[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

[George Herbert]

If you thought I was suggesting you can't make money off freely
published work, I didn't mean to leave that impression at all...
Practical experience over the last decade is that one clearly can make
a lot of money that way.

In the speculative fiction arena, Cory is one well known example.
Somewhat less well known author Eric Flint freely released one of his
early novels on the web in the mid-90s, after it had been out for
several years - there was a statistically significant *rise* in its
sales immediately, and the rest of his books showed a sales increase
as well.  I have informally heard that he thinks that between 25 and
40% of his sales have been driven by him openly releasing things.
John Scalzi sold a speculative fiction book that he wrote for fun and
serialized on his blog to a major publisher, and now is both
critically acclaimed and one of the better paid speculative fiction
writers with a number of genre bestseller list books.

My point was that -SA / GFDL type licensing doesn't help turn free web
publishing into money, and may hurt your chances to do that.


-george william herbert

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Mary Murrell <mary_murrell at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is not the case that you can't make money from a print version of something that is available on line for free. Case in point: philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an article in the 1980s in an academic journal. It eventually made its way to an unrestricted website where one could freely download it.  Nonethless, a publisher,  just a couple years ago, published the thing as a little book, with the same title and with not a single change, and it sold over 350,000 copies and got a huge amount of publicity for the author (and the essay). The title of the book/essay is On Bullshit.
>
> Of course, Cory Doctorow makes the same point about his own work, which he makes available for free on line.
>
> --- On Fri, 8/1/08, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 1:38 PM
>
> ...
> The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media
> conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly.
> Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print
> rates would fail - it's free on the web.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com