"B.Naylor" writes:
| On this kind of question, the attention span of universities tends
| to resemble that of a gnat. That doesn't make for successful
| business.
Isn't the conventional argument that the sort of information that gets
published by an academic press generally isn't of interest to anyone
except other academics ? Except perhaps for the odd Dawkins or
Hawking character who's managed to capture the public imagination.
If virtually all academics have Internet access, they can both publish
information and read (essentially for free) the information published
by other people. Modulo the bizarre information "control" policies
adopted by some universities - e.g. no personal WWW pages by
administrative fiat and WWW content decided by committee.
I don't see any particular requirement for publishers in the
traditional sense here, particularly when modern computers come with a
Web server as standard. Sure, it's nice to hold a book in your hand,
and you *can* read it in the bath, but if buying just that one book
takes 50 or 100 UKP out of your already over-stretched budget ...
Cheerio,
Martin
PS Perhaps there's an exception to this, though - when it comes to
books by lecturers which their students are expected to buy ? :-)
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