[Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Joan Goma]

>From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>

>
> On 14 March 2012 09:40, Joan Goma <jrgoma at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Unfortunatelly they still not realize that if published using a free
> > licence compatible with Wikipedeia their income would be even 15 times
> > larger.
>
> Would it? Can you explain how that business model would work? There
> are ways of making money by producing free content, but I can't quite
> see how it would work in this context.
>


I tried to do the exercise with Enciclopèdia Catalana.[1] I couldn't fine
tune the figures because they didn't gave me the details. But some rough
calculations came from the following assumptions.

Catalan Wikipedia has about 10 times more pageviews than them. If they use
a free license and use a wiki then their professionals can copy our best
articles and review them and we can copy their content. 7,8% of their
page-views go there from Catalan Wikipedia.

They have 350.000 articles and Catalan Wikipedia 360.000 but there are
about 120.000 articles that are not the same. If we copy from them the
articles we don't have then Catalan Wikipedia can grow to 480.000 articles
suddenly and page-views can grow about 15%. Copied articles have to contain
links to the source and acknowledge authors. Their traffic can easily be
duplicated.

So their balance is affected by:
*Save costs by using free software.
*Save costs and grow faster by reusing contents from wikipedia.
*More than duplicate income from advertisement.
*Possibility to increase their incomes from governmental aids and grants by
publishing using free licenses.

Summing up all this the impact in profits is huge. I tried to convince them
one year ago but until now I have not succeeded. I think the main barrier
is fear to some for profit company copying their content and exploiting it
commercially like them.

But don't worry. I can be very persistent. Sooner or later they will go out
from the dark side of force.

 [1] http://www.enciclopedia.cat/fitxa_v2.jsp?NDCHEC=0030866