What I wonder is what will happen when all these mediums come through the same pipe: the internet. (Sure, people will still see movies in theatres, but most films are already viewed on televisions and I don’t see the trend letting up.) Publishing will face a similar future as digital distribution methods mature.

Will this flattening of prestige among the forms diminish the talents of creators?

i wonder that some people don’t seem to even casually reread their posts before publishing them - so they’ll have obvious & hideous typos. It usually puts me off, as it bespeaks a slovenliness, a lack of concentration or care, that hardly encourages the reader to concentrate or care in return.

i reread everything i write before clicking ‘publish’, often several times. i don’t see the point writing if it’s going to be shit.

There is very little evidence, however, that making it available online as well, free of charge and free for adaptation and quotation, has a negative impact on book sales.

I did it myself, and I agree it doesn’t harm book sales right now. I don’t know whether to agree with your last paragraph until you specify what these “many new business models” are, exactly. But this is discussed at length in a previous post.

Gregor —

I half hope that newspaper editorials may be on the way out.

I think that some newspaper opinion journalists might have realised already that they are the most vulnerable and dispensable part of the operation, given the vast available evidence that bloggers can actually do their job better than they do. Hence a lot of the kneejerk anti-blogging rage in newspaper opinion columns, perhaps.

On the other hand, bloggers can’t replace the reporting operations of well-financed newspapers, despite all the guff talked about “citizen journalism”.

Thanks for the link to Da Russophile.

I agree with much you have written in favor of publishing a book as a book. There is very little evidence, however, that making it available online as well, free of charge and free for adaptation and quotation, has a negative impact on book sales. (NB: This is probably more true for novels and works of scholarship than, say, reference books.)

I buy lots of books. I also wish that every book were available and searchable online, as that would not only make my life and my work much easier, but would create significant economies and new uses for this content that we can’t even imagine today.

It is unfortunate that the publishing industry pretends not believe this. It means that they are doomed to follow in the tracks of the music recording industry instead of embracing the universal sharing of human knowledge that the Internet has made possible. Many new business models are emerging in this new world, and the old ones are failing despite their best efforts to turn back the clock. It is a terrible mistake to think that money can’t be made from writing and printing in a world with no enforceable copyright laws. I hope you don’t fall into this trap.

Thank you for the email that you recently sent, and which I will reply to when I get something that I want to scan. But I think that this is relevant to what you said about Op ed writing.

My own view is that there is no dichotomy in print and internet publishing and that most print journalists have a distant relationship with academic publishing and will just parrot the cliches of the day. Subsequently I half hope that newspaper editorials may be on the way out.

Shortly after reading Unspeak I looked through a book which looked good, but was ultimately depressing called Flat Earth Publishing, which spoke about the dismal quality of op ed science journalism. In America (and probably here) 90% of peer reviewed literature supports the Global warming hypothesis but 50% of opinion articles are ‘global warming sceptic’. From personal experience I also notice that broadsheet newspaper journalists have appalling knowledge of geography and history.

As it is there is one country of contemporary mainstream interest where I have some knowledge and that is Russia. Knowing a bit about Russia and then reading articles by op ed journalists (who would probably write about Iraq and globalisation in the same week) was a distubing indicator of how strong recieved wisdom and stale thinking is in the mainstream press. Putin. Weimar Republic. Appeasement. Oil Bubble. Stalin. Tsar. Jealousy. Munich. Soviet Nostalgia. Nationalism. Fossil fuel dependency. I could write a standard broadsheet newspaper op ed about Russia in five minutes, though it would all be nonsense.

For this reason, I think that the blog Da Russophile (http://darussophile.blogspot.com/) is far superior to any British broadsheet newspaper when it comes to coverage of Russia, precisely because it links to so many academic articles, and because it provides intelligent criticism of ‘kremlinologists’. I disagree to a large extent with the editorial stance, but its use of figures demonstrates why print editorials are of very poor quality.

All the best
Gregor

If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.

Partipatory Economics (Parecon for short) is a possible answer to A, as you’d be giving it away for free only in the sense that it would be free as in freedom, not free as in beer, because you’re remunerated for effort and sacrifice, not output. People would have to actually want to read your stuff for you to be remunerated, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P....._economics