I’ve been thinking a lot about how we value online things in light of a few interesting posts I’ve read recently. The first was Walt Crawford’s post about some negative reactions people had to his charging money for the electronic version of his book. One critic wrote:
But seriously, Walt, $29.50 for a paperback is bad enough but $20 for the download? Downloads are free.* I could understand maybe asking for donations. Charging a buck or two is acceptable, if you want to be a dick. But $20 for a PDF is madness. Like, RIAA suing tween music downloaders for their parent’s retirement fund level of madness.
A commenter on another blog wrote this:
Since his book is published through Lulu.com, you can get an estimate for how much it would cost to manufacture the book on a per item basis: less then $10. Since he bought an ISBN, there’s some retail markup but even factoring that into the cost, he’s pretty much doubling the price for the printed edition. Charging twice as much as the printed edition for a download is a clear cut case of shenanigans.
Where does this idea come from that any creative work available online should be free? It’s ok to charge for a printed book, but to charge for a PDF of a book is unreasonable? If so, where is a book’s value? Is it in the paper and ink used to print it? Is it the weight of it in your hand? Or is it in the words and the creative work put into it? A book’s value comes from the creative work of the writer, and that should have value no matter what format it’s in.
Take me for example. I wrote a book that came out a year ago. It is currently only available for sale in print. No one has ever told me that I have no right to sell my book and make what little money I do from it. If I took that book and started to sell it online for less money (but not for free), I would be doing nothing different than if I only sold it in print. I’d just be making my book available via another format. I guess I fail to understand how something being in a different format ends up having less or no value.
That’s not to say that I don’t understand why some people give away eBooks for free. There are lots of good arguments for it from a marketing sense. It gets you more exposure. It makes people more likely to buy your books because most people really don’t want to read a book online. So if that’s the way you choose to market your book, great. But there are still lots of folks who charge for books in PDF, like Tim O’Reilly (this is a book I’m dying to read) and 37 Signals (though they also have a free version).
So many of us have argued vociferously that what we do online has value. Some argue that writing a blog should be considered towards tenure. Others argue that blog posts are as valuable as (if not more valuable than) journal articles. If the effort of what we put into our stuff online is equal to what we put into print, then there should be nothing wrong with making money from it. I don’t understand how one can say that people shouldn’t make money from their creative work because it’s online, but I think we all have these subtle (and sometimes unconscious) assumptions about certain things that we think should be free because they’re online. (And what we sometimes forget is that just because something is free doesn’t mean the person who created it isn’t making money off of us.)
And creative work isn’t the only thing that’s undervalued online. I’ve been wanting to create an online conference for some time; a conference that sort of fits into the big space between something like Internet Librarian and something like Code4Lib. We need a conference for librarians who are tech-savvy enough where most of Internet Librarian is a review, but who would feel totally over their head at a Code4Lib. There are a lot of us who fit into that category. We also need online conferences. We aren’t all in the position of being able to travel all over the country several times a year, so it makes sense to develop online alternatives. And technologies have come so far in recent years that an online conference could be developed that would be highly interactive and provide real value to attendees.
Why have I not bothered to pursue this yet? Well, other than the fact that I’m really busy, I haven’t done it yet because I don’t think people will value an online conference in the same way they would value a physical one. When most folks sign up to attend an online webcast or something like that, they rarely ask their supervisor for the time off to do it. They rarely tape a sign to their door saying “at an online conference” so people will leave them alone. And if something comes up at work, they will likely leave the webcast to deal with it. Hey, I’ve done it. I actually had a student in the grad school class I taught last semester who had his reference shifts scheduled at the same time as our synchronous online class sessions. Talk about continuous partial attention! The fact is, people will not value an online conference/webcast/chat session in the same way they would a physical one. They will not carve out their time in the same way. And as a result, they will be likely to drop it when something else comes up.
We talk so much about wanting to have more professional online interactions, especially at a time when flying has become almost intolerable. But we don’t give them the same amount of weight as face-to-face interactions. And I think until we do, we will not have truly successful synchronous online conferences.
Thanks to Laura Crossett who really got me thinking about the “2.0 Aesthetic” and what it means for us not to value things because they’re online.
*No, downloads are not free. Bandwidth does cost money and when something becomes a runaway hit, it can get extremely expensive to provide access to it. We can download This American Life for free. But it cost WBEZ $152,000 for the Internet bandwidth to distribute the show in 2007 (please give them money to keep This American Life freely downloadable — I did).
