Publisher Tim O'Reilly shares his thoughts on free online content after reading that recent WSJ from Scott Adams about alienating fans by deleting his blog archives. "We need more than one model," O'Reilly says, which I hope nobody is surprised by—the really interesting bit comes in a later anecdote about a conversation he had recently with Rupert Murdoch:

"We talked about the tradeoffs in making the Wall Street Journal free online. It's quite clear to me that when Murdoch's purchase of the Journal is completed, the paywall will come down. He sees the Journal readers as among the most valuable advertising targets in the world. But more than that, he sees a future in which he'll be able to make those readers even more valuable by carefully and completely tracking what they actually read in the Journal."

In other words, O'Reilly asks, "How much would you let an advertiser know about you in exchange for their free content? How much would you pay to avoid having them know that about you?" Of course, this isn't necessarily a good parallel to the online book market, since advertiser-supported open-access is only a lucrative proposition when you have a sufficiently large audience to charge rates high enough to recoup your costs—and doing that with newly created book content seems prohibitively difficult unless you've got a very long perspective. You'd probably have to set up a whole database of already completed but still useful content to attract a wide pool of potential readers, and they would ideally be ones you could acquire on the cheap&38212;in other words, you'd just be reinventing Project Gutenberg, only with ads.

(Or maybe, as we'll see in a few hours, the solution is to stop thinking of book content in book-sized chunks...)