[FM Discuss] Why would a commercial publisher fund an open book? (Picking up an earler thread)

[Andy Oram]

I'm picking up a discussion on the FLOSS Manuals discussion list.

Publishers, as a Digital Foundations blog put it, are scared. We're scared of having our investment vanish as digital copies are disseminated outside our control. But we're also scared of how free content and new media on the Internet are competing with us.

I think we're all reacting in the right direction: trying to live with new media instead of fight it. One recent counter-example is the publisher's lawsuit against Google's library project, where O'Reilly stood alone in taking Google's side.

I think people have to pay for quality sometimes, and that publishers have to act more like consultants, offering services to authors and communities, than like gatekeepers. The two-fold challenge we face is:

1. To package our quality-enhancing efforts so as to make us easy to contract with.

2. To demonstrate that our efforts actually do enhance quality, which I define as helping readers to be more effective masters of the topic.

Another quality that many people in information industries offer in order to make money is convenience. iTunes makes it easy to download and organize music. You just can't get it out once you put it in. Safari Books Online, which O'Reilly started, has no DRM but is very successful because they make it pretty easy to choose books and add them to your bookshelf, then to search and browse them.

But these do not change the relationship of producer and consumer, which I am interested in doing.

Andy