Reading through many articles and blogs provides curious glimpses into the thinking processes of authors (or perhaps more accurately academic project writers?).

A recent observation that interested me was a statement that, “I don’t see why I should have to pay to read a whole book.  All I want is a very small portion of the text, and I don’t see why I should have to pay for that.”

Having just had dinner, I wondered how my butcher/supermarket would feel if I said that I didn’t want the whole cow, just the fillet of beef, and since that was such a small piece I didn’t see why I should pay to have it either.  

OK, maybe that’s not such a good example.

So let’s get to the point.  How would you know, without reading a significant portion of the book, which paragraph was the right one to quote from and why?  And why is it you think there should be a right to grab a key piece of the hard work of someone else for nothing in order to benefit yourself, for nothing?

Let’s expand on this.  The only way you can possibly know the value of one paragraph as against another in an author’s work is to have read it.  Take the following abstraction from an article by Joseph Priestly:

“It is no doubt time, and of course opportunity of examination and discussion, that gives stability to any principles. But this new theory has not only kept its ground, but has been constantly and uniformly advancing in reputation, more than ten years, which, as the attention of so many persons, the best judges of everything relating to the subject has been unremittingly given to it, is no inconsiderable period. Every year of the last twenty or thirty has been of more importance to science, and especially to chemistry, than any ten in the preceding century. So firmly established has this new theory been considered, that a new nomenclature, entirely founded upon it, has been invented, and is now almost in universal use; so that, whether adopt the new system or not, we are under the necessity of learning the new language, if we would understand some of the most valuable of modern publications.”

Now this is jolly good stuff, and with very little effort you could use this paragraph to support almost any scientific claim that you might feel like making.  It might dampen the ardour to understand that Priestly was arguing about Phlogiston, in 1796.  To know whether he was for or against, you would have to read a great deal more of the text.  And that is the point our modern author pointedly ignores.

The second point is to wonder why people think anything in a digital format is a ‘free lunch.’  Just because something is in digital form does not mean it is being given away – just try convincing Microsoft to give away Windows Vista and see where that gets you!  Sure modern authors and publishers are moving to using digital form for publishing.  But that does not equate to them giving everything away for free.  Publishers pay people to write, they pay to create market interest, awareness, they syndicate work with other publishers, and so on.  That all costs money, and, especially in this modern economic climate, people expect to be paid for what they do.  As any student of entropy will tell you, “There are no free lunches.”

So maybe our scholars should think more carefully?  If you want to go out and do the work needed to be able to write the paragraph in your own name, that’s fine.  But don’t claim that in advance you know exactly which paragraph of a work is exactly correct for you.  That’s obviously not true unless you have already read the work, and one might wonder how that could be without having purchased it?  And please don’t claim that you shouldn’t have to pay for just choosing a very small part of the work.  Maybe pearls are free in WalMart this week, but likely not.