Daniel Haeusermann’s Weblog
Today I saw that our Public TV network has been posting videos on its own YouTube channel for 10 months. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/SchweizerFer….
(They’ve been publishing content over their own website for a while now.)
Given the fact that Swiss TV viewers (including me) pay a mandatory fee of 400 dollars a year, I can only welcome this added service.
Returning from a vacation I saw today that Professor Solove posted a new paper to SSRN on July 12, the very day I went on holiday. I returned on July 21, the day the last tome of the Harry Potter saga went on sale–the lines at the bookstores’ cashiers at Dublin airport were almost as long as the ones at the security check.
Now legal scholarship appears to have its new J.K. Rowling: Professor Solove’s paper was downloaded 39′000 times within thirteen days (it’s now 4th on the all-time ranking), and there are 30,000 Google hits for the terms “daniel solove” “nothing to hide”. This is absolutely fascinating and — from this side of the atlantic — hard to explain, given that Professor Solove’s other SSRN papers are popular, too, but not on this scale.
One reason for the paper’s popularity could be that it is based on and a reaction to a discussion on the author’s blog, but I’m not sure whether this is the only reason for the paper’s success.
Less than two months after the Federal Supreme Court broke up the Swiss book price cartel, I received a sign that this move does indeed foster the access to knowledge–though not only in the way I argued earlier.
The news came in a letter from Rösslitor, St. Gallen’s biggest bookstore, which had been taken over by one of the country’s biggest book retailers a couple of years ago.
The letter started with a hymn to the importance and societal functions of public libraries and school libraries, follwed by a slightly more modest description of the bookstore’s achievments.
The important thing is that Rösslitor will allow all public libraries and school libraries a 10 % discount on all books and other media, and it will ship them for free. The discount would not have been possible under the old regime of book price fixing.
Ten per cent isn’t a lot, given that libraries are likely the bookstore’s best customers. But it’s a sign that the market is moving, and I’m pretty sure that competitors will follow. Thus, the libraries’ consumer rents will increase (and hopefully politicians will allow them to spend the money thus saved to enhance their services otherwise).
P.S. for those who think I’ve been taken in by a PR stunt, please consider the following: My hope is that if book retailers see that customers are aware of the new competition in the book market, they will be more ready to toughen the competition.
