Tony Barry wrote:
> Speaking fo myself beacuse I no longer have any need for a publisher to
> disseminate anything I want to write. I might want an endorsement of
> quality but technologies like RDF will decouple that from the publishing
> process.
>
> Tony
Strictly speaking, we have never needed a publisher to disseminate anything we want
to write. We can always go to a printer and publish anything we want, ourselves.
Just because someone publishes a book him/herself does not mean that it is
inferior, but, the perception is: if a publisher has chosen not to publish a work,
there *must* be something wrong with it.
Publishers take on an "aura" of authority which they may not deserve. For example,
if something is published by Pergamon or Random House, we treat it with more
respect than if it's published by the author.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the publisher is "responsible" for the content,
just that they have something to do with the content. We would be surprised to
discover that a book published by Pergamon was incorrect in 80% of its facts. That
would make Pergamon look very bad.
But if a self-published item had the same rate of incorrect information, we
wouldn't be surprised.
I am not a soothsayer--in fact, I am very bad at predicting the future--but I
believe this is a fundamental relationship that has existed for centuries, and will
continue in some form on the web. That's why I believe it's important to retain
this distinction in metadata schemes.
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
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