“Please give them money to keep it free” never really struck me as a particularly convincing argument. In need of reframing, at least. As to the other point, I think Napster, Mininova and the like have convinced people that the only thing was the manufacturing of stuff, so everything without that cost should be free. Back in the real world, we should probably want people with good ideas to make a living off them so they continue to have time to come up with more good ideas. However, I do understand the annoyance if the price for the digital work does not drop by the difference in cost between print and digital.
Chris, yeah, probably not the most convincing argument, but it’s pretty much the same one we get with public radio all the time. I guess if it’s something you care about enough, you feel compelled to do it. If not, you don’t. I think This American Life is awesome and it’s on at a terrible time here, so I want to make sure it stays available as a podcast.
I would assume that the cost of actually printing a book is not that significant, which is probably the reason for there not being that much of a difference between the two. Personally, I’d never buy an eBook, but that’s because I hate reading things online. I also wouldn’t read more than a few pages of a free eBook online.
An online conference would be particularly cool if it was an international one. If flying all over the country several times a year is tricky, flying all over the world is all the more so, and living in New Zealand I sometimes drool over all the neat conferences going on in other parts of the world…
I have from time to time thought wistfully of an online unconference (via Library Society of the World, for example) but something informal mightn’t, as you say, be valued by people or their institutions. Something more official, with (a) big-name organisation(s) behind it, would probably do better; and I’d expect a full-day event to do better than an hour-long event; but whether it’d do better enough I don’t know.
I wonder if an online conference would be better as a semi-synchronous event, rather than something that you had to “be here now” for.
By semi-synchronous, I’m thinking a little of FriendFeed, where the comments can come fast and furious, to the point where it almost seems like IM at times, or you can dig through the “best” (i.e. most commented/favorited) of the day and add your comments hours after the bulk of the activity.
I think also of the Online Social Networks online conference back in 2005, which was a mixed bag, but combined “live” events with asynchronous discussions, not unlike 5 Weeks to a Social Library. So there, I put aside an hour a day or so to keep up with the conference, but didn’t feel the pressure to be online at a particular time each day.
So where Deborah says a day instead of an hour, I’d say a week or more instead of a day.
I agree that such an online conference is needed; however, it might be a two-part effort. The first would be a more unconference-type push to build out content for the second part… which would be a sort of asynchronous “class” situation where people could work through content much like the 23 Things concept. I say this because I don’t know that everyone who needs the intermediate step between IL and C4L would want or need to participate in determining content; I know myself that I’d like a little guidance in which skills I should be building next.
As far as making the concept work in real life, a work buddy (or two, or three) who is also participating would up the ante in keeping focused and on track. In order to really participate, you’d need to reserve a meeting space with internet and plan to devote a structured time for participation. And because of time zones and etc., such participation would likely need to be asynchronous.
I hope people keep working on this concept because I would love to participate!
You definitely get an “amen” out of me for this post. For the cost of production in Lulu, that one commentor kinda has no idea what it takes to produce something. Not everything is released as a paperback. My father’s photo book of my uncle’s artwork (nudes in classical style) is available on Lulu. I know the margin set on getting a print version and can say it is very, very, very thin. If a book is being produced to have any sort of longevity, the cost of production in a print-on-demand environment per item ordered is hardly $10. For an 8.5 x 11 perfect bound paperback, the manufacturing cost is $12.33 for a small volume.
Although a download option is available on same said book, the artist and the author determined that it should be higher than cost of print. They both love print and are rooted in such culture. For an artist, a book form means more in that world than a digital representation. As the author and artist would rather books were out and about, the price was deliberately set higher so as to push folks over to the book. Considering the way art is bought and sold, the download price was set high as they essentially wanted some sliver of pre-payment for something that is so easily reproduced.
I see the biggest issue in day to day life in Las Vegas being that our culture in the US has no notion of “value”. I see folks look at iPods and loudly proclaim to folks with them that such a thing should only cost five dollars. Without the notion of value even in terms of physical things, can there be such relative to intangible digital things?
If it’s on-line, people undervalue it, because it’s reachable (legally or “illegally” trough file sharing sites). The notion that works (books, films, photographs) just “pop up” magically has the nasty effect making people think that there was no effort and expertise involved in producing those works.
I photograph and occasionally film some music shows, and before a single picture appear on-line (http://www.flickr.com/photos/retorta/sets/) there was hours of work from the actual photographing to the editing and organizing.
Even when i share those works through a CC license, allowing only non-commercial uses, i get inquires from magazines asking to use them for free.
In the days of vinyl records i could only buy 10 or 12 a year, so i choose very carefully the ones i could buy and i still have them with me (some of them have 34 years), because i knew the effort i made to be able to buy them.
