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July 13, 2009

| Ferguson/Fallows on China >>

Giving Things Away Is A New Liberal Art

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they’ve been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I’m kind of more interested in that too — at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly’s formulation of what we did is worth repeating: “The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible.” We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don’t think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there’s a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the “ransom” model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions’ football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn’t sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn’t even show you another football game, you’d just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:


It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries