Slide 1 a and b: title fragment
Thank you for inviting me here, and for your warm welcome
I will talk for about an hour today after which I want to open the floor for questions, reflections and discussion.
A few disclaimers beforehand
1. I will go over some of the main trends in digital publishing in both the
Humanities and Social Sciences, as in many ways they are overlapping. However, some specific trends in Social Sciences will also be discusses where the Social
Sciences and the more data-oriented Humanities (i.e., linguistics) increasingly take an in-between position, mirroring the Science Technology and Medicine field profile in some ways (more article prone, collaborative research) but they also have
Humanities profile traits as I noted before. I will give mainly examples of
experimental publishing projects, to emphasize which direction digital publishing might be heading in. Not all of these experiments might be sustainable, and some of them don’t even want to be sustainable. However, I am of the opinion that we can learn a lot of these experiments. Some of them you might be familiar with already (some more familiar than I am) and some of them not. These examples will form the trigger for the discussion afterwards.
2. I will focus mainly on books because of importance of the format for both the
Humanities and the Social Sciences and my particular expertise. Likewise, I will focus mainly on academics and publishers.
3. I will zoom in on experiments currently conducted with new formats and new publishing models. Why? They give a glimpse into the future, where things are headed, they express the potentials and challenges of digital publishing and the issues people are confronted with while engaging with the new medium.
Experiments are needed; to keep on moving and to critique established practice!
4. Finally we will have a discussion on where digital publishing is headed, what needs to be explored, what are the challenges, the problems, which issues are at stake, what kind of communication and publishing system do we want and how will we work on achieving that? What are the technical, cultural and economic factors inhibiting us form devising a truly digital-based system? Will it even be (practically and theoretically) possible to devise a system more akin to the digital? What will be the possibilities and challenges of such a system? And finally, which standards inherited from the print world are we not willing to let go off, and why?
Slide 2: main fragment: what will we be looking at.
The influence of digitization on how scholarly publications are produced, distributed and consumed.
When we talk about academic publishing, one important aspect to consider when we look at the scholarly communication value chain, is that the
1

‘publishing function’ increasingly can be performed by actors who are not traditional publishers. For instance scholars are becoming publishers, as they publish their work on their personal websites or blogs, libraries are becoming publishers, when they for instance use the content in their repositories to create overlay journals. Of course we also see the rise of new players in the field, from
Google, with its Google Book Search to Amazon and even Wikipedia could be considered a publisher.
So, due to the digital developments, the function that has traditionally been performed by the publisher can now increasingly and ever more easily be performed by different players in the value chain. This has lead to the development that you can see shifts taking place in the different functions and roles being played combined with disintermediations of different roles and functions in the value chain. Does this mean that now everyone can be a publisher or not?
Traditional publishers do have a big ‘historical’ advantage when it comes to expertise, brand name, human capital and experience. This advantage has lead to a situation in which although specific roles and players in the scholarly communication system can now be disintermediated, the traditional core
players in the system, the academics (both as authors and readers), the publisher, the library and the university still have a strong position in the system. We can however see a development towards more collaboration and communication between these players in the value chain, benefiting from each others experiences and expertise. New strategic alliances are being made and shaped between players both as a means to expand ones horizon and as a way of protecting ones own position.
However, as some of the experiments which I will show today will show, increasingly production, distribution and consumption are merging, happen in real-time in a development from product to process. But more on that soon.
Slide 3: trends
Let’s look at some general trends in digital publishing:
 New Business Models
 Development from product to process (blogs, wikis etc.)
 Collaborative research (collaboratives, social media, remix): from individual to collective experience: community around books (Richard
Nash) conversation around books, interactivity
 New ways of assessment (Open peer review, peer-to-peer review, user comments, Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
 (digital) Platforms and cooperations of small publishers
 Social media (twitter, facebook, blogs)
Slide 4: New business models
Scholars in the Humanities still fit to what one would call their ‘traditional field
profile’. They mostly work alone, they prefer to write books and they also prefer to cite books. As a recent survey amongst European Humanities scholars I
2

