We can probably glean something from what is happening in the music industry. Struggling, new artists have difficulty catching the eye of the big recording labels. With the relatively low-cost equipment that is now available, they simply press their own CDs and do direct sales. The Flow Cytometry community is in many ways the ideal group for an approach of this sort - it's small, focussed and there is a clear channel of communication (thru this forum). Aspiring authors can do an E-book on CD-ROM. With many small publishers, you'd have to do most of the lay-out yourself anyhow. From that, it's not too disfficult to run off a print edition. All this, of course, takes a lot of time and a bit of an initial capital investment. You'd also need to remember the possibility of piracy eating into your sales. The Macintosh tidbits mailing list recently discussed the relevance of a E-book vs a paper book dealing with the use of Apple's iPhoto that is possibly outdated by the time the book is ready to hit the stores. There's some useful insight there. http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-626.html <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-626.html> Te-Chih LIu Singapore -----Original Message----- From: Kenneth Ault [mailto:AULTK@mmc.org] Sent: Saturday, 18 May 2002 3:09 To: cyto-inbox Subject: Re: Publishers and Contracts This topic raises an issue that has bothered me for some time. It seems to me that publishers routinely use the native desire of scientists to become famous, and the fact that many of us have considerable egos, to take advantage of us. They ask us to write articles for books, or to edit books, and pay nothing or a pittance when they are able to make enough money to make it worthwhile for themselves. I'm not saying that publishing is anything close to the energy trading business in terms of profitability, but I do think we are taken advantage of. It would be nice (although probably impossible) if the scientific community could come up with a mechanism to defend ourselves against this kind of exploitation. Maybe its just my stupidity and poor negotiating ability, but I'd be interested in the thoughts of others. Ken Ault
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