media.  Blogs are just one part of social media.  Lee Lefevre and his CommonCraft shows are excellent.  Check out some of his other videos here.  Otherwise, enjoy this one: