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Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely go
by dougmccune 8y ago
Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely going to have to understand what makes the industry work the way it does. If you don't understand your users (in this case academics, tenure committees, universities, grant funding bodies, etc) then you're not going to make a dent in the status quo. I'm more just trying to counter the argument that there's no reason for publishers to exist, therefore it should be easy to make them obsolete. There are tons of reasons publishers and the entire system as it is exists, and if you want to change it you need to understand it.
- colordrops 8y agoFair enough, makes sense.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoI think HN has chewed all of the above to death. If you read previous comment threads it's obvious that the community actually does understand all of these things, and also understands why they're a problem. Personally I've lost count of the number of threads and posts where at least one person says "Publishers are in the reputation business." The fact that you seem unaware of this is curious. If you genuinely think that plans to disrupt the industry are going to be based on distributing PDFs, it's possible you may not be as familiar with the discussions here as perhaps you could be.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]