Do we really need open access?

Mark Liberman has posted a series of thoughts over the last couple of days on the idea that we'd be better served as a community if things that weren't selling significantly anymore went online as freely available electronic texts. Your host isn't so sure, although in what he's about to say, it's going to be a bit tricky to keep the discussion focused on the principle as opposed to the example.

As Prof. Liberman frames it:

Based on the apparently well-informed discussion on this site, a sales rank of 600,000 or so means that about one copy is sold per month. Whatever the exact sales figures at amazon and across the whole marketplace, I think we can conclude that no one is now making any significant money out of Talking Politics. Not the author, and not the publisher. More important, only a handful of people are reading it.

So why not put the whole thing up on the web for free access, as a .pdf or in whatever other form comes easily? If the text was up there, I might try to get you interested in going through Silverstein's detailed analysis of the Gettysburg Address, or take up the question of corporate message-speak and its historical precursors.People on various sides of the current election campaign would take a look at the book and praise it or damn it, but anyhow quote it and think about it. Thousands of people -- maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands of people -- would read at least parts of it, and some of those people would be journalists or politicians or political scientists or other kinds of folk who don't normally buy stuff from Prickly Paradigm Press or read what linguistic anthropologists write.

And quite a few of those people would probably find $8 to buy a paper copy, as the Baen publishing company has found out with their Free Library. I'd be willing to bet the price of a good dinner for four that sales would increase rather than decrease -- maybe even enough for the royalties to cover the cost of dinner!

It's a fine theory -- since the text has quit making money in its present distribution, any additional exposure can only help, and there's no better way to do it than with the Web.

The problem with it in practice is that Amazon already offers a bit of a taste, and what SC saw inside the book is more than enough to convince him not to bother with the rest. Starting here, you can read the first six pages of the book. Exactly what percentage of the text that is, I can't say -- Amazon pegs it at 85 pages, Prof. L. at 130 -- but they give you at least the entire first chapter of Prof. Silverstein's little spleen venting through what is essentially a vanity press for irritable academics.

And that last bit is the problem. Based on what Prof. Liberman put up in his initial post, your host was quite intrigued. A couple of Prof. Silverstein's articles were required reading in SC's introduction to linguistics and "women and language" courses. The man is an accomplished sociolinguist, and your host is absolutely not questioning his credentials or ability to write an interesting book on the subject of style in political discourse.

Unfortunately, just two pages after the stirring introduction, we find that Prof. Silverstein can barely contain his rage at George W. Bush's existence. He starts off with a quote which admittedly reflects no credit for scientific literacy on the current president:

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

Having found a disaster of a quote, Prof. Silverstein wastes no time exposing his real purpose, to write a hatchet job on someone he hates out of pure political motivation:

Dyslexic? Just stupid? Out of his league? His "League" is the Ivy one: this man has both Yale and Harvard degrees! (Want a refund, Poppy?) And, notwithstanding his actual installation as President in 2000 by a 5-4 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, he did manage to garner a certified 47.9% of the popular vote, all throughout the heartland of America. By 2002, he even managed to develop wartime "presidential coattails" stumping to win a Republican Congress."

Gosh, Professor Silverstein, why not just tell us how you really feel by calling him "Chimpler" the rest of the way? Actually, he does let the reader know how much he likes the chimp comparisons; right at the end of the page, he refers to "doctored jpegs on the net (see below)", which sounds like a promise to put a few in the body of the text, if you care to read that far -- but "open access" or not, Prof. Silverstein has already lost any readers who aren't ideologically with him, unless they're really optimistic.

It's not my intention to sit here and pick apart everything that's unfair with that paragraph, although even this rather tendentious defense of Al Gore's intellect suggests that Prof. Silverstein might want to pull back a bit on the snideness about who ought to be asking for tuition refunds. My point is rather that 3 pages, never mind 6, is enough to convince me that this is just another partisan screed, of a piece with the works of Eric Alterman, David Corn, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter.

In fairness to Prof. Liberman, whose commitment to political ecumenism is impeccable (and for which he's been praised in these pages before), his original argument for open access pleads the case for the book's linguistic merit: "there are insights that you're likely to appreciate whether or not you share his political opinions"; "I don't agree with all the analyses, whether linguistic or political, but the $8 that I sent amazon last year for my copy was money well spent". And the extent of his hopes for the book are that people would "read at least parts of it", and "quote it and think about it" regardless of the conclusions they came to.

However, this is already possible without putting the full text online. Amazon provides the same ability to read a half-dozen pages or so for many (it could be all, but I have no way to know) of the books they sell. In some cases, this is less fair to the book's content than others, but when you're buying books online, either you already knew specifically what you wanted, or you made it there because of some particular affinity with the book, whether through the author, the genre, or some other fact. It might seem that putting the full text in reach of search engines -- the real PR technique behind "open access" -- would overcome this issue of affinity, but I'd guess that people who come across the book truly at random would read a few pages, as Amazon already provides, and either say: "A-ha! More proof that the academy is so hopelessly partisan that they're not worth bothering with!" or "A-ha! More proof from an impartial scholar that all of my opinions are facts!".

This gets us back to the question of whether or not my problem is really with the notion of open access, or with Prof. Liberman's example. Although it's clear that your host doesn't much care for Prof. Silverstein's book, maybe more soberly written books would benefit from being online? Well, to paraphrase someone whose rhetoric Prof. Silverstein probably admires, it depends on the meaning of "benefit".

I have no doubt that, as with the successful example of Baen (a sci-fi publisher) that Prof. Liberman cites, sales would increase. People who come across the book and find themselves instinctively agreeing with it might like to have a copy on their shelves for the same reasons they've got a shelf full of other political polemics. This is applicable across the board -- if Prof. Silverstein had written a tome called "Linguistic Beachwear: The Flip-Flops of John Kerry", conservatives who came across it at random would snap it up for exactly the same reason. But would there be any more serious engagement with the ideas? After all, Prof. Liberman's attempt to demonstrate that open access won't harm publishers economically is motivated by a deeper desire to get ideas more freely in circulation. And it's this latter point that I rather doubt: people who encounter the ideas at random are likely to file them under "agree" or "disagree" after a few pages. That's just with a book on an accessible topic; were Prof. Silverstein to put the text of his 1996 article "Dynamics of Recent Linguistic Contact" online, nonspecialists who encountered it would probably just shrug their shoulders.

So the official SC position on open access is that Amazon's approach is about right already. One might quibble with implementation details -- perhaps a commitment to the first full chapter, however many pages that should be, would serve authors better than a half-dozen pages regardless of the length of the book. But it seems entirely reasonable to your host that one ought to be able to figure out whether or not one wishes to finish a book at some point after starting it, without actually having finished it.