Reproduction in the Digital Age - Like Dandelions or Mammals?

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has posted a summary of his recent column in Locus Magazine, “Think Like a Dandelion,” in which he discusses the “bio-economics of giving stuff away for free”. Doctorow explains:

Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free — as on the Internet.

He offers two keys to success for creating and distributing content in the digital age:

His points:

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they’re going, but remember: dandelions don’t keep track of their seeds…

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale… I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

While we find both points compelling, Doctorow’s overall argument left us a little confused. Doctorow doesn’t explicitly state it, but he seems to be saying that there are two (and only two) discrete ways of distributing content: either completely laissez-faire, in a digital form that can be disseminated like dandelion seeds; or completely controlled, in a non-digital form with no digital analog which could be consumed by capricious web users who would only half-digest the content and forget about it. Doctorow doesn’t offer much recourse for non-digital content creators (specifically publishers), seeming to suggest that the best and only way to distribute one’s creative output to the most number of “right” people is to do it freely, no strings attached. But we wonder what Doctorow’s perspective is on the qualities many people are, and perhaps always will be, willing to pay for - authenticity, quality, experience - things that physical, non-digital content provides. Doctorow asserts that we should all be thinking like dandelions but, isn’t there still a thriving lot of non-digital-content creators that must, and should, still think like mammals?

BoingBoing: Think Like a Dandelion: Advice for Understanding Reproductive Strategies in the Internet Era