Books and Copyrights: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Nook.
This discussion was inspired by another article about copy rights this time form the Wall Street Journal.
But in dollar terms, some decisions by copyright holders, rather than optimize the artist's revenue and distribution, insure the opposite. When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label's parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry's songs.
I love Joe Henry, but the price was too high. I replaced him with Shakespeare, whose work (depending on which edition you use) is in the public domain. Mr. Henry's record label may differ, but it's not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here. Were they concerned that readers might have their thirst for Mr. Henry's music sated by that single lyric? Isn't it more likely that his lyric would have enticed customers who otherwise wouldn't have heard of him?
Full article available here.
The article reminded me of a story one of my professors told me about the book he created for our class. It's a standard anthology text book of articles and it was only available through the George Mason bookstore for $109.00. I know this professor doesn't like the school book store monopoly and the way publishing companies try and lock us in with special editions for each school of packages so I asked him about the book. He told me that the $109.00 was purely the cost of printing costs and licensing the rights to reprint the articles. My professor in fact made no money off the text book at all. He even told me about how he redid the book to eliminated the more expensive articles in it and the publisher kept the retail price exactly the same with the school store which is run by Barnes and Noble, a company I usually like. Lately he has been assigning more Pdfs that we can get for free from school and online sources. Now free doesn't mean that we're getting any less of an education, in fact the reason he made a anthology in the first place was because he did not approve of the other textbooks available.
With all the free books I've downloaded form the Ludwig Von Mises institute, currently totaling 1450 books, I've been thinking a lot about this subject. I recently bought a Barnes & Noble Nook to read these books on which currently retails for $150. Before I knew of all of the free resources available to me I was never interested in an ebook reader however, the idea of reading even a tenth of my books on a laptop screen wasn't inviting to me (eye strain). I assessed the currently available ebook readers and chose the Nook because I judged to best fit my needs. Reading on the Nook as been fantastic and I'm happy with it, much more than I've been with any of my text books most of which are similarly priced.
While this may be a situation that applies best to the George Mason economics department I'd like to see B&N trying to encourage professors to recommend eReaders and emphasize the availability of free resources rather than try to lock us to a monopoly school store. I was already interested in these resources and they offered a product that I saw as a good investment which means they made money without rigging what is available to me and fighting used book sales. Instead Barnes & Noble participates in bidding wars for exclusive rights for the GMU bookstore sold by my school to pay for the bloated administration that keeps raising my tuition. Money can be made off of freely distributed materials and it doesn't require any further monopolizing of higher education.
