on Friday, July 13, 2001 4:17 PM
A.R.Deighton wrote:
Subject: Subject: Re: Blackwell Publishers - German Life and Letters
> Dear colleagues,
> Has anyone else noticed by what percentage the cost of a library
> subscription to this journal has increased over the past few (and I
mean
> few) years? The scholarship may be priceless, but ....
I'm sure Blackwells would say (truthfully enough, no doubt) they were
merely recovering their production costs. Which begs the question: since
it costs so much (to store as well as to buy), why stay on paper?
Especially since pure electronic publication could be faster and reach a
much wider readership.
Of course, Blackwells or any other commercial firm asked to tender for
WWW-only production would say that it costs just as much. But that
simply isn't true. The costings supplied by dual-media firms are all
designed to protect their paper publishing activities and allow them to
survive, thanks to the readiness of libraries to spend ricidulous
amounts of taxpayers' money on endless quantities of paper and metres of
shelving. And prices charged by on-line-only publishing outfits exploit
that fact by being way above the true economic cost, since they know
they have no real competition and that their academic clients are
ignorant of the realities of electronic publishing. Divert only a
fraction of the national spend on print media periodicals like this into
financing non-commercial academic publishing activities, and scholarship
would benefit enormously.
Michael
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Michael Beddow http://www.mbeddow.net/
XML and the Humanities page: http://xml.lexilog.org.uk/
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