conducted for the OAPEN project (about which more soon) together with my colleague Paul Rutten shows, Humanities and Social Sciences scholars main reason to publish is to communicate with their peers. Furthermore, they see publishing as a means to claim their research findings and as a way to enhance their careers. Spreading knowledge to the rest of society is also seen as a plus point. Financial reasons are at the bottom of this list.
However, as our research shows, one could claim that in today’s thoroughly digitized society, communication to ones peers is not as efficient as it may just be. Scholars profess a need for digital monographs to search for relevant information: they, as well as their libraries, feel ebooks are lacking in
availability (in libraries and online). The daily practices of scholars are changing
– they are increasingly using digital tools for their research and most importantly they expect information to be available at their fingertips: digitally.
At the same time there is still a need for the printed book for thorough study.
And as our survey results have shown, this need is felt amongst all age classes, also amongst younger scholars.
But it is not only ebooks that are lacking in availability. The amount of copies of a given printed book in libraries has also been dwindling. This gives one to wonder about the efficiency of the print based communication system: where in the 70’s print runs of on average 2000 where quite common, now a days figure of around 300 copies are more likely. Could we still call this an efficient system of dissemination of scholarly research?
Libraries are increasingly buying less monographs mainly because of the rising costs of journals in STM accompanied by budget cuts. In their acquisition decisions libraries choose to prefer buying the more costly STM articles, which forced publishers to produce lower print runs to avoid overproduction. These lower print runs not only meant less dissemination of the research results for
HSS scholars, it also meant their reputation and career got affected. As it got harder to get material published that was hard to sell, this meant younger scholars trying to get their thesis published, publications in languages other than
English and minority fields where hit hardest along with smaller publishers and libraries trying to serve their clients in the most efficient way.
Ebooks do not solve this problem: dissemination is still restricted to the few libraries that actually buy the ebook, and ebooks are still mainly bought together with printed books, making it foremost not a cheaper solution.
However, dissatisfied with the high prices of journals and the spread of knowledge, a revolution in scholarly communication was taking place first and foremost in STM: A new movement born out of dissatisfied scholars and librarians called out for public access to research results for the benefit of science and society as a whole. It took some time for the Humanities to see the benefits of Open Access for books, as I will show further on in my presentation, probably mainly to do with the slow development and uptake of the ebook in this field.
3

Getting back to Open Access, there are basically two strands of Open Access: the
Green Road, in which publications are archived in repositories after or before publication, making them freely available, and the Gold Road, which focuses on making publications openly available from the moment they are published. Many people in academia and publishing feel the last road might be more suitable for books in the Humanities, as the Green Road does not fundamentally change the underlying system of publishing and thus the decision on which books get published. They should thus be seen as complementary strategies.
OAPEN, Open Access Publishing in European Networks, in a collaborative effort of European publishers and universities, has done research on and is at the moment trying out a common OA publication and funding model for peer reviewed academic books in the HSS. Furthermore OAPEN will create a large freely available collection of current books in European languages in various fields of HSS. The project started September 8, 2008 and has just recently finished, amongst others with the creation of an OA library of books from dozens of different participating academic publishers.
Experiments with Open Access book publishing are (becoming) ubiquitous.
I conducted some 30 case studies of publishers, scholars, libraries, academies, learned societies and other parties, in various combinations, involved in the
Open Access publishing of books. From this research we can conduct that almost all of the models are based on the so-called hybrid model, where the Open
Access edition is available for free online and a printed copy can be bought, as many feel the Open Access online edition could promote sales of the printed edition, or at least will not harm the sales. Furthermore all experiments are depending on some form of funding, be it institutional support, experimental grants or infrastructural support. Furthermore, most models are also busy developing services on top of the free content, targeted at libraries, publishers, scholars or other parties, to provide some additional revenue.
Open Humanities Press. Open Humanities Press (OHP) is another example of a press experimenting with Open Access book publishing. Founded in 2006 by
‘Open Access journal editors, librarians and technologists’ (Jöttkandt 4), OHP is an international Open Access publishing collective in critical and cultural
theory. In contrast to OAPEN, the focus of OHP lies less on creating a new publishing model and more on removing negative perceptions that still exist concerning Open Access and online publishing. OHP is not only academic-led but also (and perhaps more so than other, more traditional presses) academic-
focused. Its philosophy is one of advocacy and of making clear to researchers and other stakeholders what the benefits of Open Access are. Most of all, OHP wants to battle the negative perceptions that pertain to online publishing.
Establishing notions of trust and quality in electronic and Open Access publishing are essential to persuading the scholar to step over the threshold into the digital realm. OHP wants to make it easier for those scholars who are not that involved or interested in the online world to make this transition. OHP wants to counter this perception problem by establishing a strong brand around its online and openly available products that is first and foremost trustworthy. All of
4

