Hello,
I have given a lot of thought to this kind of thing over the years - as much
as anything else because my interest (maybe it even might qualify as a
passion?) is in "knowledge building", both in general and more specifically
on the issues of technology and society such as this. And if you are truly
interested in knowledge building, I guess you also have to be concerned
about any and all that might get in its way.
Both price and less than handy techniques of distribution and availability
are important parts of the problem in my view - making this a terrific case
in point.
We have been trying to address this problem in a variety of ways over the
last half decade, and our present solution to this is the sort of free
public library and links that you will find if you click the indicated
rubrics in, say, our @Access - The Sustainable Transportation Forum at
http://www.ecoplan.org/access site. That is our latest work around, but I
also am fully aware that we have to do better. Not that we here in this
small corner of the world can ever reasonably expect to solve the problem
per se, but at least we might provide a decent, replicable example.
Do you think that we should try to show them how to do it ourselves? I
understand of course that a certain level of costs are involved in running
such an operation, but it also strikes me that one should be able to supply
electronic copies of something on the order of an order of magnitude less
for a report such as this.
So my question to the group is this: Should we or someone else go about
setting up a very low cost "electronic bookshop" for reports such as this?
If we did we could go to all those government and other sponsors and say,
look here Jack, let us sell your report for you at an affordable price, say
five quid, handle it as a credit card transaction over the net, maybe send
you half of whatever we make on the operation, and go to sleep with a smile
on our face.
Any thoughts on or reactions to this?
Eric Britton
The Commons ___ technology, economy, society ___
Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France
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Tel: +331.4326.1323 Videoconference +331.4441.6340 (1-4)
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