Sustaining on-line book sites
- From: Ben Crowell <crowell01@[redacted]>
- Subject: Sustaining on-line book sites
- Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 21:54:50 -0700
Related to this, there's the issue of how permanent digital
information is. Is a digital book more permanent or less
permanant than a book printed on paper, for instance? The
average lifetime of a web site is probably only a few years,
but the very best free information presumably will last for
a long time because so many people will have copies. Still,
what happens to free information that has a very limited
audience? What about an obscure 19th century songbook that
gets digitized and put on the web, but is then lost forever
because that web site evaporates and nobody can find any
printed copies?
I think the good news is that books are inherently low-
bandwidth, and hard disk space and web-server bandwidth
should keep getting cheaper. Maybe 10 years from now web-
hosting costs will no longer be an issue for free
books in text formats, but the challenge will be
handling the bandwidth of free audio and video, and things
like historical manuscripts that have to be preserved in
scanned form.
My own experience is that it's essentially impossible to
get people to pay for anything on the internet. I tried
making my books (www.lightandmatter.com) into begware, and
the only result was to cut downloads by 90% -- the other
10% didn't send checks, either! I'm happy enough to pay the
$50 a month for webhosting, and a nice thank-you e-mail now and
then is plenty of compensation. I also sell printed copies,
but that's a whole different story -- both costs and
revenues are on a different order of magnitude.
A pet idea of mine, which I've never followed up on,
is to establish some kind of system to allow people to
buy custom CDs of free information (e.g. free books) from
whoever can produce and sell copies most efficiently.