Round Up

Jeff Jarvis asks why “… shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page…”

Kevin Kelly states that “…people want to pay. They really do! People, mobs of them, will grab stuff that is free. They will try stuff for free that they would never touch if they had to pay. They will always gravitate, on average, to the lowest price, and what is lower than free?” But, he adds that payment is “…a way of connecting, a sign of approval, a vote, it indicates an alligence with the maker and it feels good to the payer, to support.”

William Patry had decided to quit blogging about copyright because he feels that “Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.”

I had written previously about the Garfield minus Garfield blog and now the blog “…is to be turned into a book – with the backing of the cartoon’s original creator…” Jim Davis gets it.