Smart People Saying Smart Things

Felix Salmon's column for Sept 3 is about "price discrimination". That's the thing most people hate where the guy sitting next to you on the plane paid a lot less for his ticket. As Salmon says, "If you know that your friends and neighbors are getting exactly the same product that you are, but are paying a different price for it, then someone is going to feel ripped off." Where this gets interesting is in how he applies the price discrimination discussion to paywalls - they are a form of price discrimination and we're going to see a lot more of it as more content business moves online.

Over at Locus Online, Cory Doctorow has a column that (sadly) no publishers will read but that spells out exactly why publishers should chill right the heck out and stop making e-books suck so much for libraries. It expands on the themes from his Boingboing blog post of about a month ago and points out that publishers making war on libraries/librarians is just damned stupid, if only because right now libraries are nearly the last remaining thing that is not trying to take over the publishers' business. If publishers continue making it unpleasant, though, that could change and we'd all likely be worse off for it.