I think ABNA could be more powerful if it started to encourage communication between authors and the other players in book publishing: publishers, editors, marketing staff, POD facilitators. Networking within your own micro-community is Step One. Creating a conversation that blurs the edges between the various communities involved in the whole process can generate far more interesting avenues.

Great article. Wondering what you think of a networking site like http://www.ABNABooks.com

The online marketplace, showcase, and networking site for writers was created after writers met on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award forum.

Open Access is obviously a rapidly growing movement - I don’t have the references to hand, but I seem to remember some major research universities (Harvard, maybe?) are starting to demand that all research they do is published under open access, and I think any EU-funded research must be published freely (again, I can’t remember exactly - I’m sure you’d have a better recollection than me!).

I take your point that Libraries are paying for the value-added search tools: this is where academic journal publishers need to concentrate their efforts if they are to continue be part of the business model - if the content itself is free then the academic publishers need to provide a very impressive and valuable framework around the content and sell that instead. The potential features and functionality of such a framework would fill another article like this!

I think reputation does come into it - the reputation of the journal is one of the factors assuring the reliability of the research (hand-in-hand with peer review etc). University libraries need to be able to have “the right type” of content, and if they were providing access to repositories of unreliable research then they’d be doing a major disservice to the researchers, professors and students.

And yes, these are very fascinating times!

Ironically, as a librarian I was very supportive of free information, particularly since my salary (and that of the faculty that produce the actual articles) were covered by the university. Now that I’m producing my own content and also working directly with authors and publishers on book design, I’ve developed a different perspective. Of course, even academic publishers supporting open access need to figure out some type of cost-recovery revenue source since parent institutions always have competing demands for resources.

Regardless, these are fascinating times for publishing and libraries.

As you say, there are always added-value business models that allow for charges to be made (for example, by providing up-to-the-minute customised/specialised content streamed to subscribers - although I would probably argue that technically it’s just the immediate delivery of that customised content that is being charged for, rather than the content itself).

Similarly university libraries and other researchers may still continue to pay to subscribe to digital content repositories—online academic journals etc.—because what they’re actually paying for is the reliability of the information (assured by the peer review process & the reputation of the publisher).