its publications are peer reviewed and academically certified by OHP’s renowned independent board of international scholars.
There are many more examples of presses experimenting with OA books and the numbers are rising. This is just a small sample. There is also the OAD wiki and my report on OA books available on the OAPEN website. http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publishers_of_OA_books
Benefits and drawbacks of Open Access for authors:
For researchers, Open Access publishing is seen as faster, it brings increased visibility, a potential worldwide readership, more usage and impact for their work.
A number of studies have now been carried out on the effect of Open Access on citations to articles, showing the increased citation impact that Open Access can bring. Publishing consultant Alma Swan has looked at the combined results up to date on the Open Access Research advantage. And by my colleague Ronald
Snijder on the profit of free books shows that Open Access to books leads to more discovery and more online consultations of book publications
Although there is still some fear amongst researchers concerning whether their data and research can be stolen, copied or plagiarized when online, combined with a fear that the quality guarantees and a solid peer review might not be in place for Open Access publications. Furthermore, researchers are afraid Open
Access publishing models won’t be sustainable and they are unwilling to pay for publication costs themselves.
Slide 5: From product to process:
Ok to quickly go back to the other trends, which I will explore a bit less thorough.
From product to process:
Increasingly the isolated stages of writing, publishing and consuming are becoming more integrated. Researchers publish research in process on blogs and even dedicated worksites were working papers or drafts are up for comments. (Examples Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolesence and Ted
Striphas’ Difference and repetition wiki, Gary Hall’s Open Notebook).
Publishing thus is increasingly taking place in different moments of the research process. The same goes for the consumption of the material, readers become more involved as commenters. Also, after a work is finished, the possibility to add, change or update material, is made easier by the digital product. This shows a general trend away from a stabilized endproduct of research to a more fluid and amendable concept of research as becoming.
In this process the official publication increasingly becomes a delineation line, a
threshold, an authoritative form with a certain filter function. Once this threshold is passed the process does not end but the product evolves, though enhancements, updates, commentaries, versionings and adaptations. Of course different things can be filters in this process. There can be a community filter
5

moment, a academic or a professional peer filter, a publishers branding, and/or commercial filter.
With books becoming never-ending, in my opinion they better reflect the concept of research, which is also never-ending.
Collaborations:
Increasingly, also in the Humanities, collaborations amongst researchers are taking place, both in the research and the publication phase. For instance amongst departmental colleagues, amongst universities, amongst different disciplines. Many (software) platforms are currently in use or being developed to aid this process, just think of the use of Googledocs for research. Another example of a collaboratories research environment or virtual research environment such as this project set up at Leiden University by a group of history scholars called Tales of the Dutch revolt. In the Netherlands there is a lot of interest at the moment for collaboratories as is witnessed from this clip by SURF, the organization for innovation in ICT in higher education in the NL. and The Virtual Knowledge Studio.
New ways of assessment:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly and Postmedievalism have also been experimenting with open or peer-to-peer review, either mixing forms of peer review or going for solely open. Things are early days with these methods though, and there have been comments on the value of the comments and on the fact that the system of authority is only replicated in open peer review, no initiatives for people outside academia to react etc.
Blogs and comments are also an important way of assessment for researchers.
The question is however, when will Digital work become part of curricula?
Platforms:
(collaborative) electronic Platforms for book distribution, for libraries. Look at the success of Amazon, and Google Books, openeditions, Oapen, multiproduct platforms, software platforms such as Zotero and Mendeley
All to increase scale, to act as filters, all products in one place, ease and convenience for end-users and producers.
Platforms provide basic infrastructure
Social Media
Want talk about this very long but people in both academia and publishing exist that belief social media are unimportant for the production, distribution and consumption of research. Think again. Joining the conversation that goes on here, the community building is essential. Not to say we can’t be critical of the institutions behind the social media we use the most (choices can be made here
6

