[Sigia-l] Buy or rent?

[James Melzer]

Subscription/renting has become the dominant model for
library/research information systems. Dialog, Lexis, Elsevier, and
others rent journal articles and other info sources to libraries for a
monthly or annual fee. If a library stops paying the fee, it can no
longer access the collection. Many libraries have stopped buying new
paper journals and have gone digital - they gain significant
advantages in collection breadth and currency at the price of not
actually owning their collection at all.

The problem, obviously, is there is the potential for an international
unregulated monopoly.  A company like Elesevier could potentially
amass the rights to all current information on a particular subject
(say, cancer research) by acquiring the rights to every journal on the
subject (it's not as far fetched as you'd think).  Then research
libraries and government labs will pay whatever it costs, quite
literally, to acquire that material.  It's a pretty slick business
model, if you're into that sort of thing.

~ James

http://www.dfc.org/
http://www.ipmenu.com/
http://www.nethics.umd.edu/copyown/
http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/copytoc.html

On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:04:41 -0500, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> As you may know, a slew of companies have failed to make any dent in Apple's
> dominance on digital music download business. Now that Microsoft's Janus
> platform is available to transfer DRMed music from PCs to mobile devices,
> companies like Napster are looking to 'subscription' or 'rent' of digital
> music as a differentiator against Apple's iTMS, which so far offers straight
> purchases only.
> 
> Some people may not even be aware of the fact that when you stop paying your
> monthly fees to these subscription services, your 'rented' music disappears.
> One would assume this doesn't get much mention in the $30MM ad campaign
> Napster is undertaking:
> 
> Napster Unveils Portable Service, Anti-iPod Campaign
> <http://snipurl.com/ci76>
> 
> Question: I'm aware of some such 'subscription' services like digital tech
> books or developers' tools, etc. Has anyone worked on or know of any
> subscription services (where one loses his digital assets upon unsubbing)?
> Anyone aware of any study of user preference on buy vs. rent for relatively
> small online purchases?
> 
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba
> 
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