17 ms·

The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore. As a group

The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore. As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore because distribution has no marginal cost. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the market to make a competitor. How do you win against free? Be better than free.

tpeo 9y ago
Zero marginal cost doesn't imply that the product or service in question has no value. Rather, it implies that producing has no value to the firm. But it can still have value to potential consumers. As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.
- pishpash 9y ago
  It costs money to maintain the distribution network to every additional client. But then they are regulated to (theoretically) cost just enough to ensure such goals. If the network is self-maintaining and already serves every client, then that business would be over, too.
  - sklivvz1971 9y ago
    It costs much more money to produce the electricity they use!
- infogulch 9y ago
  Publishers don't have a natural monopoly, just a circumstantial monopoly. (Yes I just made that up.) That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.
  - c3534l 9y ago
    No it doesn't because there are still fixed costs. Even if it costs me the same to send out a software license to the 100th person as it does to the 101st person, I still have to pay to develop the software, pay the rent, the fixed subscription fee of whatever it is I'm using behind the scenes to develop it, host it, etc.
    - rsfern 9y ago
      Sure, but do the fixed costs really justify the current pricing? The last paper I submitted, the gold open access fee was $3k... Forget it, we just put the preprint on arXiv, which has no problem hosting versioned preprints at no cost to the authors.
      - c3534l 9y ago
        I was really only commenting on the statement "Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Can you think of a natural monopoly which isn't circumstantial? Is your model falsifiable?
    - infogulch 9y ago
      Natural monopolies have some natural cause, not created by the monopoly or their customers. The classic example is utilities, where one natural cause of monopoly is the high cost of infrastructure discouraging new players (capex), and another is because nobody wants 5 separate power lines running to each house just so we have some competition (regulation). When I made up "circumstantial monopolies" I was thinking of monopolies that only still exist via circumstances. Like there used to be some regulation or it used to be a natural monopoly causing it to be a true monopoly, but those external reasons have disappeared and they only remain a monopoly because of inertia. Maybe "inertial monopolies" would have been a better term. It's certainly more amusing. So my argument is that journals may have had a natural monopoly in the past, and have had an inertial monopoly since, but there's no inherent reason why they still have a monopoly today. Does that help explain?
- sklivvz1971 9y ago
  "It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs." I beg to differ. The infrastructure is only part of the cost (the fixed part). The fuel needed to produce the electricity (or the electricity itself) is the variable part. As a consumer I pay much more for the variable part then for the fixed part, therefore what you say can't be correct.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    Why do you say that you pay more for the variable part?
    - isostatic 9y ago
      On the UK out bills are two parts. The standing charge, which is the infrastructure rental, and costs the same wherever you draw 100A or 100mA, and the per unit charge. The later makes up the bill of your bill.
      - tpeo 9y ago
        If I'm not mistaken, the UK uses price-cap regulation in electricity distribution, which is one where government just sets a maximum per unit price for electricity. The standing charge only pays the cost of maintaining his own individual connection to the network, but the fixed cost of installing and maintaining the distribution network go into everything else in the bill. So an UK's consumer "variable" electricity costs are actually the firm's fixed costs.
        isostatic 9y ago
        At various points both of the large parties have proposed capping energy bills. Not happened yet (the Tories ridiculed labour for proposing it, then a year later proposed it themselves) We do have a very mobile energy market, switching provider is easy. There may be price caps on the monopoly parting the system - the connection to the grid - that's because it's a natural monopoly, moreso even that the last mile of fibre from the cabinet to your house.
tdumitrescu 9y ago
Agreed. My experience with academic publishing is in the humanities, not sciences, but over the last 15 years I've seen the quality of editorial work go way down at publishers I worked with, and increasing burden placed on the authors to do work that should be the publisher's job like exact typesetting and layout, as the publishers do anything they can to slash staff costs. A year or two ago I did an article with an Oxford University Press publication and the copy editor mistook a Latin book title for German and offered some nonsensical change based on that. It used to be that OUP staff had such a depth of linguistic knowledge that they themselves offered valuable feedback to authors. Now it appears to be a purely mechanical (and largely "offshored") process for them of pushing text through a pipeline to produce cash from captive markets (university libraries). As their prestige and monopolies wane, these publishers have to be able to offer authors some tangible benefit.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  My experience in science has been the same. I used to look at high quality publications and made it a goal of mine to have my own. Recently I delivered a number of high-quality figures in a vector format for use in a publication. I made especially sure that the text and line widths were appropriate for the document. When I saw the final version of the paper I was quite upset. Not only was the main text riddled with typos and inconsistencies (thanks to having multiple authors), the figures were rendered at low resolution in both print and PDF versions. I mean literally visible pixels on a printed page. So my work was distributed in a lower quality than my own PhD thesis. But the reason we still use these publishers is simple and we all know it. Many people are happy to complain about publishers but nobody is happy to take the hit on their own CV. You shouldn't use publishers for the above reasons, but did you see my latest Impact Factor XX paper in Journal You Have Heard Of?
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding. I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original. It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.
api 9y ago
Same thing has happened in music. Record labels used to add a lot of value via scouting out raw talent and new forms of music and then pairing that talent with producers who could polish and refine it. Now they just churn out identical sounding autotuned junk and look for ways to add DRM. Seems to be a natural tendency for troubled industries to lean into their obsolescence and actually kill their value adds in a futile quest for rent.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  I know very little of the music industry, but to me your comment sounds like record labels were this benevolent and creative force and now they are not. That seems suspect to me because as far as I can tell, big name musicians have always complained about the draconian terms and poor treatment they got from their labels.
  - api 9y ago
    They've never been really great, but my point is that they added more value then than they do now. One critical value they once provided was to discover and popularize new styles. They don't do that anymore at all. Last time they did in a big way was probably grunge in the early 90s. Since then any new movements have had to go around the major labels. They've retreated to endless retreads of copycat pop.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Take a look at the movie "The Wrecking Crew". It's about studio musicians who took raw material from the record labels' "artists" and turned it into slick, professional work. If you're familiar at all with 1960's music, you'll recognize their work, it permeates popular music. The artists themselves were often poor musicians and could not play their own music very well. After watching the movie, I certainly concluded that the record label added a LOT of value.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Yeah it was amusing to learn how many of the bands whose records they recorded couldn't actually play all the music that got recorded when they toured. Even so, that music seems quite specific to that time and place. It's not as though there weren't any talented musicians in Southern California in the 1960s. It's just that many of the most talented musicians were still playing old-fashioned music, so in the interests of selling more records A&R execs decided to sign less virtuosic musicians and help them out. So, in that case the record label was "adding value" but the Monkees or the Byrds or whoever didn't really receive that value. They didn't get paid much anyway, so they would have rather made less-polished records that were more authentically their own.
pinindajin 9y ago
Be better than free? Exactly on point. The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it. I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate. Spotify offered something better than free. It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.
- simplify 9y ago
  To be fair, spotify was able to thrive because the pirate-solution alternative got shut down (grooveshark).
  - santoshalper 9y ago
    And Napster before that et al. However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - charrondev 9y ago
      Besides the convienience of streaming, I stick with spotify for their discovery features, and radios that are very targeted and generally produce good results. Their Discovery Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlist offer far more value than any other music service has. Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.
    - mgkimsal 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
linkmotif 9y ago
> The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore. Yep. If you don't add value, don't expect laws to protect you forever.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  side note : someone's positive value might just someone else's negative. Example : software patents.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rdiddly 9y ago
True, and putting it that way makes it seem painfully obvious. Yet countless companies led by seemingly rational adults somehow came to the opposite conclusion. Pretty fascinating, and I think it's a mistake to use our 20/20 hindsight to dismiss them as mere dinosaurs/idiots. I'm guessing here, but it seems like it must happen incrementally -- frog-in-the-pot-of-water style. Like they react correctly to each small change considered in isolation, but then either don't see or don't accept, and therefore can't react to, the bigger underlying paradigm shift in progress, that unites and explains all the small incremental changes. At the end of a certain interval of time, it's obvious they've failed, yet with each small decision they probably thought they were reacting appropriately. And everybody around them affirmed that. Couple books' worth of interesting material there. So if you want to have any hope of seeing things coming, you almost have to think in un-utterable heresies... and bam, I just realized I'm repeating a Paul Graham essay. Ah well. This paragraph's over!
allenz 9y ago
You argue that publishers are being outcompeted because they don't provide value. First, publishers do provide value.[1] Making copies is a trivial part of publishing; that's a straw man. Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive. PLOS, a leading open access publisher, charges a $2,000 publication fee. Then consider that in closed journals, half the articles are never read.[2] Second, publishers are not being outcompeted. Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor. Rather, piracy destroys the market. An author or digital artist also couldn't "outcompete" a pirate. Without publishers, how should researchers keep updated on relevant papers; academic and grant committees triage applicants; the interested public distinguish science from pseudoscience? Publishers should not bear all the responsibility for a complex ecosystem. We absolutely shouldn't wait to see what happens after the current system collapses. We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science. [1] http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studies-are-never-read-more-three-people-180950222/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...
- leeoniya 9y ago
  do publishers provide more value than the peer reviewers and the authors? because the subscription & access fees charged by journals disproportionately favor the publishers by a huge margin. a fixed publication fee, peer review and editing should cost some affordable amount to the authors. online distribution should be open and free. want it printed on dead trees? then sure, pay for a hard copy.
  - allenz 9y ago
    No, and you don't understand the current scientific ecosystem. Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants, and therefore benefit from open access. Publishers are not. That's why PLOS must charge authors a fee.
    - 9y ago
tommynicholas 9y ago
Good lord this is an outstanding comment
schlagetown 9y ago
Must-read article about the concept of "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!
- zwendkos 9y ago
  Thank you for this. Absolutely great read. Bookmarked!
arstin 9y ago
Exactly. Academic publishers especially have slashed all the editorial work they traditionally did and now contribute nothing. Unless you want a shitty $150 printing of a book. They are utterly parasitic on other people's money: grants, libraries, university salaries (and the weight of a book publication in promotions)... When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing. This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.
WhoBeI 9y ago
There still needs to be some kind of repositories though and someone will need cash to operate those. We could also use a discovery method to find the repositories and a common payment protocol. Then there's reviews and trust to consider. I agree that internet for distribution is the way to go but I wouldn't put a capital-s on solved just yet.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. What they really offer is filtering; being published in a particular journal is a signal of quality and impact of the work. The production and even distribution pieces are incidental to the value, but filtering is difficult to monetize in a normal market because it has high fixed and zero marginal cost. (The same is largely true of production, and as noted distribution is near zero marginal cost as well.) Note that this doesn't mean there is no value add: you can have value without marginal cost, such that utility would be lost to customers if you stopped paying the fixed costs. OTOH, if the value produced by the fixed costs has no cost to scale and no practical barrier to people reproducing it once you've produced it, you can't monetize the value produced.
- gcr 9y ago
  Reputation is built with journals, not publishers. Publishers _do_ add value to _conferences_ by helping out with funding. Since most smaller interesting conferences aren't at all profitable, it's a "symbiotic" relationship between the conference and the publisher: the publisher effectively runs the conference in return for having exclusive distribution rights over the proceedings. Sucks for the profs and students though. When a conference gets big enough to raise their own funding _and_ bold enough to shirk their publisher's exclusivity contract, in-house distribution begins to make sense.
chris_wot 9y ago
This applies to all media. I work for s major media company and they have been cutting editorial hugely. And yet they worry about readership - why would readers increase if the quality decreases?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Vinnl 9y ago
What do you mean by "floundering"? Not providing a lot of value? If so, I could agree, but otherwise, they're doing really well, and have about managed to co-opt the open access movement to ensure they maintain their ridiculous profit margins.
sadlyNess 9y ago
By 'better than free', are you referring to this[1] by Kevin Kelly. To quote from it:When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. And goes ahead to list 8 qualities of what can be sellable once distribution is no longer the value-getter. [1] http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/
wpietri 9y ago
I think a root of this problem is traditional framing of business accounting, which focuses on revenues and costs. That has some utility, but when it's the only perspective, you miss things. Imagine a hamburger shop. In the traditional frame when you want to make more money, you raise revenues (sell more! raise prices!) or cut costs (cheaper ingredients! minimize labor costs!). Using the traditional approach, it's easier to "optimize" by make your product worse and worse. The Lean Manufacturing folks, on the other hand, look at business as an exercise in value creation for the customer. They split things into value generation vs waste. When they optimize, they look for ways to reduce waste and increase value for the customer. That focus on value creation is necessary to start businesses; it's hard to build an audience if you're not providing value. It's a shame that it gets lost over time, with profit being the only focus.
arkh 9y ago
The best example is Steam. Pirate a game? Hard to find, lot of chances to get viruses and you have to update your fixed .exe every patch. Buy it? 2 clicks, one download, done. If you can wait a little you get those at half price during sales. You have user reviews and forums to check before you buy instead of paid-for "professional" reviews.

