25 Nov Selling Our Wares in the Marketplace of Ideas
The New Yorker has an interesting article on how the Internet is changing the way we think about buying and selling information. The article argues that:
We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive…. Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”
That is a stunning paragraph. If academics are information providers, then isn’t the decision to write something that is not easily accessible on the Internet a decision to be ignored or overlooked?
A quick story about information inputs. Until this year, almost all of my scholarly pursuits have relied on information inputs that were cybercentric: everything I needed to do all of my research was at my fingertips.
That changed in 2007 when I began a project that required detailed historical analysis of international law. I have now become good friends with my research librarian. I plan my research schedule around the delivery dates of books on interlibrary loan. My information inputs are dusty, hardbound books with library cards inside the back cover. It is extraordinarily frustrating to do research in this manner.
But information inputs are the least of my worries. I also am facing a difficult decision about information outputs. My current project is easily worthy of a book-length analysis. I have had a number of colleagues, most of them older than me, suggest that I publish my research as an academic book. I must admit that the idea is tempting.
And yet I can’t help but question this path. If ninety-five percent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google, do I really want to sell my intellectual wares in another market? Why not do a book length project, but do it through law journals, one chapter at a time?
Doesn’t the information we wish to convey yearn to be free? Sure, I may sacrifice some prestige if I don’t publish with an elite academic book publisher. But I think that I would prefer the information I provide to be widely read. If we are in the marketplace of ideas, shouldn’t we be committed to selling in the biggest information market of all time?
Two thoughts. First, the search nearly always starts with Google, but it doesn’t end there — if a searcher finds references to your book, won’t he or she then be able to obtain the book itself easily? Second, are you safe in assuming that the book won’t be completely searchable online within the next few years? Either way, I don’t think books are going to be obsolete in the near future.
Why not just publish a book but also distribute it as an eBook?
John and Devon,
My experience, John, with Google Books is that copyrighted material is not well presented. There are large sections of books that are simply omitted. Do you have any reason to think that academic publishers will change course in the coming years and make more of their books fully accessible online? Sure, Google Books is a way for people to find the book, but not to read it. But it doesn’t overcome the barrier of easy access to the information.
As for eBooks, Devon, how does that solve the problem of worldwide open access to the information I wish to convey? A reader of such a book would have to pay book prices to download the book, and it will therefore not reach many potential readers.
Why are these suggestions better than a few articles published in law journals that are also freely available on SSRN?
Roger Alford
Roger, I don’t think that books are necessarily a better avenue to publish the same information in law-review article form, only that they’re not always worse. There are trade-offs — books are less easily accessible, but they may also be the right length for what you have to say; they may allow you to have more control over what you want to say (you don’t have to respond to student editors who want to you to include an extra section to explain to everyone something that they don’t understand themselves); and they look nice on your bookshelf. But like so many choices, is this one really either-or? You can always do both, no? One last thought on the accessibility issue: for academics, the extra effort in obtaining a book is pretty minimal. But for the students who turn out a large proportion of published legal writing, it may well be a bridge too far. So if we’re trying to maximize our citation counts, we should publish articles (so that the students can find them more easily) rather than books (even though the scholars we’re trying to engage with can find them just fine). Yet another reason why Leiter’s reliance on… Read more »
John,
I was not writing this with a view to increasing my citation rankings. I’m asking a much more fundamental question of how we as information providers can best reach our intended audiences. In the current Internet age, I’m not sure writing books is the correct answer anymore.
Perhaps you are correct about doing both. I know several authors who have written articles and then combined them into a book. That may be a good compromise assuming there is flow and unity in the end product.
Roger Alford
Roger,
I didn’t think you were concerned about boosting your citation rankings! Obviously that isn’t what you were talking about at all. But it occurred to me that as the metric of how “’influential,” in Leiter’s terms, a publication is, is increasingly linked to the number of times that it’s cited, it will be harder to justify (to deans, tenure committees, etc.) publishing work in a form that will be cited less.
I think the key question is who IS your intended audience. If it’s a fairly narrow scholarly one, they’ll find the work either way. But if your goal is to reach a broader group, they well may not find it in a form that isn’t easily searchable. Perhaps the answer is to package the message in different media for different audiences?
Cheers,
John
As a librarian, I always welcome varieties of this discussion, and I’m grateful to New Yorker and Anthony Grafton, and now OJ, for giving it a wide forum. As a reader, I’m struck by the comments here, which assume that the onus of access to scholarly works and other kinds of literature by an “intended audience” is purely on the author or publisher. It’s seen as a marketing enterprise. I actively seek instances of literature I think I will want to read (or consume, a term better fitting the economic rhetoric). Although it isn’t the case, let’s say I first heard about the Grafton piece through this post. The reference reached me not because the efforts of New Yorker or Prof. Grafton or Prof. Alford to publicize it were effective exclusive of my own efforts to be apprised of it. One reason I read OJ and sundry other resources is to identify these sorts of works. Now, I disagree that Prof. Alford’s prospective academic book, published by a traditional academic house and issued across traditional academic print channels, won’t be “easily searchable.” That is, I disagree that researching with books is necessarily “extraordinarily frustrating.” Sometimes it is and sometimes not.… Read more »