>the long-term). If you make a hard copy the cost of a thesis comes to 36 >dollars (20-25 pounds), 21 dollars if you are content to keep only an >electronic copy. Instantly this has undercut a hardback book from a major >academic publisher by well over 50%. If publishers were to start offering >academic books in electronic form at these sorts of prices, it would enable >university libraries to vastly increase their acquisition levels, and >publishers could also cut their overheads. The customer only purchases A couple of things about this: (1) The prices here are really for dissertations which are generally (from what I understand never having written one myself) already very carefully edited for spelling/grammar and are, from the ones I've seen, usually rudimentary layout/straight text with minimal illustrations. They're published by UMI "as is" without the next layer(s) of editing and design that most other books require. (2) The long-term effects for a library are less certain. Bound on-demand books like these clearly wouldn't have as long a shelf life as a perfect-bound paperback, let alone a cloth-bound book. And at the risk of sounding too much the Luddite, whatever their storage requirements paper books are easily accessible for literally centuries while there's a very real chance a CD-ROM might not be easily readable in ten years, let alone twenty or thirty. Add to that inevitable software compatibility (will you be able to use a .pdf file in 2010?) and you can imagine some of the potential problems. >More importantly, you don't have to be a Routledge or a BFI in order to >publish an e-monograph. With access to a few hundred pounds' worth of >equipment and a little bit of training, anyone can. But that raises the >issues of peer review, publicity and distribution raised in my previous >post, and if Jeremy's pessimistic assessment of this situation is correct, >I think they will prove to be a major stumbling block. Just out of curiosity how many professors use these credentials when choosing texts for classroom use? (As distinguished from peer review as a professional measure which seems to be its primary function in the arts.) LT ---------------------------------------------- Lang Thompson http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4 Full Alert Film Review (formerly World Cinema Review) http://wlt4.home.mindspring.com/fafr.htm ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu