The business model of private, licensed digitization companies (and their University colleagues) is not only in danger, it’s quickly becoming a flimsy framework held together by questionable bravado and presumptive authority. All that’s necessary to puff it away in the breeze is… well, the normal thing one puffs with, in such situations: A crack in the link between “authority” and expense.

I’ll argue that professionally-produced electronic archives are no more authoritative than the best public efforts. They manage to charge exorbitant fees because (a) the original books they scan are scarce, and held in only a few University libraries’ Special Collections, and (b) they ride high on the reputation of authoritativeness and professionalism they established in the 20th Century. As a result, they can claim hundreds of thousands of dollars from each institution of higher learning who subscribes, and also use licensing limits to prohibit access to their content among the lay community outside the Academy.

At the expense of the public good, I’d argue. Not academic scholarly work, which proceeds at its own steadfast pace (whatever that has become these days). But rather public use, in the more general sense, among the rest of the world. Who own those works, now.

The utility of old works, whatever it might be, remains unforeseen in the thicket of prejudices overgrowing the Traditional Pedagogic Model. It will never be fulfilled until the public gain full access. The commons has, as ever, been walled in. Perhaps overgrown with Ivy. Whatever weird things might arise from public exploration of the manuscripts of the Sixteenth Century, we will never know.

The coalitions of Universities and publishers has postponed that day well into the future. What, I wonder, is the opportunity cost associated with keeping that public dialog shut down for all these decades? For another year? Another decade? Another century? How does that cost balance against the millions spent annually on maintaining rights-managed University-vetted control on public domain works?

But the walls leak. Works are scarce, but they are not in many cases unique. For a price, a person can have one of their own. When that person falls outside the cabal, and scans and republishes the work themselves, the work can escape back into public hands.

For an analogy, we might consider the economics and legal division of American frontier land in the time before the Homestead Act. I can draw analogies from historic roles back then—including “land speculator”, “squatter”, or “settler”—in thinking about the future of scholarly communication.

In the 19th Century, Eastern speculators bought land in the Northwest Territories and the land west of the Mississippi, soon after it became available. But contrary to the wishes of those would-be developers, who were holding onto it as their investments’ values appreciated, families of settlers often poured west onto that land, established themselves, built towns and thriving farms (or failed and died). They squatted. Now: How did that work out for the speculators? Possession, nine-tenths of the law.

At the moment, the large private electronic publishers like ProQuest, Thomson-Gale and Readex control access to hundreds of thousands of public-domain works. Not by taking them out of the public domain, but rather by establishing mutual exclusivity agreements with partner Universities: By throttling access to the scans and digitized texts. They collude, in other words, to keep these public domain works tucked away in a very expensive hole.

But: Who owned the land of the American frontier (disregarding Native Americans, of course)? What does the term “Public Domain” imply, exactly, when it comes to electronic editions of old books?

If nothing else, it means that anybody with the $5 or $500 needed to purchase a copy of the original work, and the hour it takes to scan the pages carefully, can release a real public domain edition of any volume. No licensing. No wall of scholarly credentials. You want to, you can redistribute any damned [public domain] book you want, for free if you like.

And that book, retaining its intrinsic value as a physical rarity, can be sold again to recoup the initial outlay. Like as not, to a University Library. All it would take to undermine the scarcity of non-unique works, when it comes to digitization, is diligence and some capital outlay.

Thus, “scholarly standards” and authoritativeness are the last defense of not only journal publishers, but the current (last?) generation of private electronic redistribution models. Public efforts are seen as amateurish and fey, prone to error and uncontrolled by… well, whatever it is that oversees academic work. The Life of the Mind Standards Organization, aka ISO-23121, I think they call it. Or lacking that, the fact that it is… wait for it… hosted by a password-protected University computer system.

What is interesting, though, is that clearly the private publishers understand these inevitabilities. Thus, I see the smarter ones no longer thinking of controlling the Unread Monographs market, but rather considering how they might “enable” the collaboration market. Host services for annotation. Edit and compile online discourse. Manage vetted discussion of works in the public domain.

And that’s where the few who see it will survive, in a new world where useful original works have become readily available to everybody: not as the gatekeepers of access, but as middlemen in the new dynamic of collaborative work. Changing their philosophical focus from the permanent Being to the transforming Becoming, they’ll morph into meta-publishers. They’ll become service providers and valued partners, who foster the channels along which work gets done. Just like they were in the 1500s.

The smartest land speculators didn’t try to hold back the tide. They became politicians.

Ask Al Swearengen: Who makes money, in the end, when there’s a big discovery and a land rush? The one who owned the land to begin with? The miners and settlers? Or the one who sells the shovels and wagon wheels?

Or maybe the liquor, whores and gambling services. I see a bright and exciting future for the Academy, as this all plays out….