Re: Wellcome Trust report

["Fytton Rowland" <J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk>]

Short-run digital presses, providing small numbers of high-quality copies
economically, are also a possible answer.  They can reproduce half-tones
and full colour, though not quite at full print quality.

Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; <margaret.landesman@library.utah.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 11:49 PM
Subject: RE: Wellcome Trust report

> I too have been told this, with respect to many countries. But even for
> the developed countries, especially for back-up archival copies, we should
> carefully consider the practice of "transmit electronically but give to
> the end user in print."
>
> At some very low print run, it would be more economical to prepare only an
> electronic version, and print the necessary number from that on a high
> speed laser printer. (I first became aware of this 20 years ago, when
> Pergamon supplied a long back run of a serial as print-out from microfilm.
> If they had said so I would have just gotten microfilm, as the print
> quality was much lower than it would be today).  This would eliminate the
> fixed costs of the print version.
>
> The print version would lose high quality in the halftones, and color in
> color ilustrations; for many journals this would not matter; for those
> that did, the print quality from laser printers is better each year, and
> the quality and price of color printers is showing a similar improvement.
>
> There are a few areas where we can rely on technical improvements for cost
> savings (storage comes to mind). In these few but fortunate cases we
> should take advantage of it.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> dgoodman@liu.edu