tpeo 9y ago

Zero marginal cost doesn't imply that the product or service in question has no value. Rather, it implies that producing has no value to the firm. But it can still have value to potential consumers. As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.

pishpash 9y ago
It costs money to maintain the distribution network to every additional client. But then they are regulated to (theoretically) cost just enough to ensure such goals. If the network is self-maintaining and already serves every client, then that business would be over, too.
- sklivvz1971 9y ago
  It costs much more money to produce the electricity they use!
infogulch 9y ago
Publishers don't have a natural monopoly, just a circumstantial monopoly. (Yes I just made that up.) That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.
- c3534l 9y ago
  No it doesn't because there are still fixed costs. Even if it costs me the same to send out a software license to the 100th person as it does to the 101st person, I still have to pay to develop the software, pay the rent, the fixed subscription fee of whatever it is I'm using behind the scenes to develop it, host it, etc.
  - rsfern 9y ago
    Sure, but do the fixed costs really justify the current pricing? The last paper I submitted, the gold open access fee was $3k... Forget it, we just put the preprint on arXiv, which has no problem hosting versioned preprints at no cost to the authors.
    - c3534l 9y ago
      I was really only commenting on the statement "Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Can you think of a natural monopoly which isn't circumstantial? Is your model falsifiable?
  - infogulch 9y ago
    Natural monopolies have some natural cause, not created by the monopoly or their customers. The classic example is utilities, where one natural cause of monopoly is the high cost of infrastructure discouraging new players (capex), and another is because nobody wants 5 separate power lines running to each house just so we have some competition (regulation). When I made up "circumstantial monopolies" I was thinking of monopolies that only still exist via circumstances. Like there used to be some regulation or it used to be a natural monopoly causing it to be a true monopoly, but those external reasons have disappeared and they only remain a monopoly because of inertia. Maybe "inertial monopolies" would have been a better term. It's certainly more amusing. So my argument is that journals may have had a natural monopoly in the past, and have had an inertial monopoly since, but there's no inherent reason why they still have a monopoly today. Does that help explain?
sklivvz1971 9y ago
"It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs." I beg to differ. The infrastructure is only part of the cost (the fixed part). The fuel needed to produce the electricity (or the electricity itself) is the variable part. As a consumer I pay much more for the variable part then for the fixed part, therefore what you say can't be correct.
- tpeo 9y ago
  Why do you say that you pay more for the variable part?
  - isostatic 9y ago
    On the UK out bills are two parts. The standing charge, which is the infrastructure rental, and costs the same wherever you draw 100A or 100mA, and the per unit charge. The later makes up the bill of your bill.
    - tpeo 9y ago
      If I'm not mistaken, the UK uses price-cap regulation in electricity distribution, which is one where government just sets a maximum per unit price for electricity. The standing charge only pays the cost of maintaining his own individual connection to the network, but the fixed cost of installing and maintaining the distribution network go into everything else in the bill. So an UK's consumer "variable" electricity costs are actually the firm's fixed costs.
      - isostatic 9y ago
        At various points both of the large parties have proposed capping energy bills. Not happened yet (the Tories ridiculed labour for proposing it, then a year later proposed it themselves) We do have a very mobile energy market, switching provider is easy. There may be price caps on the monopoly parting the system - the connection to the grid - that's because it's a natural monopoly, moreso even that the last mile of fibre from the cabinet to your house.

tdumitrescu 9y ago

Agreed. My experience with academic publishing is in the humanities, not sciences, but over the last 15 years I've seen the quality of editorial work go way down at publishers I worked with, and increasing burden placed on the authors to do work that should be the publisher's job like exact typesetting and layout, as the publishers do anything they can to slash staff costs. A year or two ago I did an article with an Oxford University Press publication and the copy editor mistook a Latin book title for German and offered some nonsensical change based on that. It used to be that OUP staff had such a depth of linguistic knowledge that they themselves offered valuable feedback to authors. Now it appears to be a purely mechanical (and largely "offshored") process for them of pushing text through a pipeline to produce cash from captive markets (university libraries). As their prestige and monopolies wane, these publishers have to be able to offer authors some tangible benefit.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
My experience in science has been the same. I used to look at high quality publications and made it a goal of mine to have my own. Recently I delivered a number of high-quality figures in a vector format for use in a publication. I made especially sure that the text and line widths were appropriate for the document. When I saw the final version of the paper I was quite upset. Not only was the main text riddled with typos and inconsistencies (thanks to having multiple authors), the figures were rendered at low resolution in both print and PDF versions. I mean literally visible pixels on a printed page. So my work was distributed in a lower quality than my own PhD thesis. But the reason we still use these publishers is simple and we all know it. Many people are happy to complain about publishers but nobody is happy to take the hit on their own CV. You shouldn't use publishers for the above reasons, but did you see my latest Impact Factor XX paper in Journal You Have Heard Of?
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding. I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original. It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.

