[5676] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Content Provider Problem?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon P. Knight)
Sat Sep 17 11:44:24 1994
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 1994 17:36:10 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk
From: "Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
On Sat, 17 Sep 1994, Tony Sanders wrote:
> Even if a text was available online I believe that most people would go
> down to the bookstore and buy a copy to read if they wanted to read it.
> *Assuming* they didn't have to buy it twice (once online and once hardcopy)!
>
> Sales of certain types of books (mainly reference books) would probably
> be affected by publication online but the vast majority would not.
I wonder how having the PostScript drafts of John Ousterhout's reference
book ``Tcl and the Tk Toolkit'' freely available has affected sales for
Addison-Wesley? My guess (and it is just a guess) is that it either
hasn't effected them at all, or has even improved sales. Why? Because I
used the PostScript draft extensively before the book was published and I
still do. But I got the book as soon as I could because it was nice to
have the full index there (which wasn't in the draft) and to be able to
read it where I currently can't easily read an electronic version (on my
Mac for example :-) ). Brent Welch is doing likewise with his new book.
So maybe all this talk of copy protection and encryption, etc is a bit of
smoke screen if free distributing the information in one format helps the
sales of the same (or similar) information in another format.
Jon
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* It's not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important *
