After Napster was shut down, many outfits sprang up to replace it. The
recording industry's strategy today is to go after individual downloaders
by the thousands. Can corpus researchers rebut a charge that they're using
this kind of free online service so they don't have to buy the books?
That is the question. The American Book Publishing industry is
extremely greedy. I have stopped buying expensive books (expensive for
me is $40+). We order one copy of these $130+ books and put them on
reserve. As long as we continue to purchase these "expensive" books,
which few read from cover to cover, we will never make any progress.
I remember telling an American publisher (someone from McGrawHill) back
in the 90s that I had brought back 30 books on various topics
(linguistics, poetry, literature, botany, etc.) from Cuba, and that I
had paid for each of them the equivalent of one dollar. He started
screaming at me, claiming that in his opinion they were probably
garbage, of very poor quality, etc. Fortunately I was reading one of
them, a collection of Cesar Vallejo's poetry, and showed it to him.
That was the end of our discussion.
More and more students are reading everything online. With Smartphones,
one can read lots of books with the E-reader and download them for about
$10/$12. I do that all the time. The same will happen to required
texts. I doubt it very much that anyone would want to purchase an
E-book for more than $20. Things will change.
Susana Sotillo
Mark P. Line wrote:
>Dominic Widdows wrote:
>
>
>>Well, nobody ever made any money suing poor people. "Google / Amazon /
>>Yahoo are already doing something like this, so if anybody gets sued,
>>they won't come after the corpus linguists first, not if they want to
>>make any money."
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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