api 9y ago

Same thing has happened in music. Record labels used to add a lot of value via scouting out raw talent and new forms of music and then pairing that talent with producers who could polish and refine it. Now they just churn out identical sounding autotuned junk and look for ways to add DRM. Seems to be a natural tendency for troubled industries to lean into their obsolescence and actually kill their value adds in a futile quest for rent.

IgorPartola 9y ago
I know very little of the music industry, but to me your comment sounds like record labels were this benevolent and creative force and now they are not. That seems suspect to me because as far as I can tell, big name musicians have always complained about the draconian terms and poor treatment they got from their labels.
- api 9y ago
  They've never been really great, but my point is that they added more value then than they do now. One critical value they once provided was to discover and popularize new styles. They don't do that anymore at all. Last time they did in a big way was probably grunge in the early 90s. Since then any new movements have had to go around the major labels. They've retreated to endless retreads of copycat pop.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Take a look at the movie "The Wrecking Crew". It's about studio musicians who took raw material from the record labels' "artists" and turned it into slick, professional work. If you're familiar at all with 1960's music, you'll recognize their work, it permeates popular music. The artists themselves were often poor musicians and could not play their own music very well. After watching the movie, I certainly concluded that the record label added a LOT of value.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yeah it was amusing to learn how many of the bands whose records they recorded couldn't actually play all the music that got recorded when they toured. Even so, that music seems quite specific to that time and place. It's not as though there weren't any talented musicians in Southern California in the 1960s. It's just that many of the most talented musicians were still playing old-fashioned music, so in the interests of selling more records A&R execs decided to sign less virtuosic musicians and help them out. So, in that case the record label was "adding value" but the Monkees or the Byrds or whoever didn't really receive that value. They didn't get paid much anyway, so they would have rather made less-polished records that were more authentically their own.

pinindajin 9y ago

Be better than free? Exactly on point. The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it. I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate. Spotify offered something better than free. It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.

simplify 9y ago
To be fair, spotify was able to thrive because the pirate-solution alternative got shut down (grooveshark).
- santoshalper 9y ago
  And Napster before that et al. However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - charrondev 9y ago
    Besides the convienience of streaming, I stick with spotify for their discovery features, and radios that are very targeted and generally produce good results. Their Discovery Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlist offer far more value than any other music service has. Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.
  - mgkimsal 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

linkmotif 9y ago

> The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore. Yep. If you don't add value, don't expect laws to protect you forever.

wiz21c 9y ago
side note : someone's positive value might just someone else's negative. Example : software patents.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rdiddly 9y ago

True, and putting it that way makes it seem painfully obvious. Yet countless companies led by seemingly rational adults somehow came to the opposite conclusion. Pretty fascinating, and I think it's a mistake to use our 20/20 hindsight to dismiss them as mere dinosaurs/idiots. I'm guessing here, but it seems like it must happen incrementally -- frog-in-the-pot-of-water style. Like they react correctly to each small change considered in isolation, but then either don't see or don't accept, and therefore can't react to, the bigger underlying paradigm shift in progress, that unites and explains all the small incremental changes. At the end of a certain interval of time, it's obvious they've failed, yet with each small decision they probably thought they were reacting appropriately. And everybody around them affirmed that. Couple books' worth of interesting material there. So if you want to have any hope of seeing things coming, you almost have to think in un-utterable heresies... and bam, I just realized I'm repeating a Paul Graham essay. Ah well. This paragraph's over!

