The Future of Scholarship: Easier, Harder, and With More Charlatans
Alan Jacobs:
It’s at least possible that in this new knowledge environment we’ll be able to take more of the research as a given — not all of it, but more of it — and will demand from researchers some of the literary virtues: lucidity of style, subtlety of argument, liveliness of narrative. Maybe when readers will make it clear that they know how easy it is to multiply sources, writers will cease to try to impress through numbers of footnotes.
I believe this is justified because I realize that when I buy an e-book from Amazon, I’m really buying a license to that content, not the content itself. This is ridiculous, by the way. I feel as if e-book retailers are simply hiding behind that philosophy as a way to further support DRM and scare publishers away from considering a DRM-free world. I’m not going to say where I work, or anything about my company, but I will say that I don’t think DRM is good for the publisher, author or customer. Don’t pro-DRM publishers realize this is one of the key complaints from their customers? I’ve heard plenty of customers tell me that e-book prices need to be low because they’re only buying access to the content, not fully owning it. That needs to change.
Google Begins to Scale Back Its Scanning of Books From University Libraries
The Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company’s long-term investment in the work remains unclear.
Potential Crisis May Be Brewing in Preservation of E-Journals
The Digital Shift:
A recently released study of e-journal preservation at Columbia and Cornell universities revealed that only about 15 percent of e-journals are being preserved and that the responsibility for preservation is diffuse at best. Even as electronic materials now account for around 60 percent of collection expenditures (and print dwindles in importance), the report, Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation, questions whether the necessary infrastructure is in place to ensure that this scholarly record remains intact over the long-term.
E-books Can’t Burn
Tim Parks:
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.
A New Kind of Review for a New Kind of Book
Carl Zimmer:
Walk into a book store and look at the science section. Most of the books are between about 200 and 400 pages. Most are created by large publishing houses. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong about a 50-page book, of course. It just doesn’t fit comfortably into the publishing business—a business that has to contend with costs for printing books, storing them in warehouses, shipping them to book stores, and accepting returned books. Ebooks create an economic space for the very short book (and the very long one). They also allow authors to reach readers without having to persuade a publisher that their book will earn back an investment.
Trouble for Elsevier, the Leading Academic Publisher
On the Media:
Late last month, a Cambridge Mathematician wrote a blog post that launched a massive boycott of the largest publisher of academic journals in the world. The boycott, now more than 6,000 academics strong, has ignited a discussion over the cost of, and access to, information published by academics. Rick Karr reports on rising discontent with the current academic publishing model.