The authors spend time producing work, develop expertise in their fields, and that has value, monetary speaking also. We should get both credit and respect for that.
Just to stir the pot a little:
To what extent are libraries responsible for the phenomenon of reduced value perceived in digital objects?
After all, many of us have been pushing a more or less uncritical “print good; Web bad” line for as long as there’s been a Web.
Interesting point, Dorothea. I wouldn’t necessarily just include libraries, but academia in general. At my University, the “web is bad” mantra comes from certain faculty members, not from the library. We teach critical thinking about resources (from anywhere) in our information literacy sessions. But I think library policies have tacitly promoted the idea that things on the web have less value. How many libraries are cataloging eBooks that live out on the web (as opposed to being provided by major eBook vendors)? I know that was discussed on several blogs a few months ago, and while I don’t believe that most of us think that anything published on the web is crap, most libraries still haven’t come up with good ways to collect it. And that is tacitly saying to students, this stuff isn’t as good.
Yes, that’s where I was hoping you’d go with that. 🙂
Librarians also have a tacit “paid good; free bad” heuristic that works against the Web. It’s part of the reason open access has had trouble becoming part of standard academic-library discourse.
For what it’s worth, I ran into an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Krugman called Bits, Bands and Books. Paul describes this situation with a comparison to the way the Grateful Dead distributes music:
The crux of the problem is that a “content powerhouse” may be able to afford to give their content way in favor of the indirect sources of income. That becomes the downward pressure on prices for the content for everyone else…
Ah, and I note with some irony the title of your blog, Meredith: “Information Wants To Be Free” 🙂
lol. Yeah, it’s like free as in freedom. There would be a lot less creative work out there if people weren’t compensated for their labor.
I just want to add a here here to the call for a mid level tech skills conference. I’ve been discussing that with my more tech savvy colleagues a lot lately.
A couple of small notes:
Chris O: For the book in question, the difference in net proceeds (to me, the author) between the download and the physical book is $0.04. Four cents. (And given Lulu’s structure, that’s essentially public information.)
Dorothea2 (that is, comment 10): Boy, is that a good point–and it affects free resources as well as free software. We tried to start a group to get a little (institutional) respect for born-free library literature. That short unhappy story has been told elsewhere…
Peter M.: Yes, it’s convenient for Krugman (paid in advance) and “thick head” folks to tell us that all creative folks need to earn their livings as rockstars and give away their output. Just not very convincing. Always amusing to see the Grateful Dead held up as examples of anything other than the Grateful Dead…
A lot of good stuff in this conversation. Thanks.
I wrote a more detailed response in my blog, but in short I would first consider where the Open-Source software movement falls (quite contrarily) into this discussion. You can’t buy prestige and respect in a community, though they sometimes find a positive correlation.
Walt: I don’t disagree with you. I offer Krugman’s piece as an explanation as to why users think the direct value for content is driving to zero. He does go on to say, after all:
Please do an online conference. Please, please, please! I would love to attend an online conference, and when I go to my (physical) Summer Refresher Workshop and do 2 presentations, another thing that I’m going to thunk people over the head with (figuratively) is the need for online and/or video conferencing for this sort of thing. With gas and air travel hovering around stupidity levels price-wise, I think now is the best time ever to show the actual value of this stuff. Meredith, if you do an online/web conference, I’m so there!
Steve @4 – FriendFeed (and all web 2.0 communication) practically *is* a semi-synchronous online unconference. The fact helps resign me to living in the Antipodes. 🙂
How much of a book is art and how much of it is production? I believe that is the fundamental question. People often question, “If the digital is cheaper than print, why is the price the same?” So it isn’t a question of digital or online books having no value, it is a question of how much goes into the creation of the book before it becomes a book? How much should the artist be compensated? It really tears the roof off.
“Is it in the words and the creative work put into it? A book’s value comes from the creative work of the writer, and that should have value no matter what format it’s in.”
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…
Unless I missed it somewhere in the long thread of comments, there’s something that hasn’t come up yet. What about the converse way that many people assign value to something (whether they do it consciously or subconsciously):
“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.”
Kathy, that is a terrific point. I’ve found that with a lot of free things (particularly free online learning opportunities). It’s funny how people are more likely to take seriously something they’ve paid for than something they haven’t.
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.
Oh, and this video shows one of the most interesting observations from the interview about Predictable Irrationality http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=178.
Thanks, Meredith! The fact that people automatically put more value on something they pay for (esp if it’s expensive) is one reason that I have always recommended the librarians should not be afraid to charge for certain services.
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!
What a great discussion!
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?