My Dots for Sunday, March 11, 2007

A great essay on why piracy is not harming legitimate sales of books but DRM is…

Quoted: Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an “economic epidemic” under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

Quoted: 1) The products they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

Quoted: 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

Quoted: 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Quoted: Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they’re the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

An older post from Tim O’Reilly on the lifecycle from self-publisher to aggregate publisher. An interesting exploration of the transition from “free” to “not free” and the balancing act the transition requires.

Quoted: What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go away, but that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must serve the values of both authors and readers. If they try to enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices that are too high or otherwise violate the norms of their target community, they will encourage that community to self-organize, or new competitors will emerge who are better attuned to the values of the community.

Tim O’Reilly blogging about when free distribution is the best approach. I love the example from Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” using the ecological example of “law of the minimum” – that growth is “limited by the necessary nutrient that is in shortest supply.”

Quoted: A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I’ve lost a great deal.