Menu + Home Page + Books + Essays + Art + Anti-DRM + Promise to the Public + Free Software + Recommended Software + Contact Me + Bio + Awards ©Copyright 2006-2009, Pedro M. Rosario Barbosa This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. |
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PublisherThe
publisher Underdetermination
in Science will definitely be Lulu.
What is Lulu? As it turns out Lulu is not a vanity
press, they see themselves more as a publishing technology. Anyone can be a
published author for free.
Why
Lulu and not more
prestigious publishing companies like Open Court, Ohio University
Press, and the like? There is a problem with all of these
publishers, even those which publish academic writings. Each
publisher obeys to something very important: the needs of the
market and how to satisfy this market. Furthermore, many of
these publishing companies reject many of these writings on the basis
on market. For example, if I write a book on Frege, and there
are two authors who have written about Frege (and sometimes even if
just one
author has written about him) probably then I would have to wait next
year or the next two years for my publication. Needless to say that
commercial presses have tried to threaten many academic entities such
as libraries, schools and universities who use their fair use rights to
copy chapters or books or entire books; and have tried threatening
small businesses dedicated to photocopying material. Also,
these commercial publishers would not accept under any circumstance the
Creative Commons License I use for my book.
So, I had to choose an alternative. I could go independent. However, publishing independently would mean actually spending huge amounts of money to publish my book, with no marketing power. I would end up with copies of my book everywhere, not even earning enough to compensate for their printing costs. Lulu is my third alternative. I can publish my work for free, and they use their marketing power to distribute my work on the Internet. Their strategy is to Print-on-Demand, so I do not have to spend a cent with trying to cover the costs of printing the book. Also, it has something that most commercial publishers lack: a fair share of profits. I can add an extra fee to the cost of printing my book for my share of the profit, which will be 80% of the profits, while Lulu will have 20%. This is a lot better for me, than what many commercial publishers would actually pay me, which would be almost nothing most of the cases. This may not be as prestigious as reputed commercial publishers, but certainly it is a lot fairer and a lot cheaper for me, while not breaking the ethical principle of letting people share non-commercially the book I published. |
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