Law Review Articles on Amazon

One of my colleagues recently noticed that a number of law review articles are available for sale (or rather digital download) at amazon.com  An example is here.  She asked me if there were any legal problems with this and I replied that I didn't think so because presumably law reviews will not license the articles to amazon unless they have authority to do so under their publication agreements with the individual authors.  We continued going back and forth on the issue because my colleague was uneasy that someone might be making money commercially from her work in a manner she had not contemplated.  The pricepoint for these downloads from amazon is around $10 per article (or really $9.95 because that sounds so much cheaper).  My assumption was that if individual law review articles are priced that way, it's probably due to the request of the publisher and amazon is probably getting a relatively small cut.  In other words if this is like other electronic downloads that amazon does, amazon can release kindle books much more cheaply when the paper version publisher does not set a particularly high price (or when there is no paper version publisher and the author is engaging in e-publishing direct through amazon).

So, aside from the fact that very few people are probably buying articles from amazon that they could access from other sources more cheaply (or free), if less conveniently, I would assume that it wouldn't be amazon making huge profits from this.  Are the law reviews actually making any money out of it then?  And, if so, how does the pricing of an individual article compare to the pricing of an entire volume of the relevant law review?  And how are journals deciding whether to release material on amazon and, when they do, are they releasing all of their published articles or just select articles that the editors think may appeal to a more general audience?

 

Comments

[Larry Ross]

This isn't really anything new. LexisNexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, and ProQuest all provide electronic access to law review articles, and charge either a flat rate or per item, and do so at a profit. Presumably all the journals that are available through these services (and Amazon) have already obtained each author's permission to distribute articles electronically through a third party (since Tasini v. New York Times, at least). What looks odd about having articles on Amazon is that they are out there in the "real world", not just the realms of legal education and practice. It's also a bit jarring to see a scholarly article sitting on the shelves of our de facto National Shopping Mall with a big price tag on it. And I think we're probably all a bit wary thanks to Google's "copy now, settle later" approach to scanning copyrighted books.

[James Grimmelmann]

Academics should generally be happy with business models that help distribute their works. The fact that someone thinks they can make money selling law review articles on Amazon means there's an audience for legal scholarship that doesn't have sufficiently convenient and affordable ways to read it. If the problem is that companies are charging readers too much, help support open access efforts, so that readers can find articles directly without the middleman.

[Anon]

I'm a little horrified that a law professor is upset that her work has found greater distribution. That her reason for being upset is that the person or company taking the entrepreneurial risk and doing the work of creating that distribution channel might make money doesn't make me less horrified.

The academy justifies taking taking tuition money from over-optimistic and naive students (burdening them sometimes with unpayable debt that, in a word, will destroy their lives) and using it to support scholarship because of a claimed social utility that arises from that scholarship. If the members of the academy believe there is social utility in scholarship, they should walk the walk, and be glad that their scholarship is gaining an outlet to those without Westlaw or HeinOnline access. In a word, supporting the sharing of the ideas they've developed is their moral debt to those who have sacrificed to support their scholarship.

If the argument instead is, no, I care about the money, and that's the reason for writing, and so I want to limit distribution unless I'm getting my taste, the professoriate should walk that walk - cut tuitions, pay professors only for teaching, and let professors make up the difference by selling their work to the highest bidder.

Since we all know that's not going to happen, can we at least agree not whine or start wringing our hands because a new channel of distribution appears? If we write to get the ideas out, shouldn't we be glad the ideas are getting out through whatever channel transmits the ideas accurately?