The Scholar’s Space

Lessig’s latest, Remix, has been out for a couple of months now. I guess I didn’t rush to grab a copy because I follow his lectures closely (he posts videos) so I thought I probably knew what he was going to say in the book — and it was not available immediately in a CC licensed version. Had it been CC’d up front, I would have read it immediately. This actually was the biggest news about his book for me: 6 months before the CC version would be released. I’m sure there’s a reason why he agreed to this, but I can’t imagine what it is. Wait a minute, yes I can. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think maybe his publisher was taking a little baby-step towards a remixed business model, a step Lessig’s in a position to encourage, and so he did.

In fact, this particular kind of remix is precisely what I found to be new about the book now that I’ve relented, gone to BookPeople, my local “keep Austin Weird” (that is, buy local) endangered species of bookstore, and bought a copy (for $9.60 more than I would have paid at Amazon…) off of the wooden shelf to bring home, read, and put on my wooden shelf, which shelves I am running short of, and would just as soon not keep adding more shelves, but that’s none of the book publishing industry’s concern, is it? The book was offered for Kindle at Amazon, but I don’t want a Kindle. But back to remix, er, Remix.

The part of the book that’s new-to-me describes remixed businesses. He calls them hybrids (oh, I want one so bad but I’m determined to wait until the all-electric comes out in 2010), but they are really just examples of the mashups he lectures about, the creative combinations of video, voice, images and text that he celebrates so as the harbingers of new creativity. These mashup businesses combine aspects of traditional commercial economies (I do this because I want to make money) with aspects or expressions of traditional sharing economies (I may do this for a million reasons but expressly *not* to make money) to take advantage of aspects of the Web that the analog world alone can’t take advantage of, thus competing better, in a Clayton Christensen kind of “innovator’s dilemma” way. They are the hybrid upstarts that Lessig predicts will upend not only bricks-and-mortar competitors like BookPeople, but even Web competitors who are not taking advantage of what can be done in Web 2.0 that couldn’t be done in Web 1.0.

Lessig gives plenty of examples of these hybrid business models that combine commercial aspects with sharing aspects, but he goes much further. He analyzes the elements that make them better competitors, their aspects that actually define what it means to make the combination, sort of an entry-level criteria recipe:

1. taking advantage of the Long Tail
2. taking advantage of the information that people freely leave about what they like, what they do and what they want, all over the place online
3. allowing others to innovate on your platform (i.e., letting others turn what you create into a building block for their own businesses).

In the world of book publishing, who is doing this? Right now?

So, it’s not that pairing a CC licensed version with a physical copy option is a hybrid. Look at the list above and ask yourself whether any of the criteria are met. It’s just that at the stage of experimentation the publishing industry is at right now, CC/buy at the same time represents a step in the right direction, and CC later/buy now is sort of sizing up that step. It takes a little bit of advantage of what people who love to share can do for the publisher — increase sales. But it leaves a lot of innovation on the table, it still leaves the industry quite vulnerable to the upstart that figures out how to compete better online, how to take better advantage of what networking (hybridizing commercial and sharing economies) can do that not-networking can’t.

Well, I haven’t finished the book. From what I understand, the best part is at the end where he suggests how copyright law ought to be changed to facilitate this advance. So, more later.