RE: Digital publishing and university presses

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I have yet to see a convincing analysis that shows, at least for 
books, why digital production and distribution are inherently 
less expensive--under our present circumstances--than the 
traditional model. The functions associated with print (paper, 
printing, binding, warehousing, etc.), most publishers agree, 
constitute about 20% to 25% of the overall cost of publishing a 
monograph. One has to add significant IT expenses in order to 
publish electronically, and these amount to at least the sums 
saved by going digital. (If you want to engage in the kind of 
future-looking publishing that was done in Gutenberg-e, the costs 
rise even much higher.) When one then looks at the complete cost 
to the system and factors in the inefficiencies of people using 
desktop printers to produce hard copies when they don't want to 
read long texts on screen, then the benefits of digital-only 
publishing begin to fade even more.  There are, of course, 
reasons why one may want to do digital publishing anyway, because 
of the greater utility of having the works manipulable in 
electronic form in ways they aren't in print. And one can aspire 
to "open access" in the digital environment, which can't be done 
in print only. But the main reason, I would suggest, cannot be 
imputed cost savings alone.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>My guess is that you are both partly right.  Making scholarship
>public, like the rest of the production of scholarship, will
>require continuing subsidy.  That's in the nature of the work.
>It is also the case that digital production and distribution is
>(or ought to be) intrinsically less expensive than older models,
>so costs should come down.  This is good news, because it frees
>up more resources to be used in the production of scholarship
>itself, which is the point in the first place.
>
>Paul Courant
>