Elsevier Snapped by Price Elasticity

January 29, 2012

Interesting page about smart folks boycotting Elsevier. You don’t know Elsevier? Well, check out the company’s subscription prices to scientific, technical and medical journals. Now navigate to The Cost of Knowledge and see what an online push back looks like. The idea is that some smart folks will no longer do editorial work, review articles, and other tasks routinely expected of knowledge farmers who want to sell information nuggets to the Elsevier combine. Publishers have a number of challenges, including prayers for Barnes & Noble assault on Amazon. Good luck with that, publishers.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I learned after publishing a number of books that it is better to output information in this free Web log than server as a knowledge farmer on subsistence income. I suppose Elsevier could try the Web censorship thing, but smart folks may be able to work around the technical efforts of print publishers trying to figure out the digital world. That price elasticity hurts when it snaps back in one’s face, doesn’t it?

Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com, my current and friendly publisher in Oslo, Norway, where the water is generally safe to drink and the publishers quite civil.

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, News, Publishing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.