New media example

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

A fascinating consumer reference work was just brought to my 
attention:

http://mtrip.com

Mtrip creates travel guides for the iPhone and iPad.  There is a 
demo on the site, which is well crafted.

It takes but a small leap of imagination to see Mtrip and its 
many inevitable kin beginning to shape the ways scholarly 
reference works get created.  As the level of editorial work for 
something like Mtrip is huge, the effort and cost of other kinds 
of reference works is bound to rise.  This in turn will create 
new barriers to finding audiences, as the best-produced services 
are more likely to attract attention.  By "best" I don't mean 
empty bells and whistles but features that provide real use to 
readers.

I urge everyone to think about the implications of this.  This 
list has seen countless posts over the past several years about 
why scholarly communications can and should cost less and less. 
There have been posts about such things as how little it takes to 
disseminate scholarship and specific proposals for such unlikely 
things as a comprehensive suite of complex services run by 
volunteers and repositories for entire fields of research 
supported by advertising.  (Advertising for what?  Blue jeans? 
Toll-access publications?)  My personal favorite is the 
suggestion that all it takes to disseminate scholarship is a 
part-time system administrator and a Linux box.

Meanwhile, a visitor to the plush environments of some research 
institutions--Stanford or Duke, say--is asked to imagine that 
research faculty go home in the evening to a monkish cell, where 
they don a hair shirt and sleep on a bed of nails.  The 
incongruity of how we live and how we propose to read is 
stunning.

Joe Esposito