Musings

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between:

Charlie Stross (CS) – Hugo Award winning author and
Paul Krugman (PK) – Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times

at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal

“…

PK: We still haven’t figured out the economics of easy information dissemination. Even though the Internet is all old hat, we still haven’t seen the economics of it play out. One of the big problems is we don’t know how do people get compensated for producing information when it can be …

CS: This is a personal preoccupation of mine, shall we say.

PK: It’s to some extent mine, although more of one of my employers. The New York Times has got enormous web presence, four million or so people read it online and yield the corporation very little in the way of revenue in the process. Whereas the dwindling number of people who want the dead tree paper are the source of … and the thing survives to some extent because people still like a piece of paper with their breakfast coffee but also to a large extent because you still can’t online get quite the visual quality of color advertisements for luxury goods that you can get in the New York Times Magazine. But you’re relying upon a very thin lag in technology to make the whole enterprise of creating and disseminating information viable. And if that starts to apply to lots of physical goods as well, we’re going to see whole sectors just implode.

CS: Oh, yeah. On the other hand, with physical goods, you’re still going to need mass and energy to assemble the frames. As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.

PK: Which is why … we used to work the professional journals, something I do know something about, professional journals sold about a couple of thousand copies worldwide, at an enormous price because every university library felt it had to have them and still does to some extent, but that’s an enterprise near to collapse because everybody reads the things online now.