[SystemSafety] Fwd: Re: New book

[Les Chambers]

More power to you Peter. 
So you're willing to board an aircraft with a 10% chance of living through
the experience? I admire your courage and stick-to-it-ivness. 
I don't begrudge publishers their pay cheques but they have comprehensively
lost the monopoly on the printed word. Their general air of infallibility is
turning foul. 20 years ago an average Joe could not sit in front of his PC,
create a work of literature then put it in front of several hundred million
eyeballs eagerly searching for his key words on Google, on twitter, on
Facebook ...

More from my essay (soon to be self published) ...
Anzac Day (Australia's memorial day) approached so it seemed logical to
contact our national broadcaster, the ABC, to offer an interview with Rex.
My confidence was high, I had facilitated an interview with Daughter Melissa
when she crowd sourced funding for a theatre production through Kickstarter.
I was dissapointed.
One ABC division reviewed Lucky and returned it within a week with a
rejection scrawled on a postit note. Another failed to acknowledge receipt
or return the book. And this in response to one of the nation's few
remaining Bomber Command veterans, a man who is approaching national
treasure status. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the ABC. They do a
fabulous job, without them Australian airwaves would have no intellectual
discourse. What disturbed me was the tone of the telephone conversation I
had with an ABC producer.  When I used the phrase "self publish"  it created
a stench that made her uncomfortable and put a certain snootiness into her
tone from that point on. In my neivty I had stumbled into an exclusive club.
It turns out that, when it comes to book promotion, the media and the
publishers embrace with the dollar fueled passion of a bodice ripper.
Published authors guarantee an interesting media interview. Interviews
provide hours of free publicity for publishers. A rum chap, such as I, no
literary black tie and with the odour of the amateur about him need not
apply.
It is a sad thing that, writing a book, a worthy enterprise so redolent with
hope and  the bright light of creative inspiration - the highest function of
the human mind -  should become so myered in the eleteism, cynicism and
naked greed of gate keepers who stand between the creatives and their
expectant audiences, gatekeepers who's creative input is zero and whose self
interest serves to crush the green shoots of anything new. 
Excluded from the club I formed my own, and what a club Twitter is!
...

And furthermore! You seem proud of the fact that academic publishers are
making money. What are you? A player or a spectator. A player would be more
interested in ways and means of rewarding the creatives for the thousands of
hours they spend delighting us with their intellects.

The essay continues ...
I'm on Skype to my New York daughter. She's an actress working in the
experemental theatres of lower Manhattan. The competition is stiff, "The top
three percent of the class is here," she says. I tell her I'm documenting my
theory that, in the future, courtesy of the web, the creatives will keep
most of the money. There is silence at the other end. I know her well; she
is dear to me; with those words hanging on the net between us, together  we
soar through the cloud and, for a brief moment, let the warm rays of the sun
shine down upon us. Could this be true: "... creatives ... keep most of the
money ..."

Maybe Peter, one day, this will be true.

Cheers
Les

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Bernard Ladkin [mailto:ladkin at rvs.uni-bielefeld.de] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 6:20 AM
To: Les Chambers
Cc: systemsafety at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Fwd: Re: New book

Well, Les, Andrew Odlyzko was claiming the imminent death of traditional
academic publishing twenty years ago. I believed it - the argument was so
obviously correct. 

And the predictions wrong. I ended up with, as I said, "no publications"
(although even that by its own criteria was manifestly false).  And the
traditional academic publishers are making money hand over fist, to the
point at which the UK government has stepped in and said "no longer with our
taxpayers's money".

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, University of Bielefeld and Causalis Limited

On 15 Apr 2013, at 21:52, "Les Chambers" <les at chambers.com.au> wrote:
> Couldn't agree more Felix.