The end of paper and copyright for technical books?
February 20th, 2008The bulk of technical works is not-for-profit. How many scholars or experts make a fortune writing a book on the specifics of Madagascar nematodes, on extended Kalman filtering for interplanetary navigation, on time and narrative in George Bernanos’ novels? It is already a miracle that they should find a publisher for such works, and another miracle that the book should find its way to a finite number of academic libraries and specialized bookshops. The motivation for writing these books is about sharing the best nuggets of human knowledge with the rest of mankind (at least that part of mankind which can understand it). Sometimes it is also about (peer) recognition. Never about money.
Trapped in paper and copyright
When paper was the only way to get the word out, then authors of technical books and articles had to find publishers. Publishers imposed copyright rules, in the unlikely event the book would sell. Then the knowledge was trapped: trapped in paper, therefore available only from the lucky academic libraries or specialized bookshops who managed to host a copy; and trapped in time, as the probability of a reprint for specialized non-fiction works is close to zero — how many books are gathering dust or lost forever in the limbo of underground shelves and copyright restrictions is beyond imagination. For all practical purposes, these books are largely unavailable to the world, except inside academia (and when you have time to wait for an interlibrary loan). As if academia was the only place where people want to learn things.
What is not searchable does not exist
But now there is the internet. Knowledge does not need paper anymore. Therefore it does not need publishers, it does not need copyright, it does not need libraries. My understanding is that authors will soon discover this, and they will also discover the one key reason why their works should be freed from paper and copyright protection: what cannot be found by an internet search engine does not exist.
When a book’s card was missing from the library catalog, the book was as good as burnt. Now when a text is not accessible to Google, ditto. Authors whose main intention is to get their message out will therefore make absolutely sure their book can be found via a full-text search on the internet. The Amazon ‘search inside‘ feature is not good enough. First pages of scientific articles at IEEE or Springerlink are not good enough. The result of an internet search is like an anteroom with 50 doors. I will visit the doors that are wide open. The locked ones, or the ones which say ’sign in to enter’, I will not visit because I already have enough with the open ones.
Therefore, if content is to be read, it has to be fully accessible. And authors want content to be read. I imagine that the wish for recognition would not readily accept a complete absence of copyright. I believe that a creative-commons licence with attribution and share-alike clauses would be the general choice for authors, although I would choose public domain straight away myself. After all, Plato, Augustine and Newton have chosen the public domain: is there no pride in just sharing what I know with the world and the world can do whatever they want with it?
What if I do not like to read on-screen?
This does not preclude paper, under the exact same model as xerox copy in academia: when I want just a short paragraph from a great book, I print the relevant page on my printer. If I want the full book, then I order it. For books which do not have enough orders to justify a conventional printing process, maybe we will see printing services specialized in on-demand printing for public-domain works: they will be sending you the book printed for you with the paper, the font-size and font-family you chose, for a price not higher than you woud have paid for a conventional book which would have had to go through the whole editor/publisher/distributor process.
What about editors?
But there remains a big question in my suggestion: how about editorial quality? Having to go through a publisher has the immense advantage of imposing an editor and a quality target. I know that whatever I write, if I can get someone to proof-read and comment, the result after correction will be greatly improved. What could replace the conventional editing process? The readership is probably generally too narrow to trigger a wikipedia-like self-improvement of the works. Will it just be volunteer-peer-based, with authors trying to find other authors to edit them? Will it be simply survival of the fittest (but then there will be a huge waste of sub-par books who could have made the cut if there had been an editor)? In fact, I am not really worried: I believe a smart solution will appear almost by itself.
And boy will I be happy in a world where all the best knowledge is at my fingertips!
Oh Mandarine, you have listed the current great fears of reference/monograph publishers. How do we stay relevant when the publishing model changes, as it is certain to do? Just last week, Harvard University faculty voted for open access for all articles published by faculty members.
The one reassuring thing is that many authors are so lazy, so sloppy in what they deliver, that editors are very much required as gatekeepers of quality. But, are authors lazy because they can get away with it, knowing that someone else will clean up their mess?
I think you are right that a solution will present itself; indeed, see this link for one such development.
Your last question and Becky’s response are intriguing — I do wonder what mechanism for editing will appear. Your vision of the future does sound wonderful, but I am very curious about quality. I often feel overwhelmed by the amount of reading material out there and am grateful for people who help me sort it out.
Becky: my best guess as to the apparent laziness of authors is that they are on a schedule (which is the general case when one works with a publisher, unless I am mistaken). If authors had a lifetime to pore over their writing, the quality would be much higher (and the amount of published material much lower, which might not necessarily be a bad thing). An editor (or a group of editors) would still be able to improve the text, but at least the obvious shortcomings would be dealt with in the first place.
Dorothy: my experience of spontaneous organisation towards quality is with open-source software. Somehow, the best stuff always pops to the surface, there to be observed, handled and polished by the best people, without so much as an institutional peer-review process or grading process. (in contrast, web-based peer-review and grading like slashdot or digg do not promote quality but popularity, with a very questionable positive feedback effect of popularity promoting popularity).
You are right in that authors are allegedly on a schedule… I have known good, fast authors and terrible, slow authors. But, I must not complain since the terrible authors are the ones I get for freelance editing, and who are paying for my vacation this year. So I have something of an interest in maintaining the importance of editors!
Maybe that’s how the system will evolve: the best authors will have no difficulties finding peers or volunteers to edit their work just for fun, pride and fame. The others will have to pay you if they want their work to be any good in the end.
Fascinating. I agree with you that it will somehow all sort itself out, and I am very impatient for the day when I will have all information I may want (in much better “searchable” form, which is also something I believe is coming, or will sort itself out). I have a feeling that publishing companies are going to become “editing” and “print-on-demand” or “download on demand” companies and will no longer be the great “gate-keepers” they’ve always been. Not quite sure how profits will work in this scenario, but I have a feeling that will work itself out as well.
Isn’t it astounding how new inventive business models seem to arise wherever the good-old merchant model of pay-per-anything is challenged?
Hear hear! We can be sad together about IEEE and Springer. I have been driven to distraction an uncountable number of times by following a link to IEEE which says that my account privileges do not grant me access to a publication. And, irony of ironies, sometimes, IEEE does not let me download and print my own papers! Should I sign up for 10 different societies just to be able to download their publications?
I wish that all of it were free or at least subsidized, with more or less standardized formats, and easier online procedures for submission, review and revision of journals (to reduce the burden on editors). I wish that IEEE stopped printing their proceedings on paper because I think that the number of trees used is out of proportion with the number of people who will go and read the papers versus the number of people who will search for a dozen papers in an hour and probably print out a couple, if at all. Further, how much space, furniture and electricity would university libraries be able to save if all of their IEEE, SPIE, Science, Nature, etc. archives were only available digitally?
You are very right about the tree-saving potential of digitizing scientific ‘papers’ (but what are we going to call them then?) I have read recently about scientists formally protesting that they were paying twice for the profits of scientific publishers: once by contributing freely to the whole content (either by submitting or reviewing articles), and again by paying real money for the result.