Peter: No, I didn’t think you were disagreeing with me. I was taking on Krugman, not you (and neither of us quoted his final statement, which really got to me, something about all of us becoming the Grateful Dead, like it or not).

Kathy: Actually, I was alluding to a piece of that–placing more value on things we pay for–in my comment to Dorothea. I strongly suspect libraries pay more attention to things they pay for than to things they get for free. I know that an attempt to gain a higher profile for a set of good-quality free library publications was a failure. I also suspect more preservation money will be spent on $ goods than on free goods… And yes, this is a natural human failing. (I’m guessing Cites & Insights would have more prestige if I charged for it–but that it would also have very few readers, probably less than 10% of current readership. So for that, I make the tradeoff one way. For books, I made the tradeoff differently–but if I was writing them as part of a paid job, directly or indirectly, I’d probably make the PDF versions free. As Aaron says, it’s a decision that needs to be up to the author/publisher.)

As far as giving some of it away…Lulu, at least, lets you set up a free preview of up to 10 pages, and you can choose which pages–so, for example, I don’t bother to show several pages of Table of Contents, but do show several pages of the first chapter of each book. I can’t imagine not providing *some* kind of preview.

So do iPhone users place higher value on blogs because they’re paying to read them?

During one talk I gave years ago, I addressed a concern about raising fines from 5 cents a day to 10 cents. The librarians were scared to death to raise the fine b/c people might not like it. well, they don’t like fines in the first place, so …

What I tried to convince them of is that cheap things seem to have less value. Are patrons going to rush books back to avoid that 5 cents a day? There’s no incentive there. Maybe 25 cents (back then) or 50 cents (now) would get their attention.

In my mind, all of that “we need to stay free” stuff just reinforces consumers’ mindset that all lib stuff is free and therefore has no value, costs nothing, why pay my tax dollars, etc. Of course that gets into a whole dif issue…

re: online conf — if you do one, YES, charge for sure. for all the reasons mentioned above. plus there will be costs you incur, for web space, bandwidth, phone calls — not to mention, heaven forbid, your valuable time.

BTW I’ve been meaning to read that book too — thanks for the video link!

I think if I did put on an online conference, I might charge a small fee for it. Not enough for anyone to get rich (and probably just enough to recoup any costs), but enough to get people to feel more of a sense of commitment to seeing it through.

I remember listening to an NPR interview with the author of this book about the sort of irrationality people exhibit when it comes to free vs. pay things http://www.predictablyirrational.com/. I haven’t read the book, but it looks really interesting.

“That’s really expense — wow, it must be great quality.” vs. “If they’re giving it away for free, it must not be very worthwhile.”

An excellent point — I couldn’t agree more. And with this in mind, I do think it is reasonable to leave the decision to charge or not charge for an electronic version of a work up to the creator of that work. Some, Cory Doctrow being the notable example, see great value in making their work available online for free (bandwith caveats aside). Certainly there are solid reasons for doing this, and as such they elect to do so. Others such as Walt or Tim O’Reilly prefer to attach a specific monitary value to the work — and as the creators of the works in question, that is certainly their prerogative.

Many authors seek the middle route of making a portion of their work available for free and charging for the rest — case in point being a web-based graphic novel publishing house I encountered a while back who would make the first six pages of their graphic novels available and then charge $29.95 for the full PDF. Again, it is the prerogative of a creator to make a portion of his/her work available for free and then charge for the rest — or enter into a deal with a publishing house to do this, as the graphic novelists who published their work through the publishing house I note above will have done. I myself never expected every last work available on the internet to be available for free, and was not at all surprised to encounter such a business model. (I as a consumer thus have the choice of paying for the content, not paying and just walking away, or seeing if I can find similar content elsewhere for free or for a lower price. There is also the pirated copy route of accessing the material in question).

With these thoughts in mind I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts about those of us on a tenure track arguing that “what we do online has value” and that “writing a blog should be considered towards tenure.” I myself am lucky in that the contributions I make to my library’s blog are considered to be of professional value at my institution, although they are no substitute for original experimentation and research in a peer-reviewed journal. I do hope that scholarship in the form of blog posts continues to gain traction and value in the academic world as a compliment to the journal literature we produce.

One last thought regarding the Greatful Dead (or any other performing band for that matter): I’ve heard the “give the music away for free and make money off concert tickets and merchandise” argument before. What many people do not realize is that the performers get only a portion of the money tickets and merchandise make (and frequently not a very large portion). The rest of that money goes to venues, concert promoters, merchandise companies, and record industry executives. Just thought that would be something to point out regarding that discussion…

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.