allenz 9y ago

You argue that publishers are being outcompeted because they don't provide value. First, publishers do provide value.[1] Making copies is a trivial part of publishing; that's a straw man. Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive. PLOS, a leading open access publisher, charges a $2,000 publication fee. Then consider that in closed journals, half the articles are never read.[2] Second, publishers are not being outcompeted. Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor. Rather, piracy destroys the market. An author or digital artist also couldn't "outcompete" a pirate. Without publishers, how should researchers keep updated on relevant papers; academic and grant committees triage applicants; the interested public distinguish science from pseudoscience? Publishers should not bear all the responsibility for a complex ecosystem. We absolutely shouldn't wait to see what happens after the current system collapses. We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science. [1] http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studies-are-never-read-more-three-people-180950222/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...

leeoniya 9y ago
do publishers provide more value than the peer reviewers and the authors? because the subscription & access fees charged by journals disproportionately favor the publishers by a huge margin. a fixed publication fee, peer review and editing should cost some affordable amount to the authors. online distribution should be open and free. want it printed on dead trees? then sure, pay for a hard copy.
- allenz 9y ago
  No, and you don't understand the current scientific ecosystem. Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants, and therefore benefit from open access. Publishers are not. That's why PLOS must charge authors a fee.
  - 9y ago

tommynicholas 9y ago

Good lord this is an outstanding comment

schlagetown 9y ago

Must-read article about the concept of "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!

zwendkos 9y ago
Thank you for this. Absolutely great read. Bookmarked!

arstin 9y ago

Exactly. Academic publishers especially have slashed all the editorial work they traditionally did and now contribute nothing. Unless you want a shitty $150 printing of a book. They are utterly parasitic on other people's money: grants, libraries, university salaries (and the weight of a book publication in promotions)... When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing. This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.

WhoBeI 9y ago

There still needs to be some kind of repositories though and someone will need cash to operate those. We could also use a discovery method to find the repositories and a common payment protocol. Then there's reviews and trust to consider. I agree that internet for distribution is the way to go but I wouldn't put a capital-s on solved just yet.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. What they really offer is filtering; being published in a particular journal is a signal of quality and impact of the work. The production and even distribution pieces are incidental to the value, but filtering is difficult to monetize in a normal market because it has high fixed and zero marginal cost. (The same is largely true of production, and as noted distribution is near zero marginal cost as well.) Note that this doesn't mean there is no value add: you can have value without marginal cost, such that utility would be lost to customers if you stopped paying the fixed costs. OTOH, if the value produced by the fixed costs has no cost to scale and no practical barrier to people reproducing it once you've produced it, you can't monetize the value produced.

gcr 9y ago
Reputation is built with journals, not publishers. Publishers _do_ add value to _conferences_ by helping out with funding. Since most smaller interesting conferences aren't at all profitable, it's a "symbiotic" relationship between the conference and the publisher: the publisher effectively runs the conference in return for having exclusive distribution rights over the proceedings. Sucks for the profs and students though. When a conference gets big enough to raise their own funding _and_ bold enough to shirk their publisher's exclusivity contract, in-house distribution begins to make sense.

chris_wot 9y ago

This applies to all media. I work for s major media company and they have been cutting editorial hugely. And yet they worry about readership - why would readers increase if the quality decreases?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Vinnl 9y ago

What do you mean by "floundering"? Not providing a lot of value? If so, I could agree, but otherwise, they're doing really well, and have about managed to co-opt the open access movement to ensure they maintain their ridiculous profit margins.

sadlyNess 9y ago

By 'better than free', are you referring to this[1] by Kevin Kelly. To quote from it:When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. And goes ahead to list 8 qualities of what can be sellable once distribution is no longer the value-getter. [1] http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

wpietri 9y ago

I think a root of this problem is traditional framing of business accounting, which focuses on revenues and costs. That has some utility, but when it's the only perspective, you miss things. Imagine a hamburger shop. In the traditional frame when you want to make more money, you raise revenues (sell more! raise prices!) or cut costs (cheaper ingredients! minimize labor costs!). Using the traditional approach, it's easier to "optimize" by make your product worse and worse. The Lean Manufacturing folks, on the other hand, look at business as an exercise in value creation for the customer. They split things into value generation vs waste. When they optimize, they look for ways to reduce waste and increase value for the customer. That focus on value creation is necessary to start businesses; it's hard to build an audience if you're not providing value. It's a shame that it gets lost over time, with profit being the only focus.

arkh 9y ago

The best example is Steam. Pirate a game? Hard to find, lot of chances to get viruses and you have to update your fixed .exe every patch. Buy it? 2 clicks, one download, done. If you can wait a little you get those at half price during sales. You have user reviews and forums to check before you buy instead of paid-for "professional" reviews.