[lug] Local Open Source Project Leads/Managers

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Evelyn Mitchell wrote:

> Gutenburg will publish anything that they can get copyright to,
> which mostly means books that have lapsed or expired copyrights.

I had kind of figured as much.

> In what way? Making a website is electronic publishing, of a sort.

I didn't word that very clearly did I <grin>.

> > In particular, providing a way for people who contribute articles to
> on-line > web services to get paid for their contributions?
> 
> Are you concerned about generating revenue, or the mechanism of paying
> the authors?

A bit of both actually.  For the most part the web currently relies on
people simply wanting their material to be freely available.  That does
sort of work, but lately I've been wondering how one could set something
up so that the author isn't simply giving their ideas or work away?  The
concept of e-books comes to mind, but I'm not sure I've seen anything that
works particularly well yet.

A somewhat weak example could be seen in the On-line article section of my
web page at <http://rmp.opusis.com/carbon/carbon.html>.  These on-line
articles have been essentially given to me free of charge to publish on
the web.  Similarly there are articles in the next section down
"Publications:" that exist in electronic form, but which must be purchased
directly from the Author and/or the publisher.  In a sense that is OK, and
you might say hey why not just partner with someone like Barnes and Noble
or Amazon.  However, many of these specialty books are self published by
the author which doens't seem to make this particularly likely.

To give this some Linux relevance <sheepish grin>, let's just say that any
solution would naturally have to work with a Linux system.  If anyone has
any further comments they should probably contact me off-list.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)