such as for open source alternatives), nevertheless they are important and authors, publishers, readers and libraries can all be found here.
Slide 7: Challenges
Institutions, power structures and conservative practices the biggest problems facing digital humanities are institutional, not
technological
Quality
What is quality? How do we establish quality? This is an important thing to figure out.
Filtering
Financing
Control
Technology
Conservative practices
However, this traditional field profile is still strongly embedded. There is a strong cultural attachment to print in the humanities (print holds more status) and a scholar is still required, also in the digital age, to write and publish a substantial book-sized work, in print, to further his career. Authorship, individual responsibility and attribution of a text are still considered very important. Not only is this institutionally embedded and part of the reputation
economy of scholarly research in the humanities, the production of a scholarly monograph is also still praised as a necessity to properly communicate one’s thoughts in these fields. The monographic format gives the possibilities to develop multiple complex arguments and narratives. Furthermore, its print nature gives it stability and integrity. Not only the creation of a print-based monograph is preferred, where it comes to the thorough study of monographs, scholars still prefer to consult a printed edition.
However, again, things are starting to change. Before many researchers considered electronic-only publications as the equivalent of publishing something without peer review. Our research has shown that electronic and openly available publications are not necessarily seen as being of less quality than printed publications. Show slide However, in many circles in the humanities views do still pertain, that the Internet is not a good place to find authoritative material because of the high level of poor quality information online.
The cultural attachment to print and the book as format can perhaps partly explain the eventual slow uptake of digital communication and publication practices in the humanities. But the situation is and has been rapidly changing.
As Chris mentioned yesterday, publishers are not very willing to experiment and although the availability of ebooks in libraries is increasing, it is still not sufficient to answer to the researchers growing need. Commercial interests
and power structures of established publishers rule, governance and hegemonic: lack of funding money and investment in experiments from those in power: keep status quo, replicate existing systems into the digital.
7

In conclusion, it seems that scholars in the humanities are standing on a
threshold, on the one hand eager to enter into the digital realm, on the other hand held back by their cultural and institutional practices, by their norms, values and proven ways of doing things when it comes to conducting, communicating and publishing their research. These practices (mixed with a good amount of skepticism and fear concerning online publishing) are inhibiting them from truly taking advantage of the possibilities the digital offers.
Quality:
What is quality? How do we establish quality? This is an important thing to figure out. Quality can be seen as a floating signifier to use Laclau and
Mouffe’s terminology, it is an empty vessel, we don’t know what it means.
Why is double blind peer review the best, does that guarantee quality?
What do we mean with quality, how do we measure it and does quality mean something different in the digital age. And we must make sure not to mix up quality and excellence. How can we ensure quality and are there other digital ways to assess quality. We need more discussion on this in the Humanities, and more transparency on quality and peer review procedures currently in use by publishers.
Filtering.
Very important: data and information overload. How do we find our way in the masses of information everyday? We need reliable and personalized filters (and we use them already) to filter out the good from the rubbish. At the same time we need to be very weary of filter failure: missing things because of our over-
personalized settings, no more surprise finds. We also need to be cautious of
automatic filters. If I type in bike in Google I get other results than u do, who controls our filters, what is behind the algorithms? Wo do we trust to filter?
Control
Smoothly going over to control here: we need to keep on arguing for a free
public space online where things can be said. We need to be weary of the
websites we use and who controls them. Who owns our data? This is what we can see as the dark side of openness. Distributing things in the open also
In this case Open Access runs the risk to be overtaken by a neoliberal rhetoric that seems to be increasingly apparent within academia, one focusing on
transparency and accountability and on the measurement and evaluation of research and research results as part of an audit culture (Hall Media Gifts). For
Open Access to be beneficial for scholars and society at large, the focus should remain on the values most cherished by the scholarly community: accessibility
and quality. Although the search for a sustainable business model is of the utmost importance, the adaptation of Open Access as simply another choice model by commercial publishers (offering it as an option only if the author asks for it) or as a way to further advance profits by charging above proportional author fees, is not the way forward. Openness is admirable but we should be aware of the negative side effects. At the same time we should be wary of arguing
8

for the Open Access exchange of research results within a world in which the
delivery platforms (especially mobile platforms) are increasingly closed off as part of their business models. Open Access will only flourish within an open web, without proprietary standards and extensive DRM regimes.
Open Access should be promoted to governments and institutions as a system that can create more value for society (Houghton) and as a model that needs extra investment to experiment with new models, to make sure that the cost of providing Open Access will not reduce the availability of funding for humanities research and will not come out of already decreasing research budgets. All in all
Open Access offers possibilities for change within the system but while we are promoting it, we should be wary of wrong uses and adaptations.
Technology
Technology
Technology: standardization, early days, connections between institutions, interoperability, infrastructure, archiving, machine-
readable metadata: not going to go in to that here.
Slide 8: experiments
Networked books and hypertexts
One of the most famous examples of a networked book is McKenziewark’s
Gamertheory, set up with the aid of the institute for the future of the book, which is currently at its third version and has an elaborate network of user comments. somewhere between the sprawling public discourse arena of the blogosphere and the collaborative knowledge factory of Wikipedia
Enhanced publications
When it comes to the use of digital publications in an online environment, the possible ways to access and read a publication are of course increased in the digital environment. So is the possibility to add supplementary information.
Especially in a field like Archaeology where large datasets are created during an excavation, which also have a specific need to be preserved, as the object of study, the soil, is destroyed during an excavation, making it into unique data material. The preservation of this material is thus extra important. The possibility to now add these datasets to a publication is of course as mentioned before, increasingly being explored at the moment. This is also what the project I am using here as an example, on enhanced publications for the Journal of
Archaeology in the Low Countries, is focusing on. SLIDE 15 An enhanced publication is hereby defined as a publication that is enhanced with three categories of information:
(1) research data (evidence of the research)
(2) extra materials (to illustrate or clarify), (data visualization tools dynamic
GIS maps) or
9

(3) post-publication data (commentaries, ranking)
Another example of a research project that is currently looking at enhanced publications is Semantic WORDS, a Project site for Enhanced Scholarly
Publications using WordPress and the Semantic WORDS plugins
Enhancing scholarly publications involves presentation in a Web environment with interlinking of the ‘objects’ of a document such as: data on which the publication is based, supplementary materials, post-publication reactions and secondary analyses. This Website is the central location for an ongoing project of creating, co-locating, and intertextual linking of Enhanced Publications of traditionally published books related to Digital Scholarship.
Each book basically has its own website with additional material. As you can see here. They developed plugins to make it easir to get traditionally based publications online.
Moving on to another category of experiments, namely with wiki, liquid or fluid
books. Liquid books are essentially books that can be adapted, modified and
remixed, in most cases via a logic of ‘open, decentralized and distributed editing’. Some of them use wiki software some don’t. To give a simple example of this idea, let’s look at this clip on dynamic books, an adaptation of liquid books
(or more modular books in this case) for textbooks.
Liquid publications project
Another example of this model is the liquid publications project.
Another example of a practical experiment that focuses on the benefits of fluidity for scholarly communication is the Liquid Publications (or LiquidPub) project.
This project, as described by Casati, Giunchiglia, and Marchese (Casati,
Giunchiglia, and Marchese), tries to bring into practice the idea of modularity described before. Focusing mainly on textbooks, the aim of the project is to enable teachers to create and compose a customized and evolving book out of
modular pre-composed content. This book will then be a ‘multi-author’ collection of materials on a given topic that can include different types of documents.
The Liquid Publications project tries to cope with the issues of authority and
authorship in a liquid environment by making a distinction between versions
and editions. Editions are solidifications of the Liquid Book, with stable and constant content, which can be referred to, preserved, and which can be made commercially available. Furthermore they create different roles for authors, from editors to collaborators, accompanied by an elaborate rights structure for authors, with the possibility to give away certain rights to their modular pieces whilst holding on to others. In this respect the liquid publications project is a very pragmatic project, catering to the needs and demands of authors (mainly for the recognition of their moral rights) while at the same time trying to benefit from and create efficiencies and modularity within a fluid environment. In this way they offer authors the choice of different ways to distribute content, from totally open to partially open to completely closed books.
Culture Machine Liquid books series
10

