Saturday, October 22, 2005

Book author wants her book in Google Print: Jason Kottke quotes from letters and blog postings from Meghann MarcoI'm a book author. My publisher [Simon & Schuster] is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I'd asked for my book to be included, because gosh it's so hard to get people to read a book [...] I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print. (Via Open Access News.) This brings me back to the hypothesis that publishers are suing to protect an artificial scarcity that allows them to extract monopoly rents from their gatekeeper role between writers and readers. If readers could easily find relevant works in the backlist or out-of-print, they could then read them at a library or buy them through used book dealers. That would tend to depress the demand for heavily promoted new works. Instead, readers' access to relevant works is mediated by opaque advertising and reviewing processes. It's a classical case of market inefficiency created by information asymmetry between seller and buyer: the buyer cannot determine independently which of the goods on offer will best meet their information need, and the buyer has no confidence that information sources like reviewers are not colluding with the seller. Closed scientific journals exploit similar inefficiencies. 5:09:07 PM