From: Benjamin Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2007 - 08:04:15 MST
Joshua,
The issue is that publishers' contracts normally explicitly forbid this.
So, at the present time, as an author one of an intellectual book that is
not likely
to yield much revenue, one is faced with an irritating choice, between
A) self-publishing the book and then posting it online -- as well as,
perhaps making it available
in hard-copy through, say, Lulu.com
B) using a "real publisher", which confers some reputation that does not
come along with
posting a book online or self-publishing it
The approach I've taken has been to sort-of cheat. I.e., I have used real
publishers because
I've considered it worthwhile to establish an acceptable academic
publication record. However,
after a book has been in print a little while, I've generally posted
rough-draft versions on my website,
even though this is not strictly allowed by the publishers' contracts.
For the AGI-08 conference proceedings, we negotiated a specific deal with
the book publisher,
which was that
-- we cannot publish the whole proceedings online, on the conference website
-- however, if authors post papers on their websites, the conference website
can link to these papers
This is odd, but I understand the publisher's point of view, given the
realities of their existence as
a publishing company.
Anyway, the publishing industry is in a state of transition, and the
academic community has not
caught up. Once paper-publication is eliminated as a marker of reputation
and status, I personally
will happily post all my stuff on my website. But I have to deal with the
social realities I'm
embedded in, like everybody else...
-- Ben G
On Nov 12, 2007 2:42 AM, Joshua Fox <joshua@joshuafox.com> wrote:
> 2007/11/12, Benjamin Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org>:
> >
> > Check out "The Hidden Pattern" (Goertzel, Ben, BrownWalker Press,
> > 2006).
> >
>
> Could I ask everyone who publishes a book to also put it (at least a draft
> version) online. Most authors aren't making money off the books, so they
> would not lost anything financially. Publishing the book in hardcopy gives
> some small imprimatur, and paper is convenient to read, but online
> publication can reach a much wider audience more quickly.
>
>
>
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