A more radical take to liquid books is provided by the OHP Culture Machine
Liquid Books series of experimental digital ‘books’ published under the conditions of both open editing and free content. They use wikisoftware
(PBworks) and at the moment have four volumes in process.
Two other examples of liquid books (the first more liquid than the other) I mention here because they are two examples of two other trends in the digital humanities: its increasing connection to the sciences on the one hand, and its collaborations with the arts (mainly due to the possibility of doing creative things with multimedia in the digital realm) on the other side.
Living books about life
The first example is that of living books about life:
“The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable series of co-edited, electronic open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.
These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, i.e., they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of editing, updating and commenting upon, by readers of all levels.”
Remixthebook
Finally, Mark Amerika’s newest book called remixthebook is accompanied by a website of artistic and theoretic remixes of material from the book, video, sound etc. From the website:
The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva, has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through their own artistic and theoretical filters.
Culturomics
Finally, a final trend within the humanities: the book as data, or the influence of culturomics on humanities research. Books as data, data mining, googlebooks
(Dan Cohen, Lev Manovich), 'big data' humanities
Two hundred years of history in the form of 5,195,769 digitised books can now be probed for cultural trends using Google's new culturomics tool, the ngram
11

viewer. An example of this is Victorian books, a project by Dan Cohen from the center for history and new media
The vast digital library of Google Books presents for the first time the possibility that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing—not just the well-known Mills and Carlyles, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even forgotten authors—to see if the Victorians truly did use the kinds of words and phrases that Houghton thought were indicative of their character.
Our effort to understand Victorian books through a series of graphs about
publication titles. Words in Titles, 1789-1914
Lev Manovich has become very famous with his cultural analytics research.
Cultural analytics is the exploration and research of massive cultural data
sets of visual material - both digitized visual artifacts and contemporary visual and interactive media. To take on the challenge of how to best explore large collections of rich cultural content, Cultural analytics has developed new methods and intuitive visual techniques to address both the new and existing
research questions, which currently drive the humanities.
The idea of quantitative analysis and visualization of massive cultural visual datasets in the humanities context.
An example can be found here with some time magazine covers.
Being able to better represent the complexity, diversity, variability, and uniqueness of cultural processes and artifacts.
Slide 9: literary publishing and the social
Finally, I want to draw your attention to some developments in literary publishing, cause I think that in literary publishing people have a much better idea of the communities surrounding books and the book as a social artifact than they do in scholarly publishing. Developments here are important to keep in mind for academic book publishing.
I am not much of a definition person but I like the idea put forward by Tim
carmody (@tcarmody in twitter) that the book is a gathering (both a gathering of content and a gathering of people). One of the projects that looks at that in an interesting way is the openbookmarks and what they are doing for the development of social reading by creating software to share bookmarks.
Ereading allows people to make bookmarks, write notes in the margins, select extracts, and measure their progress through the book. This is the reading experience, and for the first time it's possible to save and share this experience directly. A project by James Bridle, he wants to make sure these bookmarks are open though and belong to the reader.
Open: Bookmarks must be shareable, saveable and persistent.
Another project in social reading is the if:book community surrounding Doris
Lessings the Golden Notebook. It’s an experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins
12

Crowd-funding
Another development that might be interesting in social publishing to keep an eye on is crowd-sourced funding, using the community to monetary back or
pledge for a publication. I don’t think it is the winning solution, at all, but I do think that with less funding available and the need for publications to be online, experiments with these kinds of models are a must.
Unglue:it works via a similar principle: Once the author or publisher sets a fixed price for “giving the book to the world,” individuals pledge toward the book’s release — offering ten dollars, twenty, five hundred or more: however much they wish to invest to make that book available, for free, to readers around the world.
Unglued books can be read on any device — not just the Kindle, iPad, and Kobo, but on the Mac, Windows, and Linux.
According to Hellman, the e-book doesn’t go public (that is, become free) until the rights holder’s price has been met.
Slide 10: Questions
Questions that will lead the discussion are whether the experiments conducted are a real challenge or alternative, or whether they are a continuation (in digital form) of the print-based knowledge system. What are the technical, cultural and economic factors inhibiting us form devising a truly digital-based system? Will it even be (practically and theoretically) possible to devise a system more akin to the digital? What will be the possibilities and challenges of such a system? And finally, which standards inherited from the print world are we not willing to let go off, and why?
13