Scrivener's Error

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Scrivener's Error	Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

21 June 2009

link to: 11:42 [GMT-6]

At Any t > 0...

Jay Lake points to some interesting, if ultimately incomplete (and therefore unlikely — but not impossible! — to be correct) comments on the dubious future of the publishing "industry". For one thing, Mr Stevens' article fails to acknowledge that there is no publishing industry; there are, instead, thirteen (or perhaps eleven) distinct publishing niches with various degrees of cross-niche consolidation, which in turn indicates pretty clearly that there is going to be more than one future to the "publishing industry".

[reduced size] Ransom Stevens, 15 Jun 2009 Second, it continues to accept the long-tail meme without doing the discrete math. On the right, you'll find an example of the long-tail graphic as used in that article. It's vastly more realistic than most (but for the cringe-producing mislabelling of one data element that, ironically enough, torpedoes the article's later imprecation to leave proofreading to the authors), and looks pretty convincing, doesn't it? The problem is that it's a freehand drawing based on the typical curves found in a non-calculus-based statistics course. Things get much, much more interesting once one acknowledges a few real-world difficulties:

Nobody has verifiable data to determine any aspect of the plotted curve, which in my own experience (based largely on the closest thing to "verifiable data" that exists: responses to discovery requests) is neither as smooth as nor as flat as the one in the diagram;
There's a huge difference between retrospective and prospective use of distribution functions, often simplified in Heisenberg's Principle but perhaps best exemplified by attempting to solve simple things like the Bessel function for a single electron... and then figuring out crystal structure from that data;
But, most grievously, there's a variable that is completely unaccounted for: t.

Ultimately, all of these "long-tail" theories fail because they are retrospective, cumulative snapshots that account only for aggregate income/sales — they do not account at all for the rate of the relevant transactions. I refuse to further mislead by trying to create a two-dimensional, web-friendly graphical representation of a four- (or more) dimensional reality that unfolds over time.

That said, there is one vastly superior model: Cellular energy acquisition, storage, and use. In this model, publishers aren't gatekeepers: They're enzymes (or, outside of the cell, catalysts) that reduce the activation energy required to actually start a reaction — say, the extraction and storage of energy through

ATP ←→ ADP + P

without disrupting other cellular processes... and is achievable without substantial further energy input. Of course, this all assumes some knowledge of basic thermodynamics — a part of physics and chemistry that thus far seems to apply to every natural system, even if the social "sciences" (let alone academic management!) have yet to figure that out.

So, in the end, this is another misleading snapshot. I guess what I'm really calling for is Publishing: The Motion Picture before I'll accept any of this stuff... because even under the 1934 Securities Act — what is really driving all of this nonsense — there's a nonzero temporal reporting horizon for publicly held companies (quarterly reports). It's rather ironic that the last graphic in Mr Stephens' {typo intended} ultimately misguided analysis does acknowledge time... and that he's a physicist!

Labels: copyright, intellectual property, publishing, science

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Links of Interest

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Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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