Online James?

Eric Tassone writes:

I [Tassone] had to Google “Mary Rosh” but remember that imbroglio now. Made my day, too.

But really I wanted to write to ask you about something related to Bill James. I first encountered his works at age 13, when a baseball coach talked up his books and lent me one (that I fear I never returned). I then read his Abstracts from ’84 or ’85 until they went away, and then some of his other books in the ’90s. Anyway, my question is: Do you know if these works are available on a CD or DVD-ROM or the web something, like they do sometimes w/ collections like Mad Magazine or the New Yorker cartoons or whatever? Maybe through his website, to which I do not subscribe? (By the way, Google Books produces search results for the ’83-’87 editions, but at most just little clippings, not the full book or anything.)

I wonder why we don’t see more of this, since the marginal cost of re-packaging and distributing already-created content for which there is at least some pent-up demand would seem to be low. I mean, there’s at least some intense “long tail” interest from folks like me in, say, the ’81 edition to see what he had to say about the ’80 Royals. They could price gouge me all the way to making this sort of thing profitable, I would think! Isn’t this what the Internets is supposed to be good at?

Personally, I prefer the physical books, but I agree that they’re not searchable.

1 thought on “Online James?

  1. The technology isn't what is getting in the way. For any kind of format-change on out-of-print, but still-copyrighted media like this, the holdup is usually the legal one of determining/negotiating rights ownership in the new format, which depends on what the original contract was between the publisher and the author, as well as anything that has happened with mergers, inheritances, sales, etc., etc. Plus, on the internet, the issue of international rights is raised basically automatically. If the audience is, say, only a hundred people, the amount of gouging needed to pay for the hours of lawyering might be more than even the biggest fan would be willing to accept.

    It would be wonderful if there was a way to speed this up for all media. The music industry has multiple vendors who manage databases for determining rights-ownership for internet-delivery of lyrics, ringtones, and so forth, because digital music took off faster than digital books. Even there, some of the rights-data vendors are still paper-based (or were five years ago when I was tangent to this field). I can only imagine that the book industry is worse off at the moment, even with all the work that say, Amazon and Google have done.

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