Re: Licensing books

["adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

At the risk of sounding too much like the testy examiner of this 
assignment, I would suggest that this question is too 
unconstrained to be useful. Similar in WHAT respects?

Do we mean similar from the point of view of licensing for sites 
or single users? Or similar as regards delivery platform? Annual 
pricing? Big deals? Is the presupposition that scholarly books 
will be treated very differently from eg Trade books, or 
Children's books? If so, is that a safe presupposition? etc

I suspect that Joe intended to target the question in a specific 
direction, but it needs it. More direction and more context 
please.

I will risk one thought for your consideration: the journal move 
to the web began roughly 10 years ago. Looks as though the book 
move is begining roughly now. The web is very different now from 
what it was then. In the context of pervasive broadband and Web 
2.0, a big database approach such as Google Book Search, seems a 
lot more appropriate than the 'delivered file' approach used by 
PDF-type content packages for specific scientific papers. The 
challenge now for publishers and authors is much more on how to 
design optimal e-libraries, ten years ago it looked like the 
challenge was how to make e-books work. That was a blind alley.

Adam Hodgkin


On 2/24/06, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was in an interesting discussion this morning in which the 
> question came up as to whether scholarly books would follow a 
> digital path similar to what journals experienced beginning, 
> say, 10 years ago.  At the risk of this sounding a bit like a 
> "compare and contrast" assignment that is the bane of high 
> schoolers, I was wondering if other members of this list had 
> pondered this analogy.  Will books follow journals, albeit 
> several steps behind, or will they forge their own way in the 
> brave new digital world?
>
> Joe Esposito