On The Media

"The market will improve my (free) book by inspiring even better, future versions of my (still free) book?"

Makes no sense to me. I thought all a market was was a place of buying and selling. If something is free there is no buying and selling, regardless of the so called eyeballs (see dot com bubble 1.0).

No, the only commercial sense I am feeling is the *practically* tangible marketing value of such a project in favor of the author's own brand and, more significantly, that of his role as brand agent of his school.

Of course, the next step of this logic is for university pr departments must replace publishing houses in order to obtain maximum profits, i.e. increased brand value.

> Makes no sense to me. I thought all a market was was a place of buying and selling. If something is free there is no buying and selling, regardless of the so called eyeballs (see dot com bubble 1.0).

That's a third-grade understanding of how people compete. "Make the most money" is one way to compete, indeed a very successful one. But there are many ways to compete, many marketplaces.

A professor who publishes papers on academic topics is in a competition for academic reputation. There is no reason the same person couldn't compete for academic reputation on the basis of best available text. Those of us who have free texts want to make the most useful book; that's a perfectly understandable competition.

(If you like to view all competition as really about money, you can see it as that colleges and universities seek to attract students and their dollars by having professors who have the highest academic reputation. That's simplistic, but OK.)

I once took a graduate level poetry class on Gertrude Stein and the professor assigned the class to buy a slew of poetry books written by friends of his. We never opened a one of them and never discussed them although I am sure they were in the spirit of Gertrude Stein they cost a lot of money that none of the students had to spend or wished to have.

I enjoyed your segment with Preston McAfee, and was stimulated by your question whether he was subverting "the market". A deep problem of our age is market-worship, taken to ridiculous heights by the same people who are now pathetically bailing out the previously "privatized" mortgage lenders. At any rate, markets are tools to advance the greater good, not idols to be worshiped or subverted. The segment showed clearly that the textbook market has some problems, with insufficient competition (ergo high prices), dated content, insufficiently customized content, and captive customers. If professors are willing to serve the public good without lining their own pockets, the ultimate point of our social existence is manifestly fulfilled- market or no market.

I ended my working life (now I am disabled by MS) at the Yale Co-op where for years I served as a clerk in the text book department. While I tend to agree with McAfee's critique of science and engineering texts, there are myriad subjects where it has no bearing.

While I suspect Ms. Wiggins' criticism is all too often applicable, we carried many, many books in many subject areas where you would be hard pressed to view them as text books. Scholarly, yes, but not overall subject surveys, just books on topics related to the discipline being studied.

I will never forgot the late afternoon during Christmas break one year when I had the privilege of escorting David Gergen through the books adopted (that is the industry term) for Yale's Political Science Department. Not a one of them looked the least bit like the texts I had to replace when my school bus ran over them in Junior High School.

I just wish he had been interested in a friendly argument about their contents.