http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why_publishing_shoul.html “There’s no substantial business today in charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book …” I do so enjoy Cory Doctorow’s earnest rants. If you fancy yourself as a pundit on this sort of stuff, shouldn’t you know that “charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book” almost exactly describes the relationship between the magazine business and Nexis? (Nexis is an (enormously expensive) full-text search engine for magazine content.) And that to some extent, this arrangement is even blessed by the courts and authors, given that they agreed to the Copyright Class Action Settlement? Is this not relevant? (I don’t know whether this should happen; I’m merely noting that it does.)
(Also, I just discovered that LexisNexis now offer a cheaper-than-Nexis service called LexisNexis AlaCarte!. The main difference is that the database is smaller (3.8 billion articles instead of 6 billion), and that you pay per article ($3 or so); searches are free. It’s not great—the New Yorker archives only go back to 1999, for example—but it’s at least affordable.) 15:33
Delicious tags: corydoctorow business book article boingboing books copyright publishing search toread google
